Alan Mikhail
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199315277
- eISBN:
- 9780199369232
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199315277.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Middle East History
This book tells the story of Ottoman Egypt’s political, social, economic, and environmental transformations between 1517 and 1882 through the history of human-animal relations. Its main contention is ...
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This book tells the story of Ottoman Egypt’s political, social, economic, and environmental transformations between 1517 and 1882 through the history of human-animal relations. Its main contention is that changing relationships between humans and animals were central to the transformation of Egypt from an early modern society to a nineteenth-century centralizing state. Egypt in this period moved from being an early modern world characterized primarily by intense human-animal interactions to one in which this relationship was no longer constitutive of commercial and social life. The results were a fundamental reordering of political, economic, and ecological power. This book thus explains one of the most important historical transitions of the last 500 years through the history of changes to one of the most consequential of human relationships—those with animals. Three classes of animals take center stage: livestock, dogs, and charismatic megafauna. The history of human relations with each group illuminates different aspects of Ottoman Egypt’s transformations. Livestock explain changes in the nature of rural labor; dogs elucidate changes in understandings of urban sanitation, health, and the human body; and charismatic megafauna index changes in global trade and economic modes of exchange. As nearly all early modern agrarian societies between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries experienced some form of intense transformation involving the commercialization and modernization of their economies, the Egyptian example thus offers a robust template for understanding how changes in human-animal relations impacted the global transition of early modern societies to more modern forms of governance, economy, and society.Less
This book tells the story of Ottoman Egypt’s political, social, economic, and environmental transformations between 1517 and 1882 through the history of human-animal relations. Its main contention is that changing relationships between humans and animals were central to the transformation of Egypt from an early modern society to a nineteenth-century centralizing state. Egypt in this period moved from being an early modern world characterized primarily by intense human-animal interactions to one in which this relationship was no longer constitutive of commercial and social life. The results were a fundamental reordering of political, economic, and ecological power. This book thus explains one of the most important historical transitions of the last 500 years through the history of changes to one of the most consequential of human relationships—those with animals. Three classes of animals take center stage: livestock, dogs, and charismatic megafauna. The history of human relations with each group illuminates different aspects of Ottoman Egypt’s transformations. Livestock explain changes in the nature of rural labor; dogs elucidate changes in understandings of urban sanitation, health, and the human body; and charismatic megafauna index changes in global trade and economic modes of exchange. As nearly all early modern agrarian societies between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries experienced some form of intense transformation involving the commercialization and modernization of their economies, the Egyptian example thus offers a robust template for understanding how changes in human-animal relations impacted the global transition of early modern societies to more modern forms of governance, economy, and society.
Julia Phillips Cohen
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- April 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199340408
- eISBN:
- 9780199388882
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199340408.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Middle East History, History of Religion
Becoming Ottomans is the first book to tell the story of Jewish political integration into a modern Islamic empire. It begins with the process set in motion by the imperial state reforms ...
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Becoming Ottomans is the first book to tell the story of Jewish political integration into a modern Islamic empire. It begins with the process set in motion by the imperial state reforms known as the Tanzimat, which spanned the years 1839–1876 and legally emancipated the non-Muslims of the empire. Throughout this period, Jews remained little more than an afterthought in imperial politics. Four decades later the situation was difficult to recognize. By the close of the nineteenth century, Ottoman Muslims and Jews alike regularly referred to Jews as a model community, or millet—as a group whose leaders and members knew how to serve their state and were deeply engaged in Ottoman politics. This book charts this dramatic reversal, following the changing position of Jews in the empire over the course of half a century.Less
Becoming Ottomans is the first book to tell the story of Jewish political integration into a modern Islamic empire. It begins with the process set in motion by the imperial state reforms known as the Tanzimat, which spanned the years 1839–1876 and legally emancipated the non-Muslims of the empire. Throughout this period, Jews remained little more than an afterthought in imperial politics. Four decades later the situation was difficult to recognize. By the close of the nineteenth century, Ottoman Muslims and Jews alike regularly referred to Jews as a model community, or millet—as a group whose leaders and members knew how to serve their state and were deeply engaged in Ottoman politics. This book charts this dramatic reversal, following the changing position of Jews in the empire over the course of half a century.
