Here, Jayne L. Warner has created a unique biographical tapestry that illuminates not only the life of one of Turkey's leading literary and cultural authorities, but also the emergence of a republic in his native country, and sheds new light on the history of one of the world's great cities. Sumptuously illustrated throughout with evocative period pictures of Istanbul, Turkish Nomad tells the extraordinary life story of this poet, thinker, and diplomat. As a young boy, Halman surveyed the last vestiges of the Ottoman Empire, walked through the ruins of Byzantium, and grew up in the modern nation created by the charismatic Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Talat S. Halman would go on to serve the republic as its first minister of culture. The more than four decades Halman lived primarily in the United States are not overlooked but are used to discuss how his ideas developed as he taught at leading unversities-Princeton, Columbia, New York University-and introduced Americans to Turkish literature and culture through his translations and public lectures. We In the Turkish Nomad we follow the literary, scholastic, and journalistic journey of a restless writer, who might best be described by the title of one of his books, The Turkish Muse, his 2006 collection of literary reviews tracing the development of Turkish literature during the Turkish Republic.

Using network visualization and the study of the dynamics of marriage choices, Network Analysis and Ethnographic Problems expands the theory of social practice to show how changes in the structure of a society's kinship network affect the development of social cohesion over time. Using the genealogical networks of a Turkish nomad clan, authors Douglas White and Ulla Johansen explore how changes in network cohesion are revealed to be indicative of key processes of social change. This approach alters in fundamental ways the anthropological concepts of social structure, organizational dynamics, social cohesion, marriage strategies, as well as the study of community politics within the dynamics of ongoing personal interaction.

Justin McCarthy's introductory survey traces the whole history of the Ottoman Turks from their obscure beginnings in central Asia, through the establishment and rise of the Ottoman Empire to its collapse after World War One under the pressures of nationalism. Vividly illustrated with many maps, this introductory overview is designed for non-specialists but is written with great authority and with access to original sources. It fills an important gap for an authoritative but accessible account of the rise of one of the world's great civilizations.

The author of the present volume aims to investigate the relationships between Romanians and nomadic Turkic groups (Pechenegs, Uzes, Cumans) in the southern half of Moldavia, north of the Danube Delta, between the tenth century and the great Mongol invasion of 1241-1242. The Carpathian-Danubian area particularly favoured the development of sedentary life, throughout the millennia, but, at various times, nomadic pastoralists of the steppes also found this area favourable to their own way of life. Due to the basic features of its landscape, the above-mentioned area, which includes a vast plain, became the main political stage of the Romanian ethnic space, a stage on which local communities had to cope with the pressures of successive intrusions of nomadic Turks, attracted by the rich pastures north of the Lower Danube. Contacts of the Romanians and of the Turkic nomads with Byzantium, Kievan Rus’, Bulgaria and Hungary are also investigated. The conclusions of the volume are based on an analysis of both written sources (narrative, diplomatic, cartographic) and archaeological finds.

Syrian-Kurdish Intersections in the Ottoman Period is a collection of essays on different aspects of the history of the Kurdish people in Syria under the Ottoman Empire, by specialists from Canada, Cyprus, Germany, Iran, Japan, Jordan, Lebanon, the Netherlands, Syria, Turkey, and the United States. The book explores the junctures and crossings of Kurdish lives, Syrian geography in the broadest terms, and the Ottoman rule. The contributors draw on new research in Ottoman Turkish and Arabic, and a range of other archival and narrative sources to examine the history of Kurdish settlement in Syria, including Ottoman sedentarization policies, Kurdish notable families, trade, landowning, Kurdish-Bedouin relations, Kurdish-Ottoman civil servants, Sufism, and nineteenth-century state reforms. Syrian-Kurdish Intersections in the Ottoman Period traces a social, political, economic, and religious history across nearly 400 years.

