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Conferences

Call for Papers for The Ottomans and Diplomacy

In 2025 the Skilliter Centre for Ottomans Studies will be celebrating its 40th anniversary. To commemorate this and in honour of the academic research of Dr Susan Skilliter the Centre will be hosting a conference on The Ottomans and Diplomacy. This conference will be held at the Skilliter Centre for Ottomans Studies, Newnham College, University of Cambridge, from Thursday 10 to Saturday 12 July 2025. 

Taking diplomacy in its widest sense including public, cultural, personal, military and economic diplomacy, the conference will explore the Ottoman empire’s relations with the outside world. Topics to be covered will in include, for example, material culture, the construction of diplomatic texts including diplomatic ego documents and diplomatic social interactions.

Preference will be given to papers which are case study focused and demonstrate use of primary source data.

Papers will be 20 minutes in length with ten minutes for discussion. As the aim of the conference is to generate as much discussion as possible and to encourage the construction of new ideas, the number of papers will be limited and there will be no parallel sessions. 

Those interested in participating in this conference should submit an abstract (including affiliation and contact details) of between 400 and 500 words to skilliter.centre@newn.cam.ac.uk by Monday, 9 December 2024. Participants will be selected and contacted by 17 January 2025.

Speakers’ food and accommodation will be covered by the Skilliter Centre for the duration of the conference, but participants are expected to cover their own travel costs. The language of the conference will be English.

Dr Kate Fleet, Director, the Skilliter Centre.

Professor Ebru Boyar, Academic Advisor, the Skilliter Centre and Department of International Relations, Middle East Technical University, Ankara

Eve Lacey, Librarian, the Skilliter Centre and Librarian, Newnham College, University of Cambridge.

The Politics of Giving in the Late Ottoman Empire and Early Turkish Republic (1853-1950)

The Skilliter Centre for Ottoman Studies Newnham College, Cambridge

10 – 13 July 2024

 

Wednesday 10 July

14.00-18.00 Registration

 

Thursday 11 July

10.00-11.30 Panel I : Society and Philanthropy
Chair: Kate Fleet (University of Cambridge)

Efi Kanner (University of Athens), Ottoman Society as an Extended Family: Philanthropy, Respectability and the Emergence of the Public Sphere in the Late Ottoman Empire.

Gabriel Doyle (Aix-Marseille Université), The Materiality of Giving: Gardens, Donations and the Transformation of Ottoman Istanbul.

Canan Bolel (University of Washington), Navigating the Waves of Anarchy: Apathy among the Jewish Community of Istanbul and the Dynamics of Philanthropy in the 1930s.

 

11.30-12.00 Coffee

 

12.00-13.00 Panel II : Philanthropy in Times of Conflict
Chair: Ebru Boyar (Middle East Technical University, Ankara)

Milena Methodieva (University of Toronto), Politics, Benevolence, and Patriotism: Refugee Support in the Late Ottoman Empire.

Münevver Hatipoğlu (Boğaziçi University, Istanbul), Donating in Times of Crisis: İane Practices During the Cretan Revolt (1866-1869) and the Balkan Crisis (1876- 1878).

  

14.30-15.30 Panel III : Organising Philanthropy
Chair: Milena Methodieva (University of Toronto)

Ceyda Karamürsel (SOAS, University of London), Eunuchs’ Mutual Aid Society: Race, Kinlessness, and the Politics of Giving after the Empire.

Yücel Yanıkdağ (University of Richmond), Benefactors Behind Barbed Wire: Ottoman Prisoners of War and the Greek Invasion of Anatolia, 1919-1922.

 

15.30-16.00 Coffee

 

16.00-17.00 Panel IV : Philanthropic Women
Chair: Amy Singer (Brandeis University)

Sena Hatip Dinçyürek (Orient-Institut Istanbul), The Benevolent Ladies in the Ottoman Empire: the Recipients of the Order of Mercy (Şefkat Nişânı) (1878- 1918).

Elif Yumru (University of Cambridge), Beyond Charity: Unveiling the Political Dimensions of Ottoman Women’s Philanthropy in the Aftermath of the Young Turk Revolution.

 

Friday 12 July

10.00-11.00 Panel V : Children and Charity
Chair: Amy Singer (Brandeis University)

Nazan Çiçek (Ankara University), Caring for Children through the Social Aid Branches of the People’s Houses: Shoes, Lunches and Circumcision Ceremonies (1933-1946).

Mesadet Maria Sözmen (University of California, Santa Barbara), Nurturing the Future: Intellectual Philanthropy and Charity Projects for Street Children in Early Cold War Turkey.

 

11.00-11.30 Coffee

 

11.30-12.30 Panel VI : Charitable Entertainment
Chair: Ceyda Karamürsel (SOAS, University of London)

Gábor Fodor (HUN-REN Research Centre for the Humanities, Institute of History, Budapest), Giving by Music: Hungarian Charity Concerts in Constantinople during the First World War.

Daniel-Joseph MacArthur-Seal (Scuola Superiore Meridionale, Naples), Occupation and Resilience: Charitable Entertainments in Occupied Istanbul, 1918-1923.

 

Free afternoon

 

Saturday 13 July

 

10.00-11.00 Panel VII : Propaganda and Philanthropy
Chair: Nazan Çiçek (Ankara University)

Kate Fleet (University of Cambridge), The British and the Balkans: British Relief Work in Istanbul 1912-1913.

Ebru Boyar (Middle East Technical University, Ankara), British Humanitarian Propaganda in Turkey: the Anglo-Turkish Relief Society and the 1939 Erzincan Earthquake.

 

11.00-11.30 Coffee

 

11.30-13.00 Panel VIII : Gifts and Diplomacy
Chair: Yücel Yanıkdağ (University of Richmond)

Onur Engin (University of Cambridge), Sonic Glorification: Cannons as Diplomatic Objects of Gift-Giving in the Ottoman Empire.

Mehmet Doğar (University of Cambridge), Turkish Fields, Italian Wheels: Mussolini’s Gift of a Tractor to Mustafa Kemal in 1929.

Eve Lacey (University of Cambridge), “Since Generous Things Prosper”: British Council Gifts to Turkey 1940-1946.

 

For further details please contact skilliter.centre@newn.cam.ac.uk

The Ottomans and Disorder

Wednesday, 5 July 2023

14.00-18.00 Registration

 

Thursday, 6 July 2023

10.00-11.00 Panel I 
Discussing Order and Disorder
Chair: Kate Fleet (University of Cambridge)

Abdurrahman Atçıl (Sabancı University), Conceptions of Order and Disorder in the Preambles of Provincial Kanunnames. 
Ellen Nye (Harvard University), Ottoman Monetary Order and Disorder at the End of the Seventeenth Century.

11.00-11.30 Coffee

11.30-13.00 Panel II
Urban Disorders
Chair: Ebru Boyar (Middle East Technical University)

Mehmet Kalpaklı (Bilkent University), Coffeehouses and Conflict: Public Disorder in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire.
Nora Lafi (Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin), Disorder as the Sign of Rupture of the Urban Civic Pact: Case Studies from Ottoman Cairo, Aleppo and Tunis.
Miri Shefer Mossensohn (Tel Aviv University), Disorder in the Guild: Professional Jealousy and Envy among Early Modern Ottoman Physicians.

13.00-14.30 Lunch

14.30-16.00 Panel III
Disorder in the Periphery 
Chair: Milena Methodieva (University of Toronto)

Nikola Minov (Ss. Cyril & Methodius University, Skopje), Hayduks in Ottoman Macedonia. 
Cengiz Kırlı (Boğaziçi University), Rural Unrest in Ottoman Vranje in the Mid-Nineteenth Century.
Theoharis Stavrides (University of Cyprus), Shades of Disorder in Eighteenth-Century Cyprus: the Case of the Dizdar Halil Rebellion (1764-1766).

16.00-16.30 Coffee

16.30-17.30 Panel IV
Violent Disorder
Chair: Kate Fleet (University of Cambridge)

Joshua White (University of Virginia), Chaos and Captives: the Trafficking and Enslavement of Ottoman Subjects in the Seventeenth Century.
Christine Isom-Verhaaren (Brigham Young University), Combatting Pirates and Bandits in Menteşe 1584-87: the Challenges of Husam, the Sancak Bey.

 

Friday 7 July 2023

10.00-11.00 Panel V
Words of Disorder
Chair: Miri Shefer Mossensohn (Tel Aviv University)

Erdem Çıpa (University of Michigan), “The World is Filled with Sedition, Ungratefulness, and Rebellion”: a Litany of Grievances by Ali b. Abdülkerim Halife.
Christiane Czygan (University of Bonn), Disorder Needed: Sultan Süleyman’s Letters to Shah Tahmasp and the Impact of the Prince Bayezid Case.

11.00-11.30 Coffee 

11.30-12.30 Panel VI 
Disorder on the Borders and Beyond
Chair: Kate Fleet (University of Cambridge)

Kayhan Nejad (University of Oxford), Ordering the Autonomists: the Ottomans in Northwestern Iran, 1911-19.
Nikolay Antov (University of Arkansas), The Wallachian Prince Michael the Brave’s Campaigns across the Danube in the 1590s and the Ottoman Response. 

Free Afternoon

 

Saturday 8 July 2023

09.30-10.30 Panel VII
Mind and Order
Chair: Ebru Boyar (Middle East Technical University)

Yücel Yanıkdağ (University of Richmond), Between the ‘Civilizing Process’ and Brutalization: the Transformative Experience of Military Training and War.
Avner Wishnitzer (Tel Aviv University), Mindscaping: Ottoman Reform and the Dangers of the Oriental Imagination.

10.30-11.00 Coffee 

11.00-12.00 Panel VIII
Politics and Disorder
Chair: Yücel Yanıkdağ (University of Richmond)

Milena Methodieva (University of Toronto), On the Verge of Disaster: Istanbul and the Refugee Crisis of the 1877-78 Russo-Ottoman War.
Mostafa Minawi (Cornell University), A Disorderly (Dis)entanglement: Arab-Ottomans in the Post-1908 Parliament.

12.00-13.00 Panel IX 
Disorder in Late Ottoman Istanbul
Chair: Kate Fleet (University of Cambridge)

Elif Yumru (University of Cambridge), The World Upside Down: Women and the Young Turk Revolution of 1908.
Ebru Boyar (Middle East Technical University), Unlawful Liaisons: Police and Prostitutes in Late Ottoman Istanbul.