Asher Orkaby
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- June 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780190618445
- eISBN:
- 9780190618476
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190618445.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Middle East History, World Modern History
Beyond the Arab Cold War brings the Yemen Civil War (1962–68) to the forefront of modern Middle East history, in a comprehensive account that features multilingual and multinational archives and oral ...
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Beyond the Arab Cold War brings the Yemen Civil War (1962–68) to the forefront of modern Middle East history, in a comprehensive account that features multilingual and multinational archives and oral histories. Throughout six years of major conflict Yemen sat at the crossroads of regional and international conflict as dozens of countries, international organizations, and individuals intervened in the local South Arabian civil war. Yemen was a showcase for a new era of UN and Red Cross peacekeeping, clandestine activity, Egypt’s counterinsurgency, and one of the first large-scale uses of poison gas since World War I. Events in Yemen were not dominated by a single power, nor were they sole products of US-Soviet or Saudi-Egyptian Arab Cold War rivalry. Rather, during the 1960s Yemen was transformed into an arena of global conflict whose ensuing chaos tore down the walls of centuries of religious rule and isolation and laid the groundwork for the next half century of Yemeni history. The end of the Yemen Civil War marked the end of both Egyptian President Nasser’s Arab nationalist colonial expansion and the British Empire in the Middle East, two of the most dominant regional forces. The legacy of the eventual northern tribal defeat and the compromised establishment of a weak and decentralized republic are at the core of modern-day conflicts in South Arabia.Less
Beyond the Arab Cold War brings the Yemen Civil War (1962–68) to the forefront of modern Middle East history, in a comprehensive account that features multilingual and multinational archives and oral histories. Throughout six years of major conflict Yemen sat at the crossroads of regional and international conflict as dozens of countries, international organizations, and individuals intervened in the local South Arabian civil war. Yemen was a showcase for a new era of UN and Red Cross peacekeeping, clandestine activity, Egypt’s counterinsurgency, and one of the first large-scale uses of poison gas since World War I. Events in Yemen were not dominated by a single power, nor were they sole products of US-Soviet or Saudi-Egyptian Arab Cold War rivalry. Rather, during the 1960s Yemen was transformed into an arena of global conflict whose ensuing chaos tore down the walls of centuries of religious rule and isolation and laid the groundwork for the next half century of Yemeni history. The end of the Yemen Civil War marked the end of both Egyptian President Nasser’s Arab nationalist colonial expansion and the British Empire in the Middle East, two of the most dominant regional forces. The legacy of the eventual northern tribal defeat and the compromised establishment of a weak and decentralized republic are at the core of modern-day conflicts in South Arabia.
Robert S. G. Fletcher
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- March 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780198729310
- eISBN:
- 9780191796210
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198729310.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Modern History, Middle East History
This book reconstructs the history of Britain’s presence in the deserts of the interwar Middle East, making the case for its significance to scholars of imperialism and of the region’s past. It tells ...
