Governing the Armenian Question through Passports in the Late Ottoman Empire (1876–1908)

The literature on the history of passports has been generally discussed in the context of freedom of movement around the globe during the 19^th century. However, with its administrative regulations and practices, the Ottoman Empire offered a different view of passports and mobility controls. Through perceiving new threats from the political issues of the late 19^th century and directing its attention mainly at the Armenian and Macedonian Questions, one of the critical issues facing the Ottoman government during the Hamidian Era (1876–1908) was controlling the geographic mobility of the individuals who were perceived as a threat based on Ottoman security policies. This paper brings a particular case of this history into focus: the administrative control of the mobility of Armenians. Despite the fact that extensive research has been done on the Armenian Question, so far, little has been written on the policies restricting their mobility. This paper aims to explore the passport regulations and practices to shed light onto the relationship between state formation, Ottoman threat perceptions and the marginalisation of the Armenian community. I offer a new look at the securitisation of the Armenian Question.     

Two Assemblages of Cultural Transmission: Musicians,Political Actors and Educational Techniques in the Ottoman Empire and Western Europe

In this study I aim to develop a sociological understanding of why certain techniques of cultural transmission are more easily accepted in some societies than in others. With this aim in mind, I present a comparative analysis of the contrasting approaches to music education in Western Europe and the Ottoman Empire. While, as a major technique of cultural transmission music notation found relatively widespread acceptance in Western Europe at least since the eleventh century onwards, most musicians in the Ottoman Empire resisted its adoption until the end of the nineteenth century. The analysis focuses on the ways in which the choices of Ottoman and West European musicians interacted with broader social and political processes in the two societies. In the light of this analysis, it is suggested that technologies used in cultural transmission can be seen as parts of a broader assemblage and their rejection or acceptance can be conditioned by a series of socio‐political concerns.     

Between the Cracks: Macedonia and the ‘Mental Map’ of Europe

As arguably the most peripheral region within the Balkans, itself the most peripheral subset of Europe, Macedonia at the turn of the century was represented as the crossroads of East and West. Macedonia’s perceived schizophrenia crystallized during the Ilinden Uprising of 1903, a rebellion that brought the provinces of Ottoman Macedonia to the attention of the European press. The seeming brutality of the violence, and the diplomatic questions related to the future administration of Macedonia, produced conflicting interpretations among journalists as to the ‘allegiance’ of the region. The discourse over the rebellious provinces in the Ottoman Empire involved two parallel lines of thinking, one placing it within the periphery of Europe, the other at the core of “Near Eastern” politics. This article explores the approach of the British press towards the perceived ambiguities of Ottoman Macedonia and sheds greater light upon the imagining of the geographic dimensions of contemporary Europe and the Middle East.     

Vietnamisation of Southern Vietnam during the First Half of the Nineteenth Century

From the third decade of the nineteenth century, the central court of the Nguyen dynasty in Vietnam implemented an ambitious ethnic programme in southern Vietnam, where diverse ethnic groups had co-existed. Under this policy, Khmer, Chinese and other ethnic groups of southern Vietnam were forced to assimilate into the Vietnamese. They had to learn Vietnamese language, dress in Vietnamese style, and follow Vietnamese ways of life. Non-Vietnamese cults such as those symbolised in pagodas, shrines, and statues were also targets of the assimilation policies. Chinese settlers in this region experienced severe discrimination from the central court, forcing them to be reborn as Vietnamese. Vietnamese southerners, who had once been against the central court, willingly joined the vanguard of Vietnamising other ethnic groups. Southern Vietnam, which had previously been ethnically heterogeneous with about 30-35 per cent of non-Vietnamese areas and probably a similar proportion of non-Vietnamese people to the total southern population, began to be actively Vietnamised from this period. This policy, in fact, resulted in ethnic segregation and intense clashes between the two groups: Vietnamese and Non-Vietnamese. On the other hand, this process was an important motivation for Vietnamese southerners to strengthen their affiliation to the king in Hue.     

The Enlightenment, Greek Civilization and the Ottoman Empire: Reflections on Thomas Hope's Anastasius

Abstract This paper addresses the widespread belief in Europe in the late eighteenth century that without a Greek revival in art, architecture, and philosophy, the rejuvenation of European civilization would never be complete. This intellectual tradition, which is commonly referred to as Philhellenism, sought to rescue the Greek civilization from the Turkish rule. However, the Greeks turned out to be too poor, too religious, and too well integrated into the Ottoman society to respond to the call of the European intellectuals. This essay examines the source and implications of this clash between the enlightenment's idealized Greeks and the real Greeks of eastern Mediterranean through a close reading of Anastasius: Memoirs of a Greek that was written by Thomas Hope at the close of the eighteenth century.     

Framing Sectarianism in the Middle East

This paper argues that a long view perspective of contemporary sectarianism between Sunni and Shia Islam in the Middle East could be read on the background of earlier forms of sectarianism going back to the 19^th and 20^th century history of the region. Such an approach would disentangle sectarianism from primordial narratives as an intrinsic problem of Islam going back to the early schism of the 7^th century and place it in social formations and social practices, and link it to the emergence of sectarianism during the Ottoman age of reforms. It would explicit arguments that link sectarianism with modernism, discussing how the emergence of modern, secular institutions that were based in early-modern millet system led to sects and sectarianism. The outcome of this approach is conceptualization of sect and sectarianism, its categorization, and confronting it with other modern narratives of the history of the Middle East.     

土耳其世俗化进程中的中产阶层功能分析

土耳其是第一个以中产阶层为主体的伊斯兰国家。中产阶层形成至今约有一个世纪的历史,其成员组成由最早奥斯曼帝国晚期的官僚阶级和军人、到现代土耳其时期的小商人、知识分子等。大多数中产阶层自身建构为欧洲身份认同,喜欢西方化的生活方式。在98％都是穆斯林的土耳其,这部分中产阶层坚持推行世俗化发展道路,支持国家加入欧盟和深化与美国的传统盟友关系。中产阶层不仅是民主化的推动力,而且是推动国内经济增长的重要力量。21世纪以来,土耳其经济稳定的增长使中产阶层占有比例不断扩大,以至于土耳其成为西方大品牌竞相投资扩张的热土。在当代土耳其,中产阶层与现代化已经融为一体,他们教育水平较高,具有良好的文化特征,对整个社会文化氛围的形成具有巨大的影响力。可以说,中产阶层是决定土耳其国家未来发展方向的重要力量。     

Sidestepping Capitalism: on the Ottoman Road to Elsewhere*

Abstract Mapping productivist logic derived from the history of capitalism onto the rest of the world blocks the view of alternative systems, and their internal logic. Theories of the capitalist state can capture neither the nature of the non-capitalist states nor those states’ social and economic relations. Our alternative formulation of the Ottoman state disassociates class, property, and distribution from the sphere of production and associates them with the state. Thereby, Ottoman history sheds its petrified cloak and the Ottoman state comes to life; motion, change and class conflict are things Ottoman once again.     

Hakk or Right: A Veblenian Narration of the Differences between the Justice Notions in Western Europe and Turkey

Using Veblen's status emulation theory in the background, but essentially engaged in theoretical debates on the transition to capitalism and modernity, this paper attempts to provide a comparative account of different forms of domination in Western European feudal society and the Ottoman Empire. In contrast, an individualistic representation of reality gained prevalence in social conflicts in Western Europe, precisely because forms of exploitation associated with European serfdom were far more severe and un‐tempered than was true for the Ottoman Empire. Due to being short of a legitimate claim to genuine nobility, Western European feudal aristocracy was driven into an insatiable hunger for luxury and waste. In the absence of a powerful central authority, members of this class “turned inward” for their ever‐increasing exploits and waged war against their servants, living and working under their private jurisdictions. The peasants, both free and serf, not only revolted repeatedly, but also ran into the cities to have “fairly secure property rights” so that they would be “the lord” or “dominus” of their own lives and morality. Out of this, a new justice notion had grown, that of natural rights law, which equated all human individuals within one single concern, that of “the right to self‐preservation,” eventually dragging the whole social fabric into heightened self‐centeredness. The Ottoman ruling class could not turn inward and wage an open class war against its servants. This was the land of peace, dar‐al Islam. All people, Muslim and non‐Muslim lived, or were supposed to live, in peace and harmony under the supreme order of Hakk. The transition to an individualistic justice notion along the lines of natural rights law was on the whole clogged in Turkey.     