 

Social and Cultural Life in Ottoman Anatolia

Sempozyum / Symposium
12-13 Aralık / December 2018
Vekam Ankara Bağ Evi
Ankara, Turkey

Osmanlı Anadolusu’nda Toplumsal ve Kültürel Yaşam
Social and Cultural Life in Ottoman Anatolia

Bilimsel Komite // Scientific Committee

Prof. Dr. Filiz Yenişehirlioğlu
Koç Üniversitesi Vehbi Koç Ankara Araştırmaları Uygulama ve Araştırma Merkezi
Koç University, Vehbi Koç Ankara Studies Research Center

Dr. Kate Fleet
Cambridge Üniversitesi, Skilliter Osmanlı Çalışmaları Merkezi
University of Cambridge, The Skilliter Centre for Ottoman Studies

Prof. Dr. Ebru Boyar
Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, Cambridge Üniversitesi Skilliter Osmanlı Çalışmaları Merkezi
Middle East Technical University, University of Cambridge, The Skilliter Centre for Ottoman Studies

Organizasyon Komitesi // Organisation Committee

A. Beril Kırcı
Koç Üniversitesi Vehbi Koç Ankara Araştırmaları Uygulama ve Araştırma Merkezi
Koç University, Vehbi Koç Ankara Studies Research Center

Mehtap Türkyılmaz
Koç Üniversitesi Vehbi Koç Ankara Araştırmaları Uygulama ve Araştırma Merkezi
Koç University, Vehbi Koç Ankara Studies Research Center

Fadime Küçükhüseyin
Koç Üniversitesi Vehbi Koç Ankara Araştırmaları Uygulama ve Araştırma Merkezi
Koç University, Vehbi Koç Ankara Studies Research Center

Middle Eastern and Balkan Mobilities in the Interwar Period (1918-1939)

Thursday 13 September

9.00-10.30  Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Space 

“German expatriates in the “twilight” of the Ottoman empire: Friedrich Schrader in Istanbul, 1908-1919”

Philip Wirtz (SOAS, London)

“Post-Ottoman dreams and nightmares in the Mandate Middle East”

Michael Provence (University of California San Diego)

“The making of the Greek refugee memory in the interwar period”

Haris Exertzoglou (University of the Aegean)

10.30-11.00 Coffee  

11.00-12.30 Politics in Exile

“The great opening of space: conceptualizing the nexus between migration and the abstraction of Arab and Muslim political identities in the interwar period”

Peter Wien (University of Maryland)

“Politics in exile: strategies of opposition to the republic among Turkish exiles in the interwar period”

Ebru Boyar (METU, Ankara)

“Pan Arabism and Zionism in the interwar period: on two unrealized population transfers”

Eli Osheroff (Leibniz-ZMO-Hebrew University, Jerusalem)

Friday 14 September

8.30-10.00 Mobility

“Strolling through Istanbul: Egyptians in 1930s Turkey”

Amit Bein (Clemson University)

“Regional careers: the mobility of doctors across new frontiers”

Liat Kozma (Hebrew University, Jerusalem)

“The many roads to the “Right Path”. Muslim association El-Hidaje between Egypt and Yugoslavia” 

Fabio Giomi (CETOBAC, Paris)

10.00-10.30 Coffee

10.30-12.00 Integration

“Yugoslav Muslims and Turkey: nation, allegiance, and migration in the interwar period”

Leyla Amzi-Erdogdular (Rutgers University, Newark)

“Worlds old and new: Muslim émigrés from Bulgaria in the aftermath of empire and the early Turkish republic”

Milena Methodieva (University of Toronto)

“Integration and visibility strategies of the middle-class refugees in Ayvalık after the Greek and Turkish compulsory population exchange”

Seda Özdemir Şimşek (Boğaziçi University, Istanbul)

12.00-13.00 Borders

“Short distance mobility across the Syrian-Turkish border, 1929-1939: paradoxes of a global Middle East”

Jordi Tejel (University of Neuchâtel)

“Convergence, territoriality and the Soviet-Turkish Border Treaty of 1928”

Onur İşçi (Bilkent University, Ankara)

14.30-16.00 Colonialism

“Colonialism and mobility in Libya during the Balbo era, 1934-1940”

Brian McLaren (University of Washington)

“The colonization of Aromanians in Southern Dobruja (1925-1933)”

Nikola Minov (St. Cyril and St Methodius University, Skopje)

“Muslim religious mobility in moving pictures: the Dutch Hajj documentary film Het Groote Mekka Feest (1928) and its colonial context”

Amr Ryad (KU Leuven)

16.00-16.30 Coffee 

16.30-18.00 The Search for a Better Life 

“Between two newly established nation states. Unwanted and (un)desirable Muslim migration from Yugoslavia to Turkey during the 1920s” 

Edvin Pezo (IOS Regensburg)

“‘We want our share of life, light and freedom’: exile, migration and the rise of nationalism in colonial Algeria in the interwar period”

Rabah Aissaoui (University of Leicester)

“From Marjayoun to Oklahoma: the globalization of the periphery in interwar Lebanon”

Toufoul Abou-Hodeib (University of Oslo)

Trade and Production in Ottoman Anatolia

September, 28 2017, Thursday

10:00 – 10:15  Opening Speech

Prof. Filiz Yenişehirlioğlu, Koç University, Director of VEKAM
Dr. Kate Fleet, University of Cambridge, The Skilliter Centre for Ottoman Studies

10:15 – 11:00 Keynote Speech

The Political Economy of Trade and Production in Ottoman Anatolia

Prof. Metin Coşgel, The University of Connecticut
Dr. Sadullah Yıldırım, Ibn Haldun University

11:00 – 11:20 Break

12:20 – 12:10 Session I

Chair: Prof. Filiz Yenişehirlioğlu, Koç University VEKAM

The structure of Agricultural Production in Sixteenth-Centre Central Anatolia: A General Overview

Prof. Mehmet Öz, Hacettepe University

Land and Labour in the Western Anatolian Landed Estates (Çiftliks) of the Nineteenth Century

Assoc. Prof. Yücel Terzibaşoğlu, Boğaziçi University

12:10 – 13:30 Lunch

13:30 – 14:15 Keynote Speech

Copper in the Hands of Ottoman Women: Outlandish or Unexceptional?

Prof. Suraiya Faroqhi, Ibn Haldun University

14:15 – 14:35 Break

14:35 – 16:00 Session II

Chair: Dr. Kate Fleet, University of Cambridge, The Skilliter Centre for Ottoman Studies

A Glance at Ottoman Trade through the Records of the Imperial Mint: Foreign Coins in Circulation in Anatolia and Rumelia (1766-1802)

Asst. Prof. Ö. Faruk Bölükbaşı, Bilecik Şeyh Edebali University

Trade and Production in Aleppo and its Hinterland in the Sixteenth Century

Assoc. Prof. Margaret Venzke, Stetson University

Tribe as an Economic Actor: The Cihanbeyli Tribe in the Province of Ankara (1839-1865)

Assoc. Prof. Yonca Köksal Özyaşar, Koç University
Mehmet Polatel, Koç University

September, 29 2017, Friday

10:00 – 10:45 Keynote Speech

Global Trade Routes and Anatolia during the Classical Ottoman Era

Prof. Özer Ergenç, Bilkent University

10:45 – 11:05 Break

11:05 – 13:00 Session III

Chair: Prof. Ebru Boyar, Middle East Technical University

Genoese Commercial Activities in Northern Anatolia in the First Half of the Fifteenth Century

Dr. Kate Fleet, University of Cambridge, The Skilliter Centre for Ottoman Studies

Production and Trade of Cotton in Ottoman Anatolia from the Early Modern to the Modern Period c. 1700- 1914

Prof. Elena Frangakis-Syrett, The City University of New York

Fakes of the Trade: Uncertainty and the Activation of Economic Norms in the Nineteenth Century

Dr. Marc Aymes, Centre National de la Recherche Scienti que

Occupations and Investment in Nineteenth-Century Bursa

Assoc. Prof. Hülya Canbakal, Sabancı University

Assoc. Prof. Erdem Kabadayı, Koç University

Prof. Alpay Filiztekin, Özyeğin University

The Ottomans and Entertainment

This conference was held at the Skilliter Centre for Ottomans Studies from 29 June to 2 July 2016. Papers did consider Ottoman entertainment in the widest possible sense, from specific areas of entertainment (including performing arts, religious festivities, excursions, consumption, travel, night life, violence as entertainment and entertainment for troops in war) to Ottoman concepts of leisure and pleasure, the division between acceptable and un-acceptable entertainment and the social, political and economic impact of entertainment.

Disease and Disaster in Ottoman Anatolia

This conference was part of a three-year project organised by the Skilliter Centre for Ottoman Studies and Vehbi Koç ve Ankara Araştırmaları Merkezi (VEKAM), Koç University, on The Socio-Economic History of Anatolia in the Ottoman Period. It was held at the Skilliter Centre on 18-19 March 2016 and the speakers were:

  • Yaron Ayalon (Ball State), “Plague, psychology, and religious boundaries in Ottoman Anatolia”.
  • Ebru Boyar (METU, Ankara / Skilliter Centre), “The ‘diseasescape’ of late Ottoman Anatolia: state approaches, social reactions and the complexities of implementation”.
  • Selçuk Dursun (METU, Ankara), “The question of the forest: rethinking the deforestation narratives in the Late Ottoman empire”.
  • Tolga Esmer (Central European University, Budapest), “Emotions in the Ottoman archives: imperial uncommon sense at the height of turn-of-the-nineteenth-century insurgency”.
  • Özge Ertem (Harvard), “Coping with post-war famine and hunger in the Ottoman East (1879-1882)”.
  • Güneş Işıksel (Medeniyet University, Istanbul), “Brigands, calamities and states: regulation of banditry by the Ottomans and their neighbours in the sixteenth century”.
  • Nükhet Varlık (Rutgers), “Plague ecology in Ottoman Anatolia”.
  • Sara Nur Yıldız (University of St Andrews / Orient-Institut Istanbul), “The disease landscape of medieval Anatolia and the early modern Ottoman world”.
Middle Eastern Societies (1918-1939): Challenges, Changes and Transitions

The Department of International Relations, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, in association with the Skilliter Centre for Ottoman Studies, Newnham College, University of Cambridge, is organizing a conference on Middle Eastern Societies (1918-1939): Challenges, Changes and Transitions to be held on 15-17 October 2015 in Ankara, Turkey. The organizer of the conference is Associate Professor Ebru Boyar.

The period 1918 to 1939 represents one of major upheaval and change in the Middle East. Following the end of the First World War and the collapse of the Ottoman empire, a new political map of the region was constructed, mandates were established and new nation-states emerged. Examining the period from two major perspectives, state-society relations and city-society relations, this conference aims to examine various aspects of social change, questioning how societies adopted, adapted to, negotiated over or resisted changes imposed by internal or external political actors, or brought about by violence or economic circumstances. It will also examine how reforms and changes in one society impacted on other societies in the region and how different segments of the same society responded to change.

Subjects that papers might consider include:

  • Migration and mobility
  • Health and medicine
  • Education
  • Legal practices
  • The position of women
  • Political participation
  • Leisure and entertainment
  • Advertising and consumption
  • Welfare
  • Tourism

The two key-note speakers are Professor Ulrike Freitag, Professor at the Institute of Islamic Studies, Freie Universität Berlin and Director of Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin, and Professor Eugene L. Rogan, University Lecturer in the Modern History of the Middle East, Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford, and Director of The Middle East Centre, St Antony’s College, University of Oxford.

Preference will be given to papers which are case study focused and demonstrate use of primary source data. Papers, which will be 20 minutes in length with ten minutes for discussion, will be circulated to participants three weeks before the commencement of the conference. As the aim of the conference is to generate as much discussion as possible and to encourage the construction of new ideas, the number of papers will be limited and there will be no parallel sessions. It is intended to publish selected papers from the conference in a volume to be published by an international publisher.

Those interested in participating in this conference should submit an abstract (including affiliation and contact details) of between 400 and 500 words to Professor Ebru Boyar (boyar@metu.edu.tr) by 15 January 2015. Participants will be selected and contacted by 15 February 2015.

Speakers’ food and accommodation will be covered for the duration of the conference but participants are expected to cover their own travel costs. The language of the conference will be English.

More information can be found on the METU website.

The Ottomans and health: a comparative perspective

The Skilliter Centre conference on The Ottomans and health: a comparative perspective was held from 3-6 July, 2013. The conference set out to consider health in the widest possible sense with papers on areas ranging from concepts of hygiene, morality and philanthropy, to healthscapes, architecture and gravestones.

Wednesday 3 July 

14.00-18.00 Registration

18.45-20.30 Reception

A reception will be given by the Principal of Newnham College, Professor Dame Carol Black, to be held at the Principal’s Lodge.

Thursday 4 July

09.30-11.00 Panel I – Morality

Chair: Professor Elizabeth Zachariadou (Crete)

  • Professor Angeliki Konstantakopoulou (Ioanina), Pure soul in unclean body: some remarks on Christian-Islamic divergences.
  • Professor John Alexander (Thessaloniki) and Dr Sophia Laiou (Ionian University, Corfu), Health and philanthropy among the Ottoman Orthodox population, eighteenth to early nineteenth century.
  • Dr Ebru Boyar (ODTÜ, Ankara), The moral road to health in the late Ottoman empire and early Turkish republic.

11.00-11.30 Coffee

11.30-13.00 Panel II – Cleanliness

Ch​air: Dr Colin Heywood (Hull)

  • Professor Elizabeth Archibald (Durham), Therapeutic bathing in the medieval West: literary and historical evidence.
  • Dr Svetla Ianeva (New Bulgarian University, Sofia), Hygiene in nineteenth-century Ottoman Bulgaria.
  • Dr Kate Fleet (Cambridge), The little frogs in Terkos: providing water to Istanbul in the late Ottoman empire.