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This book reconstructs the history of Britain’s presence in the deserts of the interwar Middle East, making the case for its significance to scholars of imperialism and of the region’s past. It tells the story of what happened when the British Empire and Bedouin communities met on the desert frontiers between the Mediterranean Sea and the Persian Gulf, and traces the workings of the resulting practices of ‘desert administration’, from their origins in the wake of one world war to their eclipse after the next, as British officials, Bedouin shaykhs, and nationalist politicians jostled to influence desert affairs. Drawn to the commanding heights of political society in the region’s towns and cities, historians have tended to afford frontier ‘margins’ merely marginal treatment. Instead, this book combines the study of imperialism, nomads, and the desert itself to reveal the centrality of ‘desert administration’ and tribal control to the working of Britain’s empire, repositioning neglected frontier areas as nerve centres of imperial activity. It was out on the frontier that key political bargains had to be struck; British control even deepened here as it retreated from Middle Eastern cities. To take the pulse of imperial rule, and to gauge the prospects of nationalism, this book leads the shift in historians’ attentions from the familiar, urban seats of power to the desert ‘hinterlands’ that state-centric approaches have long obscured.Less
This book reconstructs the history of Britain’s presence in the deserts of the interwar Middle East, making the case for its significance to scholars of imperialism and of the region’s past. It tells the story of what happened when the British Empire and Bedouin communities met on the desert frontiers between the Mediterranean Sea and the Persian Gulf, and traces the workings of the resulting practices of ‘desert administration’, from their origins in the wake of one world war to their eclipse after the next, as British officials, Bedouin shaykhs, and nationalist politicians jostled to influence desert affairs. Drawn to the commanding heights of political society in the region’s towns and cities, historians have tended to afford frontier ‘margins’ merely marginal treatment. Instead, this book combines the study of imperialism, nomads, and the desert itself to reveal the centrality of ‘desert administration’ and tribal control to the working of Britain’s empire, repositioning neglected frontier areas as nerve centres of imperial activity. It was out on the frontier that key political bargains had to be struck; British control even deepened here as it retreated from Middle Eastern cities. To take the pulse of imperial rule, and to gauge the prospects of nationalism, this book leads the shift in historians’ attentions from the familiar, urban seats of power to the desert ‘hinterlands’ that state-centric approaches have long obscured.
Martin Bunton
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199211081
- eISBN:
- 9780191695797
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199211081.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Middle East History
This book focuses on the way in which the Palestine Mandate was part of a broader British imperial administration — a fact often masked by Jewish immigration and land purchase in Palestine. The ...
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This book focuses on the way in which the Palestine Mandate was part of a broader British imperial administration — a fact often masked by Jewish immigration and land purchase in Palestine. The book's research reveals clear links to colonial practice in India, Sudan, and Cyprus amongst other places. It argues that land officials’ views on sound land management were derived from their own experiences of rural England, and that this was far more influential on the shaping of land policies than the promise of a Jewish National Home. The book reveals how the British were intent on preserving the status quo of Ottoman land law, which (when few Britons could read Ottoman or were well grounded in its legal codes) led to a series of translations, interpretations, and hence new applications of land law. The sense of importance the British attributed to their work surveying and registering properties and transactions is captured in the efforts of British officials to microfilm all of their records at the height of the Second World War. Despite this, however, land policies remained in flux.Less
This book focuses on the way in which the Palestine Mandate was part of a broader British imperial administration — a fact often masked by Jewish immigration and land purchase in Palestine. The book's research reveals clear links to colonial practice in India, Sudan, and Cyprus amongst other places. It argues that land officials’ views on sound land management were derived from their own experiences of rural England, and that this was far more influential on the shaping of land policies than the promise of a Jewish National Home. The book reveals how the British were intent on preserving the status quo of Ottoman land law, which (when few Britons could read Ottoman or were well grounded in its legal codes) led to a series of translations, interpretations, and hence new applications of land law. The sense of importance the British attributed to their work surveying and registering properties and transactions is captured in the efforts of British officials to microfilm all of their records at the height of the Second World War. Despite this, however, land policies remained in flux.
Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- March 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780195308860
- eISBN:
- 9780190254292
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780195308860.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Middle East History
The role of women in Iran has commonly been viewed solely through the lens of religion, symbolized by veiled females subordinated by society. This book aims to explain how the role of women has been ...
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The role of women in Iran has commonly been viewed solely through the lens of religion, symbolized by veiled females subordinated by society. This book aims to explain how the role of women has been central to national political debates in Iran. Spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the book examines issues impacting women's lives under successive regimes, including hygiene campaigns that cast mothers as custodians of a healthy civilization; debates over female education, employment, and political rights; conflicts between religion and secularism; the politics of dress; and government policies on contraception and population control. Among the topics the book examines is the development of a women's movement in Iran, perhaps most publicly expressed by Nobel Prize winner Shirin Ebadi. The narrative comes up to the present, looking at reproductive rights, the spread of AIDS, and fashion since the Iranian Revolution.Less
The role of women in Iran has commonly been viewed solely through the lens of religion, symbolized by veiled females subordinated by society. This book aims to explain how the role of women has been central to national political debates in Iran. Spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the book examines issues impacting women's lives under successive regimes, including hygiene campaigns that cast mothers as custodians of a healthy civilization; debates over female education, employment, and political rights; conflicts between religion and secularism; the politics of dress; and government policies on contraception and population control. Among the topics the book examines is the development of a women's movement in Iran, perhaps most publicly expressed by Nobel Prize winner Shirin Ebadi. The narrative comes up to the present, looking at reproductive rights, the spread of AIDS, and fashion since the Iranian Revolution.
