The War with the Ottoman Empire: The Centenary History of Australia and the Great War,Volume 2

The War with the Ottoman Empire: The Centenary History of Australia and the Great War, Volume 2. By Jeffrey Grey (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp.x + 238. 16 Maps. AU$59.95 (cloth).     

Window-conflicts in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey: visual privacy,materiality and right to the city

This article focuses on the visual privacy rights as practised in the urban settings in the late Ottoman Empire (1850–70) and in contemporary Turkey (1980–2010). The analysis draws on the detailed examination of the legal conflicts on the overlooking windows between neighbouring houses in both periods. A hundred legal cases from the Ottoman context and 35 parallel cases from the last decades in Turkey were covered to understand the everyday practices of visual privacy and to compare them with the official privacy rules in the Ottoman and Republican contexts. First, the cases suggest that even today many citizens, including some lower court judges, confidently defend the urban right to be unseen from the neighbour's window despite the contrary decisions of the Supreme Court. Second, the in-depth analysis of the window-conflicts showed that the radical separation of the material world from the human world in both Islamic law and the Republican Civil Law was challenged by popular claims to visual privacy thanks to their exclusive focus on windows. It is argued that popular privacy rights were not about individual private space but about the urban built environment. Hence, windows were targets of the claims of the right to the city.     

Empire of Taxonomy: Ethnic and Religious Identities in the Ottoman Surveys and Censuses

This article examines how the Ottoman Empire through pre-modern surveys (tahrir) and censuses, counted, categorized and classified their population according to ethnic and religious identities, and how the social, economic and political transformation impacted on the change of taxonomy (nomenclature, classification and hierarchization) over time. