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This book examines the rise and development of the Arab intellectual under colonial rule through to independence. It includes coverage of a number of states and individuals including liberals, radical secularists and salafi intellectuals.
A history of the postal system that once connected the Ottoman Empire Before the advent of steamships or the telegraph, the premier technology for long-distance communication was the horse-run relay system. Every empire had one--including the Ottoman Empire. In The Sublime Post, Choon Hwee Koh examines how the vast Ottoman postal system worked across three centuries by tracking the roles of eight small-scale actors--the Courier, the Tatar, Imperial Decrees, the Bookkeeper, the Postmaster, the Villager, Money, and the Horse. There are stories of price-gouging postmasters; of murdered couriers and their bereaved widows; of moonlighting officials transporting merchandise; of neighboring village...
This book examines the process of secularization in the Middle East in the late 19th and early 20th century through an analysis of the transformation and abolition of Islamic Caliphate. Focusing on debates in both the center of the Caliphate and its periphery, the author argues that the relationship between Islam and secularism was one of accommodation, rather than simply conflict and confrontation, because Islam was the single most important source of legitimation in the modernization of the Middle East. Through detailed analysis of both official documents and the writings of the intellectuals who contributed to reforms in the Empire, the author first examines the general secularization pro...
During the formation of the Turkish national movement, while Istanbul was under British, French, and Italian occupation, a distinct factional split emerged. One side supported the Ottoman sultanate’s sovereignty, while the other championed a populist, republican path. An Istanbul at the Threshold of Nation State contextualizes this history of coalition, political disintegration, and power struggles in Turkey between 1918 and 1923 to highlight the rise of anti-communist movements and the emergence of national labor and merchant confederations that formed xenophobic, Christian exclusionary policies in the 1920s and 30s.
This volume discusses globalising processes from the perspective of the humanities and social sciences. It focuses on the ‘global south’, notably the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. Densely researched case studies examine a variety of approaches for their potential to understand connecting processes on different scales. The studies seek to overcome the main traps of the ‘globalisation’ paradigm, such as its occidental bias, its notion of linear expansion, its simplifying dichotomy between ‘local’ and ‘global’, and an often-found lack of historical depth. They elaborate the asymmetries, mobilities, opportunities and barriers involved in globalising processes. Their new perspective on these processes is captured by the concept of ‘translocality’, which aims at integrating a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches from different disciplines.
In recent decades, the culture, society, politics, and economics of Bahrain have been transformed, driving its global ambitions while retaining to a degree the rule of law and cosmopolitanism. Islam and Capitalism in the Making of Modern Bahrain examines the transformation of Bahrain from the 1930s, from a regional trading port and then an important oil producer into the financial hub for the Gulf and into a global centre of Islamic finance. It focuses on the changes and tensions that transformation brought to Bahrain's political, legal, economic, religious, and social structures. In this book, Rajeswary Brown explores the rising force of youth populism driven by the persistence of poverty and unemployment, notably among rural Shi'ite communities and unemployed middle-class youth, as well as examining Bahrain's skillful reconciliation of the demands of Islamic faith, expressed in the Sharia, to the requirements of modern financial capitalism. In this, Bahrain's experience can be set against the modern history of much of the rest of the Middle East, most strikingly with respect to the position of Islamic charities, notably in Syria, comparisons of which are fully explored here.
"The leading academic vehicle for scholarly publication in the field of medieval warfare." Medieval Warfare The articles in volume 22 of the Journal of Medieval Military History range widely, not only in chronology but also in geography and approach. Sven Ekdahl looks at the big picture of the role of Swedish castles in the north; L. J. Andrew Villalon focuses on the very particular and culturally significant rewards given by the Catholic Kings to two noble families to celebrate minor victories on the borders of Granada in the far south. Subjects include fighting at the tactical level (the unexpectedly substantial tradition of mounted archery in England, the Low Countries and France, reveale...
Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said probes migrant labor's role in shaping the history of the Suez Canal and modern Egypt. It maps the everyday life of Port Said's residents between 1859, when the town was founded as the Suez Canal's northern harbor, and 1906, when a railway connected it to the rest of Egypt. Through groundbreaking research, Lucia Carminati provides a ground-level perspective on the key processes touching late nineteenth-century Egypt: heightened domestic mobility and immigration, intensified urbanization, changing urban governance, and growing foreign encroachment. By privileging migrants' prosaic lives, Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said shows how unevenness and inequality laid the groundwork for the Suez Canal's making.
In Selim III, Social Order and Policing in Istanbul at the End of the Eighteenth Century Betül Başaran examines Sultan Selim III’s social control and surveillance measures. Drawing mainly from a set of inspection registers and censuses from the 1790s, as well as court records she paints a colorful picture of the city’s residents and artisans. She argues that the period constitutes the beginnings of large-scale population control and crisis management and urges us to think about the Ottoman Empire as a polity that was increasingly becoming a “statistical” state, along with its contemporaries in Europe, and to go beyond mechanistic models of borrowing that focus primarily on military reform and European influence in our discussions of Ottoman reform and “modernity”.