13.00-14.30 Lunch

14.30-16.00 Panel III – Trade

Chair:Dr Kate Fleet (Cambridge)

  • Dr Tara Alberts (York), Rose water from Mecca and gall-nuts from the Levant: the trade in curative commodities between Southeast Asia and the Middle East in the early modern period.
  • Erol Baykal (Cambridge), Selling medicine in the late Ottoman empire.
  • Dr Vera Costantini (Venice), Well-protected remedies. The Venetian pharmacopoeia in the Ottoman empire.

16.00-16.30 Coffee

16.30-18.00 Panel IV – State and Health in the Late Ottoman Empire

Chair: Dr Gábor Ágoston (Georgetown)

 

  • Dr Tuba Demirci (Kemerburgaz University, Istanbul), Mother and children’s health in the late Ottoman empire: critical issues regarding welfare, pronatalism and population progeny between 1839-1908.
  • Dr Emine Ö. Evered (Michigan State), Confronting disease, controlling society: late Ottoman experiences with syphilis and regulation.
  • Dr Yücel Yanıkdağ (University of Richmond), Firar as psychogenic fugue: the dilemma of Ottoman military desertion in the Great War.

19.30 Dinner

Friday 5 July

09.30-10.30 Panel V – Medical Knowledge I

Chair: Professor Ben Fortna (SOAS)

  • Dr Debby Banham (Cambridge), ‘The East’ as a source of medical ideas and materials in early medieval England.
  • Dr Birsen Bulmuş (Appalachian State University), Feyzi Mustafa Hayatizade and the Ottoman conception of syphilis in the eighteenth century.

10.30-11.00 Coffee 

11.00-12.00 Panel VI – Medical Knowledge II

Chair: Professor Abdul-Karim Rafeq (College of William and Mary)

  • Dr Maurits van den Boogert (Leiden), Dr Russell’s clinical eye: western reports on Ottoman medicine from the eighteenth century.
  • Dr Kyle Evered (Michigan State), Locating malaria in the late Ottoman context: between republican narratives and the historical record.

12.00-13.00 Panel VII – Hospitals

Chair: Professor Filiz Yenişehirlioğlu (Başkent University, Ankara)

  • Dr Miri Shefer-Mossensohn (Tel Aviv), The many masters of early modern Ottoman hospitals: between the imperial palace, harem, bureaucracy, and the Muslim legal courts.
  • Dr Nina Ergin (Koç University, Istanbul), Healing by design? A multi-sensorial approach to early modern Ottoman hospital architecture.

13.00-14.30 Lunch

Afternoon free

Saturday 6 July

9.00-12.00 Panel VIII – City and Health

Chair: Professor Elizabeth Zachariadou (Crete)

  • Professor Abdul-Karim Rafeq (The College of William and Mary), Traditional and institutional medicine in Ottoman Damascus.
  • Dr Amina El-Bendary (AUC, Cairo), A social history of medicine in medieval Egypt and Syria.

10.00-10.30 Coffee

  • Dr Nükhet Varlık (Rutgers), Imagined healthscapes: places of health and disease in early modern Ottoman cities.
  • Dr Colin Heywood (Hull), Edirne-Izmir-Larnaca, 1690-1710: experiences of disease and death in three Ottoman milieux.
  • Dr Antonis Anastasopoulos (Crete), Communicating death: Ottoman gravestones from Crete.

12.00-13.00 Roundtable Discussion: 

Discussant: Dr Gábor Ágoston (Georgetown)

13.00-14.30 Lunch

The organizers gratefully acknowledge the support of the George Macaulay Trevelyan Fund and Newnham College

For further details please contact Kate Fleet (khf11@cam.ac.uk) or Ebru Boyar (boyar@metu.edu.tr)

Abstracts

 

Rose water from Mecca and gall-nuts from the Levant: the trade in curative commodities between Southeast Asia and the Middle East in the early modern period

Tara Alberts (University of York)

Recent scholarship has stressed the vibrant trade in spices and other commodities between Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Historians have explored the effect of these diplomatic, mercantile and religious exchanges on the societies, cultures and economies of both regions. The arrival of Europeans in Southeast Asia brought added complexity to these trade networks: disrupting some established connections and influencing the creation of new diplomatic and mercantile links between the two regions. European accounts are frequently very detailed about the commodities available in the entrepôts of Southeast Asia. In particular, these accounts can reveal the flourishing medical market place which existed in many port-cities, illustrating the wide range of medicines, ritual objects and other materials which could be used for healing. This paper explores European perceptions of the trade between the Middle East and Southeast Asia, and in particular of the curative commodities (purportedly) arriving in Southeast Asia with Middle Eastern merchants. Many European accounts made rhetorical reference to the supposed struggle between cross and crescent in the region, as Islam and Christianity both gained converts. Against this backdrop, medicines and ideas about health and healing often took on added significance in narratives of the encounter. Some missionaries expressed concern, for example, that Muslim proselytisers would be able to persuade Southeast Asians of the veracity of Islam through providing access to novel cures. This paper will explore the ways in which monitoring the exchange of curative commodities between Southeast Asia and the Middle East became linked to wider European objectives and anxieties in the region and the wider world.

 Health and philanthropy among the Ottoman Orthodox population, eighteenth to early nineteenth century

John Alexander (Thessaloniki) and Sophia Laiou (Ionian University, Corfu)

For the Orthodox Christian urban population of the Ottoman Empire the eighteenth century was identified with demographic and economic development. This development resulted in obvious socio-economic differentiation between the Orthodox urban strata and the formation of “internal” elites, which interacted with the Ottoman administrative system  and/or participated in the commercial networks within or outside the Ottoman empire.

A means of reproduction of the power structure within the boundaries of the Orthodox Ottoman population was the practice of philanthropy. In the second half of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century in large Ottoman cities wealthy Christian reaya funded the building of hospitals, aiming at the comfort of the co religious lower social layers. On the other hand, Orthodox bishops, continuing the philanthropic tradition of the Orthodox Church, donated money to the monasteries for the relief of the ill and infirm people.

In this paper the above mentioned aspects of the philanthropic activity will be addressed, focusing on issues referring to: a) the restriction of this activity in large urban centers, in full correspondence with the restricted number of the hospitals established as vakıfs by members of the Ottoman dynasty; if in the case of the Ottoman Muslims the offer of food was considered a more significant act of philanthropy and piety, in the case of the urban Orthodox Ottoman population were there other priorities concerning the donation of cash for philanthropic reasons? b) What was the social profile of the donors and what was their motivation? How strong was their class consciousness towards their co religious? c) What was the role of the Orthodox monasteries in the nursing of the sick poor Christians? d) In what way the rules that the Orthodox donors imposed can be compared with the stipulations of the Muslim cash vakıfs?

Communicating death: Ottoman gravestones from Crete

Antonis Anastasopoulos (University of Crete and Institute for Mediterranean Studies/FORTH)

The aim of my paper is to examine how death is represented in the epitaphs of the Islamic gravestones of Rethymno (Ott. Resmo), Crete. Death is the result of factors such as ill health, accident, crime, or old age, but most of the time citing the cause of death on an Ottoman gravestone was considered irrelevant. By definition, the aim of the epitaphs was not to systematically record the lives and circumstances of death of the persons concerned, but rather to mourn death and praise the dead. Thus, the paper will focus on socially acceptable ways to talk about death in the context of funerary practices, and will also seek to address the issue of the bounds between social conformity and the expression of genuine feeling on gravestones as permanent markers of death placed in a cemetery, which in the case of Rethymno, as in other Ottoman settlements, was an open area situated outside the district of the living, the walled town. The Rethymno gravestones will be examined in the context of the extensive literature on Ottoman gravestones, and an attempt will also be made to locate references to death in other types of sources from Ottoman Crete, such as folk poems.

 Therapeutic bathing in the medieval West: literary and historical evidence

Elizabeth Archibald (University of Durham)

Therapeutic bathing was widely practiced in the medieval West. In this paper I shall consider various kinds of evidence, literary and historical. Baths were widely available in private homes and in public bathhouses, though public baths were on a much smaller scale than Roman ones. Visits to the baths were often excuses for amorous encounters, according to literary texts including the Roman de la Rose, the Occitan romance Flamenca, Boccacio’s Decameron and Macchiavelli’s play Mandragola. Bathing as a cure for medical problems was very widespread in continental Europe (I am less confident that it was common in England, which has only one hot spa, Bath). It is recommended in many medical texts for everyone from newborn babies to the old, with many qualifications according to the season and the ailment to be cured. Many images offer further evidence of the popularity of bathing; our spa and jacuzzi culture today is nothing new.

 ‘The East’ as a source of medical ideas and materials in early medieval England

Debbie Banham (University of Cambridge)

The twelfth century is widely known as the period when ‘Arabic’ medical knowledge (some of it originating even further east) became widely available in western Europe, but western texts had in fact been showing an interest in places to the east for a couple of centuries before that. This paper will focus on medical texts written in the vernacular in England in the tenth and eleventh centuries, showing how they foreshadow developments normally asociated with the twelfth-century ‘Renaissance’. In common with other writings from early medieval England, the Old English medical texts do envisage Asia as a locus of strangeness and special knowledge, as well as holiness, but they also associate it with particular medical authorities and ingredients. The paper will investigate the identity of those authorities and ingredients, and the sources of the latter, and place the texts’ ‘Orient’ in its context, both within medical developments in the medieval West, and in wider ideas about the East in England in the early middle ages.

Selling medicine in the late Ottoman empire

Erol Baykal (University of Cambridge)

The public discourse about different types of drugs in the Ottoman empire took two distinct forms, namely the discussion of new and established medication in professional journals on the one hand and the marketing of branded drugs on the other. Both forums addressed a distinctly different audience: the former, medicine professionals and pharmacists, and the latter, the general public. Interestingly, dichotomies occurred between what was, according to expert opinion, proper good value medication and the type of drugs the general consumers, influenced by advertising campaigns, preferred. This paper examines the behaviour of Ottoman consumers within these parameters in order to establish how much expert opinion and advertising could influence consumer behaviour.

A social history of medicine in late medieval Egypt and Syria

Amina El-Bendary (AUC, Cairo)

The history of medicine is one of the richest areas of medieval and early Islamic history. Much research has focused on the medical discourses of classical Islam, especially on medical texts written by physicians. These texts have revealed to us the continuation of Galenic medicine under the Arab caliphates and the persistence of the humoral theories. This study of medical discourses is also complemented by studies that focus on the practice. For medieval Islamic societies, surviving waqf documents are also an important source for studying the bimaristans of the period.

However, in addition to this high tradition of specialized medicine, other traditions existed and practice varied. Surviving Arabic chronicles can also add to our understanding of the practice of medicine on a popular level. Historians such as al-Maqrizi or Ibn Taghribirdi or Ibn Tawq as they chronicled the everyday affairs of their societies also gave us an idea of how these societies perceived and dealt with health concerns and illnesses. The references to health issues and concerns by medieval historians suggest that practice was more varied than the study of normative texts suggests. These references also help us to better appreciate the challenges facing medieval societies, and the social anxiety at a time of different epidemics.

 Dr Russell’s clinical eye: western reports on Ottoman medicine from the eighteenth century

Maurits van den Boogert (Leiden)

The medical knowledge of the Arabs was held in high regard in the West for a long time, but this began to change in the eighteenth century. Due to new approaches to (the teaching of) physick in Europe, Western medical men began to look at the East from a different perspective. Scholars and practitioners in Europe continued to be interested in medical texts – mostly still in Arabic – from the Ottoman empire, but the Levant also became a territory where first-hand experience could be acquired with diseases that were uncommon in the West. The British merchant navy and the Levant Company provided fruitful infrastructures for such medical inquiries. Alexander and Patrick Russell – the two half-brothers who are all too often conflated into the singular “Dr Russell” – embodied many aspects of these developments during the Enlightenment. As students of the pupils of Boerhaave, they were genuinely interested in actual patients, and both relied more on clinical observation than on venerable medical theories. On the basis of the publications of both Alexander and Patrick Russell, this paper will discuss their attitudes towards Ottoman medicine; their reports about the plague; and what accounts like those of the Russells tell us about Ottoman folk medicine, including inoculation.

