The fifth chapter focuses on manuscript versions of al-Damāmīnī’s texts to trace their spread across the western Indian Ocean and beyond over the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. It argues that at this point a broad transoceanic community of readers shaped the circulation and reading of al-Damāmīnī’s grammar commentaries by developing new strategies of appropriating and accessing Arabic texts. New paratextual profiles emerged to enable the transregional spread of his scholarship through textual reproductions. Most significantly, the ‘table of contents’ (fihrist) appeared by the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a new reader-centred device employed in a range of philological texts (as a broad manuscript survey shows) to facilitate the study of Arabic, turn manuscript copies into works of reference, and individualise studying pursuits. Building on previous scholarship, the manuscript materials corroborate the emergence of new textual practices and show how the communities of the transregional formation across the western Indian Ocean became part of these transformations in the field of Arabic learned encounters.

This chapter traces the inflection of various religio-cultural traditions and customs of erotic love and sex and ordering of sexual acts in sixteenth-century Istanbul as defined by literary and documentary sources. With its diverse population and as the seat of the Ottoman dynasty, Istanbul was one of the most crowded and diverse cities of the sixteenth century. It witnessed the formation of an elite class that distinguished itself from the majority of the urban population through ideological othering strategies and the establishment of law codes to order and rule the diverse communities in the city. Literary works that focused on the city and documents, including law codes and court records, reflect conflicting views on sexual relations: while chaste love among members of the elite was idealized in romances and sexual acts were criticized in satirical works, documents reflected the ways sexual acts and desires were regulated, controlled, and punished.

Chapter 6 discusses ceramic especially the blue-and-white ceramic, the chief wealth maker of the fifteenth century Dai Viet, in response to the Ming banning maritime trade from the late fourteenth to the late fifteenth centuries. Both Sukhothai and Champa took the chance to develop their own ceramic exports yet only Dai Viet was able to make the blue-and-white ceramics, because its easy access of the cobalt blue in Yunnan. Dai Viet ceramics’ major markets were Middle East and Java. This export was largely operated by the Muslim networks in Southeast Asia, which first promoted then overlapped with the Fujianese networks. The circulation of Muslim traders through ports in the Tongking Gulf and South China helped Dai Viet to profit from China’s Ming Gap as well as develop deeper trade relations with eastern gulf ports such as Qinzhou and Hainan Island.

Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations documents the lives and experiences of everyday people through the lens of human movement and mobility from 1400 to 1800. Focusing on the most important typologies of preindustrial global migrations, this volume reveals how these movements transformed global paths of mobility, the impacts of which we still see in societies today. Case studies include those that arose from the demand for free, forced, and unfree labor, long- and short-distance trade, rural/urban displacement, religious mobility, and the rise of the number of refugees worldwide. With thirty chapters from leading experts in the field, this authoritative volume is an essential and detailed study of how migration shaped the nature of global human interactions before the age of modern globalization.

As defined by the World Health Organization, a disaster is “an occurrence disrupting the normal conditions of existence and causing a level of suffering that exceeds the capacity of adjustment of the affected community.” Whether caused by natural sources or man-made reasons, a disaster defines a chaotic process in the social, economic, physical, and environmental systems that are integrated into the lives of people. In order to alleviate or prevent the effects of disasters, mitigation strategies are developed and implemented in the form of policies, guidelines, and planning initiatives. Within these initiatives, cities and their built environment get specific attention as they define concentrated locations and a high density of people, social, and economic activity. After the 1999 Marmara Earthquake, the government of Turkey has passed urban transformation laws and implemented disaster mitigation strategies to take a proactive stance in dealing with the adverse effects of possible high magnitude earthquakes on cities. Urban transformation, in the sense of disaster mitigation, has been about upgrading of the built environment and infrastructure as well as creating open spaces. In this respect, urban transformation efforts in Istanbul, as a city of 17 million residents and being located on a highly risky seismic zone, becomes an interesting case study. This chapter will examine urban transformation efforts in Istanbul during the last decade as a form of disaster mitigation strategy and will offer a critical review of earthquake preparedness through the planning initiatives and shaping of the built environment.

In this Introduction, we meet two fixer–reporter teams who cover the same event – a terrorism attack in Istanbul – in very different ways. Fixers are news contributors who assist foreign reporters by arranging, translating, and otherwise mediating between them and local news sources. Depending on a fixer’s background, aspirations, and relationship with their client reporter, they can shape the news in significant ways. To understand how and why fixers shape the news, attention to political, historical, and biographical contexts of newsmaking is essential. The Introduction goes on to explain that the fixer and reporter characters who appear in this book are composite characters created from data collected through ethnographic research.

