Author: Avner Wishnitzer
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022625786X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 286
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Book Description
Up until the end of the eighteenth century, the way Ottomans used their clocks conformed to the inner logic of their own temporal culture. However, this began to change rather dramatically during the nineteenth century, as the Ottoman Empire was increasingly assimilated into the European-dominated global economy and the project of modern state building began to gather momentum. In Reading Clocks, Alla Turca, Avner Wishnitzer unravels the complexity of Ottoman temporal culture and for the first time tells the story of its transformation. He explains that in their attempt to attain better surveillance capabilities and higher levels of regularity and efficiency, various organs of the reforming Ottoman state developed elaborate temporal constructs in which clocks played an increasingly important role. As the reform movement spread beyond the government apparatus, emerging groups of officers, bureaucrats, and urban professionals incorporated novel time-related ideas, values, and behaviors into their self-consciously “modern” outlook and lifestyle. Acculturated in the highly regimented environment of schools and barracks, they came to identify efficiency and temporal regularity with progress and the former temporal patterns with the old political order. Drawing on a wealth of archival and literary sources, Wishnitzer’s original and highly important work presents the shifting culture of time as an arena in which Ottoman social groups competed for legitimacy and a medium through which the very concept of modernity was defined. Reading Clocks, Alla Turca breaks new ground in the study of the Middle East and presents us with a new understanding of the relationship between time and modernity.
Author: Avner Wishnitzer
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022625772X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 286
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Book Description
Reading Clocks, Alla Turca explores the technological and social aspects of Ottoman temporal culture, where religious and secular powers competed and colluded for authority, the army tried to rationalize its systems of training and communication, and schoolboys complained about how long classes were. The conflicts that played out on the field of temporal systems were not along the axes one might expect, with secular, urban, rationalist, modernizing, and Europeanizing forces arrayed against rural, traditional, religious, and nationalist people and parties. Rather, religious institutions saw the rationalization of temporal culture as a way to extend their authority (the muezzin s call to prayer was the traditional way of counting the hours of the day, after all), and urban elites proclaimed their nationalism and their religiosity by their watches, both timepiece and jewelry. The image of Europe was, in a mirror of European Orientalism, deployed as both a rationalist model to be emulated (by, for example, the military) and a negative model of lazy and late aristocratic carelessness (by government administrators). Exploring sources as varied as lyric poetry, military manuals, school and military memoirs, and ferry timetables, Avner Wishnitzer lays out the full richness of Ottoman temporal culture in the nineteenth century."
Author: Avner Wishnitzer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108934390
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 391
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Book Description
In a world that is constantly awake, illuminated and exposed, there is much to gain from looking into the darkness of times past. This fascinating and vivid picture of nocturnal life in Middle Eastern cities shows that the night in the eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire created unique conditions for economic, criminal, political, devotional and leisurely pursuits that were hardly possible during the day. Offering the possibility of livelihood and brotherhood, pleasure and refuge; the darkness allowed confiding, hiding and conspiring - activities which had far-reaching consequences on Ottoman state and society in the early modern period. Instead of dismissing the night as merely a dark corridor between days, As Night Falls demonstrates how fundamental these nocturnal hours have been in shaping the major social, cultural and political processes in the early modern Middle East.
Author: Vanessa Ogle
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674737024
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
As new networks of railways, steamships, and telegraph communications brought distant places into unprecedented proximity, previously minor discrepancies in local time-telling became a global problem. Vanessa Ogle’s chronicle of the struggle to standardize clock times and calendars from 1870 to 1950 highlights the many hurdles that proponents of uniformity faced in establishing international standards. Time played a foundational role in nineteenth-century globalization. Growing interconnectedness prompted contemporaries to reflect on the annihilation of space and distance and to develop a global consciousness. Time—historical, evolutionary, religious, social, and legal—provided a basis for comparing the world’s nations and societies, and it established hierarchies that separated “advanced” from “backward” peoples in an age when such distinctions underwrote European imperialism. Debates and disagreements on the varieties of time drew in a wide array of observers: German government officials, British social reformers, colonial administrators, Indian nationalists, Arab reformers, Muslim scholars, and League of Nations bureaucrats. Such exchanges often heightened national and regional disparities. The standardization of clock times therefore remained incomplete as late as the 1940s, and the sought-after unification of calendars never came to pass. The Global Transformation of Time reveals how globalization was less a relentlessly homogenizing force than a slow and uneven process of adoption and adaptation that often accentuated national differences.
Author: Fatma Sel Turhan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0857736760
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 450
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Book Description
Bosnia enjoyed a special status within the Ottoman Empire. Many of the empire's 'janissaries', an elite military stratum of soldiers and nobleman, hailed from this Balkan region. So when Sultan Mehmet II abolished this warrior class in 1826, and this curtailed the regions access to influence in Constantinople, Bosnia rebelled. Under the leadership of Husein Gradascevic, the 'dragon of Bosnia', the kingdom declared independence and waged war with the Ottoman Empire. For the first time, Fatma Sel Turhan illuminates a period of crucial importance to the Balkan regions. She argues convincingly that the uprising was a response to Ottoman moves towards modernization designed to save the Ottoman Empire from decline, but which eventually led to its demise. She assesses how far the uprising can be considered a nationalist movement, who the rebels were, and how the central authorities dealt with and punished the perpetrators. "The Ottoman Empire and the Bosnian Uprising" is a major fresh contribution to our understanding of the late Ottoman world and the history of the Balkans.