Turks ruled the Middle East for a millennium and eastern Europe for many centuries and it is an undoubted fact that they moulded the lands under their dominion. It is therefore something of a paradox that the history of Turkey and aspects of the identity and role of the Turks, both as Muslims and as an ethnic group, still remain little known in the west and undervalued in the Arabic and Persian-speaking worlds. This book contributes to historical scholarship on Turkey by focusing on its key foundational myth, the battle of Manzikert in 1071--the Turkish equivalent of the battle of Hastings. Manzikert destroyed the hold of Christian Byzantium on eastern Turkey and opened the whole country to the spread of Islam, a process completed with the fall of Constantinople and Trebizond some four centuries later. Translations and a close analysis of all the extant Muslim sources--both Arabic and Persian--which deal with the battle of Manzikert are provided in the book. It also looks at these writings as literary works and vehicles of religious ideology and analyses the ongoing confrontation between the Muslim Turks and Christian Europe and the importance of Manzikert in the formation of the modern state of Turkey since 1923.

In Essays on Turkish Literature and History Barbara Flemming makes available essays partly previously published in German. They offer insights gained through decades of scholarship. Although the Ottoman period is central, a wide range is covered, including an early Turkish principality, Mamluk and Ottoman Egypt, and contemporary southeastern Turkey. The essays look into historical and political factors involved in the preoccupation with the world’s ending, into Muslim-Christian dialogue, the sultan’s prayer before battle, and the bilingualism of poets. Of particular interest are the sections on female participation in mysticism, on an anti-Sufi movement in Cairo, on the Ottoman capital’s appeal to collectors and emigrants (Diez, Süssheim, Böhlau), and on the far-reaching effects of alphabet change.

During the nineteenth century, the development and codification of forest science in France were closely linked to Provence's time-honored tradition of mobile pastoralism, which formed a major part of the economy. At the beginning of the century, pastoralism also featured prominently in the economies and social traditions of North Africa and southwestern Anatolia until French forest agents implemented ideas and practices for forest management in these areas aimed largely at regulating and marginalizing Mediterranean mobile pastoral traditions. These practices changed not only landscapes but also the social order of these three Mediterranean societies and the nature of French colonial administration. In Nomad's Land Andrea E. Duffy investigates the relationship between Mediterranean mobile pastoralism and nineteenth-century French forestry through case studies in Provence, French colonial Algeria, and Ottoman Anatolia. By restricting the use of shared spaces, foresters helped bring the populations of Provence and Algeria under the control of the state, and French scientific forestry became a medium for state initiatives to sedentarize mobile pastoral groups in Anatolia. Locals responded through petitions, arson, violence, compromise, and adaptation. Duffy shows that French efforts to promote scientific forestry both internally and abroad were intimately tied to empire building and paralleled the solidification of Western narratives condemning the pastoral tradition, leading to sometimes tragic outcomes for both the environment and pastoralists.

The arrival of the Seljuk Turks in Anatolia forms an indispensable part of modern Turkish discourse on national identity, but Western scholars, by contrast, have rarely included the Anatolian Turks in their discussions about the formation of European nations or the transformation of the Near East. The Turkish penetration of Byzantine Asia Minor is primarily conceived of as a conflict between empires, sedentary and nomadic groups, or religious and ethnic entities. This book proposes a new narrative, which begins with the waning influence of Constantinople and Cairo over large parts of Anatolia and the Byzantine-Muslim borderlands, as well as the failure of the nascent Seljuk sultanate to supplant them as a leading supra-regional force. In both Byzantine Anatolia and regions of the Muslim heartlands, local elites and regional powers came to the fore as holders of political authority and rivals in incessant power struggles. Turkish warrior groups quickly assumed a leading role in this process, not because of their raids and conquests, but because of their intrusion into pre-existing social networks. They exploited administrative tools and local resources and thus gained the acceptance of local rulers and their subjects. Nuclei of lordships came into being, which could evolve into larger territorial units. There was no Byzantine decline nor Turkish triumph but, rather, the driving force of change was the successful interaction between these two spheres.