Season 11

E503 | In this first part of a two-part interview, we talk to Marc Baer about how he first became interested in Ottoman history and explore the main themes and the questions underpinning the research in his five books. In this conversation, we place special focus on the books Honored by the Glory of Islam: Conversion and Conquest in Ottoman Europe and The Dönme: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries, and Secular Turks. Our discussion centers on approaches to the subject of conversion in the Ottoman Empire and the history of the dönme community born out of the transformations of the 17th century.

More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2021/06/baer1.html

Marc David Baer is Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research interests include religious conversion, gender and sexuality, and interreligious relations and state violence in the Ottoman Empire, Greece, Turkey, and Germany.

Zeinab Azarbadegan is the post-doctoral fellow at the Vienna School of International Studies. She completed her PhD at Columbia University. Her research focuses on imperial knowledge production about the space of Ottoman Iraq by the Ottomans, the Qajars, and the British in the late nineteenth century.

CREDITS

Episode No. 503
Release Date: 18 June 2021
Audio editing by Zeinab Azarbadegan
Music: Special thanks to Monsieur Doumani for permission to use the composition "The System/Το σύστημαν", Isaac Algazi - Avinou Malkenou, Isaac Algazi - Ana Ke Av Zedoni 
Images and bibliography courtesy of Marc Baer available at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2021/06/baer1.html

Conversion and Jewish Histories of the Ottoman Empire | Marc Baer

E504 | The Ottoman conquests of the 16th century represented a watershed moment in many senses. Our guest Faisal Husain explains the most literal of these senses: the unification of the Tigris and Euphrates basins under a single political authority and its ramifications for the history of Iraq. In our conversation, we explore how Ottoman rule in Iraq created new ecological possibilities and realities, setting the stage for momentous interventions in the rivers detailed in Husain's recent book "Rivers of the Sultan: The Tigris and Euphrates in the Ottoman Empire." We also reflect on what Iraq reveals about Ottoman history writ large and the empire's dualist historical identity as an agrarian empire on one hand and flexible one on the other, in which accommodating local ecological difference was critical to governance.

More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2021/06/the-environmental-origins-of-ottoman.html

Faisal Husain is Assistant Professor of History at the Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of Rivers of the Sultan and a member of the editorial boards of Marmara Türkiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi and Global Environment.

Chris Gratien is Assistant Professor of History at University of Virginia, where he teaches classes on global environmental history and the Middle East. His first monograph entitled The Unsettled Plain: An Environmental History of the Late Ottoman Frontier is forthcoming with Stanford University Press.

CREDITS

Episode No. 504
Release Date: 27 June 2021
Recording Location: Charlottesville, VA / State College, PA
Sound production and compisition by Sam Dolbee
Music: Chad Crouch - Pacing 
Bibliography and images courtesy of Faisal Husain available at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2021/06/the-environmental-origins-of-ottoman.html

The Environmental Origins of Ottoman Iraq | Faisal Husain

E505 | 19. yüzyılın ikinci yarısında, dinamit gibi patlayıcıların icadı ile küresel düzeyde oluşan küçük silah fazlası Osmanlı Balkanlarındaki devrimcileri hangi bakımlardan güçlendirdi? Osmanlı Devleti, imparatorluk karşıtı eylemleri kolaylaştıran bu ”devrim karaborsası”nı hangi yöntemleri kullanarak kontrol etmeye çalıştı? Bu bölümde, Dr. Ramazan Hakkı Öztan ile geç Osmanlı Balkanlarında devrimcilik, şiddet ve teknoloji ilişkisini, meselenin küresel politik ekonomi boyutunu da dikkate alarak değerlendiriyoruz. Devrimci şiddetin kavramsallaştırılması ve ideolojilerin devrimci siyasetteki önemini eleştirel olarak ele alırken, bu alandaki arşiv kaynaklarının nasıl incelenebileceğini de örneklerle tartışıyoruz.

https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2021/07/oztan.html

Ramazan Hakkı Öztan lisans eğitimini Hacettepe Üniversitesi İngiliz Dili ve Edebiyatı’nda, yüksek lisansını ise Wyoming Üniversitesi Tarih bölümünde tamamladı. 2016 yılında Utah Üniversitesi Tarih bölümünde Peter Sluglett’ın danışmanlığında tamamladığı doktora tezinde, 19 yüzyıl sonu Osmanlı Balkanlarında ‘milliyetçiliğin metaları’ ve ‘devrimin karaborsası’ olarak kavramsallaştırdığı silah ve dinamit kaçakçılığı üzerine yoğunlaştı. 2017-2020 yılları arasında Neuchâtel Üniversitesi’nde Jordi Tejel’in yürütücüsü olduğu ve Avrupa Birliği Ufuk2020 programı kapsamındaki bir araştırma projesinde, doktora sonrası araştırmacı olarak çalıştı ve Türkiye-Suriye sınır bölgesi üzerine araştırmalar yaptı. Kasım 2020’den beri Boğaziçi Üniversitesi Atatürk Enstitüsü’nde Dr. Öğretim Üyesi olarak görev yapmaktadır.