Matthew S. Gordon and Kathryn A. Hain (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780190622183
- eISBN:
- 9780190622213
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190622183.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Middle East History, World Medieval History
Concubines and Courtesans: Women and Slavery in Islamic History contains 16 essays that consider, from a variety of viewpoints, enslaved and freed women across medieval and premodern Islamic social ...
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Concubines and Courtesans: Women and Slavery in Islamic History contains 16 essays that consider, from a variety of viewpoints, enslaved and freed women across medieval and premodern Islamic social history. The essays bring together arguments regarding slavery, gender, social networking, cultural production (music, poetry, and dance), sexuality, Islamic family law, and religion in the shaping of Near Eastern and Islamic society over time. They range over nearly 1,000 years of Islamic history—from the early, formative period (7th–10th century CE) to the late Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal eras (16th–18th century CE)—and regions from al-Andalus (Islamic Spain) to Central Asia (Timurid Iran). The close, common thread joining the essays is an effort to account for the lives, careers, and representations of female slaves and freed women participating in and contributing to elite urban society of the Islamic realm. Interest in a gendered approach to Islamic history, society, and religion has, by now, deep roots in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies. The shared aim of the essays collected here is to get at the wealth of these topics and to underscore their centrality to a firm grasp on Islamic and Middle Eastern history.Less
Concubines and Courtesans: Women and Slavery in Islamic History contains 16 essays that consider, from a variety of viewpoints, enslaved and freed women across medieval and premodern Islamic social history. The essays bring together arguments regarding slavery, gender, social networking, cultural production (music, poetry, and dance), sexuality, Islamic family law, and religion in the shaping of Near Eastern and Islamic society over time. They range over nearly 1,000 years of Islamic history—from the early, formative period (7th–10th century CE) to the late Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal eras (16th–18th century CE)—and regions from al-Andalus (Islamic Spain) to Central Asia (Timurid Iran). The close, common thread joining the essays is an effort to account for the lives, careers, and representations of female slaves and freed women participating in and contributing to elite urban society of the Islamic realm. Interest in a gendered approach to Islamic history, society, and religion has, by now, deep roots in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies. The shared aim of the essays collected here is to get at the wealth of these topics and to underscore their centrality to a firm grasp on Islamic and Middle Eastern history.
Charles Issawi
- Published in print:
- 1998
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195118131
- eISBN:
- 9780199854554
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195118131.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Middle East History
Among the forces shaping today's international landscape, those of cultural differences and conflicts are perhaps the most prominent. This collection of chapters has been written in the belief that a ...
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Among the forces shaping today's international landscape, those of cultural differences and conflicts are perhaps the most prominent. This collection of chapters has been written in the belief that a study of past encounters and conflicts between the world's major cultures can shed light on their nature and importance. Ranging in scope from the great ancient civilizations to Shelley's passion for the Middle East, from the economics of the Ottoman empire to the pre-eminence of English as an international language, this collection reflects the many interests of its author, with an emphasis on the Middle East, whose cultural conflict with the West is of concern to us today.Less
Among the forces shaping today's international landscape, those of cultural differences and conflicts are perhaps the most prominent. This collection of chapters has been written in the belief that a study of past encounters and conflicts between the world's major cultures can shed light on their nature and importance. Ranging in scope from the great ancient civilizations to Shelley's passion for the Middle East, from the economics of the Ottoman empire to the pre-eminence of English as an international language, this collection reflects the many interests of its author, with an emphasis on the Middle East, whose cultural conflict with the West is of concern to us today.
