Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

A study of Ottoman society and the impact of Ottoman rule in the Middle East from the conquest of Constantinople to the death of Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish Republic. Emphasis will be on the conflict between preservation and reform in the nineteenth century and on the significance of the Ottoman legacy for twentieth century Turkey and the Arab world.

COURSE DETAILS:

WARLORDS, PEASANTS, PASHAS: THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND MODERN TURKEY, 1300-1950 

This course is an introduction to the political, economic and social history of (a) the Ottoman Empire from its emergence as a major European and Middle Eastern power in the early fourteenth century to its demise in the aftermath of World War I and (b) of the Republic of Turkey, one of its principal successor states. We start by looking at the origins of the Ottomans as warlords on the frontiers of the fading Byzantine Empire in the early fourteenth century. We will then examine Ottoman expansion and methods of rule over a multi-ethnic, multi-religious empire during the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries in the wider context of other early modern polities; the lives of Ottoman men and women in both the imperial capital Istanbul and the provinces; Sufi orders and grandee households as key elements of metropolitan and provincial societies; the rise of provincial elite families to political and economic prominence and the concomitant shift from a centralized imperial structure to a conglomerate of semi-autonomous regions during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the making of a modern Ottoman state and the transformation of local society through the encounter with European imperialism from the late eighteenth century; the making of the Turkish Republic in the aftermath of World War I; the Ottoman legacy in Republican Turkey.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING: