households http://hdl.handle.net/10900/130859 2026-05-13T15:27:22Z 2026-05-13T15:27:22Z Ben-Bassat, Yuval Büssow, Johann http://hdl.handle.net/10900/126565 2023-07-17T06:45:13Z 2023-01-01T00:00:00Z

From the Household to the Wider World. Local Perspectives on Urban Institutions in late Ottoman Bilad al-Sham Ben-Bassat, Yuval; Büssow, Johann From the Household to the Wider World provides new insights into urban governance in different cities in Ottoman Palestine and Syria (Bilad al-Sham) during the late Ottoman period, c. 1800–1920. It enriches Ottoman urban studies by viewing cities (not only the major ones that are often discussed in the literature but also peripheral localities) as crucial spaces in which socio-political processes on various scales interact with localized material structures. This outlook addresses the challenges of bridging the divide between text-based studies and the study of material culture, and in so doing maps local cases onto larger historical processes, at the level of the region, the Empire, and global connections. This collection of essays delves into specific case studies based on original research that take different perspectives to explore structure and agency, theory and practice, as well as textual and material evidence to reflect multiple ways to address these challenges. This book will be of interest to scholars, researchers and students of the Middle East in the fields of Urban Studies, History, as well as Ottoman and Islamic Studies. The inclusion of boxed texts listing key sources, instructive illustrations, as well as extensive glossary are all designed to provide students and non-specialists with robust tools to access this field.

2023-01-01T00:00:00Z Ben-Bassat, Yuval http://hdl.handle.net/10900/130899 2023-07-17T06:42:48Z 2023-02-01T00:00:00Z

Ottoman urban institutions and urban governance: a framework for inquiry Ben-Bassat, Yuval The urban history of late Ottoman Syria and Palestine (Bilad al-Sham) is a maturing field of research, and we can now go beyond the format of single-city studies that have dominated the literature over the past decades. Given this fortunate situation, this article addresses three key challenges for a more integrated urban history of the region: How can urban history respond to today’s heightened awareness of cities as crucial spaces in which socio-political processes on various scales interact with localized material structures? How can we capture the trans-local entanglements and connections of individual cities? How can we assess both the commonalities and the specificities of specific developments through comparison? As an answer, we propose a bottom-up and actor-centered perspective on urban history that focuses on urban institutions, defined as systems of social rules that structure social interactions. We further propose to study how urban institutions were anchored in concrete places and material structures, which we call urban nodal points, and how institutions and nodal points were embedded in urban governance, i.e., the ways in which urban societies make decisions on collective problems, and thereby modify the institutional and material landscape of the city.

2023-02-01T00:00:00Z Yazbak, Mahmoud http://hdl.handle.net/10900/130898 2023-07-17T06:42:56Z 2023-02-01T00:00:00Z

A Mamluk Household in Jaffa: The Case of Abu Nabbut (1805–1819) Yazbak, Mahmoud After the death of Dahir al-ʿUmar in 1775, a local Galilean leader, Ahmad Paşa al-Jazzar, a manumitted Bosnian mamluk was nominated wali (governor) of the wilaya (province) of Sidon/Acre. He set up a mamluk household that governed various districts in Palestine. Abu Nabbut, a manumitted mamluk of Jazzar, became the mutasallim (governor of a district) of Jaffa in 1805, under Sulayman Paşa, who was also a manumitted mamluk of Jazzar. Abu Nabbut’s mamluk household in Jaffa governed Jaffa and Palestine’s southern sub-districts. Abu Nabbut’s monumental construction efforts in Jaffa between 1805 and 1817 were intended to make Jaffa look different from other localities in the southern sanjaq, and give it the semblance of a capital similar to Acre, the capital of the wilaya.

2023-02-01T00:00:00Z Büssow, Sarah http://hdl.handle.net/10900/130897 2023-07-17T06:43:03Z 2023-02-01T00:00:00Z

Structural portraits of elite households in Gaza, c. 1900: strategies and patterns of cooperation Büssow, Sarah Throughout the Ottoman period, elite households and elite families were cen- tral figures in Middle Eastern urban politics; however, these entities were shaped in dif- ferent ways as a function of time and place. Thanks to the exceptional source of docu- mentation constituted by the Ottoman census of 1905, information on these households and families can be reconstructed for the city of Gaza at the end of the Ottoman period at finer granularity than ever before. This chapter examines the strategies implemented by established elite families in late Ottoman Gaza as they endeavored to preserve their power and influence. It does not focus on their economic or political activities or the narratives produced about them, but rather on their most private sphere; i.e., social relations within the household and between households, which show how members collaborated with each other to further their shared interests. Hierarchical, cooperative and diverging patterns of relationships within a whole family or a family branch emerge from this analysis.

2023-02-01T00:00:00Z