Studies of early-modern Islamic cities have stressed the atypical or the idiosyncratic. This bias derives largely from orientalist presumptions that they were in some way substandard or deviant. The first purpose of this volume is to normalize Ottoman cities, to demonstrate how, on the one hand, they resembled cities generally and how, on the other, their specific histories individualized them. The second purpose is to challenge the previous literature and to negotiate an agenda for future study. By considering the narrative histories of Aleppo, Izmir and Istanbul, the book offers a departure from the piecemeal methods of previous studies, emphasizing their importance during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and highlighting their essentially Ottoman character. While the essays provide an overall view, each can be approached separately. Their exploration of the sources and the agendas of those who have conditioned scholarly understanding of these cities will make them essential student reading.

Modern scholarship has not given Edirne the attention it deserves regarding its significance as one of the capitals of the Ottoman Empire. This edited volume offers a reinterpretation of Edirne’s history from Early Ottoman times to recent periods of the Turkish Republic. Presently, disconnections and discontinuities introduced by the transition from empire to nation state still characterize the image of the city and the historiography about it. In contrast, this volume examines how the city engages in the forming, deflecting and creative appropriation of its heritage, a process that has turned Edirne into a UNESCO heritage hotspot. A closer historical analysis demonstrates the dissonances and contradictions that these different interpretations and uses of heritage produce. From the beginning, Edirne was shaped by its connectivity and relationality to other places, above all to Istanbul. This perspective is employed at many different levels, e.g., with regard to its population, institutions, architecture, infrastructures and popular culture, but also regarding the imaginations Edirne triggered. In sum, this multi-disciplinary volume boosts urban history beyond Istanbul and offers new insight into Ottoman and Turkish connectivities from the vantage point of certain key moments of Edirne’s history.

Administration, society and intellectual life of the Turkish Empire during the two centuries that followed the capture of Constantinople in 1453.

Volume 3 of The Cambridge History of Turkey covers the period from 1603 to 1839.

Bringing together cultural, economic and social historians from across Europe and beyond, this volume offers a consideration from a number of perspectives of the principal forces that further integrated the Ottoman Empire and Western Europe during the first century of industrialisation. The essays not only review and analyse the commercial, financial and monetary factors, negative as well as positive, that bore upon the region's initial stages of modern transformation, but also provide a ready introduction to major aspects of the economy and society of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century. Beginning with two chapters providing the context to the development of Ottoman relations with Western Europe up to the second half of the nineteenth century, the collection then moves on to explore more specific questions of trade links, the impact of improved transportation and communications, the development and changing nature of Ottoman finance and banking, as well as European investment in Turkey. The outcome is a broad ranging consideration of how all these issues played a fundamental role in the final decades of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of Turkey as a modern state with links to both east and west. The essays in this collection derive from the EABFH colloquium held in the Imperial Mint, Istanbul, in October 1999.

Whether defined as essentially 'Turkish', and therefore alien to the Lebanese experience, or remembered in its final years as a tyrannical and brutal dictatorship, the period has not been thought of fondly in most Lebanese historiography. In a far-reaching and much-needed analysis of this complex legacy, James A. Reilly looks at Arabic-language history writing emanating from Lebanon in the post-1975 period, focusing on the three main Ottoman administrative centres of Saida, Beirut and Tripoli. This examination highlights key aspects of Lebanon's current political and cultural climate, and emphasises important points of agreement and conflict in contemporary historical discourse. The 1989 Ta'if Accords, for example, which ended the Lebanese Civil War, were accompanied by calls for reinterpretation of how the country's history could assist in creating a sense of national cohesion. The Ottoman Cities of Lebanon is invaluable to all historians and researchers working on Lebanese history and politics, and wider issues of identity, post-imperialist discourse and nationhood in the Middle East.

In the late fifteenth century, the north-eastern Balkans were under-populated and under-institutionalized. Yet, by the end of the following century, the regions of Deliorman and Gerlovo were home to one of the largest Muslim populations in southeast Europe. Nikolay Antov sheds fresh light on the mechanics of Islamization along the Ottoman frontier, and presents an instructive case study of the 'indigenization' of Islam – the process through which Islam, in its diverse doctrinal and socio-cultural manifestations, became part of a distinct regional landscape. Simultaneously, Antov uses a wide array of administrative, narrative-literary, and legal sources, exploring the perspectives of both the imperial center and regional actors in urban, rural, and nomadic settings, to trace the transformation of the Ottoman polity from a frontier principality into a centralized empire. Contributing to the further understanding of Balkan Islam, state formation and empire building, this unique text will appeal to those studying Ottoman, Balkan, and Islamic world history.