Texte remanié de: Ph. D. thesis--London university. / Bibliogr. p. 261-271. Index.

This study is intended to serve as a fresh look at one of the significant aspects of Ottoman history through a case study of the North-Central Anatolian district (kaza) of Amasya at the turn of the seventeenth century: the changes in the rural structure of Anatolia during a period of turbulence, generally known as the period of the Celali rebellions. The research is mainly based on quantitative data contained in two existing Ottoman tax registers of different types (one mufassal tahrir defteri and one detailed 'avariz defteri), dating respectively from 1576 and 1642. The study examines the situation in three related aspects, namely settlement patterns, population structure and the composition of society in rural Amasya. Through a comparative analysis of the two tax registers, it underlines the changes observed in these three fields between 1576 and 1642. The first point that emerges from the survey is that the settled rural population in the kaza of Amasya appears to have increased significantly (almost two fold) between the 1520s and 1576, and that there was a great number of landless peasant households in the villages, as well as unmarried males in 1576. Secondly, most of the villages seem to have been situated in the lowland plains at this date. Thirdly, rural society consisted overwhelmingly of peasants working on lands of varying sizes, over which they had the hereditary usufruct rights as tenants. Living usually in the country, a significant number of notables, most of whom had pre-Ottoman connections, and timariots together excercised their rights of taxation over the peasantry. By 1642, it appears that this picture had undergone major changes: both the number of inhabited villages and their tax-paying adult male populations in the kaza dropped drastically (by 38.70 and 78.67 % respectively). While some "new" villages appeared in different localities, the remaining villages had become half-deserted. Most of disappeared/deserted villages seem to have been the smaller ones which had possibly been located in lowlands. The number of recorded bachelors in the remaining villages in 1642 constituted less than 10 per cent of the 1576 figure. There also appeared a significant number of (about 7% of total rural population) migrant groups/individuals (biruniyan or "outsiders") in villages; furthermore, we find similar number of militarymen (askeris) settled in the villages, and engaging in agriculture on their farms (ciftliks). It becomes apparent that many peasants moved to these ciftliks, probably for security reasons, while many others who had previously fled from their lands, returned to find their lands occupied by these askeris. The situation of the revenue-holding notables and timariots of the region, on the other hand, seriously dete riorated during this period. From a detailed survey of the socio-political developments of the period in the region, mainly based on the records of outgoing imperial decrees (miihimmes) and the Sharia Court registers (sicils) of Amasya, it becomes clear that these significant changes in the rural structure and society of the kaza between 1576 and 1642 were primarily the result of an unprecedented level of human-made catastrophes that took place during the large-scale Celali depredation of the period, and that these were accompanied by frequent occurrences of natural disasters. Therefore, the changes in the rural structure and society of the kaza of Amasya that emerge from the comparative analysis of the two tax registers represent firstly, the extent of the ruin of the countryside, and secondly, the extent of the erosion of the tax base of the Ottoman government in the region during this turbulent period.

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Though officially ruled by the Ottoman Entire, Egypt was under British occupation between 1882 and 1922. Most studies about the British in Egypt during this time focus on the political and administrative activities of British officials based on government documents or their memoirs and biographies. This thesis focuses on various aspects of the British community in Cairo based on sources that have been previously overlooked such as census records, certain private papers, and business, newspaper, military and missionary archives. At the outset, this discussion introduces demographic data on the British community to establish its size, residential location and context among other foreign communities and the wider Egyptian society. Then it deliberates on the occasional ambiguous boundaries that identified members of the community from non-members as well as the symbols and institutions that united the community. Ensuing chapters on the community's socio-occupational diversity and criminal activities suggest that the British community in Cairo was not homogeneous. The community consisted of not only law-abiding upper middle class officials but of an assortment of businessmen, missionaries, and working-class maids and labourers; some of whom were involved in crimes and misdemeanours. The analysis concludes by investigating the diversity of reactions of Cairo's Britons to the challenge of World War I and the subsequent revolutionary period of 1919-1922. Due to time and space constraints, the discussion concentrates on the British community in Cairo, since for the most part, more Britons resided in Cairo than Alexandria. However, where appropriate to the thesis' key themes, data on the British in Alexandria will be included.