 The moral road to health in the late Ottoman empire and the Early Turkish Republic

Ebru Boyar (Middle East Technical University, Ankara)

This paper aims to trace the developments in the state policy towards syphilis, one of the four big diseases in the late Ottoman and early Republican period. For the state, syphilis was a “terrible disease” endangering not only public health but also threatening the security of the state and even the very survival of the population. The way the state sought to combat the spread of the disease was to make it a moral issue and it therefore adopted an increasingly moral tone in its discourse, developing from the comparatively relaxed tone of the Abdülhamidian era to the more stridently moral pronouncements of the CUP and the more stigmatising rhetoric of the early Republican government. However, this increasing moralistic tone proved counter-productive and undermined the ability of the state to enforce its health policy. The state was thus forced to shift its discourse, on the one hand toning down its moralistic approach in its relations with the urban upper classes, further driven into concealment rather than disclosure by social stigmatisation, and, on the other, stressing the moral unacceptability of syphilis in rural areas, in combination with a strong-arm policy of enforced medical treatment.

Mustafa Feyzi Hayatizade Efendi’s Risale-i İllet-i Merakiyye:a case study in pre-modern Ottoman conceptions of syphilis

Birsen Bulmuş (Appalachian State University)

Mustafa Feyzi Hayatizade Efendi’s Risale-i İllet-i Merakiyye, written in 1093 (1682-1683), represents a pivotal moment in Ottoman conceptions about syphilis, an infectious disease that possibly originates from transmission from America in the wake of Christopher Columbus’s “discovery”. This work, thoroughly based on the findings of late sixteenth- and early seventeeth-century European writers such as Hieronymous Fabricius, Amatus Lucitanus, and Daniel Sennert, endorsed the claim that syphillis had changed in nature, and had, in time, become distinct from the French pox (maraz-i Efrenci). In Hayatizade’s opinion, illicit sex was only one cause of the illet-i merakiyye, “the disease of curiosity/passion”. Poor diet, or anything else that could cause a preponderance of black bile in the internal organs, could upset the Galenic bodily balance, and set off a chronic infection.

Hayatizade, like the European sources which he used, aimed in large part at elite audiences. The Galenic methods which they advocated required the individualized attention of courtly doctors, and could not readily be applied to the poor. They also focused on male patients, and blamed women as being much more naturally predisposed towards the disease, and possibly helping to spread the bile.

Hayatizade’s work is also of interest because of its lack of reference towards spiritual causes. This may in part be due to his own background as a Jewish convert to Islam, and to his role as the chief court physician (Hekimbaşı) to Mehmed IV, whose job might have been in part to transmit the latest knowledge and methods from abroad.

Some two centuries later, Ottoman or foreign-born doctors, also working from a European secular medical understanding of medicine, would redefine syphilis and the methods used to cure and prevent the disease in radically different terms.

Mother and children’s health in the late Ottoman empire: critical issues regarding welfare, pronatalism and population progeny between 1839-1908

Tuba Demirci (Kemerburgaz University, Istanbul)

The period between the late eighteenth to the twentieth century was the time for ever-increasing concern about demographic dynamics such as population decline and rise, population hygiene and public health both for the industrialized and modernizing polities. The Ottoman empire was not an exception; the massive demographic transformation and the anxiety of depopulation coloured many different aspects of Ottoman administration in the nineteenth century. Medical authorities sought ways to hinder the factors that led to the decrease of imperial population and initiated policies to promote its further increase. Beginning from the mid-nineteenth century, Ottoman imperial administration handled population issues by introducing centralized, better and sometimes compulsory health services as well as preventive measures. Parallel to these, health administration also developed as a concept that functioned through control and disciplining of medical professionals and subject people, various regulatory discourses for vaccination, proper treatment and information on various health related complications. From the 1840s onwards, pronatalism became an integral component of Ottoman public health policies that a regulatory modern discourse was formed through anti-abortion policies, institutional arrangements to train modern midwives and obstetricians, measures for difficult deliveries and post partum fever, and prevention of venereal diseases together with various child welfare schemes. From the 1870s onwards, Ottoman advice genre also started to provide guidelines for families, mainly for women about maternal and children’s health by elaborating issues which were either dealt with inadequately or were not within the scope of pronatalist regulations put in force. This paper, therefore, will deal with the content and scope of children’s and maternal health as critical dimensions of Ottoman pronatalism and public health on the one hand, and Ottoman institutional modernization on the other. Gendered, disciplinary and medicalized discourses about child and maternal health will also constitute the scope of my discussion.

 Healing by design? a multi-sensorial approach to early modern Ottoman hospital architecture

Nina Ergin (Koç University)

“Hospital patients should never be imbued with the idea that they are sick…” Frank Lloyd Wright commented in a 1948 interview on modern hospital design. Ironically, in the subsequent decades architects moved farther and farther away from the restorative environments that the Ancient Greeks had already emphasized in medical treatment, instead allowing functional efficiency to become their sole guiding principle. Since the 1980s, however, the medical establishment has once more shown interest in the architectural environment in which health care is delivered, as well as in the ways in which buildings and gardens can either support or undermine the healing process—a turn summarized by the concept “healing by design.”

In Ottoman Medicine: Healing and Medical Institutions, 1500-1700, Shefer-Mossensohn has considered Ottoman hospital gardens in relation to the modern concept of “healing by design” and provided a brief discussion of architectural space, which also includes its multi-sensorial, experiential qualities contributing to an integralistic therapy. Yet, a detailed discussion of Ottoman hospital architecture in relation to the qualities of space that characterize good design — such as attention to the variety of sensory experiences within the space, orientation, connection, scale, and symbolic meaning — is still a desideratum. This paper will take as a starting point the present knowledge of good hospital design, as it is based on psychological and physiological research studies. Through the lens of this knowledge, it will then examine early modern Ottoman hospital architecture, together with textual sources, in order to understand how far Ottoman architects either consciously or intuitively designed hospitals that appealed to the senses, promoted well-being, and assisted in the therapeutic process.

 Confronting disease, controlling society: late Ottoman experiences with syphilis and regulation

Emine Ö. Evered (Michigan State University)

In the late Ottoman era, the empire was confronted by an increase in figures of reported cases of syphilis. These numbers that seemed to reveal an increased incidence in the occurrence of the sexually-transmitted disease — and particular concerns about its occurrence among Ottoman troops — compelled the state to adopt a more interventionist posture vis-à-vis its citizenry in the name of public health and effectual governance. In particular, from the end of the Crimean War (1853-1856) until the final years of the empire in the early 1920s, imperial authorities expressed their anxieties over syphilis not only in terms of morality or religiosity but also with regard to concerns over demography and economy. Based upon primary sources — both archival and published — this paper explores and analyzes how the late Ottoman state increasingly positioned itself to govern its citizens in terms of their health, fertility, and sexuality.

Locating malaria in the late Ottoman context: between republican narratives and the historical record

Kyle T. Evered (Michigan State University)

Among ailments found to occur in Anatolia during the late Ottoman era, malaria constituted not the most pressing of concerns, but it was one of appreciable significance. In this regard, it troubled not only Ottoman authorities and citizens but also foreign interests, such as those proposing to build railways or undertake other initiatives within the empire. In many accounts, malaria was viewed and depicted thus as an impediment to development — more than as a malady of lethal consequence. As greater knowledge of malaria’s etiology and epidemiology emerged throughout the world — including the Ottoman region, efforts to modify the physical environment (e.g., to drain wetlands) were initiated by the late nineteenth century — often modeled upon similar campaigns such as those undertaken in Italy. Moreover, by the 1890s — and with European participation, an institute of bacteriology was established in Istanbul.  Additional institutional and legislative remedies soon followed. Though constrained severely by the declining empire’s scarcity of resources and a lack of widespread political concern over malaria, such measures reveal the emergence of an imperial initiative to confront the disease. Despite this track record, the subsequent republic’s characterizations of the empire regarding the malaria problem were replete with condemnation on the grounds of inaction and indifference.  Relying upon primary and secondary sources, this paper engages with not only the conduct of anti-malaria campaigns in the late Ottoman era, it also confronts the early republican historical account regarding the disease and the Ottoman state — a narrative that championed the Kemalist state’s initiatives in public health and nation-building.

 The little frogs in Terkos: providing drinking water to Istanbul in the late Ottoman empire

Kate Fleet (University of Cambridge)

The provision of clean drinking water to Istanbul, with its very large population, was an attractive proposition for foreign concession hunters who regarded it as a lucrative venture. For the Ottoman state, the provision of water for the city’s population was in the late nineteenth century, as it had been in the previous centuries, an important issue. This paper will consider the attempts to obtain concessions to provide drinking water to various parts of the city, including in particular Beyoğlu, in the early years of Abdülhamid’s reign, the conditions under which the Ottoman government was prepared to grant concessions, the requirements it imposed, and the way in which granting such a concession was viewed.

Edirne – Izmir – Larnaca, 1670-1710: experiences of disease and death in three Ottoman milieux

Colin Heywood (University of Hull)

The interaction of climate and health – or disease – and history is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon which in recent decades has not lacked its investigators. On the one hand, classic studies such as Le Roy LaDurie’s; on the other, semi-popular studies such as Zinsser’s or W. H. Macneill’s. Certain tropes spring to mind: the climatic rigours of the 1310s and 20s in western Europe, with a series of cold, wet summers, incessant rain, and widespread dearth and famine, and the possible interconnections between this and the outbursting in western Eurasia of the Black Death a quarter of a century later.

Moving on, the effect of the bitter winters and climatic downturn in the 1590s are well-documented and have generated an extensive literature. Less well-studied has been the last decade of the seventeenth century, which contained probably the coldest series of years in the whole period of the ‘Little Ice Age’. In the studies of all these phenomena, the Ottoman component fails, almost entirely, to find a place.

And yet, questions may be asked: was it coincidence that the critical years in which the Ottoman beylik came into existence and then made the leap across the Straits into Rumeli were those of the early fourteenth-century climatic crisis in much of Europe, and then of the Black Death. Was it also coincidence that the two longest of the interminable series of European wars in which the Ottoman state involved itself – the original “Long War” of 1593-1606, and the even longer war between 1683 and 99, were both fought in years of extreme climatic pressure. How do war, climate and disease fit together in the Ottoman context? For the present paper I have chosen to illustrate some provisonal connexions in three disparate Ottoman loci of the late seventeenth/early eighteenth century, from 1670 to 1710 – one (Edirne) in Rumeli; one (Izmir) in Anatolia, and one (Larnaca) on the island of Cyprus. It is hoped some tentative conclusions may emerge as a result of this preliminary sketch of a much larger problem.

Hygiene in nineteenth-century Ottoman Bulgaria

Svetla Ianeva (New Bulgarian University, Sofia)

Based on a variety of primary sources such as private correspondence, diaries, travel accounts, memoir, and combining macro with micro-historical approaches, the paper will try to outline the main hygienic notions and practices in nineteenth-century Ottoman Bulgaria. It will examine the most important elements of personal, home and everyday life hygiene (washing, bathing and body hygiene, cleaning, ways of prevention of diseases, etc.) as well as several aspects of public hygiene such as the availability and public use of water, fountains, baths, the state of cleanliness of the streets and other public places (such as bazaars, caravanserais, hospitals), the location and state of the graveyards, some public measures for the prevention of the spread of diseases (isolation and quarantine, etc). The differences in the hygienic notions, habits and practices of the local population based on religion, culture and tradition as well as the existence or absence of mutual influences in this respect will be considered. The paper will also address the question of the begnning of some transformations in the traditional patterns of hygiene in the region during the second half of the nineteenth century under European influence or under the influence of modern education.

Pure soul in unclean body: some remarks on Christian-Islamic divergences

Angeliki Kostantakopoulou (University of Ioannina)

As the title implies, our topic tries to conceive two divergent dimensions, namely the transcendental (spotless soul, i.e. psychic/mental cleanness/health) and the material ones (dirty body, i.e. negligence of cleaning/corporal health); yet in this paper both issues will be analyzed as being simultaneously transcendental and material, on the basis of the platonic idea of mimesis, according to which religious norms and admonitions, as constituents of worldviews and behavioural systems, acquire an uncontested materiality, alias, they are incorporated: “A corporally acquired knowledge is not something that one has got, but something that one has become” (“Ce qui est appris par corps n’est pas quelque chose que l’on a … mais quelque chose que l’on est”, Pierre Bourdieu, Le sens pratique, Paris 1980, 123, n. 12).

