PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
Program in Hellenic Studies
Colloquium
"Between (more than two) Worlds:
The Formation of the Late Ottoman State"
Friday May 13, 2011
Leyla Amzi-Erdoğdular(Columbia University)
The Orient in Europe: Habsburg Reinvention of the Ottoman Urban Landscape in Bosnia Herzegovina
The Ottoman urban environment in Bosnia Herzegovina became an object of the Habsburg mission in its first Oriental colony. Partly due to pragmatic diplomatic, political, and strategic interests, and partly to the fact that Bosnia Herzegovina was an important example of the Habsburg multicultural vision, the new administration did not set out to do away with all the Ottoman vestiges in the province, including its Muslim population. On the contrary, they were hoping that the Muslims in particular would play an important role in incorporating the province fully into the Habsburg Monarchy by articulating and reinventing the Muslim and the Ottoman in a specific Habsburg form. For that reason conciliatory attitude toward Muslims was expressed on different levels, including the urban face of the capital Sarajevo as the model of Habsburg success in Bosnia Herzegovina that combined Habsburg values and influences, local culture, and Ottoman heritage in a unique manner.
Amzi-Erdoğdular is a PhD candidate in the department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University. She received her MA in Near Eastern Studies from New York University. Leyla is currently working on her dissertation titled “Afterlife of Empire: Ottoman Continuities and Muslims of Bosnia Herzegovina during the Habsburg Administration, 1878-1914.” Her research interests include migrations and pan-Islamism in the late Ottoman Empire, rise of nationalism and identity politics in the Balkans, and sociopolitical aspects of Sufism in nineteenth and twentieth century Ottoman Empire and Turkey.
Shepherds, Bandits, and the late Ottoman State: Re-negotiating the Local Social Pact
The mid-nineteenth century reforms, the Tanzimat, were aimed at allowing the imperial government greater control over the provinces and advancing administrative centralization. The creation of a modern criminal justice system was an important step in advancing centralization, as it enabled the state to interfere in matters of the private sphere and establish new state-individual relationship. With this new social pact Ottoman society shifted from "mediated-access," to more "direct access," society. However, in order to implement its new order the central government had to overcome a long standing social pact in which it had little place in and gain the local communities trust. This mission was not an easy one.
Omri Paz is a Fulbright Fellow at the Islamic Legal Studies Program at Harvard Law School. He received his PhD from Tel-Aviv University where he wrote his dissertation on the Ottoman criminal justice system in the mid-19th century under Prof. Ehud Toledano. Omri received several Grants and Fellowships: the Süleyman Demirel Foundation (2005-10); the Tel Aviv University Chair for Ottoman Studies (2008); the Chaim Herzog Center for Middle East Studies & Diplomacy (2005), and is the author of several forthcoming articles. Currently he works on the social history of Ottoman hard labor penal institutions in the 19th century.
Michael A. Reynolds (Princeton University)
Shattering the Ottoman and Russian Empires
Historians conventionally narrate the collapse of the Ottoman Empire as a story of emerging nationalisms. According to his schema, the growth and consolidation of ethno-national identities among the constituent peoples of the Ottoman Empire explains that state’s ultimate break-up into multiple nation-states. The fact that the the fate of the Ottoman Empire seemingly paralleled those of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires made this perspective incontrovertible. Theoretical work on nationalism conducted over the course of the past three or four decades, however, should prompt historians to reconsider the traditional model of Ottoman collapse. The example of late Ottoman Eastern Anatolia suggests an alternative framework for conceptualizing the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Although Eastern Anatolia in the early twentieth century offered poor soil for the genesis of nationalist movements, one nonetheless finds there the emergence of a movement of tribal Kurdish chiefs who adopted the rhetoric of nationalism and adapted the logic of nationalism toward their own ends. Understanding the region’s role as an arena of contestation between the Ottoman, Russian, British, and French empires suggests a new perspective on the transformation and disintegration of the Ottoman empire as a whole.
Michael A. Reynolds is assistant professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University where he teaches courses on Near Eastern and Eurasian history. His recent publications include Shattering Empires: The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires, 1908-1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) and “Abdürrezzak Bedirhan Ottoman Kurd and Russophile in the Twilight of Empire,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 12, 2 (Spring 2011): 411-50.
Ali Yaycioglu (Fairfield University)
Locality and Spatial Logic of Provincial Governance in the Late Ottoman Empire (1699-1839): This paper focuses on the administrative and fiscal categories of the Ottoman provincial governance in the 18th and early 19th centuries. It examines how administrative divisions based on territorial/spatial forms (such as provinces) and fiscal divisions based on various revenue sources scattered in different provincial units constitute two different and sometimes conflicting logics of the Ottoman provincial system.
Dr. Yaycioglu was born, grew up and attended school in Ankara, Turkey. After completing his undergraduate education in International Relations at the Middle East Technical University, he started his graduate study in History at Bilkent University and continued in Islamic Studies at McGill University. He completed his Ph.D. in History and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University in 2008. He carried out post-doctoral studies in Aga Khan Program in Islamic Architecture at Harvard and Program in Hellenic Studies at Princeton Universities. Currently, he is an assistant professor in the History Department at Fairfield University. From 2011 June, he will join the History Department at Stanford. Dr Yaycioglu’s general research interest is the Ottoman World in the 18th and early 19th centuries, with particular emphasis on the transformation of the imperial system, provincial communities and local elites.
Last updated 5/13/11