Bernard Lewis
- Published in print:
- 1996
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195102833
- eISBN:
- 9780199854509
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195102833.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Middle East History
This book uses the climatic year of 1492, a year laden with epic events and riven by political debate, to explore a clash of civilizations — between the Jews, Christendom, and Islam, as well as that ...
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This book uses the climatic year of 1492, a year laden with epic events and riven by political debate, to explore a clash of civilizations — between the Jews, Christendom, and Islam, as well as that between the New World and the Old. In the same year that Columbus set sail across the Atlantic, the book reminds us, the Spanish monarchy captured Granada, the last Muslim stronghold on the peninsula, and also expelled the Jews. It uses these three epochal events to explore the nature of the European-Islamic conflict, placing the voyages of discovery in a new context. It traces Christian Europe's path from being a primitive backwater on the edges of the vast, cosmopolitan Caliphate, through the heightening rivalry of the two religions, to the triumph of the West over Islam, examining the factors behind their changing fortunes and cultural qualities. The book provides a new understanding of the distant events that gave shape to the modern world.Less
This book uses the climatic year of 1492, a year laden with epic events and riven by political debate, to explore a clash of civilizations — between the Jews, Christendom, and Islam, as well as that between the New World and the Old. In the same year that Columbus set sail across the Atlantic, the book reminds us, the Spanish monarchy captured Granada, the last Muslim stronghold on the peninsula, and also expelled the Jews. It uses these three epochal events to explore the nature of the European-Islamic conflict, placing the voyages of discovery in a new context. It traces Christian Europe's path from being a primitive backwater on the edges of the vast, cosmopolitan Caliphate, through the heightening rivalry of the two religions, to the triumph of the West over Islam, examining the factors behind their changing fortunes and cultural qualities. The book provides a new understanding of the distant events that gave shape to the modern world.
Antoinette Burton
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780195144253
- eISBN:
- 9780199871919
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195144253.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Middle East History
This book uses the writing of three 20th century Indian women to interrogate the status of the traditional archive, reading their memoirs, fictions, and histories as counter-narratives of colonial ...
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This book uses the writing of three 20th century Indian women to interrogate the status of the traditional archive, reading their memoirs, fictions, and histories as counter-narratives of colonial modernity. Janaki Majumdar was the daughter of the first president of the Indian National Congress. Her unpublished “Family History” (1935) stages the story of her parents' transnational marriage as a series of homes the family inhabited in Britain and India — thereby providing a heretofore unavailable narrative of the domestic face of 19th century Indian nationalism. Cornelia Sorabji was one of the first Indian women to qualify for the bar. Her memoirs (1934 and 1936) demonstrate her determination to rescue the zenana (women's quarters) and purdahnashin (secluded women) from the recesses of the orthodox home in order to counter the emancipationist claims of Gandhian nationalism. Last but not least, Attia Hosain's 1961 novel, Sunlight on Broken Column, represents the violence and trauma of partition through the biography of a young heroine called Laila and her family home. Taken together, their writings raise questions about what counts as an archive, offering insights into the relationship of women to memory and history, gender to fact and fiction, and feminism to nationalism and postcolonialism.Less
This book uses the writing of three 20th century Indian women to interrogate the status of the traditional archive, reading their memoirs, fictions, and histories as counter-narratives of colonial modernity. Janaki Majumdar was the daughter of the first president of the Indian National Congress. Her unpublished “Family History” (1935) stages the story of her parents' transnational marriage as a series of homes the family inhabited in Britain and India — thereby providing a heretofore unavailable narrative of the domestic face of 19th century Indian nationalism. Cornelia Sorabji was one of the first Indian women to qualify for the bar. Her memoirs (1934 and 1936) demonstrate her determination to rescue the zenana (women's quarters) and purdahnashin (secluded women) from the recesses of the orthodox home in order to counter the emancipationist claims of Gandhian nationalism. Last but not least, Attia Hosain's 1961 novel, Sunlight on Broken Column, represents the violence and trauma of partition through the biography of a young heroine called Laila and her family home. Taken together, their writings raise questions about what counts as an archive, offering insights into the relationship of women to memory and history, gender to fact and fiction, and feminism to nationalism and postcolonialism.
