Part I: Shared Worlds



DRAFT. SUBJECT TO REVISION

HIST 440: Early Modern World History

Tuesday 2:00-4:50pm

Taper Hall of Humanities, 111

Office Hours: Tuesday, 12:00-2:00 pm

Dr. Vera Keller

Multiple Modernities: Early Modern Europe and the Ottoman Empire, 1450-1750

In this comparative course of European and Ottoman history, the basic categories of historical periodization are up for discussion. What does early modernity mean? Is it a universal category or one which applies only, if at all, to Europe? In particular, we will interrogate the historiography which has emphasized the public sphere or civil society as key features of modernity. These historical concepts emerged from the study of European history; a comparative perspective will aid us in judging the validity and coherence of these concepts and whether they pertain to various parts of the world. Is the public a disciplined zone of rational discourse or is it the marketplace of bodily desire? Does the public differentiate between state and society or link the two? Does it exclude women? Does it require print? What is the relevance of religion, secularization, and science to an emerging public sphere? What is the difference between the public sphere and civil society? How have public and private, center and periphery developed in similar or different ways in Europe and the Ottoman Empire? Through such questions, we will engage in a variety of stimulating debates which have been shaped by and continue to shape our understanding of the world we live in today. Course requirements include attendance and class participation (15%), mid-term exam (20 %), class presentations (15%), Response paper (10%), Blackboard posts (10%) and an 8 to 10 page final paper (30%).

Aims of the Course:

This course is intended both to provide a basis of knowledge of European and Ottoman history of the early modern period as well as to utilize that basis as the springboard for debate on questions fundamental to the writing of history in any period. Thus, the aims of the course are 1) to develop your knowledge of particular regions in a specific time period, 2) to develop your understanding of what history more generally is and how historical debate functions, and 3) to develop your critical thinking and writing skills to help you prepare for any endeavor. The assignments have been designed to challenge and test all three of these goals. If you fully engage with the course, at the end of it you should be more informed about early modern history, more understanding of historical debate and its significance, and a better presenter, debater, and writer.

Expectations of the Course Participants:

- Attendance and participation. One excused absence allowed before points are deducted.

- Adherence to the Student Conduct Code.

- No use of the internet or cell phones in class! Please view seminar time as sacred, off-line time, and give the seminar your full attention.

Office Hours and Email Policy

Office hours are a highly beneficial practice for everyone involved. They allow the professors to prepare a certain block of their time devoted entirely to communicating with students outside of the class. They allow students to get to know their professors better, get better answers to their questions, and invariably receive more guidance and advice than they would in an email. Office hours really help with clarifying course material in order to succeed in a course, getting extra advice about college, grad school, and job searches, and getting to know professors better so that those recommendation letters we all need at some point will be easier to obtain. Office hours are there for you. Use them! Email should only be used in case of emergencies when attending office hours is not an option, but do not expect a rapid reply. If you cannot attend the designated office hours, you can email me to set up an appointment for another time.

Assignments

- Attendance and participation will be assessed at every class meeting, and these really do matter in your final grade. Participation means not just answering questions posed by the professors, but being a good participant in the class by raising questions for discussion, engaging with your fellow students by listening and responding to their points, and respecting your fellow students.

- The mid-term exam is there to make sure you do the reading; any of the assigned reading is fair game for the midterm exam.

- For the class presentation, you choose and read an entire import work and report upon it to the class. You will have to obtain the book yourself, and since it might be checked out right before your presentation, you should plan this early in the semester. You will want to make clear in your presentation that you in fact read and thought about the whole book. One good way to do this i to develop your own ideas about the argument of the book, and to pose questions for class discussion that arise out of it, rather than merely summarizing the work’s contents.

- Post an original question about the reading at least one hour before class on the course Blackboard site. This is a great way also to prepare yourself for class participation by reading other people’s questions and thinking of possible responses before class.

- The response paper is a trial run for the final paper. There will be no assigned topic; choose one or more of the readings as the basis for your critical response of the validity of the author’s argument and evidence.

- Determining the question to address in your final paper will be up to you, although everyone will be required to discuss their final paper topic in office hours with me at least once, and we will workshop all the topics in class. A good question is half the paper! The final paper is an exercise in showing that you have engaged and thought about the issues raised in class, but also that you can produce a fine, finished historical product. “Finished” means:

a) a strong thesis statement. Keep this specific! General statements generally do not make good thesis statements, especially in a paper of this length.

b) energetic historical writing. This means strong, active verbs, not too many prepositions, shorter paragraphs, and paragraphs that flow from one to the next.

c) footnoting (preferably Chicago style). Every fact must be supported by a footnote to a source, and Wikipedia will not be accepted as a source.

d) a bibliography. I’ll be curious to see how many course readings or other readings you engaged with.

e) possibly, figures. If you discuss visual evidence, you must provide the image.

f) proof-reading.