Our remarks –tentative as they are– are formed out of a comparative investigation of Christian-Islamic perceptions and stances. It is specially intended to draw the attention to the above-mentioned issues, which are conceived rather as historically determined phenomena than as simply cultural ones. Thus, our aim is neither at tracing discriminations among the flock nor at seeking diachronic and inviolable norms. We are more interested in attempting explanations regarding (a) the differences between Christian/Islamic soul-body perceptions and practices, especially during the late-middle ages, when the mystic-version of Orthodoxy (Hesychasm) became the dominant piety model and political ideology, and (b) modes of communication between the two religious thought-patterns, like the practices of religious syncretism which have a long-range impact upon the traditional societies, still visible in modern ones.

The above research issue is only one aspect of a wider historical phenomenon, namely the origins of the Balkan traditionality – conceived as “backwardness”.

 Traditional and institutional medicine in Ottoman Damascus

Abdul-Karim Rafeq (The College of William and Mary)

A turning point in the official attitude toward medical health in Ottoman Damascus occurred under Egyptian rule in Syria in the 1830s. The Egyptians, among other things, introduced the quarantine and built a hospital for the army in Damascus. During the Ottoman Tanzimat that followed, the chief Hanafi judge in Damascus issued an order on 3 Rabi’ II 1259/3 May 1843 to the judges in the Damascus Shari’a courts to not accredit anyone who claims to be a physician but to consult with the Hekimbaşı (the chief physician) who alone has the authority to nominate a credible physician.

In the Ottoman centuries that preceded these state innovations, medicine in Damascus was practiced by physicians from all religious faiths, but with a higher percentage of Christians and to a lesser extent of Jews, who nevertheless figured as druggists. Most of the physicians had inherited the profession from their fathers, thus constituting families of physicians. The acknowledged physician was appointed to a paid position in the public hospital, the Bimaristan al-Nouri, in Damascus which is heavily endowed with vakıfs (waqfs).

The main sources of information about traditional medicine are the literary sources and the Shari’a court records. The literary sources, notably the biographical dictionaries of Muslim notables that exclude non-Muslims, mention those persons who had studied medicine alongside other disciplines but fail to give proof of their clinical expertise except in very few cases. By contrast, the Shari’a court records give details about the appointment of physicians regardless of their religion in the Bimaristan al-Nouri, the level of their position, and their pay. In addition to his hospital position, the physician could practice his profession in his hanut (shop). The probate inventories (muhallafat) give detailed information about the estates of deceased physicians, including the medical books and the equipment they had. To guard against malpractice, a Muslim patient, for example, who had a hernia to be removed by a Christian surgeon declared in his presence in the Damascus Shari’a court on 28 Sha’ban 1138/28 April 1726 that he will not hold the surgeon responsible if he dies.

No medical guilds are reported in Ottoman Syria with the exception of the guild of the barbers-surgeons (ta’ifat al-hallaqin wa’l-jarrahin) who performed minor surgery, such as circumcision and bloodletting, and also sold leeches. Popular medical practices, such as cupping, creating a hole in the leg to drain pus (hummust al-kayy), and visitations to healers and shrines were widely practiced.

During the Tanzimat, and especially during the rule of Sultan Abdülhamid II (1876-1909), the state introduced several medical facilities into Damascus. The sultan, who declared himself caliph, favored Damascene notables, and himself belonged to the Shadhilliyya Sufi order based in Damascus, built the Hamidian hospital in Damascus in 1899 and established a medical school which began to function in 1903-4 to provide services to the 4th Turkish army in Syria but also to placate the local Muslims. The irony is that the medical school in Damascus taught medicine in Turkish until the end of Ottoman rule when it shifted into Arabic and continued to do so under the French mandate. By contrast, the American medical school established by American Presbyterians in Beirut in 1867 as part of the Syrian Protestant College established a year earlier began teaching medicine in Arabic until 1882 when it shifted into English.

The many masters of Ottoman hospitals: between the imperial palace, harem, bureaucracy, and the Muslim legal courts

Miri Shefer-Mossensohn (Tel Aviv University)

This paper focuses on hospitals in the Ottoman urban centres during the early modern period analysing them as Ottoman institutions. During this period several hospitals were established as part of the vakıf system in imperial centres which included the three capitals, some princely seats in Anatolia, and various other provincial centres. How were these hospitals managed individually and as a group? Why did the system operate in its specific ways within the wider imperial administrative circles? Why did vakıf institutions become so entangled with so many branches of the state: the Imperial palace and harem, the central bureaucracy and the Shari’a courts?

Relying on sources produced within the state apparatus for the sake of running hospitals (archival documents of appointments and financial budgets found at the Osmanlı Başbakanlık Arşivi), it will be clear that Ottoman hospitals were fully co-opted into the Ottoman state. I will suggest the complex and seemingly chaotic system of administration were one cause for these hospitals to endure for several centuries and enjoy an image of efficient institutions.

Understanding the hospital system will then enlighten us not only regarding one Ottoman institution, about which we still do not know as much as we should, but also educate us some more on the working of the Ottoman state during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Imagined healthscapes: places of health and disease in early modern Ottoman cities

Nükhet Varlık (Rutgers University-Newark)

With a view to exploring how an association between health and place developed in the early modern Ottoman imagination, I will focus on three Ottoman cities, namely Istanbul, Edirne, and Bursa, and seek to understand what natural, spiritual, and cultural qualities of these cities came to be associated with health and disease. For example, Edirne is often portrayed in the sources as a place of retreat for Ottoman sultans and other elite members of Ottoman society, especially at times of crises in Istanbul; this is where the Ottoman sultans went for “hunting” or “to get the fresh air of the mountains”. In a similar vein, Bursa is often praised for its clean mountain air, green trees, and therapeutic waters. However, in the early modern era, both Edirne and Bursa were small, crowded, and filthy cities, as suggested by contemporary observers. So, what factors contributed to their being imagined as places of health and healing? I shall argue that the answer to this question can be found in the multifaceted competition between these cities. A close reading of sources reveals that Edirne and Bursa were imagined in this way precisely as a response to the critical rise of the imperial capital Istanbul, which, as a result of a complex social and political transformation came to be associated with disease in the sixteenth century. Thus, looking at the fabrication of these imagined healthscapes enables us to offer a critical reading of resistance to the Ottoman imperial project.

Firar as psychogenic fugue: the dilemma of Ottoman military desertion in the Great War

Yücel Yanıkdağ (University of Richmond)

During the Great War, approximately 500,000 Ottoman soldiers, or roughly 18 per cent of all men fielded during the war, were considered to have deserted their ranks.  Several Ottoman and Turkish military officers at the time and a handful of Ottoman historians since then have offered their interpretations on the causes of this extremely high rate of desertion.  From the perspective of social, cultural, and military history, these reasons are important, as they can tell us something about the concerns, fears, and mentalities of the Ottoman peasants who were conscripted into military service, sometimes against their will. There was yet a third group of experts whose views on desertion have been completely overlooked.  These were the Ottoman-Turkish neuro-psychiatrists, who argued that a majority of desertions during the war were pathological (marazi firar) in nature. Almost always divorced from the war itself, in this socio-medical interpretation desertion became a symptom of a number of mental ailments which, they believed, afflicted these men. For the neuro-psychiatrists, desertion became the ultimate sign of a larger medical problem—hysteria, epilepsy or schizophrenia to name a few—with those individuals who numbered in the hundreds of thousands. While focusing mostly on medicalization, this paper also hopes to deal with problems of historical interpretation of desertion raised by this pathologization. If these neuro-psychiatrists were correct in their diagnoses, then modern historians finding only non-medical reasons for desertion as they do could be missing half the picture. Yet, we must also question the motivations of neuro-psychiatrists for ignoring those non-medical reasons at the expense of medical ones.

The Ottoman woman : a comparative perspective

The aim of the conference (30 June-2 July 2011) was to examine the role of women within Ottoman society and to question some of the more stereotypic representations of women not as integrated, active and visible members of society but as excluded, or contained and secluded objects.

Power

  • Chair: Professor Abdul-Karim Rafeq (College of William and Mary)
  • Professor Suraiya Faroqhi (Bilgi University, Istanbul), Women as textile owners in early eighteenth-century Bursa. 
  • Professor Palmira Brummett (University of Tennessee), The ‘what if?’ of the Ottoman female: authority, ethnography, sexuality, conversation. 
  • Professor Amy Singer (University of Tel Aviv), Ottoman women and philanthropy. 
  • Dr Svetlana Ivanova (Sofia University), The Muslim Woman and the book in Rumeli in the pre-Industrial period. 

Economic life

  • Chairs: Dr Ebru Boyar (METU, Ankara), Professor Leslie Peirce (New York University)
  • Dr Alex Sapoznik (University of Cambridge), Women’s contribution to household income in late medieval England. 
  • Dr Birten Çelik (METU, Ankara), Unconcious pioneers in female emancipation: Ottoman working women in the late Ottoman empire. 
  • Professor Barbara Wittman (University of Akron), An assessment of market women’s livelihood strategies and informal networks in South Africa. 
  • Dr Kate Fleet (University of Cambridge), Women as economic protestors in nineteenth-century Istanbul. 
  • Dr Svetla Ianeva (New Bulgarian University, Sofia), The economic activities of women in the central part of the Ottoman Balkans in the nineteenth century.

Society and space

  • Chair: Kate Fleet (University of Cambridge)
  • Dr Nina Ergin (Koç University, Istanbul), Ottoman women’s spaces: the acoustic dimension. 
  • Professor Edith Ambros (University of Vienna), How secluded was the Ottoman woman in public pleasure-grounds? 
  • Erol Baykal (University of Cambridge), Patriotic nurses during the Balkan Wars. 

Order and Violence

  • Chair: Professor Palmira Brummett (University of Tennessee)
  • Professor Leslie Peirce (New York University), Violence against women in early modern Anatolia. 
  • Dr Ebru Boyar (METU, Ankara), Prostitution and public order in the late Ottoman empire. 

Law and the court

  • Chair: Dr Mary Laven (University of Cambridge)
  • Professor Abdul-Karim Rafeq (College of William and Mary), Women in the court records of Ottoman Damascus. 
  • Dr James Baldwin (Koç University, Istanbul), Ottoman policy on divorce in 17th-century Cairo: legal pluralism and legal change. 

Identity and representation

  • Chair: Professor Suraiya Faroqhi (Bilgi University, Istanbul)
  • Professor Paul Bailey (University of Edinburgh), The multiple identities of the “modern woman” in early twentieth-century East Asia. 
  • Professor Lucienne Thys-Şenocak (Koç University, Istanbul), Reading beyond the lines: Hadice Turhan Sultan and the correspondence of imperial Ottoman women. 
  • Dr Kostantin Zhukov (Oriental Institute, St Petersburg), The Ottoman women as seen through the eyes of Ariadna Tyrkova-Williams. 

Intellectual life

  • Chair: Professor Edith Ambros (University of Vienna)
  • Dr Didem Havlioğlu (University of Utah), The Ottoman woman as an intellectual. 
  • Dr Dominic Brookshaw (University of Manchester), Confection of the assembly: women poets in early nineteenth-century Iran. 

Slavery

  • Chair: Dr Kate Fleet (University of Cambridge)
  • Nur Khan (University of Cambridge), Gendered slave-owning practices in early modern Istanbul. 
  • Will Smiley (University of Cambridge),Gendering captivity: female and male prisoners, Islamic law and the legitimacy of Ottoman warfare. 
  • Professor Carmel Cassar (University of Malta), The Jewesses of Malta: slaves and peddlers, healers and diviners. 
  • Dr Felicitas Becker (University of Cambridge), What do we know about relations between (ex-)slave women and (ex-)mistresses on the southern Swahili Coast in the 20th century? 

