Suraiya Faroqhi's scholarly contribution to the field of Ottoman history has been prodigious. Her latest book represents a summation of that scholarship, an introduction to the state-of-the-art in Ottoman history. In a compelling exploration of the ways that primary and secondary sources can be used to interpret history, the author reaches out to students and researchers in the field and in related disciplines to familiarise them with these documents. By considering both archival and narrative sources, she explains why they were prepared, encouraging her readers to adopt a critical approach to their findings, and disabusing them of the notion that everything recorded in official documents is necessarily true! While the book is essentially a guide to a complex discipline for those about to embark upon their research, the experienced Ottomanist will find much that is original and provocative in its sophisticated interpretation of the field.

Second edition of an authoritative text on the Ottoman Empire.

Despite the fact that its capital city and over one third of its territory was within the continent of Europe, the Ottoman Empire has consistently been regarded as a place apart, inextricably divided from the West by differences of culture and religion. A perception of its militarism, its barbarism, its tyranny, the sexual appetites of its rulers and its pervasive exoticism has led historians to measure the Ottoman world against a western standard and find it lacking. In recent decades, a dynamic and convincing scholarship has emerged that seeks to comprehend and, in the process, to de-exoticize this enduring realm. Dan Goffman provides a thorough introduction to the history and institutions of the Ottoman Empire from this new standpoint, and presents a claim for its inclusion in Europe. His lucid and engaging book - an important addition to New Approaches to European History - will be essential reading for undergraduates.

Food is a marker of identity, culture, and class, and it denotes power, routine, leisure, and celebration. Despite its importance to every aspect of historical research, this topic has not been sufficiently explored in Ottoman history. This volume places the study of food in the mainstream of Ottoman history by analyzing major issues - origins, identity, minorities, Ottomanization, the 'golden age', foreign relations, the nature of modernity - all from the perspective of food. Each chapter relies on elements such as food, foodstuffs, recipes, eating habits, utensils, and vessels as the starting point to explain an aspect of Ottoman history, thus showing how the study of food contributes to the study of the Ottoman Empire in general.

A joint publication of the Gennadius Library and the Aikaterini Laskaridis Foundation, Ottoman Athens is the first volume to focus on the Ottoman presence in Athens. This collection of 12 essays explores the architecture, antiquities, cartography, and documentary sources from the period, shedding light on little-studied material and illuminating daily life in Greece's most famous city during Ottoman rule. Topics include the Parthenon mosque; the neighborhood of Karykes and the fountain of the Exechoron; the restoration of the Benizelos Mansion; Ottoman-period baths in Athens; topographic maps of Athens during the Ottoman period; the Vienna Anonymous and the Bassano drawing; Ottoman-period pottery found in the Athenian Agora; and travelers' accounts of the hammams of Athens.

At the turn of the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire straddled three continents and encompassed extraordinary ethnic and cultural diversity among the millions of people living within its borders. This text provides a concise history of the late empire between 1789 and 1918, turbulent years marked by incredible social change.

Between 1453 and 1526 Muslims founded three major states in the Mediterranean, Iran and South Asia: respectively the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires. By the early seventeenth century their descendants controlled territories that encompassed much of the Muslim world, stretching from the Balkans and North Africa to the Bay of Bengal and including a combined population of between 130 and 160 million people. This book is the first comparative study of the politics, religion, and culture of these three empires between 1300 and 1923. At the heart of the analysis is Islam, and how it impacted on the political and military structures, the economy, language, literature and religious traditions of these great empires. This original and sophisticated study provides an antidote to the modern view of Muslim societies by illustrating the complexity, humanity and vitality of these empires, empires that cannot be reduced simply to religious doctrine.

Up until the end of the eighteenth century, the way Ottomans used their clocks conformed to the inner logic of their own temporal culture. However, this began to change rather dramatically during the nineteenth century, as the Ottoman Empire was increasingly assimilated into the European-dominated global economy and the project of modern state building began to gather momentum. In Reading Clocks, Alla Turca, Avner Wishnitzer unravels the complexity of Ottoman temporal culture and for the first time tells the story of its transformation. He explains that in their attempt to attain better surveillance capabilities and higher levels of regularity and efficiency, various organs of the reforming Ottoman state developed elaborate temporal constructs in which clocks played an increasingly important role. As the reform movement spread beyond the government apparatus, emerging groups of officers, bureaucrats, and urban professionals incorporated novel time-related ideas, values, and behaviors into their self-consciously “modern” outlook and lifestyle. Acculturated in the highly regimented environment of schools and barracks, they came to identify efficiency and temporal regularity with progress and the former temporal patterns with the old political order. Drawing on a wealth of archival and literary sources, Wishnitzer’s original and highly important work presents the shifting culture of time as an arena in which Ottoman social groups competed for legitimacy and a medium through which the very concept of modernity was defined. Reading Clocks, Alla Turca breaks new ground in the study of the Middle East and presents us with a new understanding of the relationship between time and modernity.

Dreams and Lives in Ottoman Istanbul explores biography writing and dream narratives in seventeenth-century Istanbul. It focuses on the prominent biographer ‘Aṭā’ī (d. 1637) and with his help shows how learned circles narrated dreams to assess their position in the Ottoman enterprise. This book demonstrates that dreams provided biographers not only with a means to form learned communities in a politically fragile landscape but also with a medium to debate the correct career paths and social networks in late sixteenth and early seventeenth-century Istanbul. By adopting a comparative approach, this book engages with current scholarly dialogues about life-writing, dreams, and practices of remembrance in Habsburg Spain, Safavid Iran, Mughal India and Ming China. Recent studies have shown the shared rhythms between these contemporaneous dynasties and the Ottomans, and there is now a strong interest in comparative approaches to examining cultural life. This first English-language monograph on Ottoman dreamscapes addresses this interest and introduces a world where dreams changed lives, the dead appeared in broad daylight, and biographers invited their readers to the gardens of remembrance.