Verschlagwortet: Ottoman Empire

The Wondrous World of Omar El-Zeenni

By Sana Tannoury-Karam, with translations by Fatima Kassem Moussa. In 1918, Omar el-Zeenni looked around him and declared “The world is madness”. Indeed, by the end of the First World War, el-Zeenni’s world was turning upside down. Born in Beirut in 1895, Omar el-Zeenni belonged to the “last Ottoman generation” that had come of age in the last few years of the Ottoman empire’s existence and whose politicization occurred during the First World War.

Picturing the Labor Landscape: The Silahtarağa Power Plant and Istanbul’s Electrical Infrastructure

By Nurçin İleri. This essay centres on a series of photographs, which I first came across at an auction in November 2020. These black and white images depict Istanbul’s first urban scale power plant, the Silahtarağa campus and extension of the grid to the city in the early 1910s.

Ottoman Roads to the Present: Infrastructure Development in Southeast Europe

By Florian Riedler and Nenad Stefanov. Public discourse and official historiography in Southeast Europe still understand the Ottoman period as ‘backward’. This backwardness is particularly associated with social and cultural immobility. According to this perspective, the Ottoman state dominated the Balkan Peninsula and prevented it from ‘moving forward’ and ‘progressing’ like the rest of Europe.

Turkish women touring in Gülhane Park

Urban Parks in Late Ottoman Istanbul

By Mustafa Emir Küçük. People have used green spaces for recreational purposes throughout history, yet the concept of the park as a designed green space for people’s recreation in the middle of the city developed on an international scale in the nineteenth century. In Istanbul, the construction of urban parks was one of the many urban infrastructural projects in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Imagining the Telegraph in the Ottoman Empire

By Pauline Lewis. By the 1880s, approximately 20,000 miles of telegraph wires and cables stretched across the Ottoman Empire, circulating more than three million electrical messages each year. As scholars have convincingly shown, the technology offered a powerful new tool for the Ottoman central government to exert direct control over distant populations and provinces.

Water extraction system in a market garden around Belgradkapı, İstanbul

Urban Agriculture in Pre-Modern Istanbul

By Ayşe Nur Akdal. Today, one can find it bizarre to come across a rural element in cities. However, historically, there was not a clear distinction between urban and rural. Agricultural and urban space existed together. Due to a lack of sufficient preservation and transportation technologies, easily perishable foods, such as dairy products and vegetables, were produced in urban areas. Istanbul was a good example with widespread and plentiful market gardens (2017; 11-18).

Primordial History, Print Capitalism, and Egyptology in Nineteenth-Century Cairo

By Adam Mestyan. Some years ago I came across a fragmented, nineteenth-century Arabic manuscript in Cairo. The work, The Garden of Ismail’s Praise, caught my eye as one of a number of compositions written in praise of Ismail Pasha (r. 1863–1879), the “khedive”, or Ottoman governor, of Egypt.

Missionary Anxiety Along Ottoman Istanbul’s Railways

By Gabriel Doyle. When new railway lines started to crisscross Ottoman territory at the end of the 19th century, the infrastructural change fuelled a missionary awakening. Catholic congregations, especially, were interested in the urban and rural areas around the Anatolian railway line, which started to be built in 1889 and intended to link Istanbul to Ankara.

Where Intellectual and Environmental Histories Meet: Kashf al-ẓunūn and its Addenda as a Source for Ottoman Environmental History

By M. Fatih Çalışır. Main themes of environmental history. Environmental history is a kind of history that seeks an understanding of human beings as they have lived, worked, and thought in relationship to the rest of nature through the changes brought by time.

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