Books | Ottoman Warfare, 1500-1700 and Studies on Ottoman Society and Culture, 16th–18th Centuries

Mavi Boncuk |

Ottoman Warfare, 1500-1700
By Rhoads Murphey[1]
Copyright Year 1999
ISBN 9781857283891
278 Pages

Ottoman Warfare is an impressive and original examination of the Ottoman military machine, detailing its success in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. Focusing primarily on the evolution of the Ottoman military organization and its subsequent impact on Ottoman society in a period of change, the book redresses the historiographical imbalance in the existing literature, analyzing why the Ottomans were the focus of such intense military concern.Several books have been written on the fiscal, technological, tactical, and political dimensions of Ottoman military history; little has been attempted, however, to recreate or evoke the physical and psychological realities of war as experienced by Ottoman soldiers. Rhoads Murphey seeks to rectify this imbalance, favoring operational matters and providing a detailed study of a number of campaigns: we are offered, for example, vivid descriptions of life in the trenches with the diggers at Baghdad in 1638, who dug a total of five miles at 50 yards a day. Murphey's analysis does not focus on the Ottoman's success or failure in particular campaigns per se; he focuses on understanding the actual process of how the Ottoman military machine worked.This long-awaited work will become the definitive study of Ottoman warfare in the early modern period, and will be invaluable to those studying the Ottoman Empire and early modern European history in general.


Studies on Ottoman Society and Culture, 16th–18th Centuries
By Rhoads Murphey[1]
Copyright Year 2007
ISBN 9780754659310
340 Pages

The studies presented in this collection are concerned most particularly with the material conditions of life in the mature Ottoman state of the 16th-18th centuries. They range from the evaluation of sources of livelihood and conditions in the workplace on the one hand, to notions of domesticity and organization of the private sphere on the other, and deal with the provinces, in both the Balkans and in Asia, as much as with Istanbul. At the same time the volume aims to illuminate Ottoman imperial institutional forms and norms as they existed in the high imperial era before the rapid change and transformation associated with late imperial times when the empire was more exposed both to global economic forces and external political pressures. This concentration on the relatively stable conditions that prevailed in the empire throughout the bulk of the early modern era (ca. 1450-ca. 1750) provides the reader with an opportunity to assess Ottoman institutional development and observe social and economic organization in their relatively 'pure' state before the double impact of industrialization and increasing Westernization in the late nineteenth century.

Table of Contents
Contents: Preface; 
Part 1 Cultural Relations and Exchange of Ideas: 

Ottoman medicine and transculturalism from the 16th through the 18th century; 
Westernisation in the 18th-century Ottoman empire: how far, how fast?; 
Bigots or informed observers? A periodization of pre-colonial English and European writing on the Middle East; 
The Ottoman attitude towards the adoption of Western technology: the role of the efrenci technicians in civil and military applications. 

Part 2 Urban Living: 

Provisioning Istanbul: the state and subsistence in the early modern Middle East;
 Communal living in Ottoman Istanbul: searching for the foundations of an urban tradition; 
Disaster relief practices in 17th-century Istanbul: a brief overview of organizational aspects of urban renewal projects undertaken in the aftermath of catastrophic fires; 
The city of Belgrade in the early years of Serbian self-rule and dual administration with the Ottomans: vignettes from Rashid's History illuminating the transformation of a Muslim metropolis of the Balkans. 

Part 3 Population Groups, Population Movements, Production and Organisation of Labour: 

Some features of nomadism in the Ottoman empire: a survey based on tribal census and judicial appeal documentation from archives in Istanbul and Damascus; 
Ottoman census methods in the mid-16th century: 3 case histories; The conceptual and pragmatic uses of the 'summary' (idjmal) register in 16th-century Ottoman administrative practice; Population movements and labor mobility in Balkan contexts: a glance at post-1600 Ottoman social realities; 
Silver production in Rumelia according to an official Ottoman report circa 1600; 
Tobacco cultivation in northern Syria and conditions of its marketing and distribution in the late 18th century; 
The construction of a fortress at Mosul in 1631: a case study of an important facet of Ottoman military expenditure; 
Index.

Reviews


'... this work is extremely useful for scholars studying administrative practices as well as economic and societal interactions within the Ottoman Empire. The articles are well written and are arranged to complement each other. it makes this work much more valuable than just the sum of its parts. The use and analysis of primary source documents in all of the articles greatly enhances the value of this work and makes the bibliography and citations of each article extremely valuable for scholars of this period.' Sixteenth Century Journal.

[1] Rhoads Murphey, Department of History | Honorary Senior Research Fellow

BA (Columbia), MA, PhD (Chicago).">My training in the field of Turkish and Ottoman Studies was completed under the expert guidance of three acknowledged masters of the discipline in London with Victor Menage, in New York with Tibor Halasi-Kun and in Chicago with Halil Inalcik where I remained for 7 years (1973-1979). After a ten year-stint (1982-1991) at Columbia University in New York, serving two departments as both language instructor and historian, in 1992 I started a new career at Birmingham with responsibility for coverage of Turkish history and culture at the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies. The result of this transatlantic transplantation has been the widening of my intellectual and academic horizons to encompass the wider Mediterranean and Balkan worlds and the opportunity of pursuing new avenues of research that were closed to me as a younger practitioner in academia."

Books

R. Murphey. 2009 Essays on Ottoman Historians and Historiography (Istanbul: Eren Yayıncılık)
R. Murphey. 2008. Exploring Ottoman Sovereignty: Tradition, Image and Practice in the Ottoman Imperial Household, 1400-1800 (London: Continuum Books)
R Murphey. 2007. Studies on Ottoman Society and Culture, 16th - 18th Centuries, Aldershot, Hampshire, Ashgate

Chapters in collective works

R. Murphey. 2010. “Ottoman Military Organisation in South-eastern Europe, 1420s-1720”, in F. Tallet and D. J. Trim (eds.), European Warfare, 1350-1750 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 135-158
R. Murphey.2009. “The garrison and its hinterland in the Ottoman East, 1578-1605” in A.C. S. Peacock (ed.), The Frontiers of the Ottoman World: Proceedings of the British Academy, Volume 156 (London: British Academy, 2009), pp. 353-370
R. Murphey. 2009. “Syria’s “Underdevelopment” under Ottoman Rule: Revisiting an Old Theme in the Light of New Evidence from the Court Records of Aleppo in the Eighteenth Century” in J. Hathaway (ed.), The Ottoman Lands in the Ottoman Era Minneapolis, MN 2009[Minnesota Studies in Early Modern History, No. 2], Chapter 9, pp. 209-230
R. Murphey. 2007. A Comparative Look at Ottoman and Habsburg Resources and Readiness for War (In Guerra y sociedad en la Monarquia Hispánica, I & II, 75-102). Maffi GH-D (Editor), Ediciones Laberinto, Madrid