Can Gümüş Boğaziçi Üniversitesi Atatürk İlkeleri ve İnkılap Tarihi Enstitüsü'ndeki doktora çalışmalarına, geç Osmanlı dönemi kentlerinde halk sağlığı ve kentleşme ilişkisini incelediği araştırmasıyla devam ediyor.

YAPIM VE YAYIN

Bölüm No: 505
Yayınlanma Tarihi: 6 Temmuz 2021
Kayıt yeri: İstanbul
Ses Editörü: Can Gümüş
Müzik: Aitua; A.A. Aalto; Chad Crouch
Görseller ve Kaynakça Ramazan Hakkı Öztan’ın müsaadesiyle

Balkan Komitacıları, Teknoloji ve Şiddet | Ramazan Hakkı Öztan

E506 | Refik Halid Karay (1889-1965) was a writer, bureaucrat, and political exile whose life spanned the end of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of the Republic of Turkey. Christine Philliou traces his life as well as a genealogy of political opposition more broadly in her new book Turkey: A Past Against History. Following Refik Halid between his exiles in Sinop, Syria, and elsewehre as well as his momentous encounter with Mustafa Kemal in the Telegraph Episode, Philliou sheds light on the complicated transition between empire and nation. She also grapples with the challenge of telling history based on the voluminous and often satirical musings of a figure himself deeply invested in interpreting the past. 

More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2021/07/halit.html

Christine Philliou is professor in the History Department, Director of the Modern Greek and Hellenic Studies Program at the Institute for European Studies, and Director of the Turkish and Ottoman Studies Program at the Center for Middle East Studies at UC Berkeley. Her first book was Biography of an Empire (2010, UC Press; Greek edition forthcoming 2021 with Alexandria Publications) and her new book is Turkey: A Past Against History (2021, UC Press).

Sam Dolbee is a lecturer on History and Literature at Harvard University. His research is on the environmental history of the late Ottoman Empire told through the frame of locusts in the Jazira region.

Brittany White is a graduate student in the Department of History at the University of Virginia. Broadly, she is interested in the African Diaspora in former Ottoman territories.

CREDITS 

Episode No. 506
Release Date: 16 July 2021
Recording Location: Kensington, CA / Somerville, MA / New York, NY
Sound production by Sam Dolbee
Script by Brittany White and Sam Dolbee
Additional thanks to Chris Gratien
Music: Zé Trigueiros, "Petite Route," "Saez," "Big Road of Burravoe"
Images and bibliography courtesy of Christine Philliou available at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2021/07/halit.html

Refik Halit: A Life of Opposition | Christine Philliou

E507 | In this episode, Fariba Zarinebaf discusses the history of Galata and the early modern Mediterranean more broadly. Beginning with the incorporation of Galata's Genoese community of Istanbul under Ottoman rule in 1453, Zarinebaf explains how the treaties known as the capitulations (ahdname in Turkish) provided a durable framework for commercial exchange and pluralistic everyday life in Ottoman port cities. She also considers how these arrangements compared with commerce and life in non-Ottoman Mediterranean ports. Through a focus on French-Ottoman relations, Zarinebaf offers a glimpse of how treaties become involved in changing economic fortunes in the Mediterranean and the world. She also attends to how these economic patterns shaped the more intimate aspects of social life in Galata, closing with the impact of Napoleon's invasion of Egypt on the French community of Galata.

More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2021/07/zarinebaf.html

Fariba Zarinebaf obtained her PhD in Middle Eastern history from the University of Chicago in 1991. She is a professor of history at the University of California-Riverside and was the former director of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies there. She has taught at Bilkent University, Northwestern University and the University of Virginia. Among her publications are, Les Iraniens d’Istanbul, co-edited with Thierry Zarcone, Crime and Punishment in Eighteenth Century Istanbul (University of California Press, 2010), Mediterranean Encounters, Trade and Pluralism in Galata (University of California Press, 2018) and Fariba Zarinebaf, John Bennet and Jack L. Davis, A Historical and Economic Geography of Ottoman Greece (American School of Classical Studies, 2005), Women on the Margins: Gender, Charity and Justice in the Early Modern Middle East ( Isis press, 2014). Her next book is tentatively entitled; The Last of the Silk Caravans, Cross-Cultural Trade and Urban Life on the Ottoman-Safavid Silk Road in the Early Modern Period.