This dissertation examines the Ottoman grand strategy during the turbulent years of war and reform between 1826 and 1841.The concept of grand strategy utilized in my thesis does hereby not refer to purely military matters. It is rather a notion that explains how a political authority strives to realize its long-term aims through mobilization of its available instruments and resources. During 1820s-1840s, facing grave internal and external threats, the Ottoman grand strategy was directed at defending its existing possessions and re-establishing the center’s authority throughout the empire. To ensure their aims, Ottoman decision-makers initiated a radical bureaucratic-military reform agenda and mobilized available fiscal, military and ideological resources at their disposal. The majority of the existing scholarship tend to interpret the Ottoman reforms in an overly descriptive or superficial manner, therefore neglecting the Ottoman decision-makers’ perceptions, plans, and broader goals as well as the subsequent effects (and repercussions) of those policies within the empire. The “Eastern Question” literature, which is mainly based on European sources, often ignores the Ottoman agency and obscures the rather complex nature of Ottoman policy-making by assessing it within a facile “modernist-reactionary” bipolarity for the period in question. With my holistic approach and utilization of unused archival material, I will contribute to the existing knowledge about Ottoman policy-making and political-military transformation during the era in question. I argue in my thesis that the imperial center consciously, if frantically, responded to the internal and external challenges by tightening its grip around its subjects and making far-reaching changes in its governmentality. Aided by an expanding and diversifying military-administrative bureaucracy, Ottoman rulers managed to collect more taxes, create and expand a disciplined army, limit the power of provincial notables, standardize governing practices and pragmatically used their newly established European embassies to achieve their foreign goals. The social and economic costs of these policies were also immense, as I clearly underline in my study. Many common subjects and members of the higher classes expressed neither optimism nor pleasure about the top-down reforms and state policies. They were heavily taxed, suffered from rampant inflation, while tens of thousands of men were pressed into the new military formations to serve until they became disabled, deserted or died. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / Grounded in archival research in Turkish historical repositories, this thesis examines the Ottoman ruling elite’s efforts to ensure the empire’s integrity and re-establish central authority by military-bureaucratic reform and internal negotiation in the second quarter of the 19th century. Going beyond the standard institutional histories and Eurocentric narratives of the Eastern Question, it explores how the Ottoman sultans and bureaucrats mobilized the empire’s political, military, and ideological resources to achieve their broader goals of reversing collapse and resisting European political-military challenge.

La présente thèse vise à étudier le fonctionnement et les résultats d'une expérience constitutionnelle orientée pour surmonter "l'ancien régime" et pour former une identité nationale ottomane par les promesses de l’état de droit et du respect des procédures parlementaires. À cet égard, l’étude se concentre sur une série des pratiques administratives et législatives au début de l'époque de Meşrutiyet entre les années 1908 et 1913.La thèse observe les processus de la promulgation et l’application des lois critiques pour créer une unification nationale, notamment la loi martiale et la loi de la conscription militaire des non-musulmanes ottomanes surtout en relation avec les réseaux politiques des Bulgares Macédoniens et Helléniques. En traçant le développement des tensions autour de ces lois à Istanbul et en Roumélie, la thèse expose les déviations dans l’interprétation de Kanun-i Esasi par les représentants des divers factions sociopolitiques, l’hétérogénéité dans les attitudes des acteurs locaux et centraux et le rôle déterminant des rivalités locales dans la formation d’un corpus juridique en particulier et une souveraineté constitutionnelle en général. / The dissertation examines the functioning of Ottoman constitutional rule born in 1908 which aimed at forming a new body politic, an Ottoman nation, on the sociopolitical structure inherited from the "old regime.” As this Ottomanism, which was officially and publicly referred as "the unity of elements" (ittihad-ı anasır), was closely related with the promise of parliamentarianism and the rule of constitutional norms, the dissertation focuses on the legislative and administrative practices starting in Spring 1909 until the outbreak of the Balkan Wars. To this end, the study follows the enactment and application phases of certain critical laws in creating such a national unification — the martial law and the law on the conscription of non-Muslims to the Ottoman army — with specific emphasis on Macedonian-Bulgarian and Hellenist political networks. Tracing the development of tensions and strategies among official and civil political actors in Istanbul and Rumelia evolving around these laws, the dissertation demonstrates deviations in the interpretation of the Kanun-ı Esasi by various representatives of sociopolitical factions, the heterogeneity of attitudes of central and local political actors, and the effective role of local struggles in the development of constitutional sovereignty.