A TALE OF TWO VISIONS: Representing the Orientialized West,Representing the Orient

Starting in the eighteenth century, the West’s interest in the exotic was matched with a rival gaze from the East. The fluid seams where the so-called dualities met have generated powerful spaces of tension: Occident, Orient; master, colonized; and public, private. The elite Muslim Ottoman women’s agency in dress via adoption of corsets, tight-fitting dresses and the adoption of overstuffed seating furniture modeled after the Turkish divan in the West resulted in an unprecedented conflict between furniture, the body and the dress. The inclusion of the body and its dress in the discourse helps to construct an interior design theory that deals with the immediate, experiential role of the body unlike the abstract body in space, which served architectural theory for centuries. Furthermore, the body fosters social manifestation of spaces. This is the fascinating story of a cultural exchange between women: an exchange of divans and corsets.     

Reluctant Militants: Colonialism,Territory, and Sanusi Resistance on the Ottoman-Saharan Frontier

Libya's enigmatic Sanusi brotherhood has been the subject of perennial debate since its emergence in Ottoman Cyrenaica in the mid nineteenth century, becoming a screen upon which apologists and detractors could project their own political anxieties and desires. For European critics, the brotherhood embodied the irrationality and fanaticism of the Islamic East. Its networks in North and Central Africa constituted an obstacle to their expansionist designs, while Sanusi prestige throughout the Muslim world rendered the brotherhood a threat to the entire colonial order of things. Nationalist historiography has generally endorsed this view, albeit with a positive valence, characterizing the Sanusiyya as an anticolonial social movement. Meanwhile, modern critical scholarship has tried to impose order on the chaos of the turn-of-the-century Sahara by assigning to the fraternity the role of a “proto-state.” This article proposes a new framework for understanding the history and sociology of the Sanusi. Drawing on theorists of subaltern resistance such as James Scott and Michael Adas—alongside Ottoman, British, French, and Italian primary sources—I demonstrate that the brotherhood began its life as an inward-looking Islamic social justice movement with little evident interest in state building or the geopolitical controversies of the moment. I coin the term “reluctant militants” to describe its mercurial trajectory from frontier evangelism to armed struggle in response to French and Italian colonial encirclement. This process culminated in the Long War of 1911–1931, during which the Sanusiyya played a critical part in the struggles over post-Ottoman reconstruction, from the Maghreb to Anatolia.     

Managing Guardianships of the Elderly:

Guardianships and conservatorships are currently used to carry out public policy concerning protection of and advocacy for elderly people who cannot care for themselves. This article analyzes this public policy with the idea in mind that the legal aspects of guardianships and conservatorships must be linked with clinical assessment in order for public agencies to provide high quality, need-based services for individual clients. The article also explores the notion that case management for such clients involves coordination of services between the court system and human services providers.     

Refugees of Turkish origin: "coerced immigrants" to Turkey since 1945

"While several studies (in both Turkish and English) have been made on migration to the Ottoman Empire from the Caucasus and the Balkans during the nineteenth century...very little systematic and comprehensive research on migration has been undertaken on the period since the establishment of the Turkish Republic. This article, which aims to partially fill the gap, is divided into three parts: the issue of national refugees (refugees of Turkish origin) in relation to Turkey's overall refugee policy; Turkey's policy towards national refugees; and the volume and causes of refugee migration to Turkey since 1945." (SUMMARY IN FRE AND SPA)     

From partisan war to the ethnography of European Turkey: the Balkan career of Ivan Liprandi, 1790–1880