The organizers gratefully acknowledge the support of the Thriplow Trust, the George Macaulay Trevelyan Trust and Newnham College.

Reconsidering colonialism

This conference (5-6 February 2010) considered various aspects colonialist from a comparative perspective, with papers covering the Ottoman empire and the early Turkish Republic, the Portuguese in early modern Southeast Asia, American missionaries, British-mandated Palestine, Algeria, Malta and Cyprus.

Decolonisation

  • Feroz Ahmad (Yeditepe University, Istanbul), “Decolonization and the fall of the Ottoman Empire.”
  • James McDougall (Oxford University), “Old guard, new era: the imperialism of development at the end of French Algeria.”

Colonial Rule

  • Erol Baykal (Cambridge University), “Colonial Dutch interest in the Ottoman press in the 19th century.”
  • Jake Norris (Cambridge University), “Beyond mandatory borders: civil society under British rule in Bethlehem.”

Religion

  • Tara Alberts (Cambridge University), ” ‘A worthy enterprise for your courage’: Portuguese colonial ambition and evangelism in early modern Southeast Asia.”
  • Andrew Preston (Cambridge University), “Faith, rights, and norms: American missionaries and informal empire.”

Economy

  • Aimilia Themopoulou (Athens University), “British trade and British interests in Salonica in its hinterland in the 19th century.”
  • Kate Fleet (Cambridge University), “Money and politics: British activities in Anatolia during the Turkish national liberation war.”
  • Carmel Cassar (University of Malta), “Continuity and change: the adoption of a wheat free trade in British Malta.”

Intellectual approaches

  • Gabriela Ramos (Cambridge University), “Indigenous perceptions of Spanish colonialism.”
  • Ebru Boyar (Middle East Technical University, Ankara), “The deconstruction of mental colonisation: intellectual responses to colonialism in the early Turkish Republic.”
  • Irene Pophaides (Frederick University, Cyprus), “The dialectic of ideology and circumstance: Enosis revisited.”
The Ottomans and Britain in the late 19th and early 20th centuries

Diplomacy

  • Chair: Gül Tokay (Istanbul)
  • John Burman (Cambridge), “Rebels and revolutionaries: Britain and opposition to the Ottoman system during the late Hamidian period, 1898-1908.” 
  • Gökhan Çetinsaya (Istanbul Şehir University), “Anglo-Ottoman relations: the case of Iraq.” 
  • Feroze Yasamee (Manchester), “Neutrality and moderation: Abdülhamid II and Great Britain, 1888-1892.” 

The case of Cyprus

  • Chair: Feroze Yasamee (Manchester)
  • Irene Pophaides (Cambridge), “The Ottoman-British-Cypriot triangle: a reassessment.” 
  • Niyazi Kızılyürek (University of Cyprus), “How did the Muslims of Cyprus become an ethnic community?” 
  • Sia Anagnostopoulou (Panteion University, Athens), “Cyprus: the critical encouter between the imperial-type modernity of the Ottoman Empire and the radical, representative modernity of Britain.” 

Espionage

  • Ebru Boyar (METU, Ankara), “Ottoman responses to English espionage in Anatolia in the post-World War I period.”
  • Kate Fleet (Cambridge), “British activities in south-eastern Anatolia in the aftermath of the First World War.”

The organizers gratefully acknowledge the support of the A.G. Leventis Foundation and The English School in Nicosia, Cyprus.

The Mediterranean as a theatre of cultural flows

​This was a one-day graduate conference with members of the research project “Dynamic Asymmetries in Transcultural Flows at the Intersection of Asia and Europe: The Case of the Early Modern Ottoman Empire”, which forms part of the University of Heidelberg’s “Cluster of Excellence: Asia and Europe in a Global Context: Shifting Asymmetries in Cultural Flows“.

10.00-11.30PANEL 1
 Evangelos Katafylis, Christian-Muslim contacts and interrelations in the 14th century through the epistle of Gregory Palamas.
 Tobias Graf, Studying renegades as agents of cultural flows and their role in the Ottoman state, c. 1580-1610.
11.30-12.00Break
12.00-13.30PANEL 2
 Christian Roth, The eighteenth-century Aegean as a theatre of transcultural flows.
 Will Smiley, Ottoman-Russian cultural flows through captivity in the eighteenth century.
13.30-14.30Lunch
14.30-15.00PANEL 3
 Nur Sobers Khan, Slaves as agents of cultural and technical exchange in mid-16th century Istanbul.
15.00-15.30Break
15.30-16.00PANEL 4
 John Burman, Bridging an uncrossable divide: British diplomacy in Istanbul at the turn of the twentieth century.
The Ottomans and wealth : a comparative perspective

The aim of the conference was to consider all aspects of wealth, from making, bequeathing, concealing and displaying. Although the focus was on the Ottoman world, the Centre was keen to bring in scholars from other fields in order to give a comparative perspective. The conference was held 4-7 July 2007.

Papers from the conference were edited by Ebru Boyar and Kate Fleet and published in Oriens, 37 (2009), pp. 103-269.

Religion and wealth

  • Chair: Margaret Malamud (New Mexico)
  • Gerald Hawting (SOAS), Wealth, charity and alms giving in early Islam. 
  • Adam Sabra (Georgia), Manifesting God’s blessings: wealth in Egyptian Sufism.

Provincial poverty and wealth

  • Chairs: Ben Fortna (SOAS), Colin Heywood (Hull)
  • Leslie Peirce (NYU), Were peasants poorer? Assessing provincial wealth in 16th-century Anatolia. 
  • Hülya Canbakal (Sabancı, Istanbul), Comparative reflections on the distribution of wealth in 17th-century Ayntab.
  • Amina Elbendary (Cambridge), Making a living and managing poverty in late medieval Damascus: a reading of Ibn Tawq’s al-Ta’liq. 
  • Eminegül Karababa (Exeter), Origins of consumer culture in an early modern context: Ottoman Bursa. 
  • Virginia Aksan (McMaster), Pockets of wealth in the provinces: the 18th-century Caniklizade. 

Wealth, politics and power

  • Chairs: Palmira Brummett (Tennessee) , Margaret Malamud (New Mexico)
  • Ebru Boyar (ODTÜ, Ankara), Profitable prostitution: state use of immoral earnings for social benefit. 
  • Kate Fleet (Cambridge), Paying for an island: the Venetians, the Ottomans and Crete. 
  • Alejandro Cañeque (Durham), The circulation of wealth and power in an economy of favour and reward: New Spain in the 16th and 17th centuries.
  • Abdul-Karim Rafeq (The College of William and Mary), Sources of wealth and its social and political implications in 19th-century Damascus. 
  • Frederick Anscombe (Birkbeck, London), Wealth, poverty, justice and injustice: Balkan revolts of the early 19th century. 
  • Pàl Fodor (The Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Institute of History, Budapest), Fur of lynx and arable field: the wealth of an Ottoman tax farmer (1602). 
  • Svetla Ianeva (The Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Institute of History, Sofia), Financing the state? Tax farming as a source of individual wealth in the 19th century.

Wealth and diplomacy

  • Chair: Leslie Peirce (NYU)
  • Lisa Jardine (Queen Mary, London), Gloriana rules the waves: cordial exchanges between Elizabeth I and Murad III. 
  • John Burman (Cambridge), Politics and profit: the National Bank of Turkey revisited. 

Coins

  • Chair: Colin Heywood (Hull)
  • Elina Screen (Cambridge), Coins and wealth: an early medieval perspective. 
  • John-Paul Ghobrial (Princeton), Money talks: coinage and the communication of political news in the early modern Ottoman world. 

People and wealth

  • Chair: David Morgan (Wisconsin-Madison)
  • Anna Sobers (Cambridge), Slaves, wealth and fear: an episode from late Mamluk-era Egypt. 
  • Madeline Zilfi (Maryland), Wealth in people: slave ownership and elite contestation in the Ottoman reform era. Gabriela Ramos (Cambridge), People, coca, and cloth: changing ideas about wealth in 16th-century Peru. 

Merchants

  • Chair: Julian Chrysostomides (The Hellenic Institute, Royal Holloway, London)
  • Elizabeth Zachariadou (Crete), A ship owner on the island of Patmos at the end of the 16th century. 
  • James Tracy (Minnesota), Aleppo and Cairo in the silver age of Venetian trade: Andrea Berengo and Lorenzo Tiepolo. 

Cultural wealth I Display and narration

  • Chair: Lisa Jardine (Queen Mary, London)
  • Janet Huskinson (Open University), Desirable residences: display housing for the living and the dead in the Roman empire. 
  • Palmira Brummett (Tennessee), Envisioning Ottoman wealth: narrating and mapping Ottoman “treasure” in the 16th and early 17th centuries. 
  • Rhoads Murphey (Birmingham), Exoticism versus domesticity in the display of wealth in the households of provincial paşas of the 17th and 18th centuries: reflections of tereke inventories in Syria and Anatolia and a comparison with evidence from contemporary Istanbul. 
  • Zeynep Çelik (New Jersey School of Architecture), Defining the cultural wealth of the Ottoman empire c. 1900: architectural heritage, diversity and modernity in the Arab provinces. 

Cultural wealth II The book

  • Chair: Margaret Malamud (New Mexico)
  • Rosamond McKitterick (Cambridge), Books, wealth and social status in Carolingian Francia (8th and 9th centuries). 
  • Nelly Hanna (AUC, Cairo), Literacy and legal culture in the 17th century. 
  • Orlin Sabev (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Balkan History, Sofia), Rich men, poor men: Ottoman printers and booksellers making fortune or needing survival (18th-19th centuries)? 

Position and wealth

  • Chair: Kate Fleet (Cambridge)
  • Maurits van den Boogert (Leiden), Provocative wealth? The financial position of non-Muslim beratlıs in the 18th century. 
  • Antonis Hadjikyriacou (SOAS), Provincial wealth and power: the case of Hadjigeorgakis Kornesios, dragoman of Cyprus, 1779-1809.

 

The organizers gratefully acknowledge the support of Sheila Browne, former Principal of Newnham College, and the George Macaulay Trevelyan Trust .

The Ottoman neighbourhood

Panels on the Ottoman neighbourhood were organised by Ebru Boyar and the Skilliter Centre within the METU 4th International Relations Conference, Neighbourhood: Past, Present and Future, held in Ankara, between 30 June-2July 2005.

‘Foreigners’ within

  • Kate Fleet (University of Cambridge), The Genoese consuls along the Black Sea in the early 15th century.
  • Ebru Boyar (ODTÜ, Ankara), Alienating Anatolia: the government’s approach to syphilis in the Abdülhamidian era.

Representation I

  • Kate Daniels (University of Cambridge), The Ottoman other in modern Arabic literary discourse.
  • Inna Simonova (Moscow State University), The ‘All-Slavdom Idea’ and the Slavic world.
  • Angeliki Konstantakopoulu (University of Ioannina), The Ottoman past in Greece and Romania during the 1930s.

Representation II

  • Michele Bernardini (University of Naples. L’Orientale), The Ottoman image in Timurid literature.
  • Mustafa Soykut (ODTÜ, Ankara), Italian historiography on the Ottoman empire: a political image in the 15th to the 17th centuries.
  • Alessandro Taddei (University of Naples. L’Orientale), Ottoman monuments in Thessaloniki in the account of Johannis Anagnostis.

Mahalle

  • Antonis Anastasopoulos (University of Crete), Neighbourhood life in Ottoman Kandiye: the economic aspect.
  • Ferdan Ergut (ODTÜ, Ankara), Civil initiatives in policing Ottoman cities.
  • Makram Khoury (Univeristy of Cambridge), Multilingualism in the press in Ottoman Palestine.
Eye-witness accounts as historical sources for the history of the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East in the late Byzantine and Ottoman periods

This conference, which examined travel accounts, histories and chronicles, and personal accounts, was organised jointly with Julian Chrysostomides and the Hellenic Institute, Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, University of London.

I Travel Accounts 

Kate Fleet (Cambridge), Piloti goes to Naxos: a mission for the Mamluks.

Ebru Boyar (ODTÜ, Ankara), Syphilis in Anatolia through the eyes of a journalist in the early 20th century.