Chapter 3 examines post-1873 depression-era Ottoman novels and plays that articulate a language of difference by juxtaposing the success of industrious heroes against the failure of consumerist dandy anti-heroes. The representation of industrious and dandy characters in fin-de-siècle Istanbul shows the interconnectedness and interdependence between novels and the discourses and practices of productivity, in sharing the same new moral universe. Differing from the normative and distant language of the morality authors, or the authoritative and punitive language of the bureaucratic reforms explored in Chapters 1 and 2, the playful voices of novelists displayed dynamic and at times ambivalent representations of the idle and dandy, as an alternate, yet socially undesirable form of self-fashioning. By pitting a hardworking and upwardly mobile hero against the dandy anti-hero, novels thematized the period’s concern with valuing work as a constitutive element of character and nation-building, and also drew boundaries that defined who was and was not included in the nation. As a forum in which citizenship was debated, fiction established difference using ridicule, marginalization, and even criminalization as a social intervention.

This chapter argues that the some of the huge Kurdish population in western Turkey forms an Internal Diaspora. It introduces the concept of the Internal Diaspora by discussing the literature in relation to international diasporas. It then proceeds to discuss the challenges in assessing how many Kurds live outside of their Kurdish homeland in western Turkey. It tracks multiple generations of Kurdish migration, and the issues migrants were confronted with in western cities. It highlights some of the lived experiences for Kurds in the West such as poverty, racist exclusion, diminishing economic opportunities and patterns of informal residential segregation, especially in gecekondu neighbourhoods. It then proceeds to analyse how and why the PKK first mobilised in western Turkey, as well as considering how the mobilisation contrasted with that in Kurdish regions. It demonstrates that Kurdish students became the organisational core of the movement before expanding into marginal neighbours populated by destitute Kurds. It also looks at the decline of the revolutionary Turkish left and takes the case of the Gaziosmanpaşa neighbourhood as an illustrative case study. It finishes with a discussion of the parliamentary Kurdish parties and how it affected the PKK mobilization.

Chapter 5 explores the visual and rhetorical styles through which Ottoman history was modernized. Faced with enduring Western Orientalism, Turkish authors, architects, and illustrators took a number of distinct stylistic steps to celebrate their history while presenting their relationship to it as an unequivocally modern one. The explosion of popular history magazines and historical novels during the 1950s provided a forum in which the act of reading about the past could itself become a performance of modernity. Whether blending popular history with pulp fiction or encouraging Turkish citizens to approach their country from the perspective of Western tourists, Turkish authors pioneered approaches to re-appropriating their own past that remain popular today.

With new discourses and standards on the cleanliness and regularity of streets gaining influence in the Ottoman administration and public, memorandums and planning policies become widespread in the Mediterranean port cities as of the 1830s/1840s. Especially neighborhoods reconstructed after fires and newly developed faubourgs see their application, although often only partially.

The nineteenth century infatuation with opera by residents of Izmir, Istanbul, and Thessaloniki is grounded mainly in their attempt to take part in a global "civilizing mission." The middle classes and the administration intended but often failed to educate the lower classes to properly behavior during theater performances, refraining from smoking, eating, unpleasant bodily movements or ill-timed displays of veneration. Nonetheless, all these and also violence were not uncommon at the opera house. Moreover, opera aficionados wishes for a "one world" of global stage entertainment, for a cultural exchange with Western and Central Europe. Unfortunately, Western interest in Eastern music and narratives came to an end in the 1820s, whereas Eastern interest in Western performances gained momentum later.

The introduction formulates a critique of the predominant reading of modern Ottoman historiography for its focus on nationalities, nationalism, and the state. It traces the reason for this neglect from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century.It argues that the Europeanized and heterogeneous culture of the large cities needs more attention in studies of the modernization of the region and operationalizes notions of urban, global, and cultural history for this purpose.

Quay development had a fundamental impact on late nineteenth-century Eastern Mediterranean urban space. Large-scale development of the waterfront created not only a new facade for Izmir and Thessaloniki, but also precipitated new usages of urban space and modes of transport, labor, and leisure. They also led to a perceived bifurcation of the urban space into modernized and non-modernized quarters.

In addition to facilitating the accumulation of wealth, palace affiliation also created a group of women who had the resources and inclination to engage in charitable activities. A career in the harem underscored by material and moral patronage enabled many of these former slaves to amass the necessary resources—wealth, status, and networks—to be charitable. Thus, chapter 5 deals with another component of the material world, that of the charitable activities of female members of the imperial court. More specifically, the chapter examines their architectural patronage and endowments. In the previous chapters, palace women appeared as the receivers of patronage. In this chapter, they appear as dispensers of patronage as a result of the patronage that they themselves had received. The chapter endeavors to locate the impact of being affiliated with a particular household on the charitable activities of its members. It also aims to evaluate the possible implications that the charitable activities of this group of women had for the imperial court, the members of the imperial household, and Ottoman society. It demonstrates how female members of the imperial court engaged in charitable activities that served the interests of both Ottoman subjects and members of the imperial court, while also leaving their individual mark on the architectural, social, urban, religious, and intellectual landscape of various regions of the empire