Projects 2017-2020 Working Group 1: Mobile Actors

Andreas Helmedach
The project explores the war experiences of soldiers in the Venetian army in Ottoman Southeastern Europe, that is in those territories of Dalmatia, Albania and Greece, which were conquered, occupied, and for the most part lost to the Ottoman Empire during the Morean (or Peloponnesian) Wars of 1684-1699 and 1715-1718. Military journeys are a core topic of migration history; the history of such mobility in the context of the Morean wars will lead towards a better understanding of transcultural processes in the Southeast European region. Similar to other forms of travelling, military journeys not only link up points of departure and arrival, but they also mean crossing through given spaces and territories. It is here that translocalisation and transculturalisation happen. Such processes in fact have always been constituent elements of soldiers’ and combatants’ war experiences. A central question is in which ways the circumstances of military campaigns in Ottoman Southeastern Europe molded the soldier's daily routines, perceptions, and experiences of war. The focus is on the life-worlds of officers, sergeants and ordinary soldiers. The project explores their daily routines during their voyages towards and away from the theatre of war; their service in the garrison, the camp, and the field; their encounters with civilians (not least with women); and how they came to terms with combat and violence, with desertion, imprisonment, slavery and (if the occasion arose) ransoming; with illness, wounds, disability, and death. The backdrop of these men’s experiences, imaginings, and discourses about their experience of “migration as transcultural entanglement” was the Ottoman Empire. From their socialization in their home countries they had to match new modes and patterns of interaction and cooperation both with their peers, who constituted the ethnic and religious heterogeneity of the Venetian army, and with the "locals", who also were heterogeneous as far as their ethnicity, religion, and social origin were concerned. The framework of early modern times seems particularly fitting to explore the transcultural processes involved, as it forced upon the men a particular intensity of interaction as such, but especially, beyond the battlefields, a cooperation with the “other”, with individuals who were considered „enemies“.

Nana Kharebava
This project deals with the interactional spaces of the Georgian kings and the nobility who maintained close socio-cultural and political interaction and communication with the royal courts of neighbouring countries like the Safavid, the Ottoman and the Russian Empires. Migration processes played a crucial role in the creation of interactional fields within the conflicting areas of expansion of these great powers. The timeframe of the project covers a period starting with the peace of Amasya (1555) up to the emigration of the last Safavid viceroy Vakhtang VI (alias Hosaynqoli Khan) from the Eastern Georgian Kingdom Kartli to the Court of the Tsar in 1724. It examines a set of political actors from the Eastern Georgian Kingdoms of Kartli and Kakheti, areas which were considered to be under the influence of the Safavids following the agreement in the peace treaty of Amasya between the Ottomans and the Safavids. A comparative historical analysis proves to be the best methodological approach in researching the interactional spaces of Georgian political actors who found themselves in a highly complex process of assimilation and differentiation towards Safavid culture and religion as well as under continuous influence of major political interests of the Ottomans and the Tsar. It is the aim of this project to explain the political behaviour of the Georgian Kings in the framework of migration, cross-cultural relations, mechanisms of maintenance of power as well as religious cultures which were expressions of a global development within the transottoman area.

Elke Hartmann, Vahé Tachjian
This project focuses on the protagonists of the Young Turk movement in the late Ottoman Empire, i.e. the political opposition movement against the Ottoman sultan Abdülhamid II. (r. 1876-1909), which included activists of different ethnic, social and religious backgrounds united by their common goal of establishing a constitutional regime, which was achieved in 1908. Many of these Young Turks—Tatars and Armenians alike—came from the Caucasus and Transcaucasus, the Crimea or the Volga-Ural region, but were active as journalists and revolutionaries on both sides of the Russian-Ottoman border. The project investigates how their Russian background—their education as well as their individual and collective experiences of Russian Tsarist rule—influenced these political actors' thinking and actions. It explores their specific hopes and expectations regarding the Ottoman Empire given their Russian background. It further examines what impulses they brought back to their Russian-ruled regions of origin. This overall question is to be examined regarding four aspects: First, the Tatar and Armenian revolutionaries’ transimperial networks and mobility across the Ottoman-Russian borders and beyond to European and North African places of exile. Second, probing the intellectual history, the impact of their Russian origin—personal contacts, reading histories, education, experiences or events—on these protagonists’ political thinking and priorities as well as their geographical framework of reference, which possibly differentiated them from their comrades originating from within the Ottoman Empire. Thirdly, concerning political practice, possible adoptions of Russian-inspired modes of political organisation, style or self-representation, as well as mutual relations and interactions between the various groups (Ottoman or Russian Turks/Tatars and Ottoman or Russian Armenians). Fourth, the influences of the encounters and experiences in the Ottoman Empire on the ideas of the commuters or returnees to the Russian realms. The main sources for the study will be the writings of the Young Turk protagonists themselves: on the one hand their memoirs and exchange of letters, and, more importantly, on the other hand their numerous writings published in the newspapers they founded and directed, printed in Russian, Ottoman, Armenian, Tatar, Azeri and French.

