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Biography of an empire
This vividly detailed revisionist history opens a new vista on the great Ottoman Empire in the early nineteenth century, a key period often seen as the eve of Tanzimat westernizing reforms and the beginning of three distinct histories—ethnic nationalism in the Balkans, imperial modernization from Istanbul, and European colonialism in the Middle East. Christine Philliou brilliantly shines a new light on imperial crisis and change in the 1820s and 1830s by unearthing the life of one man. Stephanos Vogorides (1780–1859) was part of a network of Christian elites known phanariots, institutionally excluded from power yet intimately bound up with Ottoman governance. By tracing the contours of the wide-ranging networks—crossing ethnic, religious, and institutional boundaries—in which the phanariots moved, Philliou provides a unique view of Ottoman power and, ultimately, of the Ottoman legacies in the Middle East and Balkans today. What emerges is a wide-angled analysis of governance as a lived experience at a moment in which there was no clear blueprint for power.
eBook
Historic Engagements with Occidental Cultures, Religions, Powers
This book explores centuries of power relations and imperial and civilizing rhetorics, overarching themes highlighted in these infrequently heard accounts by eastern travelers to the West. Considered in depth are evolutions in mental frameworks and practices that led to the emergence of anticolonial consciousness and strategies of protest.
eBook
Rules of Law, Politics of Empire
All legal systems attempt to work by providing rules for social interaction and asserting the validity of these rules for individuals subject to them. Occasionally, rule makers and their advisors make extensive claims for applications of their laws: that they apply or should be applied to all who share a faith, to all in a single polity, in the extreme to all the peoples of the earth. But the ordinary state of law depends upon a selective and multiform approach to rules—to the range of their applicability, to their appropriate sources, and to the entitlement to implement them. Empires
Book Chapter
Reading Backward
Nothing could be more philologically correct than to begin a discussion of philology with a survey of the changing semantic range of the word. The practice of philology, of course, has a long and checkered history, and one could gather a bouquet of definitions of the word, from Seneca’s famous denunciation of philology as cheapened philosophy (quae philosophia fuit facta philologia est) to Giulio Bertoni’s fascist-era declaration that “the object of philology is a reality to be conquered” (13). I won’t go all the way back to the origins of the word – to the Greeks, for whomphilologiameant both
Book Chapter
There Is, in the Heart of Asia, … an Entirely French Population
Over the course of three days in January 1919, a host of French businessmen, functionaries, politicians, schemers, and scholars met in Marseille for the Congrès français de la Syrie.¹ Gathering in the grand halls of the Marseille Chamber of Commerce, the assembled dignitaries sought to stake France’s claim to “Syria,” as the region that would soon be divided into the Mandate states of Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, and Transjordan was then commonly known. Many of the attendees were members of the Marseille and Lyon Chambers of Commerce, whose long-standing economic ties to “Syria” predisposed them toward pushing for its formal acquisition.
Book Chapter
The Commodore as Diplomat
Edmund Roberts was not the only American of the 1830s to launch a diplomatic career based on his connections to political leaders. Andrew Jackson’s administration, which took office in 1829, became notorious for ushering in the “spoils system,” a form of political cronyism under which government jobs were doled out freely to friends and political supporters. Diplomatic posts were high on the list of patronage positions that Jackson handed out to backers, irrespective of their qualifications for office. Shamefully, the same system of politically motivated appointments remains in place today for many senior diplomatic positions.
When Jackson decided to appoint
Book Chapter
Conclusions
Despite showing continuity with the earlier urban tradition, Late Antique cities in the East differ from their Roman counterparts for being ‘small, fortified, Christian, and Imperial’ (Zanini 2003, 214). In the Early Islamic period, pre-existing cities saw the addition of two important components in the urban fabric, namely the mosque and the s u q , and witnessed the continuity of the process the street grid’s disintegration. How these changes affected Palmyra has already been discussed at length in the preceding chapters. The following wider, but necessarily brief and incomplete, overview of a selection of cities in Syria, which show
Book Chapter
Introduction
Dating back to the first serious Western inquiries concerning the site, the history of Palmyra, the ‘ bride of the desert’, is split into two phases with the events of 272–273 at the centre.¹ The first three centuries were a period of prosperity for the city. Palmyra flourished as a crucial caravan centre during the time. Its community was thriving; its art, architecture, and language (Palmyrene, a west Aramaic dialect) are all proofs of the existence of a well-rooted, autonomous identity that was the result of complex crosscultural interrelations between the East and the West. Most of the archaeological
Book Chapter