The Balkan entanglements of the Great Powers have long interested historians of war, diplomacy, and nation-building in South-Eastern Europe. Although tsarist officers played a central role in Russian policies in the region, historians have rarely treated their writings as expressions of specifically military concerns and preoccupations. The present article seeks to fill this gap by reconstructing the Balkan career of Ivan Liprandi, a Russian officer, partisan leader, and self-styled expert on the European part of the Ottoman Empire during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. The article traces Liprandi’s effort to turn his direct experience of partisan warfare into knowledge and place that knowledge at the disposal of the Russian military command. Liprandi’s remarkable Balkan career testifies to the growing interest of the Imperial Russian military in the ethno-confessional profile and political attitudes of the local population as factors contributing to victory or defeat. Liprandi’s statistical and ethnographic writings on the Balkans are also indicative of the nexus between the military and civilian forms of knowledge that emerged in the middle decades of the nineteenth century.     

Foster‐Daughter or Servant,Charity or Abuse: Beslemes in the Late Ottoman Empire*

This paper addresses the complex and contradictory framing of youthful female sexuality, personified in the figure of foster‐daughters (beslemes), in the nineteenth century Ottoman Empire. Beslemes were both sexually exploited and attempted to be disciplined under the critical gaze of the upper classes and the state, since they disturbed the accepted rules and limits of sexual agency as sexually active unwed adolescent girls. They were marginalized as indecent and fallen girls, since sexual agency and chastity were considered to be incompatible. Though acknowledging the subordination of foster‐daughters, this paper suggests that these young women were not completely subjected, silenced and helpless and that they were able to find ways of taking the initiative in resistive strategies.     

Capitalism and the Modern Nation-State: Rethinking the Creation of the Turkish Republic

Abstract This paper proposes an alternative to the modernization. dependency and bourgeois-revolution accounts of the creation of the Turkish Republic. It presents a theoretical framework for a materialist, but non-instrumentalist. analysis of the modern nation-state and the ideology of nationalism, and places the history of transformation from the patrimonial Ottoman Empire into the modern Turkish Republic within that theoretical framework. It argues that this transformation took place incrementally, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in a process of Ottoman resistance-and-accommodation to globally expanding capitalism.     

Child maltreatment victims' attitudes about appearing in dependency and criminal courts

In the present study, we investigated the attitudes of maltreated children involved in court hearings. Specifically, this pilot research examined whether type of abuse (sexual vs. physical vs. neglect), type of court (dependency vs. criminal), and child and abuse characteristics predicted child victims' feelings about seeing defendants in court and answering questions in the courtroom. Data were collected from interviews with the children and from their court files. Results indicated that greater negativity about seeing defendants in the courtroom was significantly predicted by testifying as a sexual abuse victim in criminal court and by being female regardless of court system, whereas greater positivity about seeing defendants in the courtroom was predicted by appearing in dependency court hearings as a physical abuse victim. In addition, greater severity of maltreatment and older age of the children were significantly associated with greater negativity about answering questions in court. Implications for future research are discussed.     

Elders and the Courts

Abstract

This article examines how trial courts should address complex issues of an aging society. More older people, living longer, will enter courthouses with underlying problems that will impede effective access and court processes and will require judges to enhance linkages with community health, mental health, and social services providers. The article analyzes how court systems perceive these issues and explores how they have begun to address them. It concludes with an argument in support of innovative new approaches to assist courts in responding to emerging issues of older adults.     

The Zones of Fragility: Outlaws and the Forms of Violence in the Ottoman Empire

This study explores the relationship between violence and power through examining the archival documents about the outlaws in the Ottoman Empire from 1852 to 1876. I argue that the outlaws and the use of violence in the public sphere defied the power of the Ottoman Empire. Thereof, the present study agrees with the main thesis of Hannah Arendt about the destructive influence of violence on power. However, I take Hannah Arendt's argument on violence one step further by claiming that the form of violence ‐whether political or non‐political‐ loses its significance when both public safety and state sovereignty are under great threats at the same time in the zones of fragility.