This thesis analyzes the educational activities of the Ottoman Jews in a time period between the last decades of the Ottoman Empire and the early years of the Turkish Republic covering the reforms the new regime performed for a secular education system. The particular education society called the Alliance Isra&eacute / lite Universelle is taken as a case study with all its activities from its establishment in 1860 to the closing its last school in Turkey. The French origin AIU schools are considered with different scopes, including their impacts upon the Ottoman and Turkish education systems and interactions with the social life in each. However, in order to analyze this institution, the administration of the heterogeneous Ottoman state is required to be revised and the status of the Jewish communities in the Ottoman Empire is to be overviewed. In the study, besides the AIU archival resources, mainly the first and second hand sources in the Turkish archives are used.

Dissertation--Florenz--Europäisches Hochschulinstitut, 2001. / Bibliogr. p. 429-455.

Texte remanié de: Proefschrift--Universiteit Utrecht, 2000. / Bibliogr. p. 221-237.

This thesis examines late Ottoman discourses on the soul and emotions as reflected by a large corpus of psychological literature under the umbrella of ilm-i ahval-i ruh (the science of the states of the soul, psychology) in relation to the rise of the rhetoric concerning the 'new man' - an imaginary 'Ottoman individual' educated in 'new schools' to be in complete harmony with Ottoman modernization. It posits that the 'new man' was subjected to a process of design as a producing unit whether in possession of a soul or not, while the conceptual framework of the 'individual' was being formulated. The secondary literature on Ottoman modernization has illustrated intellectual efforts for designing the 'new man' in relation to the formation of national identity. In doing so it has focused on the process of indoctrination and the dissemination of normative accounts. Drawing on that literature, this thesis intends to complicate the picture and look beyond the normative accounts. By approaching the debate between materialism and spiritualism as a psychological argument and revolving the story around the metaphors of 'man as machine' and 'man as animal', it aims to display the influence of the scientific and technological changes that shaped the material as well as the intellectual culture these authors experienced. In an attempt to go beyond what lies beneath the national and religious underpinnings of the imagined 'new man', this thesis maintains a tight focus on the psychological writings of four intellectuals - all of whom gave serious thought to the debate about the soul: Abdullah Cevdet, Filibeli Ahmed Hilmi, Baha Tevfik, and Mustafa Şekip Tunç. By shifting the centre of focus of the rhetoric about the 'new man' from national or religious identity formation to the pressing concerns about economic and technological progress, it shows an Ottoman entanglement with science and technology and a deeper Ottoman inquiry into the conceptual framework of the individual. Accordingly it argues that the psychological literature on the soul and emotions bears testimony to the acute concern for how to integrate individuals into the frenzy of progressive discourses in the late Ottoman Empire. This concern constituted common ground among intellectuals from different backgrounds. Yet they held different understandings of the notion of progress and often gave different answers to deeper philosophical questions pertaining to the new man's soul, emotions, will, and relations with collective units. Such complexity demonstrates that multiple trajectories were possible before national identity formation took concrete forms in a much later context, and that transnational patterns of 'constructing the subjects' through psychological studies played an equally important role.