Suchergebnisse

One of the most frequent cases in which vermin appear in Ottoman official correspondence is when they "attack" or "invade" human settlements, consuming or destroying food produced specifically for human consumption. Until effective ways and tools to manage them emerged in the late nineteenth century, communities withstood flies, locusts, and rats. Indeed, specific categories of animals subsumed within the category of vermin/haşarat seem to have become among the biggest troublemakers in rural Anatolia and Mesopotamia. These vermin caused not only short-term scarcity of food, especially concerning during famines, but also writ-large settlement abandonment, resulting in the temporary and even long-term problems of rural/regional economic systems. Yet very few Ottoman historians have reconstructed these stories within a critical animal history perspective. While it is true that these attacks and invasions of vermin created great burdens on human (and other animal) communities throughout history globally, the ways we historians have handled such cases tend to be anthropocentric. Here I argue for an ontological turn towards spatial aspects of vermin lives within human settlements and thus position my line of thinking about interaction from the ground-up, both literally and figuratively. From early-modern Ottoman discourses about vermin and the strategies used to cope with them from dictionaries/lexicons, literary and scientific texts, legal codices, and archival material, I develop a new analytical tool to understand interaction between humans and vermin as competition over perceived and actual space. I argue that we approach vermin behavior from the perspective of a spatial consciousness that constructed extended liminal configurations of space, which I call animalscapes. Human communities in Anatolia and Mesopotamia on the other hand, acknowledged the vermin perception of animalscapes and negotiated their place within, until the invention of chemical weapons against vermin at the end of the nineteenth century.

Defence date: 12 September 2017 ; Examining Board: Prof. Luca Molà European University Institute (Supervisor); Prof. Suraiya N. Faroqhi Istanbul Bilgi University (External Supervisor); Prof. Stéphane Van Damme European University Institute; Prof. Alan Mikhail Yale University ; This study examines the effects of climate change on the early-nineteenth century socio-political transformation of the Ottoman Empire by analyzing the institutionalization of an imperial political-ecology, and the transformation of socio-ecologies of the imperial subjects as a reaction to both the climate change and the development of the imperial political ecology. It is argued that the first official weather forecasts, the first Ottoman natural history museum (1836-1848) and model farms of the 1840s were institutional outputs of a significant change in the perception of nature of Ottoman administrators. On the other hand, that perception, which tended to understand nature more and more as a commodity and a scientific object was reacted and challenged by Ottoman subjects in a variety of ways ranging from resistance, to adaptation, and invention of new tactics to cope with its effects. Abstaining from felling trees for the Tersane-i Amire, incendiarism, altering established labor-relations and migration against the will of the state were among the most common practices. It is argued that the resulting dialectic between an ideology based on expert knowledge and identity, and one based on local knowledge became a decisive factor in the empire-building practices and the direction of reforms during the second half of the century. The same dialectic made visible the reasons of the 'failure' of Ottoman state in natural disaster relief after the 1830s, especially during the famine of 1845-50. Dependence of Ottoman administration on centrally appointed expert-bureaucrats and their ideology in comparison to pre-1840 famines, limited the ability of the state to take immediate action and its capacity to negotiate with local elites, merchants, producers and consumers. Famine-time charity and philanthropy have become practices through which a new imperial identity was negotiated between the central authorities, local elites and common subjects of the empire.

As was the case in many other countries, it was only in the early years of this century that Greek and Turkish labour historians began to systematically look beyond national borders to investigate their intricately interrelated histories. The studies in Working in Greece and Turkey provide an overdue exploration of labour history on both sides of the Aegean, before as well as after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Deploying the approaches of global labour history as a framework, this volume presents transnational, transcontinental, and diachronic comparisons that illuminate the shared history of Greece and Turkey