Featured Interviews

The hajj—that is, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca—is a pillar of faith for Muslims, but in the late nineteenth century, it was also a legal, epidemiological, and imperial frontier. In his long-anticipated Imperial Mecca: Ottoman Arabia and the Indian Ocean Hajj, Michael Christopher Low offers an account how that “very heart of Islam”—Mecca and the Hijaz—came to straddle “two imperial worlds.” Imperial Mecca charts how the British Empire came to challenge Ottoman imperial legitimacy and, subsequently, affect its pilgrimage administration, its relationship to non-Ottoman Muslims, and inspire administrative anxieties around the semi-autonomous province of the Hijaz. Since his widely-read 2008 article, “Empire and the Hajj,” Low has been a leading contributor in the now flourishing field of hajj studies. Based on archives largely based in Istanbul and London, Imperial Mecca consolidates nearly fifteen years of research, reflection, and labour and reasserts an understudied “Ottoman sense of space, place, population, environment, and territory back [into] our understanding of the transimperial hajj.”

Prof. Selçuk Esenbel is one of the trustees of the Toynbee Prize Foundation and a leading historian in Turkey. Prof. Esenbel has contributed greatly to the development of global history in Turkey, specifically in relation to Japanese and wider Eurasian history. We sat down with Esenbel in Istanbul to talk about the state of global history in Turkey today and her recent book, Japan on the Silk Road: Encounters and Perspectives of Politics and Culture in Eurasia (Brill's Japanese Studies Library, 2017).

In examining the annual movement of pilgrims from the opposite ends of the Indian Ocean, Prof. Eric Tagliacozzo taps in to a process that has been taking place for more than five hundred years: first by sail, then by steam, then by air. Connections between Southeast Asia and the Middle East do not center solely on Islam. They are part of a far more complex network of trade, movement, and cross-cultural exchange. These connections between Southeast Asia and the Middle East are part of a far wider set of connections between peoples along the entire Indian Ocean littoral from eastern Africa to the South China Sea. We talked with Tagliacozzo about his previous works and his contributions to scholarship on the Indian Ocean world as well as transnational and global history. We spoke about his days as a 22-year old college student interviewing spice traders from Japan to East Africa. Our discussion ranged from illicit trade in rhinoceros horns to itinerant peoples' methods of resistance to colonial rule. And we discussed how, often, those two things were one-and-the-same.

Seth Anziska discusses a range of issues, from the current Israeli political climate and the future of the Palestinian national movement, to the methodological challenges confronting historians of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the stakes of writing history that is informed by personal experience.

In his book, Afghanistan Rising: Islamic Law and Statecraft between the Ottoman and British Empires, Faiz Ahmed, Associate Professor of History at Brown University, tells a story of a modern Islamic project of statecraft and legal synthesis, undertaken against a background of broader regional connections. The early legal history of Afghanistan is an account of an Islamic politics that did not, as in contemporary cases, grasp for imported European legal codes. Nor did it constitute a case of Salafi or "Wahhabi" ideologies of Islamic reform. Rather, King Amanullah's project emerged out of a rich history of what Ahmed calls "interislamic" cultural exchange and modern visions of politics, including a unique adaptation and application of the shariʿa to the form of the modern nation-state.

Priya Satia argues that the making of Britain's "covert empire" was bound up in intelligence-gathering tactics pioneered by British agents in the Middle East (Arabia and Iraq, specifically). The ultimate tool of covert empire—aerial surveillance—came to be used far beyond the Middle East; but, Satia argues, its initial deployment there resulted from the marriage of a cultural epistemology peculiar to British agents in Arabia with the emergence of mass democracy, and a new suspicion of empire, in Britain itself.

Taking the Ottoman Empire out of the Middle East area studies prison to which it's so often confined, Mostafa Minawi has traced, in detail, many of the long-missed connections between the Sublime Porte – the center of Ottoman governance – and sub-Saharan Africa. More specifically, his research has demonstrated how those links played into the Ottoman Empire's participation in the late nineteenth century "scramble" for territory by European empires on the African continent – an episode in which, Minawi argues, the empire played a much more active role than has previously been assumed.

Salim Yaqub's most recent book, Imperfect Strangers: Americans, Arabs, and U.S.–Middle East Relations in the 1970s (Cornell University Press, 2016), examines social and political dimensions of the Arab-US relationship during the 1970s, allowing us to understand the perceptions of two groups toward each other. It also sheds light on how the position of Arab-Americans changed according to the developing political situation in the 1970s focusing, for example, on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The book stresses the need for a global perspective in understanding the roots of contemporary debates on U.S-Middle East politics.

Exploring prostitution through the regional lens of the Mediterranean—rather than through a political lens like that of a single nation or empire—Kozma innovatively dissects the many layers of state-regulated prostitution and the involvement of global and local institutions. From Casablanca to Beirut, Alexandria to Haifa, people, practices, germs, and attitudes toward prostitution and sexual practices migrated and spread during the interwar period.

Non-Muslim communities and other religions have historically been disenchanted with European colonization and its claims that the white race and Christianity were somehow superior. This disenchantment makes us question whether anti-Westernism is a derivative of anti-colonial critiques or whether it represents a distinctively religious reaction to modernity. Such wider analysis is crucial in order to understand why anti-Western ideas persist in current times. Ottoman pan-Islamism and Japanese pan-Asianism play a vital role in deciphering the influence of anti-Western ideas on global history. Both Ottoman Turkey and Japan struggled with the ideas about Western "the standards of civilization" around the same time. Do the events and ideological currents in these two empires help us understand anti-Westernisms today?

How can we re-conceptualize histories of energy, crucially necessary to understanding our times, and place them in longer, atypical timelines? We brought together scholars of different backgrounds and from different locations to begin thinking through this question on the heels of Powering Empire and to expand the prevailing conversation on the global history of energy more broadly.

The image of the Middle East as a place plagued with endless sectarian strife and communal violence is an enduring one. These representations were, of course, an integral part of the oriental repertoire of European colonial powers. But in our own times, the proliferation of these images and their attendant discourse has been no less ubiquitous. Especially since the illegal US invasion of Iraq in 2003, sectarianism has been discussed, within and without the academy, as the defining problem of the region. But what does a persistent concern with the question of conflicted division occlude? For Ussama Makdisi, the answer is a parallel history of co-existence. His recent book, Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern World, offers a corrective to contemporary accounts of communal difference and divide—which he considers a myth “conflating contemporary political identifications with far older religious solidarities”. Makdisi insists that we place this complex history in a larger global context. The question of political (re)-ordering of a diverse polis was not unique in the rapidly modernizing world of the nineteenth century and was not unique to the Ottoman Empire—it was one confronted by all states and societies. The attempts by the late Ottoman state and its constituents to navigate ethnic and racial difference while developing new forms of political associations, is what he terms as the “ecumenical frame”. The book tells the stories of these political imaginations through a narrative that takes us geographically, from Anatolia to the Balkans and from Palestine to Lebanon, and temporally from the Ottoman Age to the end of the twentieth century. Its breadth and intellectual ambition welcome extensive engagement. Last Fall, we invited three imminent scholars to share their reflections on this work. These follow below and end with a response by Professor Makdisi. We are so grateful to our panelists for taking out the time to participate in this panel and trust that readers will find the the discussion invigorating.

Please connect us to the local historians in your fields who think globally, but do not have the privilege of working internationally.

What We're Reading This Week

What We're Reading This Week

What We're Reading This Week