E507 | In this episode, Fariba Zarinebaf discusses the history of Galata and the early modern Mediterranean more broadly. Beginning with the incorporation of Galata's Genoese community of Istanbul under Ottoman rule in 1453, Zarinebaf explains how the treaties known as the capitulations (ahdname in Turkish) provided a durable framework for commercial exchange and pluralistic everyday life in Ottoman port cities. She also considers how these arrangements compared with commerce and life in non-Ottoman Mediterranean ports. Through a focus on French-Ottoman relations, Zarinebaf offers a glimpse of how treaties become involved in changing economic fortunes in the Mediterranean and the world. She also attends to how these economic patterns shaped the more intimate aspects of social life in Galata, closing with the impact of Napoleon's invasion of Egypt on the French community of Galata.
More at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2021/07/zarinebaf.html
Fariba Zarinebaf obtained her PhD in Middle Eastern history from the University of Chicago in 1991. She is a professor of history at the University of California-Riverside and was the former director of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies there. She has taught at Bilkent University, Northwestern University and the University of Virginia. Among her publications are, Les Iraniens d’Istanbul, co-edited with Thierry Zarcone, Crime and Punishment in Eighteenth Century Istanbul (University of California Press, 2010), Mediterranean Encounters, Trade and Pluralism in Galata (University of California Press, 2018) and Fariba Zarinebaf, John Bennet and Jack L. Davis, A Historical and Economic Geography of Ottoman Greece (American School of Classical Studies, 2005), Women on the Margins: Gender, Charity and Justice in the Early Modern Middle East ( Isis press, 2014). Her next book is tentatively entitled; The Last of the Silk Caravans, Cross-Cultural Trade and Urban Life on the Ottoman-Safavid Silk Road in the Early Modern Period.
Sam Dolbee is a lecturer on History and Literature at Harvard University. His research is on the environmental history of the late Ottoman Empire told through the frame of locusts in the Jazira region.
Nir Shafir researches the intellectual and religious history of the Middle East, from roughly 1400-1800, focusing on material culture and the history of science and technology. He is an assistant professor of history at UCSD.
CREDITS
Episode No. 507
Release Date: 23 July 2021
Recording Location: Chicago, IL / Somerville, MA / Torino
Sound production by Sam Dolbee
Additional thanks to Chris Gratien
Music: Blue Dot Sessions, "Fifteen Street,"; Zé Trigueiros, "Saez"
Images and bibliography courtesy of Fariba Zarinebaf available at https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2021/07/zarinebaf.html