Readings:

All readings are provided online on the course website. If there is a theme not addressed in this syllabus that is of interest to you, please bring it to my attention early in the semester, and we can discuss incorporating it into the class.

Part I: 1450-1600

In Part One we discuss a period once conceptualized as a European Renaissance, but which has increasingly been treated in historiography as one of shared trends across Eurasia, including international exploration, imperial expansion, apocalypticism, the revival of classical inheritances, artistic rivalry and exchange, cartographic innovations, and new religious reforms.

Important Dates:

September 21: Response Paper Due

October 12: Trip to LACMA

October 26: Mid-term

December 15: Final Paper

August 24:

Course Introduction

Virginia Aksan and Daniel Goffman, “Introduction: Situating the early modern Ottoman world,” The Early Modern Ottomans: Remapping the Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 1-12.

Merry Weisner-Hank, “Europe in the World, 1450-1600,” Early Modern Europe, 1450-1789 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006).

Suraiya Faroqhi, “Introduction,” The later Ottoman Empire, 1603-1839, Suraiya N. Faroqhi, ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1-17.

August 31: Contact Zones

E. Natalie Rothman, “Interpreting Dragomans: Boundaries and Crossings in the Early Modern Mediterranean,”Comparative Studies in Society and History 51(2009), 771-800.

Reports:

Cemal Kafadar, Between Two Worlds: the Construction of the Ottoman State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

Molly Greene, A Shared World: Christians and Muslims in the early modern Mediterranean (Princeton: Princeton Univeristy Press, 2000).

Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (New

York: Harper, 1972).

Suraiya Faroqhi, The Ottoman Empire and the World around it (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

September 7: 1453: Empire and the Apocalypse

Kaya Şahin, “Constantinople and the End Time: The Ottoman Conquest as a Portent of the Last Hour,” Journal of Early Modern History 14:4 (2010), 317-35.

Nina Berman, “Ottoman Shock-and-Awe and the Rise of Protestantism: Luther's Reactions to the Ottoman Invasions of the Early Sixteenth Century,” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 41:3 (2005), 226-45.

Reports:

John Headley, Tommaso Campanella and the Transformation of the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).

Cornell Fleischer, Bureaucrat and Intellectual in the Ottoman Empire: the historian Mustafa Ali (1541-1600)(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).

September 14: Shared Inheritances?

Su Fang Ng. “Global Renaissance: Alexander the Great and Early Modern Classicism from the British Isles to the Malay Archipelago.” Comparative Literature, The Idea of Europe, 58:4 ( 2006): 293-312.

Nancy Bisaha, “The New Barbarians: Redefining the Turks in Classical Terms,” Creating East and West: Renaissance Humanists and the Ottoman Turks (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 43-93.

Report:

Edward Said, Orientalism (Vintage Books, 1978).

September 21: 1492: The Age of Discovery

Nabil Matar, Introduction and Chapter Three, “The Renaissance Triangle: Britons, Muslims, and American Indians,” Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).

Jerry Brotton, “Disorienting the East,” Trading Territories: Mapping the Early Modern World (Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press, 1998), 87-118.

Reports:

Justin Stagl, A History of Curiosity: The Theory of Travel, 1550-1800 (1995)

Robert Dankoff. An Ottoman Mentality: The World of Evliya Çelebi (Leiden: Brill, 2004).

Giancarlo Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

Nabil Matar, In the Lands of the Christians: Arabic Travel Writing in the Seventeenth Century (NewYork: Routledge, 2003).

Response Paper Due: in hard copy, handed in at the start of class, please.

September 28: New Heterodoxies and Orthodoxies

Adnan Ahmed Husain, “Introduction: Approaching Islam and the Religious Cultures of the medieval and early modern Mediterranean,” A Faithful Sea: The Religious Cultures of the Mediterranean, 1200-1700 (Oxford: Oneworld, 2007).

Ariel Salzmann, “The Moral Economies of the Pre-Modern Mediterranean” from Living in the Ottoman Ecumenical Community: Essays in Honour of Suraiya Faroqhi, Vera Costantini and Markus Koller, eds.