Alexandra Gerykova
Together with the sub-project by Eveline Dierauff, this project examines debates on collective identity among Jewish and Arab populations in Palestine around the turn of the 20th century. This sub-project focuses on debates in the first two decades of the 20th century on collective Jewish identity among Jewish immigrants from Russia to Jaffa/Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. It shows how collective self-definitions of all social groups present in Palestine were redefined in translocal constructions of the near and distant “others”. As its main source the project analyses articles from contemporary local Hebrew newspapers that establish the collective identity of Jewish immigrants, but also elaborate on different outlooks between the Ashkenazim and Sephardim among them. In addition, these newspapers describe relations with Arabs and Christians, also observing from afar the escalating Jewish-Christian clashes in Russia and their repercussions. Furthermore, selected biographies and autobiographies of individual persons will be taken into account. These case studies lay out transregional debates of a society that was continuously changed by migration, particularly from Russia and the (formerly) Ottoman territories of South Eastern Europe. It was marked by the formation and fortification of new identity concepts as well as the transformation of national identity in the context of Ottoman constitutional patriotism after the Young Turk Revolution of 1908.

Veruschka Wagner

The institution of slavery was an integral part of Ottoman society and continued to exist into the 20th century. The Ottoman system was characterized by its openness, which allowed slaves access to economic and social development. The research project will focus on this point and analyse on the basis of Court registers the spatial and social mobility of slaves originating from the Black Sea region in 17th-century Istanbul. The enslaved peoples’ places of origin as well as the period have hardly been taken into account in research on slavery in the Ottoman Empire, compared to other places and periods and especially in the here-intended combination. The increasing accessibility of sources simplifies analysis and enables examination of the period of a whole century. In contrast to perceptions of slavery as complete passive dependency of persons as Patterson’s image of social death evokes, the project will demonstrate that the enslaved possessed self-determined spaces of action and mobility that were linked to their (trans)cultural, economic, and personal relations. The project will give information about the legal status of slaves, their integration into a particular community, and their role in that community. The social and economic networks slaves were involved in and their exchange relationships within and between these networks are of particular importance. Central questions the project discusses are: What kind of mobility dynamics are shown by these flows? Were manumitted slaves really released into structures that allowed them to improve their legal and social positions? Was there a connection between the slaves’ careers and their regions of origin?

Anna Vlachopoulou

The project investigates the social, economic and transcultural entanglements between the Ottoman Empire and regions of Western Europe, Russia, and Asia. It takes the trading houses of the Greek families Rallis and Zarifis as a vantage point to scrutinise the mobility of people, capital, raw materials and goods between different world regions during the development of global capitalism in the long 19th century. By focusing on the social and cultural histories of these transimperial dynasties of entrepreneurs as well as their transimperial (or rather transottoman) biographies the project pursues the following objectives: First, it adds to a broader scholarly discourse aiming at a better understanding of the history of globalisation by interpreting regional connections and complementary spatial relations anew. Second, it explores the political and social contexts in which the Rallis and Zarifis families built their trading empires. Therefore, the project will examine the agency of important Ottoman protagonists taking part in transnational and worldwide economic interactions as well as their relationships with other interested parties like the Greek trading communities abroad.

