As a consequence of the political developments following World War I, the Ottoman Empire has been treated by a great number of historians above all as an intrinsic part of Turkish national history. Although the academic community has recognized that the Ottoman Empire was, in fact, multiethnic and multicultural, this recognition has too rarely been translated into scholarly practice. This is due in large part to the fragmentation of Ottoman studies into various academic disciplines that only infrequently communicate with one another: as examples, Turkish-language literature predominantly produced by Muslims is treated by Turkish Literature experts and Turkologists in the West; Ottoman Ladino literature falls within the purview of Romance studies; the empire’s Greeks are studied within the field of Byzantine and Hellenic studies; and so on.
This publication series aims to bring all of these perspectives together in a historically specific and responsible way by providing a key publication platform for scholars aiming to study the narrative sources of a vast geographic region, stretching, at times, from Bosnia to the Yemen, in its full complexity as a multilingual and multiethnic Empire.
For further information about the series please contact Michael Greenwood at [email protected]
By Stefan Hanß
April 18, 2023
This microhistory of the Salvagos—an Istanbul family of Venetian interpreters and spies travelling the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mediterranean—is a remarkable feat of the historian’s craft of storytelling. With his father having been killed by secret order of Venice and his nephew to be ...
Edited
By Christoph Herzog, Richard Wittmann
September 04, 2018
Istanbul – Kushta – Constantinople presents twelve studies that draw on contemporary life narratives that shed light on little explored aspects of nineteenth-century Ottoman Istanbul. As a broad category of personal writing that goes beyond the traditional confines of the autobiography, life ...
By Philipp Wirtz
March 17, 2017
The period between the 1880s and the 1920s was a time of momentous changes in the Ottoman Empire. It was also an age of literary experiments, of which autobiography forms a part. This book analyses Turkish autobiographical narratives describing the part of their authors’ lives that was spent while ...