Lia Tornesello (Naples), 19th-century Persian travel accounts.

Erica Hunter (Cambridge), European travellers and the Christians of the Hakkari region in the early 19th century.

II Histories and Chronicles

Michele Bernardini (Naples), The Bazm u Razm of ‘Aziz Astārābādi.

Charles Melville (Cambridge), TBA.

Murat Mengüç (Cambridge), Kemal’s Selatinname and its implications for the language of early Ottoman chronicles.

Amina Elbendary (Cambridge), Chronicling their times: Arab historians of the late Mamluk and early Ottoman periods.

Stefka Parveva (Sofia), The popular Balkan chronicle of the 15th-19th century: the marginal notes and their authors.

III Personal Accounts

Mark Dickens (Cambridge), Byzantine and Syriac accounts of 6th-century embassies to the Turks.

Angeliki Konstantakopoulou (Ioannina), Byzantine and Arab eye-witness accounts of the attack of Thessalonica by the Saracens (904).

Kate Daniels (Cambridge), The waning days of Ottoman domination in the diaries of Khalil Sakakini.

Makram Khoury (Cambridge) Najib Nassar and the Palestinian discovery of Zionism in the early 20th century.

The Ottomans and trade

Papers from this conference were edited by Ebru Boyar and Kate Fleet and published in The Ottomans and Trade (Oriente Moderno, XXV/1) (Rome, 2006).

Thursday 21 March

PANEL 1: 

  • Chair: Dr Colin Heywood (SOAS)
  • Professor Dan Goffman (Indiana), Homogeneity and heterogenity in the Early Modern Ottoman world: toward a typology for Ottoman expansion. 
  • Professor Salih Özbaran (Izmir), The Ottomans and the Indian trade: new data and reconsiderations. 
  • Professor Michele Bernardini (Istituto Orientale Universario, Naples), Commercial activities in Anatolia during the period of Timur’s invasion: new perspectives. 

PANEL 2: 

  • Chair: Dr Nelida Fuccaro (Exeter)
  • Professor Elena Frangakis-Syrett (CUNY), The evolution and dynamics of Ottoman-European trade: the 18th century. 
  • Professor Leila Fawaz (Tufts), Beirut in the 19th century. 

PANEL 3: 

  • Chair: Dr Colin Heywood (SOAS)
  • Professor Suraiya Faroqhi (Munich), The business misfortunes of a 17th-century Ottoman merchant. 
  • Dr Jan Schmidt (Leiden), Hamza Efendi’s treatise on buying and selling of 1678. 

PANEL 4: 

  • Chair: Professor Leila Fawaz (Tufts)
  • Dr Maurits van den Boogert (Leiden), Ottoman Greeks in the Dutch Levant trade: collective policy and individual practice (1750-1800). 
  • Dr Svetla Ianeva (Sofia), Commercial practices and protoindustrial activities of a Bulgarian trader: Hristo Rachkov at the end of the 18th -beginning of the 19th centuries.

Friday 22 March

PANEL 5: 

  • Chair: Professor Amy Singer (Tel Aviv)
  • Dr Eugenia Kermeli (Bilkent, Ankara), The legal aspect of the iltizam contract. 
  • Ms Ebru Boyar (Cambridge/METU), Public good and private exploitation: criticism of the tobacco Régie in 1909. 
  • Dr Kate Fleet (Cambridge), Trade and law in the early 15th century: the case of Cagi Sati Oglu. 

PANEL 6: 

  • Chair: Professor Geoffrey Lewis (Oxford)
  • Professor Jane Hathaway (Ohio), The Ottomans and the Yemeni coffee trade in the 17th and 18th centuries. 
  • Professor Mina Rozen (Haifa), The bread of the poor: meat trade and politics in Jewish Ottoman society of the 19th century. 
  • Dr Dariusz Kolodziecjzyk (Warsaw), Slave hunting and slave redemption as a business enterprise: the northern Black Sea region in the 16th and 17th centuries. 

Saturday 23 March

PANEL 7: 

  • Chair: Professor Leila Fawaz (Tufts)
  • Dr Eyal Ginio (The Hebrew University, Jerusalem), The conquering Balkan Orthodox merchant?: Muslim merchants in the Ottoman Balkans. 
  • Dr Svetlana Ivanova (Sofia), Minorities: the merchants in Rumeli in the 17th and 18th centuries. 
  • Dr Antonis Anastasopoulos (Crete), Building alliances: a Christian merchant in 18th-century Karaferye. 

PANEL 8: 

  • Chair: Professor Amy Singer (Tel Aviv)
  • Mr Tim Stanley (London), Shiraz, Istanbul, Delhi: luxury manuscripts and trade. 
  • Dr Nicolas Vatin (CNRS, Paris), Le commerce funéraire à Istanbul.

PANEL 9:

  • Chair: Dr Colin Heywood (SOAS)
  • Dr Fruma Zachs (Haifa), Commerce and merchants under Amir Bashir II: from market town to commercial. 
  • Dr Stefka Parveva (Sofia), The influence of the market on the urban agrarian space: the case of the town of Arcadia in 1716. 
  • Dr Rossitsa Gradeva (Sofia), Villagers in international trade: the case of Chervena voda in the 17th-18th centuries. 

The Skilliter Centre for Ottoman Studies gratefully acknowledges the support of the British Academy.

Taxation in the Ottoman world 1300-1660

CHAIR: Lesley Peirce (UCLA)

Jonathan Harris (London), Laonikos Chalkokondyles and Ottoman taxation. 

Kate Fleet (Cambridge), Tax farming in Istanbul after the conquest: the case of rents. 

Eleni Sakellariou (Ioannina), The Western perspective: tax farming in a province of the Spanish empire. Southern Italy and the Genoese involvement. 

Huri Islamoglu (Sabanc University), Taxation as an aspect of pre-modern property relations: the Ottoman case. 

CHAIR: Amy Singer (Tel Aviv)

Salih Özbaran (Izmir), Military men as tax collectors in the Provinces of Basra and Lahsa in the 16th century. 

Pál Fodor (ELTE, Budapest), Some thoughs on the Ottoman tax-farm system and its applications in Hungary in the 16th century. 

Olexander Halenko (Kiev), The taxation of wine production and trade in 16th- century Crimea.

Victor Ostapchuk (Toronto), Viziers, tax farmers and gazis in the adventures and misadventures of defending a frontier: the case of the northern Black Sea in the first half of the 17th century.

Piracy in the Ottoman empire

This conference considered various aspects of corsairing, piracy and ransom in the Mediterranean.

CHAIR: Elena Frangakis-Syrett (CUNY)

Elizabeth Zachariadou (Crete) Itinerant corsairs in the Aegean (14th-15th centuries) 

Nicolas Vatin (Paris) Tableau de la piraterie dans les eaux ottomanes en 1559-1560

Pàl Fodor (ELTE, Budapest) Piracy, ransom, slavery and trade: French participation in the liberation of Ottoman slaves from Malta 

Maurits van den Boogert (Leiden) Loss and liability: who pays the prizes of corsairs?

Suraiya Faroqhi (Munich) Ottoman views on piracy in the Adriatic in the 16th and 17th centuries 

Gelina Harlaftis (Piraeus) Corsairs and Pirates in the Mediterranean during Ottoman Rule 

Alexander de Groot (Leiden) Barbary Legend revisited: Ottoman peace treaties from Algiers (17th-18th centuries) 

Eyal Ginio (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) Piracy and redemption in the Aegean: the sicil evidence

The Ottoman Frontier

This conference examined the Ottoman frontier under four main headings: the fluid frontier, the fixed frontier, the commercial frontier and the cultural frontier.

17-20 March 1999

The Fluid Frontier

  • Chair: Colin Heywood (SOAS)
  • Colin Imber (Manchester), The vocabulary of frontiers
  • Keith Hopwood (Lampeter), The wild west: the frontier with Byzantium in the 12th and early 13th centuries
  • Charles Melville (Cambridge), The western border of Mongol Anatolia
  • Nicolas Vatin (CNRS, Paris), Un exemple de relations frontalières: l’Empire ottoman et l’Ordre de Saint-Jean-de-Jérusalem à Rhodes entre 1480 et 1522.

The Cultural Frontier

  • Chair: Albert Lavigne (Ambassade de France)
  • Dina Rhiz Khoury (Washington, DC), Between Ottomans, Wahhabis and Safavids/Qajars: frontier intellectuals in Iraqi cities.
  • Kate Bennison (Cambridge), The impact of the Ottoman circle of equity upon the Sharifian Sultanate of Morocco.
  • Amy Singer (Tel Aviv), Ottoman Jerusalem: an urban frontier.

The Commercial Frontier

  • Chair: Kate Fleet (Cambridge)
  • Molly Greene (Princeton), Redrawing religious boundaries in Mediterranean commerce.
  • Elena Frangakis-Syrett (CUNY), Merchants or agents: Europeans and Ottomans in the Levant in the 18th century.
  • Eugene Rogan (Oxford), Nablusi merchants at the Transjordan frontier.
  • Svetla Ianeva (Sofia), Des voies de la transmission de nouveau savoir-faire artisanal à travers les frontières ottomanes au XIXe siècle (avec une référence spéciale à la partie centrale des Balkans).

The Fixed Frontier

  • Chairs: Rossitsa Gradeva (Sofia), Gábor Ágoston (Washington, DC), Molly Greene (Princeton), Colin Heywood (SOAS, London)
  • Gábor Ágoston (Washington, DC), The Habsburg-Ottoman frontier in Hungary. 
  • Jan Schmidt (Leiden), The Bosnian border in Napoleonic times.
  • Rossitsa Gradeva (Sofia), Osman Pazvantoglu’s Christian associates and subjects.
  • Svetlana Ivanova (Sofia), The Vidin Varosh and kanun-i serhad.
  • Victor Ostapchuk (Kiev), Viewing the Ottoman Black Sea frontier: the Ottoman and modern perspectives.
  • Antonis Anastasopoulos (Crete), Kaza borders as limits of authority and responsibility in 18th century Ottoman practice.
  • Eugenia Kermeli (Bilkent, Ankara), Some questions on the land system introduced in Crete by the Ottomans.
  • Salih Özbaran (Cambrige), Ottoman military and fiscal organization on the southern frontier: two mevacib registers of Basra province in the 16th century.
  • Rhoads Murphey (Birmingham), 17th-century internal Ottoman boundaries.
  • Daniel Panzac (Aix-en-Provence), Le cordon sanitaire: une matérialisation des frontières ottomanes aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles.
Ottoman archaeology

This conference was organised in conjunction with Mark Nesbitt, Institute of Archaeology, UCL.

Filiz Yenişehirlioğlu (Hacettepe, Ankara), Excavations in Istanbul. 

Machiel Kiel (Utrecht), Electronic” excavation of an Ottoman külliye in Kirkkavak. 

Caroline Finkel (Istanbul), Dirt and documents: the case of Ottoman Ozi (Ochakov). 

Joanita Vroom (Utrecht), Turkish rubbish in Greek soil: the Ottoman pottery from some waste pits in Thebes, Boetia. 

Thurstan Robinson (Oxford), Archaeology and defterology: reading the environment in Pisidia/Tekke.

John Bintliff (Durham), Constructing an Ottoman archaeology: the deserted village project in Central Greece. 

Mark Nesbitt (Institute of Archaeology, University College London), Archaeobotany and defterology: interdisciplinary approaches to Ottoman agriculture. 

St John Simpson (British Museum), Turkish delight: the impact of tobacco in the Ottoman empire.

Aspects of the late Ottoman economy

Focusing on commerce, banking, crafts, guilds and economic trends, this conference considered the Ottoman economy in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Amnon Cohen (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem), The changing face of the Fertile Crescent: Hourani’s ideas in the light of further research. 

Eugene Rogan (Oxford), Families and trade in the early 19th century. 

Ruba Kanaan (Oxford), Reconstruction of an Ottoman port city: Jaffa 1799-1831.

Elena Frangakis-Syrett (CUNY), The dynamics of integration: western Anatolia in the late 18th to the early 20th centuries. 

Christopher Clay (Bristol), European banking and the Ottoman empire before 1875: a story of disappointed expectation.

