Under Ottoman rule, the city of Haifa, located at the southern point of the largest bay on the coast of what today is Israel, was transformed from a scarcely-inhabited fortress town to a major modern city. This book details the history of Haifa under the Ottomans during the period 1516-1918. Alex Carmel uses a variety of original sources to uncover the realities of life in Haifa under Ottoman rule and paints a vivid picture of the development of the city in this era. Carmel's work has become the benchmark of the historiography of Israel's third largest city and remains to this day, the best-known and most highly-regarded survey of Haifa under Ottoman rule. This, the first English edition of 'Ottoman Haifa', will be essential reading for all historians of the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East.

This volume offers a history of Haifa during that crucial part of the nineteenth century when Europe's penetration of Palestine combined with Istanbul's centralization efforts to alter irrevocably the social fabric of the country and change its political destiny. After tracing the town's beginnings in the early eighteenth century, the author painstakingly reconstructs from the few sijill volumes that have survived vital aspects of Ottoman Haifa's society and administration. A fresh look at the town's demography is followed by an in-depth discussion of the way inter-communal relations developed after the 1864 Vilāyets Law had brought a restructuring of the sources of elite power. The author's findings on the social status of Haifa's Muslim women significantly add to the vibrant picture of economic activities we now know urban Muslim women in the Ottoman Empire were involved in.

Under Ottoman rule, the city of Haifa, located at the southern point of the largest bay on the coast of what today is Israel, was transformed from a scarcely-inhabited fortress town to a major modern city. This book details the history of Haifa under the Ottomans during the period 1516-1918. Alex Carmel uses a variety of original sources to uncover the realities of life in Haifa under Ottoman rule and paints a vivid picture of the development of the city in this era. Carmel's work has become the benchmark of the historiography of Israel's third largest city and remains to this day, the best-known and most highly-regarded survey of Haifa under Ottoman rule. This, the first English edition of 'Ottoman Haifa', will be essential reading for all historians of the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East.

Napoleon’s invasion of the Middle East marks the beginning of the modern era in the region. This book traces the developments that led to the making of a new and separate geographical-political entity in the Middle East known as Eretz Israel and the establishment of the State of Israel within its bounds. Thus, its time frame runs from Napoleon’s invasion of Eretz Israel / Palestine in 1799 to the establishment of Israel in 1948–1949. Eretz Israel as the formal name of a separate entity in the modern era first appeared in the early translations into Hebrew of the Balfour Declaration, while in the original document the country was referred to as “Palestine.” During the period of Ottoman rule the territory that would in time be called Eretz Israel / Palestine was not a separate political unit. Among Jews, use of “Eretz Israel” increased only after the beginning of Zionist aliyot. Had the Zionist movement not arisen, it is doubtful whether the development to which this study is devoted would have occurred. The motivating force behind that process is without doubt the Zionist element. That is why Jews are the major protagonists in this book.

In Ordinary Jerusalem, Angelos Dalachanis, Vincent Lemire and thirty-five scholars depict the ordinary history of an extraordinary global city in the late Ottoman and Mandate periods. Utilizing largely unknown archives, they revisit the holy city of three religions, which has often been defined solely as an eternal battlefield and studied exclusively through the prism of geopolitics and religion. At the core of their analysis are topics and issues developed by the European Research Council-funded project “Opening Jerusalem Archives: For a Connected History of Citadinité in the Holy City, 1840–1940.” Drawn from the French vocabulary of geography and urban sociology, the concept of citadinité describes the dynamic identity relationship a city’s inhabitants develop with each other and with their urban environment.

A study of Palestine in the early twentieth century that takes a step back from the intricacies of the Arab-Zionist conflict, focusing instead on the country's position within the broader history of empire and anti-colonial resistance.