Author: Ebru Boyar
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004399232
Category : Social Science
Languages : tr
Pages : 308
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Book Description
Approaching Ottoman social history through the lens of entertainment, this volume considers the multi-faceted roles of entertainment within society. At its most basic level entertainment could be all about pleasure, leisure and fun. But it also played a role in socialisation, gender divisions, social stratification and the establishment of moral norms, political loyalties and social, ethnic or religious identities. By addressing the ways in which entertainment was employed and enjoyed in Ottoman society, Entertainment Among the Ottomans introduces the reader to a new way of understanding the Ottoman world. Contributors are: Antonis Anastasopoulos, Tülay Artan, Ebru Boyar, Palmira Brummett, Kate Fleet, James Grehan, Svetla Ianeva, Yavuz Köse, William Kynan-Wilson, Milena Methodieva and Yücel Yanıkdağ.
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004412840
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 301
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Book Description
Scientific Instruments between East and West is a collection of essays on aspects of the transmission of knowledge about scientific instruments and the trade in such instruments between the Eastern and Western worlds, particularly from Europe to the Ottoman Empire. The contributors, from a variety of countries, draw on original Arabic and Ottoman Turkish manuscripts and other archival sources and publications dating from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries not previously studied for their relevance to the history of scientific instruments. This little-studied topic in the history of science was the subject of the 35th Scientific Instrument Symposium held in Istanbul in September 2016, where the original versions of these essays were delivered. Contributors are Mahdi Abdeljaouad, Pierre Ageron, Hamid Bohloul, Patrice Bret, Gaye Danışan, Feza Günergun, Meltem Kocaman, Richard L. Kremer, Janet Laidla, Panagiotis Lazos, David Pantalony, Atilla Polat, Bernd Scholze, Konstantinos Skordoulis, Seyyed Hadi Tabatabaei, Anthony Turner, Hasan Umut, and George Vlahakis. See inside the book here.
Author: On Barak
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520276140
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 358
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Book Description
In this pioneering history of transportation and communication in the modern Middle East, On Barak argues that contrary to accepted wisdom technological modernity in Egypt did not drive a sense of time focused on standardization only. Surprisingly, the introduction of the steamer, railway, telegraph, tramway, and telephone in colonial Egypt actually triggered the development of unique timekeeping practices that resignified and subverted the typical modernist infatuation with expediency and promptness. These countertempos, predicated on uneasiness over “dehumanizing” European standards of efficiency, sprang from and contributed to non-linear modes of arranging time. Barak shows how these countertempos formed and developed with each new technological innovation during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, contributing to a particularly Egyptian sense of time that extends into the present day, exerting influence over contemporary political language in the Arab world. The universal notion of a modern mechanical standard time and the deviations supposedly characterizing non-Western settings “from time immemorial,” On Time provocatively argues, were in fact mutually constitutive and mutually reinforcing.
Author: John Hausdoerffer
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022677743X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 299
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Book Description
This book "challenges our relationship to the environment and to each other, not only now but across generations. It is an important question for our time, when communities have become fragmented by a global consumer society, when our selves have become isolated in a competitive and technology-driven economy, and when our spiritual, social, and ecological impacts on human and other-than-human beings extend farther than ever imagined due to globalization and climate change. Through interviews and poetic snapshots into the experience of Indigenous people and others, this book demands that the reader think about how contemporary concerns oblige us to see ourselves as someone's future ancestor and, in turn, creates for the reader a different way of looking at his or her traditions and self"--
Author: Robert A. Voeks
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022654785X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 334
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Book Description
In the mysterious and pristine forests of the tropics, a wealth of ethnobotanical panaceas and shamanic knowledge promises cures for everything from cancer and AIDS to the common cold. To access such miracles, we need only to discover and protect these medicinal treasures before they succumb to the corrosive forces of the modern world. A compelling biocultural story, certainly, and a popular perspective on the lands and peoples of equatorial latitudes—but true? Only in part. In The Ethnobotany of Eden, geographer Robert A. Voeks unravels the long lianas of history and occasional strands of truth that gave rise to this irresistible jungle medicine narrative. By exploring the interconnected worlds of anthropology, botany, and geography, Voeks shows that well-intentioned scientists and environmentalists originally crafted the jungle narrative with the primary goal of saving the world’s tropical rainforests from destruction. It was a strategy deployed to address a pressing environmental problem, one that appeared at a propitious point in history just as the Western world was taking a more globalized view of environmental issues. And yet, although supported by science and its practitioners, the story was also underpinned by a persuasive mix of myth, sentimentality, and nostalgia for a long-lost tropical Eden. Resurrecting the fascinating history of plant prospecting in the tropics, from the colonial era to the present day, The Ethnobotany of Eden rewrites with modern science the degradation narrative we’ve built up around tropical forests, revealing the entangled origins of our fables of forest cures.
