Ottoman History Podcast

The entity known today as the Ottoman Empire is often taken by historians as an exemplary model of an imperial state. Yet, until the nineteenth century, Ottomans had never referred to their state as an empire in their writings or bureaucratic records and diplomatic correspondences. In this podcast, Einar Wigen explores the curious absence of the term "empire" within the Ottoman vocabulary, explains how the concept entered Ottoman Turkish, and deals with some possibly equivalent Ottoman titles and designations that may be considered imperial.

Ottoman life was deeply embedded in the countryside and rural production, and thus, issues of irrigation and ecology surrounding the production of staple food crops ranked high on the list of imperial concerns. In this episode, Alan Mikhail explains the ecological history of the relationship between the Ottoman Empire and its breadbasket in Egypt, and explores other issues related to the nascent field of Middle East environmental history.

Historians have used classical Ottoman texts to explore social issues such as sexuality, with compiled manuscripts from various literary genres often forming a data-mine for historical information. However, this type of selective reading has often distorted or obscured the original meaning and context of literary works. Sometimes, texts that appear erotic or sexual in nature such as gazel could have been intended for an entirely different purpose. In this episode, Dr. Selim Kuru examines the concepts of mahbub peresti (worship of the beloved) and gulâm pâregi (pederasty) and various motifs concerning male beauty in the shehrengiz (Gibb's "city-thrillers") genre in search of a more contextualized approach these would-be erotic texts.