04.09.2017
Conference: The Power of Connections - Interpersonal Networks and Agency in the Ottoman Empire and Ottoman Europe
The Power of Connections
Interpersonal Networks and Agency in the Ottoman Empire and Ottoman Europe
Annual Conference of the Working Group "Ottoman Europe"
Tübingen, 27–28 September 2017
[Homepage of the Working Group "Ottoman Europe"]
Venue
University of Tübingen, Theologicum (Faculty of Theology), Liebermeister Straße 12, 72076 Tübingen, Germany, Seminar Room 12 (2nd floor, Room 223)
Hosts
- Institute for Modern History, University of Tübingen
- Center for Islamic Theology, University of Tübingen
- Department of Oriental and Islamic Studies, University of Tübingen
- Historical Institute, Gießen University
With financial support from the DFG Priority Programme "Transottomanica: Eastern European–Ottoman–Persian Mobility Dynamics"
Organized by Ayşegül Argıt (Heidelberg), Prof. Dr. Lejla Demiri (Tübingen), and Dr. Tobias Graf (Tübingen/Heidelberg) in cooperation with the Working Group "Ottoman Europe".
Abstract
Whether on a local, a regional, an imperial, or a global level, interpersonal networks provide the crucial social infrastructure for human activity across the board, from ostensibly lonely academic studies to dinner parties, from travel to conquest. Like the physical infrastructure provided by roads and ports, the postal system and telegraph lines, water pipes and electric wires, this social infrastructure enables, shapes, and sustains certain forms of human behaviour. Like physical infrastructure, the existence of social infrastructure was the result of conscious efforts as much as serendipity. Moreover, in their very nature, interpersonal networks were dynamic, changing over time as individual members reoriented themselves or passed away and as the social, political, economic, and legal frameworks transformed. Such shifts in turn affected the formation of webs of contact as well as the respective patterns of, and options for, action.
The 2017 Annual Conference of the Working Group "Ottoman Europe" brings together scholars working on the Ottoman Empire and Ottoman Europe from the fourteenth to the twentieth century to reflect on the ways in which interpersonal networks enabled, constrained, and shaped the actions of individual as well as group actors and how the creation and maintenance of such networks itself became the object of agency. The papers cover a wide variety of themes, including, but not limited to, Ottoman political, cultural, and social history, diplomacy and 'international' relations, violence, economic history and commerce, as well as the history of literary production, scholarship, and theology. Contributors will examine individual actors, social groups, as well as associations and institutions such as families, guilds, and state agencies.
Programme
Wednesday, 27 September 2017
14:30–15:00 Registration and tea/coffee
15:00–15:15 Welcome and introduction
15:15–16:15 Panel 1: Scholarly Networks
- Chair: Lejla Demiri (Tübingen)
- M. Sait Özervarlı (Istanbul), Study Circles, Scholar Invitations, and Text Competitions: Building Scholarly Networks in the Early Ottoman Period
- Asim Zubčević (Sarajevo), Books and Their Owners in Ottoman Sarajevo, 1762–1828
16:15–16:30 Tea/coffee break
16:30–17:30 Panel 2: Networks in Pursuance of Religion and Ethics
- Chair: Erdal Toprakyaran (Tübingen)
- Ines Aščerić-Todd (Edinburgh), Sufis, Artisans and Traders: Ottoman Guilds as Economic, Social and Spiritual Networks
- Fatih Ermiş (Tübingen), The Construction of Ottoman Ethics: From the Nicomachean Ethics to Akhlaq-i Alai
17:30–17:45 Tea/coffee break
17:45–18:45 Panel 3: Political Mobilization
- Chair: Philip Hahn (Tübingen)
- Ayşegül Argıt (Heidelberg), Press, Politics, and Mobilization in Istanbul, 1908–1914
- Johann Büssow (Tübingen), Social and Political Networks in Late Ottoman Gaza
20:00 Dinner
Thursday, 28 September 2017
9:30–11:00 Panel 4: Between War and Peace
- Chair: Ayşegül Argıt (Heidelberg)
- Tobias Graf (Tübingen), Reconstructing Intelligence Networks: The Example of Austrian-Habsburg Intelligence in Istanbul, c. 1575–1583
- Nikolas Pissis (Berlin), The Greek Spies of Muscovy in the Ottoman Empire, 1640–1660
- Andreas Helmedach (Berlin/Bochum), Between Venice and the Ottoman Empire: Networks of Violence in Dalmatia
11:00–11:15 Tea/coffee break
11:15–12:45 Panel 5: Commerce and Trade
- Chair: Denise Klein (Mainz)
- Evelyn Korsch (Venice/Erfurt), Global Networks and Multi-Layered Agency of an Armenian Merchant Banker Family
- Gülay Tulasoğlu (Ankara), The Katipzade Family between Trade and Politics
- Anna Vlachopoulou (Munich), Networking as a Business Strategy in the "Long 19th Century"
12:45–14:30 Lunch
14:30–15:30 Panel 6: Connecting the Localities and the Imperial Centre
- Chair: Stefan Rohdewald (Gießen)
- Uroš Dakić (Belgrade), Sokollu Mehmed Pasha's Kinship Network in the Serbian Orthodox Church
- Henning Sievert (Berne/Heidelberg), Brokerage in the Well-Connected Domains
15:30–15:45 Tea/coffee break
15:45–16:45 Panel 7: The Ottoman’s Empire's Tributaries
- Chair: Tobias Graf (Tübingen/Heidelberg)
- Daniel Ursprung (Zurich), Christians Acting as Ottomans: Wallachia's Seventeenth-Century Elites as Agents of Ottomanization
- Konrad Petrovszky (Vienna), When Networks Fail: The Case of the Phanariot Iordaki Stavraki
16:45–17:00 Tea/coffee break
17:00–17:45 Concluding discussion
Chair and commentary: Renate Dürr (Tübingen)