Svetla Ianeva (Sofia), Crafts, craftsmen and corporations in the central Balkan lands in the first half of the 19th century. 

Michael Palairet (Edinburgh), Economic trends in Ottoman Macedonia, 1878-1912, compared with those in post-Ottoman Bulgaria.

The Ottomans and the sea

Friday 22 March, 1996

  • Elizabeth Zachariadou, Monks and Sailors under the Ottoman Sultans.
  • Catherine Otten, Relations between the Aegean Islands and the Turks in the 14th and 15th Centuries. 
  • Kate Fleet, Early Turkish naval activities. 
  • Molly Greene, Ruling an island without a navy: a comparative look at Venetian and Ottoman Crete.
  • Palmira Brummett, The Ottomans as a world power: what we don’t know about Ottoman seapower.
  • William Blair, The development of the Ottoman steam navy in the 19th century. 
  • Konstantin Zhukov & Alexander Vitol, The origins of the Ottoman submarine fleet. 
  • Victoria Holbrook, Oceanic narcissism and post classical Ottoman poetry. 
  • Claudia Römer, The sea in comparisons and metaphors in Ottoman historiography in the 16th century.

Saturday 23 March, 1996

  • Victor Ostapchuk, The changed military and political landscape of the Ottoman Black Sea in the face of the Cossack onslaught in the 17th century.
  • Alexander Halenko, Was the Black Sea “closed” before its “opening” by the Russians? 
  • Rossitsa Gradeva, War and peace along the Danube at the end of the 17th century. 
  • İdris Bostan, Technological developments in the Ottoman navy during the second half of the 17th century with special reference to the types of ships.
  • Rhoads Murphey, Technology transfer in the naval sphere during the pre-print era.
  • Elena Frangakis-Syret, An analysis of Ottoman-Western trade in the Aegean from the 18th to the early 20th centuries.
  • Alexander de Groot, The Ottoman squadrons of Barbery in the 17th and 18th centuries: the sea road towards modernisation. 
  • Gábor Ágostan, Merces prohibitae and the Anglo-Turkish trade in war materials in the 16th and 17th centuries. 
  • Kaori Komatsu, The Ottoman navy during the reign of Abdülhamid II: an analysis of the financial problem. 
  • John Alexander, The Ottomans and the Red Sea.
Ottoman cities

Papers at this conference considered Cairo, Üsküp and Jerusalem, as well as Qasr Ibrim and Ottoman style and imperial ideology in an urban setting.

Chair: André Raymond (Aix-en-Provence)

Doris Behrens Abouseif (Munich)
Dawudiyya in Ottoman Cairo

Filiz Yenişehirlioğlu (Cambridge)
Ottoman style and imperial ideology: participation in a visual experience within an urban setting

Machiel Kiel (Utrecht)
Üsküp: the emergence of an Ottoman city

Wendy Pullan (Cambridge)
Jerusalem: transformation from a mamluk to an Ottoman city

John Alexander (Cambridge)
Qasr Ibrim: an Ottoman fortress

Spying in the Ottoman Empire

Chair: Suraiya Faroqhi (Munich)

Kate Fleet (Cambridge)
Italians, Turks and intelligence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries

Alexander Halenko (Kiev)
Moscow spying in the Ottoman empire from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries

F. A. K. Yasamee (Manchester)
Espionage at the end of the Ottoman empire

Chair: F. A. K. Yasamee (Manchester)

Bülent Gökay (Cambridge)
The illicit adventures of Rawlinson: British intelligence in the final phase of the Ottoman empire

The loss of the provinces: Ottoman fragmentation to 1918

Discussant: Kate Fleet (Cambridge)
Bülent Gökay (Cambridge)
The end of Ottoman rule in the Balkans

Discussant: Richard Crampton (Oxford)
Stevan Pavlowitch (Southampton)
Serbia and the decline of the Ottoman empire

Discussant: Richard Crampton (Oxford)
F. A. K. Yasamee (Manchester)
Bulgaria and the decline of the Ottoman empire

Discussant: Dimitry Zhantiev (Moscow)
Eugene Rogan (Oxford)
Reconsolidation of Ottoman rule in the Arab provinces

David Kushner (Haifa)
Ali Ekrem Bey, Governor of Jersulem, 1906-1908

Documentary sources for Ottoman history

Colin Heywood (SOAS)
Ottoman documents and their context
Julian Chrysostomides (Royal Holloway, London)
Byzantine and Venetian sources for Ottoman history
Kate Fleet (Cambridge)
Genoese archival sources for Ottoman history
Colin Imber (Manchester)
Ottoman legal documents

Rhoads Murphey (Birmingham)
Issues in interpreting icmals

Emerging identities in the late Ottoman empire

This conference examined various aspects of identity in the late Ottoman empire.​​

Discussant: Ulrike Freitag (SOAS)

  • Bülent Gökay (Keele), A quest for identity: the Kurds in the late Ottoman empire.
  • Nelida Fuccaro (Exeter), The Yazidi Kurds of Iraq: tribe, sect and state in the late Ottoman period.

Discussant: Filiz Yenişehirlioğlu (Cambridge)

  • Alexander de Groot (Leiden), The changing identity of dragomans in the 19th century.
  • Kate Bennison (Cambridge), Prestige by association: Arabo-Ottoman legitimacy in North Africa.
  • Ben Fortna (SOAS), Seizing the moral high ground: discipline and identity in late Ottoman schools.
The Ottoman empire in the eighteenth century

Ottomans Online

These seminars ran online in 2020 and 2021. They were recorded and the Ottomans Online playlist now available online via the Skilliter Centre YouTube channel. 

Ottomans Online playlist

Seminars

Ambrosio Bembo: Visualizing Ottoman Space and Authority, The Traveler in 1671

Thursday 22nd October 2020
4.30pm (UK time)

Palmira Brummett
Professor Emerita, Dept. of History, University of Tennessee

Turkish Diplomacy and the 1936 Montreux Convention

Tuesday 3rd November 2020
4.30pm (UK time)

Onur İşçi
Assistant Professor of International Relations and Director of the Center for Russian Studies (CRS), Bilkent University

Military Masculinity Under Fire: Suffering and Manliness in the Ottoman First World War

Thursday 3rd December 2020
4.30pm (UK time)

Yücel Yanıkdağ
Professor of History, University of Richmond

The Cairo Geniza as a Source for Ottoman History?

Thursday 28th January 2021
4.30pm (UK time)

Jane Hathaway
Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of History, Ohio State University

Frames and Fashion: Ottoman Costume Books as Material Texts

Thursday 25th February 2021
4.30pm (UK time)

William Kynan-Wilson
Lecturer in Department of History of Art, University of Bristol

Not so distant neighbor: Turkey and the Middle East in the 1930s

Thursday 25th March 2021
4.30pm (UK time)

Amit Bein
Professor of History, Clemson University

A Queer Cosmology: Male Ottoman Poets and the Power of Poetry

Thursday 27th May 2021
4.30pm (UK time)

Selim Kuru
Associate Professor
University of Washington, Seattle

The Armeno-Turkish Manuscripts and Prints in the Mekhitarist Congregation in Vienna as a unique source for the intellectual and cultural history of the Ottoman Empire

Thursday 24th June 2021
4.30pm (UK time)

Professor Yavuz Köse
University of Vienna

Graduate seminars

From 2007 to 2010, the Skilliter Centre ran a series of graduate seminars.

Papers given at the Skilliter Centre Graduate Seminar in Ottoman Studies

Butrus Abu-Manneh (Haifa), “The Reform Edict of 1856 and its antecedents”.

James Baldwin (NYU), “Petitioning the sultan in Ottoman Egypt.”

Erol Baykal (Cambridge), “The cholera epidemics in Istanbul”.

Erol Baykal (Cambridge) “A quantitative look at the 1908 press boom”

Doris Behrens-Abouseif (SOAS), “The Takiyya of Sultan Mahmud in Cairo”.

Maurits van den Boogert (Leiden), “The ‘Smyrna affair’ of 1853: international diplomacy and law in the Ottoman empire in the 19th century”.

Marianne Boqvist (Skilliter Centre), “Interpreting the integration of the Ottomans in early Ottoman Damascus through the kadı court records”.

John Burman (Cambridge), “Fact or fiction? The alleged Ottoman accession to the Anglo-Japanese agreement, 1905”.

Pascal Firges (Heidelberg), “Britain and the Ottoman Empire in the Years of the French Revolution”.

Pascal Firges (Heidelberg), “The French Revolution in Istanbul: The British Perspective”.

Ben Fortna (SOAS), “Reading between public and private in the late Ottoman Empire and the early Turkish Republic”.

Claudia Gazzini (Oxford), ” Iahudi, musawi or just an Ottoman citizen? Jews in the nizami and shar’iya court records of late Ottoman Libya”.

John-Paul Ghobrial (Princeton), ” Informal Networks of Information and Europeans in Istanbul: The Case of Sir William Trumbull in 1688”.

Tobias Graf (Cambridge), “Ciğalazade Yusuf Sinan Pasha and Ali Bey: Two case studies in the early modern renegade phenomenon”.

Vanessa Gueno (Aix-en-Provence), “De la ville à la campagne, un paysage tripartite. Homs à la fin du XIXe siècle/From the city to the countryside, a tripartite landscape. Homs at the end of the XIXth century”.

Marios Hadjianastasis (Birmingham), “The rebellion of Mehmed Boyacıoğlu in Cyprus, 1680”.

Antonis Hadjikyriacou (SOAS), “Imperial Responses to Security Concerns in the Mediterranean: Administering Eighteenth-century Cyprus”.

Stefan Ihrig (Cambridge), “ ‘Mustafa on the Rhine’ and ‘Ankara in Munich’ – The role model of Turkey in the Weimar Republic”.

Natalia Krolikowska (Warsaw), “The crimean khan, his beys and his subjects. The study of Murad Giray’s reign (1678-1683)”.

Amal Marogy (Cambridge), “Minorities in Iraq under the Ottoman Empire”.

Stephen McPhillips (Aix-en-Provence), “Settlement and landscape development in the Homs Region, Syria: introduction to the project and preliminary indications for the Islamic periods”.

Jake Norris (Cambridge), ‘The imperial struggle for control of the Dead Sea, 1906-1934”.

Claire Norton (St. Mary’s University College), “Lust, Greed, Torture and Identity: Narrations of Conversion and the Creation of the Early Modern ‘Renegade in a Maghrebi Ottoman Context'”

Natalia Nowakowska (Oxford), “’Poland, the Ottomans and the Crusade c.1500”.

Irene Pophaides (Cambridge), “The still birth of Cypriot identity: Cyprus at the end of Ottoman rule”.

Kristine Rose (Cambridge), “An introduction to Islamic manuscript material: structures and conversation with examples from Cambridge University Library”.

Kristine Rose (Cambridge), “The Ottoman manuscripts in the University Library”.

Will Smiley (Cambridge), “Ottoman reforms and relations with Russia in the late 18th century”.

Salim Tamari (Institute of Jerusalem Studies, Ramallah), “Camels in Siberia: the experience of WWI Ottoman prisoner”.

Mark Voyger (Cambridge), “The Barbary ‘States’: a political reality, or a bicentennial stereotype in the U.S. diplomatic practice and legal thinking?”.

Stefan Weber (London), “Giving history space: social agents, architecture and the making of the Ottoman port city of Sidon”

Christine Woodhead (Durham) “Ottoman letter collections”.

Mehmet Yerçil (Cambridge), Ottoman rule versus German informal imperialism: questions of Ottoman mobility counterposed to the analysis of Anatolia by Germans, 1870-1914”.

The changing city: Istanbul at the end of empire

On Sunday 28th September 2008, the Skilliter Centre hosted a talk, “The changing city: Istanbul at the end of empire”, as part of Cambridge University’s alumni weekend. The talk, given by Kate Fleet and Ebru Boyar, covered a range of aspects of Istanbul life in the nineteenth century, from the adoption of sea-bathing to the changes in the way the city’s inhabitants dressed.

The talk was accompanied by a handout illustrated with images taken from the items in the Centre’s rare books collection. There was also a small display of some of the books from the collection.