EXCERPT
“In his book Révolutions de Constantinople (1819), Antoine
Juchereau de Saint-Denis (1778–1842), a French émigré and military engineer employed
by the Ottoman state as an expert in fortification and artillery, narrated the
stormy events that he observed in the Ottoman capital in 1807 and 1808. During
three révolutions, as Juchereau defined them, two sultans were deposed and
executed, several statesmen were beheaded, poisoned, or lynched, and thousands
of ordinary Ottoman men and women became victims of violence and terror.
Perhaps more important, Juchereau maintained, these revolutions resulted from a
battle between the reform program of the New Order—a military and administrative
reorganization agenda under the Ottoman sultan Selim III (r. 1789–1807)—and the
general public, led by the guards of the old order, the Janissaries, and ulama
(learned hierarchy).
....
Published in French Mediterraneans: Transnational and Imperial Histories,edited by Patricia M. E. Lorcin and Todd Shepard,Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2016.
Mavi Boncuk |
Ali Yaycıoğlu[1] is a historian of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey. His research centers on economic, political and legal institutions and practices as well as social and cultural life in southeastern Europe and the Middle East during the Ottoman Empire. He also has a research agenda on how people imagined, represented and recorded property, territory, and nature in early periods. Furthermore, Dr. Yaycıoğlu explores how we can use digital tools to understand, visualize and conceptualize these imaginations, representations and recordings. He teaches courses on the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey; empires, markets and networks in the early modern world; global history of the age of revolutions; doing economic history; and digital humanities.
Professor Yaycıoğlu's first book, Partners of the Empire: Crisis of the Ottoman Order in the Age of Revolutions[1] (Stanford University Press, 2016) offers a rethinking of the Ottoman Empire within the global context of the revolutionary age in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Currently Dr. Yaycıoğlu is working on a book project, entitled The Order of Debt: Power, Wealth and Death in the Ottoman Empire analyzing transformations in property, finance and statehood in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The book focuses on episodes of economic violence during the political and economic transformation from the Early Modern era to the Modern times through fiscal records, probate inventories, debt and credit registers, confiscation and auction documents. Dr. Yaycıoğlu's other project, tentatively entitled Ottoman Topologies: Managing, Knowing and Recording Natureexamines symbiotic relationship between managerial, intellectual and scribal organization of the Ottoman Empire and various eco-orders, such as mountains, forests, valleys, steppes, river and lakesides, coastal areas, islands and deserts...
Ali Yaycıoğlu is the supervisor of a digital history project, Mapping Ottoman Epirus, housed in Stanford’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA).
Born and raised in Ankara, Turkey, Ali Yaycıoğlu studied International Relations at the Middle East Technical University and Ottoman History at Bilkent University. Then, he studied Arabic and Islamic legal history at McGill University in Montreal. Yaycıoğlu completed his Ph.D. in History and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard in 2008. After his Ph.D., Yaycioglu carried out post-doctoral studies in the Agha Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at the same university and then in Hellenic Studies at Princeton. He joined the History Department at Stanford in 2011. Professor Yaycıoğlu is also director of Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies and a board member of Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA), cofounder of Ottoman and Turkey Encounters at Stanford (OTES) and an associate member of the Centre d'études turques, ottomanes, balkaniques et centrasiatiques at L'École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris.
[1] Partners of the Empire: The Crisis of the Ottoman Order in the Age of Revolutions
2016 Stanford University Press
Partners of Empire offers a radical rethinking of the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Over this unstable period, the Ottoman Empire faced political crises, institutional shakeups, and popular insurrections. It responded through various reform options and settlements. New institutional configurations emerged; constitutional texts were codified—and annulled. The empire became a political theater where different actors struggled, collaborated, and competed on conflicting agendas and opposing interests.
"Ali Yaycioglu's magnificent study provides us with a deeply researched portrait of the relationship between the Ottoman provinces and the imperial capital in the tumultuous years of the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century when the very future of the Empire was uncertain. Moving beyond generic references to 'the age of the ayan,' Yaycioglu draws compelling portraits of the individuals, and their provincial milieux, who fought both with and against Istanbul to create the Empire anew."
—Molly Greene, Princeton University
"Ali Yaycioglu skillfully weaves a complex narrative of the 18th-century Ottoman political landscape, illuminating the struggles as well as the coalitions between various social groups. His compelling account should be required reading not only for those interested in the history of the Ottoman Empire, the Balkans, and the Middle East, but in global history as well."
—Şevket Pamuk, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul
"This book not only fills the arguably single most important gap in early modern Middle Eastern history by providing a cohesive narrative for the eighteenth century in the Ottoman Empire, but it also teaches a lesson about how to write world history by centering the focus of analysis outside the West. Ali Yaycioglu's work offers the most conclusive corrective to the still often-heard argument that representative institutions are a foreign import to the Middle East."
—Baki Tezcan, University of California, Davis
Associate Professor of History
B.S., Middle East Technical University, International Relations (1994)
M.A., Bilkent University, History (1997)
Graduate, McGill University, Study in Islamic Studies (1998)
Ph.D., Harvard University, History and Middle Eastern Studies (2008)
Postdoctoral Fellow, Princeton University, Program in Hellenic Studies (2009)