Lyubomir Pozharliev

The objective of the project is to reconstruct the transottoman interactions in the Black Sea region by analysing the establishment of the steam shipping transportation system in the 19th century and the infrastructures related to it. Biographies and practical intercultural mediation strategies of key figures in the port cities of Odessa and Varna will be central for the study. The development of the steam shipping transportation system had a cumulative effect upon the establishment of other types of transport infrastructures such as railways, roads, the post and the telegraph, as well as for the development of the trade, banking and insurance sectors. In the case of Varna, this concerned accounting and trade law, or in the case of Odessa, the education of captains, machine operators and other specialists. It also led to the introduction of new diplomatic relations such as consulates or companies’ international branches. The research will be divided into three parts. The first one reflects upon the roles of the two port cities as transimperial places of transfer of knowledge and transregional networks. The second one contextualizes the Varna and Odessa ports as centres of cross-cultural, commercial and political influence in the Ottoman and Russian Empires and beyond during the 19th century. Finally, the third and most important part analyses the very institutionalisation of the steam shipping transportation system in the Black Sea as a result of transcultural practices and experiences. The study will follow the methodological frame of the entangled histories and modernities in the fields of cultural history and biography studies. This includes the interpretative analysis of original sources such as normative documents, diaries and letters, the visual analysis of photo archives as well as network analysis.

Lyubomir Pozharliev

The objective of the project is to reconstruct the transottoman interactions in the Black Sea region by analysing the establishment of the steam shipping transportation system in the 19th century and the infrastructures related to it. Biographies and practical intercultural mediation strategies of key figures in the port cities of Odessa and Varna will be central for the study. The development of the steam shipping transportation system had a cumulative effect upon the establishment of other types of transport infrastructures such as railways, roads, the post and the telegraph, as well as for the development of the trade, banking and insurance sectors. In the case of Varna, this concerned accounting and trade law, or in the case of Odessa, the education of captains, machine operators and other specialists. It also led to the introduction of new diplomatic relations such as consulates or companies’ international branches. The research will be divided into three parts. The first one reflects upon the roles of the two port cities as transimperial places of transfer of knowledge and transregional networks. The second one contextualizes the Varna and Odessa ports as centres of cross-cultural, commercial and political influence in the Ottoman and Russian Empires and beyond during the 19th century. Finally, the third and most important part analyses the very institutionalisation of the steam shipping transportation system in the Black Sea as a result of transcultural practices and experiences. The study will follow the methodological frame of the entangled histories and modernities in the fields of cultural history and biography studies. This includes the interpretative analysis of original sources such as normative documents, diaries and letters, the visual analysis of photo archives as well as network analysis.

Stanislav Mohylnyi

What is the relation of slavery and liberation in the contest between the Ottoman and Muscovite Empires for the loyalties of populations in the vicinity of the Black Sea? In the period from 1475 to 1700, slave raids and slave trade in the region between the Caucasus and Hungary corralled between two and three million people to markets mainly in the South. Muscovy fought this population drain by fortifying the steppe frontier, state sponsored ransom and expansionary ideologies of slave liberation; it employed Muslim subjects to achieve these ends. From early on, Muslim empires offered limited rights to the enslaved in order to develop loyal relations between masters, slaves and the state. In the Ottoman Empire, loyalty was often already practiced by slaves, who benefited from free movement or contractual manumission. Between these poles there were many transitions: mediators, merchants, diplomatic emissaries, clerics, translators and Cossacks with far-reaching connections, whose loyalties were decisive for ransoming the enslaved. Returning, manumitted or fleeing slaves themselves transited along these transottoman crossovers, the contexts of which were especially important since most former slaves remained with their Ottoman masters. The project looks at these crossovers from the Muscovite point of view and profits from Ottoman contexts accessible in the Transottomanica programme. How did Muscovy make sure that returning captives and kidnapped persons were loyal, despite their experience of extended periods of Muslim influence? How did Moscow try to inspire loyalty in Muslim Tatars who communicated extensively with their coreligionists on the other side of the steppe and in it? In terms of method, the project uses the toolbox made available by recent studies of loyalty which are based on Max Weber’s and Georg Simmel’s sociologies. In this way, archival sources such as slave narratives speaking about the transitions and reasons for leaving the Ottoman Empire will be analysed. Chronicles, saints vitae, murals as well as church rituals and plays formulated the ideology of Muscovy as New Israel and the tsar as the new Moses, who liberates Orthodox slaves as once the Israelites were liberated from Egyptian slavery.

The sub-project of Stanislav Mohylnyi will research the social history of the Hetmanate in the eithgeenth century through the prism of social status and attempts to change it by means of social subjugation. Attention is to be given to variagated factors that shaped social standing in the Hetmanate, such as  grassroots level relationships, the institutional framework and the policies of the Russian empire towards the Hetmanate.