Reports: Reports: Madeline Zilfi, The Politics of Piety: The Ottoman Ulema in the Postclassical Age (Minneapolois: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1988).

Brad Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).

Michel De Certeau: The Mystic Fable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

Ahmet Karamustafa, God's Unruly Friends: Dervish Groups in the Islamic later middle period, 1200-1550 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1994).

October 5: Trading Cultures

Lisa Jardine and Jeremy Brotton, “Chapter One, Exchanging Identity: Breaching the Boundaries of Renaissance Europe,” Global Interests: Renaissance Art Between East and West (Reaktion, 2006), 11-62.

October 12: Renaissance and Mimesis

Walter G. Andrews and Mehmet Kalpaklı, Chapter Eleven, “Renaissance, Renaissances, and the Age of Beloveds,” The Age of Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in early-modern Ottoman and European culture and society (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 329-354.

Gülru Necipoğlu, “Süleyman the Magnificent and the Representation of Power in the Context of Ottoman-Hapsburg-Papal Rivalry,” Art Bulletin 71:3 (1989), 401-427.

Trip to Los Angeles County Museum of Art

October 19: The Rule of Women

Three Letters from Safiye to Elizabeth

Leslie Peirce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 267-286

Madeline C. Zilfi, “Muslim Women in the Early Modern Era,” in Suraiya N. Faroqhi, ed., The Cambridge History of Turkey (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006).

Report:

The rest of Leslie Peirce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

October 26: Midterm

Part II: 1600-1750

In Part Two of the course, we will examine several phenomena often considered from within a European framework as hallmarks of modernity: the emergence of conceptions of the state, of political interests, and of constitutional rights, new views of nature, the expansion of civility, and an increasing separation of public and private spheres. We will compare these phenomena across Europe and the Ottoman empire, explore the convergences and divergences of the period, and question what “early modernity” might mean from a more global vantage point.

November 2: The Emergence of the State

Ariel Salzmann, Introduction and Chapter One, “On a Map of Eurasia,” Toqueville in the Ottoman Empire: Rival Paths to the Modern State (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 31-74.

Peter Burke, “Tacitism, Scepticism, and Reason of State," The Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450–1700, eds. J. H. Burns and Mark Goldie.

Reports: Remainder of Salzmann, Toqueville in the Ottoman Empire

November 9: Nature and Ideas of Science

Alan Debus, “Chapter Ten, Paracelsianism and the Diffusion of the Chemical Philosophy in early modern Europe,” 225-268

Miri Shefer Mossensohn, “A Tale of Two Discourses: The Historiography of Ottoman-Muslim Medicine,” Social History of Medicine 21:1 (April 2008), 1 - 12.

Reports:

Miri Shefer Mossensohn, Ottoman medicine: Healing and Medical institutions, 1500-1700 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009).

Emeleddin İhsanoğlu, Science, Technology and Learning in the Ottoman Empire: Western influence, Local institutions, and the Transfer of Knowledge (Aldershot: Variorum, 2004).

November 16: Enlightenments?

Margaret C. Jacob, “The Mental Landscape of the Public Sphere: A European Perspective,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 28:1 (1994), 95-113.

Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt, “Civil Society, Public Sphere, the Myth of Oriental Despostism and Political Dynamics in Islamic Societies,” Chapter Seventeen, Comparative Civilizations and Multiple Modernities (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 399- 434.

Reports: Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Thomas Burger, trans. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991.

Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: the History of Manners and State Formation and Civilization, Edmund Jephcott, trans. (Oxford: Basil Blackwood, 1978).

Final Paper Workshop

November 23: Print Publicity and Sites of Sociability

Haim Gerber, “The Public Sphere and Civil Society in the Ottoman Empire,” The Public Sphere in Muslim Societies, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 65-82.

Geoffrey Roper, Chapter 12, “The Printing Press and Change in the Arab World,” Agent of Change: Print Culture studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 250-267.

Reports:

Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe.

Brian Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).

Recommended:

Shirine Hamadeh, “Public Spaces and the Garden Culture of Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century,” The Early Modern Ottomans: Remapping the Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 277-312.

U. Kömecoğlu. “The Publicness and Sociabilities of the Ottoman Coffeehouse,” Javnost- The Public 12(2), 2005, 5-22.

November 30: What is Early Modernity?

Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia,” Modern Asian Studies 31:3 (1997), Special Issue: The Eurasian Context.

Lorraine Daston, “The Nature of Nature in early Modern Europe,” Configurations 6.2 (1998) 149-172.

Final Paper Due December 15

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download