Sam Dolbee is a lecturer on History and Literature at Harvard University. His research is on the environmental history of the late Ottoman Empire told through the frame of locusts in the Jazira region.

Nir Shafir researches the intellectual and religious history of the Middle East, from roughly 1400-1800, focusing on material culture and the history of science and technology. He is an assistant professor of history at UCSD.

CREDITS

Episode No. 507
Release Date: 23 July 2021
Recording Location: Chicago, IL / Somerville, MA / Torino
Sound production by Sam Dolbee
Additional thanks to Chris Gratien
Music: Blue Dot Sessions, "Fifteen Street,"; Zé Trigueiros, "Saez" 
Images and bibliography courtesy of Fariba Zarinebaf available at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2021/07/zarinebaf.html

Galata and the Early Modern Mediterranean World | Fariba Zarinebaf

E518 | In 1878, following the Congress of Berlin, Bulgaria became a de facto independent principality. Not anymore under Ottoman rule, the Muslims of Bulgaria navigated this political shift by redefining their place as a minority of a nation-state. The community underwent a political polarization between traditional notables and a group pushing for reforms within Muslim institutions. In this episode, we discuss how these reformists engaged with state and nation-building in Bulgaria by highlighting their connections with the broader Muslim world. Not only did Bulgarian Muslims contribute to the rise of the Young Turk movement, they were also part of a transnational space in which intellectuals and activists debated issues such as the place of Islam in modern society, the value of education, and the question of political relationship with non-Muslim rulers.

This episode is cross-listed with The Southeast Passage: http://thesoutheastpassage.com/methodieva-bulgarian-muslims-empire-nation/

Milena Methodieva is a scholar of Ottoman, Balkan, and Turkish history. She is Assistant Professor at the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto, Canada. Her scholarship focuses on the political, social, and intellectual transformations in the late Ottoman empire, its successors in the Balkans, and modern Turkey. In her new research project, she focuses on migration to explore the unraveling of the Ottoman imperial world and the emergence of nation-states in the Balkans and modern Turkey.

Andreas Guidi is Lecturer of Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Konstanz, Germany. After his joint Ph.D. at the Humboldt University in Berlin and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, he is preparing a monograph tentatively entitled “Youth between Empires: Generations, Fascist Colonialism, and the post-Ottoman Mediterranean in Rhodes”. His post-doc project investigates how smugglers and illegal trade contributed to constructing a transnational modern Mediterranean.

Jovo Miladinović is an academic staff member at University of Konstanz. His research explores the history of Balkan and Mediterannean borderlands during the 19th and 20th century.

CREDITS

Episode No. 518
Release Date: 24 January 2022
Recording Location: Toronto / Berlin
Audio editing by Andreas Guidi and Jovo Miladinović 
Music: The Southeast Passage Theme, by Giulio Stermieri; Eridi Kalmadı Dağların Karı, performed by Seval Eroğlu; Kanun Taksimi 
Images and bibliography courtesy of Milena Methodieva available at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2022/01/methodieva.html

Bulgarian Muslims between Empire and Nation | Milena Methodieva

E520 | How did one learn to be a good Muslim in the early 15th century? In newly conquered Ottoman lands where Christians and converts lived side by side, how would one go about learning the proper rites and beliefs to hold? This conversation with Carlos Grenier explores the lives and ideas of two brothers, Mehmed Yazıcıoğlu and Ahmed Bican, Sufis of the frontier city of Gelibolu who grappled with this very question. Their response was to craft a synthesis, an Ottoman Islam so to speak, in the form of Turkish texts that guided their communities on the proper way to be a Muslim. They reached an enormous readership and rank as some of the most popular books to ever be produced in Ottoman Turkish. And as Grenier explains, the Yazıcıoğlus articulated a new Ottoman spiritual vernacular forged in the balance between two worlds of the Balkan and Mediterranean frontiers and the Islamic intellectual sphere.

More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2022/02/grenier.html

Carlos Grenier is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Florida International University. His recent book, The Spiritual Vernacular of the Early Ottoman Frontier, and published by Edinburgh University Press, analyzes the life and works of the Yazıcıoğlu brothers of fifteenth-century Gelibolu, authors of important works of popular Ottoman Islam. Dr. Grenier is interested in religion in the early Ottoman Empire and pre-Ottoman Anatolia, in Sufis within their political contexts, in vernacular Islamic literature within global Islam, and in late medieval and early modern philosophy of nature and of language.

Maryam Patton is a PhD candidate at Harvard University in the joint History and Middle Eastern Studies program. Her research explores cultural, intellectual, and scientific exchanges across the early modern Mediterranean. Her dissertation studies the cultural history of time and temporal consciousness in 16th century Istanbul and Venice. She is also the host of "Desert Cruising with Captain Ahab," a weekly rock and metal show at WPRB Princeton.

