Suchergebnisse

This volume explores the transition from the old regime to modern forms of sovereignty in the Middle East. By rereading Tocqueville's classic, The Old Régime and the French Revolution , through an Ottoman prism this study probes the unresolved paradoxes in his analysis of institutional change while documenting an old regime that has remained in the shadows of modern history. Each section of the book explores a specific dimension of Ottoman sovereignty - space, hierarchy, and vernacular governance - through a detailed examination of a particular 18th century document. An Ottoman perspective on the eighteenth century not only furnishes critical pieces of the old-regime puzzle. It also illustrates how an uncritical reception of Tocqueville's model of modernization has obscured the ongoing interaction between the "Eurasian" and Westphalian state systems and parallel processes of sociopolitical change

Faruk Tabak, who died of complications following a stroke on 15 February 2008 at age fifty-four, passed his youth in central Anatolia. A childhood in industrial Eskişehir—where, he once told me, the Porsuk River's color varied with the day's textile-dye batch—and college winters in smog-enveloped Ankara made him ("a man of the north") dream of the pristine landscapes and bright tableaus of Turkey's Mediterranean shores. Trained as an architect and later as a planner at the Middle East Technical University, Tabak charted the currents of modern hegemony, capitalism, ecology, and the spatial dispersion of populations through the deep waters of the Mediterranean's past.