2012: Year in Review

Emrah Safa Gürkan and I started Ottoman History Podcast in the Spring of 2011, but 2012 was the beginning of a new trajectory for us. We upgraded our equipment and production value, and we expanded our audience  through our Facebook group and other outlets using historical photographs and additional materials. Our episodes, which by the end of the 2012 numbered more than 80, featured the contributions of over 40 scholars and researchers from eleven countries and more than twenty institutions. 

We also added more people to the team. Elçin Arabacı joined up to help with our images collection, and with the initiative of Sam Dolbee, we also launched the Tozsuz Evrak document blog, where we have posted dozens of short articles showcasing interesting archival documents and primary sources. Zachary Foster expanded our operations through remote submissions of episodes from Princeton. 

with Vedica Kant Beit Majed, Istanbul, December 2012

In our first year of podcasting, our guests were largely limited to scholars studying and teaching at Georgetown University, and thus, our scope was limited to the expertise of those scholars. In 2012, one of our goals was to expand our coverage of Ottoman history through diversifying our ranks and exploring new  and developing areas of inquiry.

Environmental history has emerged as an exciting new area for researchers working on the Ottoman Empire and Middle East, and we dealt with environment and ecology in a number of episodes. Alan Mikhail, whose work entitled Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt earned the 2011 Roger Owen Book Award at MESA, came on the podcast to discuss the ways in which Ottoman provinces such as Egypt were linked to the imperial center through ecology and food networks. Timur Hammond led a round-table discussion on major debates and themes in the emerging field of Middle East environmental history with Sam Dolbee, Elizabeth Williams, and yours truly. Graham Pitts came on to talk about agriculture in the twentieth-century Middle East in a comparative perspective, touching on the cases of Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, Turkey, and Syria. Sam Dolbee talked about rural development and ecology at AUB under the French Mandate.

Nora Barakat's episode on late Ottoman Transjordan also touched on agrarian transformations in the Middle East, focusing on nomads and changing patterns of settlement in the region through the interface of tribal communities and evolving Ottoman legal structures.

On the other side of the social history spectrum, many of our guests dealt with issues of cultural history and literature. Aslı Niyazioğlu's podcast that examined the role of dreams in Ottoman literature and politics and Oscar Aguirre-Mandujano's episode on ritual slaughter of horses in early Ottoman sources stressed the importance of reading literature in its sociopolitical context and highlighted the ways in which literature can be better used as a source for Ottoman history. The same was true for Selim Kuru's discussion of sex, love, and worship in Ottoman classical texts, which was one of our most popular episodes of the year. Didem Havlioğlu likewise sought to highlight the presence of women literati among Ottoman intellectuals.

By this same token, art was an important concern of ours that brought new media to the podcast format.  Using Islamic calligraphic art as a window onto larger cultural and historiographical issues, Irvin Cemil Schick challenged scholarship focused on a perceived lack of figural art in Muslim societies. Emily Neumeier used a painting of mysterious origins to explore the life and times of Osman Hamdi Bey, a famous Ottoman painter and antiquarian. Elçin Arabacı's dicussion of an early Ottoman illustrated surgery manual easily provided the most interesting (and graphic) images of the year. Mehmet Uğur Ekinci offered an overview of Ottoman classical music and its historical transformations using sample recordings of different compositions in one of our most well-received "historiographical mixtapes." 

In fact, in 2012 we were able to introduce a number of historiographical mixtapes that explored history through music and music through history, including an episode on music in Lebanon, a musical biography of the enigmatic and controversial singer Asmahan, and an assortment of folk songs (türkü) that cast light onto aspects of Ottoman and modern Turkish history featuring the contribution of Elçin Arabacı.

In addition to introducing these emerging topics in the study of Ottoman history, we also explored new approaches to familiar issues. Kahraman Şakul outlined what he referred to as a new military history, an approach that expands the purvey of military history beyond the battles and the strategy to include many social history topics related to warfare. Vedica Kant's discussion of the experience of Indian and Ottoman prisoners of war during World War I provided a ready example of this new approach.

Likewise, Emrah Safa Gürkan's comments on the role of factions in the imperial capital provided an important critique to the longstanding model of a rational and monolithic Ottoman state, and Nicholas Danforth weighed new and old ways of periodizing the history of modern Turkey. In a podcast on conceptual history, Einar Wigen even went so far as to discuss whether or not the Ottomans ever conceived of their state as an "empire" in the way we refer to it today.

As many of these new themes in Ottoman history have been influenced by trends in the historiography of other world regions, it is not surprising that global perspectives played an important role in many of our episodes. Our round-table with Michael Polczynski, Elena Abbott, and Soha El Achi that discussed slavery in the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the Black Sea centered on the differences in slavery as practiced in different regions of the world and the continuities and parallels that linked these differing practices. Andrew Arsan's episode on Ottoman migration to the Americas and other parts of the world and Jeffery Dyer's contribution on Zanzibar looked at the often overlooked presence of large numbers of Ottoman citizens in emerging imperial spheres of the nineteenth century. Madeleine Elfenbein's talk on Evliya Çelebi and Michael Polczynski's discussion of an Ottoman Armenian traveler from Poland highlighted the broader trend to emphasize the inclusion of the Middle East in the story of early modern explorations and travel.

The discussion of commodities was also an important subset of this global discussion, but we did not feature any podcasts on familiar commodities such as sugar or cotton. Instead we examined lesser-studied trade items such as drugs in the Eastern Mediterranean with Zachary Foster and talked about taste in Graham Cornnwell's episode on the spread of tea in Morocco and my half-serious contribution on the rise and fall of the Ottoman among European furniture styles. 

Just as in 2011, Palestine was an important part of the conversation as well. Louis Fishman discussed the emergence of "Palestinianism" and Zionism within the context of Ottoman political pluralism following the 1908 constitutional reforms, and Zachary Foster explored the long history of the name "Palestine" under Ottoman rule.  

The legacy of Anatolia's Greek inhabitants received treatment in a number of episodes. The influence of Greek language in the Trabzon region was an important part of Bernt Brendemoen's podcast on the early spread of Turkish in Anatolia and the Black Sea dialects. Ayça Baydar explored the self-identification of Karamanlis--the Orthodox Christian inhabitants of Western and Central Anatolia--during the empire's final decades, and Valantis Stamelos, a Greek-American who has made a new home in his ancestral Izmir, introduced his film about reconciliation that explores his move to Izmir and the life of the Greek community in Turkey today.

2012 was a big year for the Ottoman History Podcast in other ways, too. With the initiative and collaboration of Aslı Niyazioğlu, Emrah and I conducted a podcasting workshop sponsored by the KOLT center at Koç University that helped an undergraduate class of history students develop podcast projects as a fun and interactive way of expanding their outlets for creative and academic output. On the personal side, I moved to Istanbul and began my dissertation research on the social environmental history of Ottoman Çukurova, and Emrah finished his dissertation on spy networks and information in the early modern Mediterranean. Even more momentous than these changes was the birth of Emrah and his wife Elif's beautiful daughter Zeynep, who, if she is anything like her father, may well be talking enough to do a podcast of her own by the end of next year.

This was just a brief summary of what we did in 2012. Look forward to many new additions as well as more of the same in 2013. For more, visit this link, which provides a complete listing of our episodes thus far. You can subscribe to the Ottoman History Podcast using our podcast feed or through our page in podcast listings such as iTunes.