CREDITS

Episode No. 520
Release Date: 4 February 2021
Recording Location: Miami, FL / Oxford, UK
Sound production by Maryam Patton
Music: Monplaisir - Estampe Galactus Barbare Epaul Giraffe Ennui
Bibliography courtesy of Carlos Grenier available at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2022/02/grenier.html

The Spiritual Vernacular of the Early Ottoman Frontier | Carlos Grenier

On this week’s Global Research News Hour, as part of its ongoing mission to separate the myths from the reality of Russia’s now three week long  military incursion in Ukraine we speak to guests who can relay more background on the history and geopolitics of the area allowing us to assess with greater clarity the steps for resolution ahead. In part 1 of our program, activist and editor Richard Sanders explains some of his research on Stepan Bandera and on the groups still following his lead. Then in part 2, journalist Eva Bartlett talks about her journey to Crimea and the Donbas in 2019, what she learned from them, and on how her previous investigations in Gaza and  Syria informs her understanding of Western Press style fake news in the current Ukraine conflict.

A Complex War: Some Holes in the Mainstream Account of “Justice in Ukraine”

Dawn in a forest clearing, Halleskogen Sweden, with yellowhammer, tree pipit, cuckoos and cranes

Halleskogen Yellowhammer 140622

Awakening (2022)

A conversation with author and historian Matt Ehret covering Russian and Chinese global 'soft power' projects. Unlike Western neocolonialism which has destroyed and divided continents and destabilised sovereign nations to enable the plunder of resources and stunted development of 'third world' countries and peoples - the Russian and Chinese model is based upon unity and 'win, win'. The focus is on the improvement of industrial and civilian infrastructure rather than its destruction. Russia and China should not be seen as a saviour but rather as a pragmatic, rational alternative to the decades of Western tyranny and supremacy. Will their 'new world order' be better than the US-led version? Time will tell but the advancement of Russia and China is not going to be stopped.

Connecting continents with Russian and Chinese soft power - Matt Ehret

Journalisten Per Shapiro lämnade Sveriges Radio för att starta sin egen plattform, Folkets Radio. I den nya kanalen är hans löfte till lyssnarna att uppsöka journalistikens no-go-zoner, om det så handlar om vaccinbiverkningar, strålning från 5G eller klimatet. Nu är han aktuell med boken ”Kriget mot livet – hur vi manipuleras av arkontisk intelligens”. Finns det en väg ut ur den teknokratiska fällan?

Avsnitt 54 – Per Shapiro

Best-selling author and renown geopolitical analyst Robert D. Kaplan discusses his new book "The Loom of Time: Between Empire and Anarchy, from the Mediterranean to China". Empire has worked to stave off anarchy in the Middle East and it's the first time in memory where there is no imperial authority in the Greater Middle East. China has been doing a lot in the Middle East and it's ambitions are economic, military, diplomatic, cultural, etc. In his book he does deep dive on countries in the region where he speaks to political elites. We discuss Turkey and how Erdogan has been the most influential leader since Ataturk, moving the country back toward Islam. He also provides insights on Egypt and Saudi Arabia and China's vie for the World Island.

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About Robert D. Kaplan
ROBERT D. KAPLAN is the bestselling author of twenty-two books on foreign affairs and travel translated into many languages, including The Loom of Time, The Tragic Mind, Adriatic, The Good American, The Coming Anarchy, Balkan Ghosts, Asia’s Cauldron, and The Revenge of Geography. He holds the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. For three decades he reported on foreign affairs for The Atlantic.

A senior adviser at Eurasia Group, he was chief geopolitical analyst at Stratfor, a visiting professor at the United States Naval Academy, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, and a member of both the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board and the U. S. Navy's Executive Panel. Foreign Policy magazine twice named him one of the world’s “Top 100 Global Thinkers.”

*Podcast intro music is from the song "The Queens Jig" by "Musicke & Mirth" from their album "Music for Two Lyra Viols": http://musicke-mirth.de/en/recordings.html (available on iTunes or Amazon)

Robert Kaplan: China Seeks World Island as Middle East Forges New Architecture #382

For voice and percussion quartet. Performed by Jennifer Walshe and the Schlagquartett Köln. 

For James Tilly Matthews. 

Physics For The Girl In the Street (2007)

Lahemaa National Park, Estonia, 12.04.2018.

www.bemtevi.de

if you want to support my work: ko-fi.com/bemtevi

Silence (Estonian Forest)

BBC Radio Oxford's News ID.

They add so much bass, it was really difficult during the edit to match the two tracks together (I couldn't find a 'clean cut', you might be able to notice where it happens).

The Spiritual Vernacular of the Early Ottoman Frontier | Carlos Grenier

Ottoman History Podcast

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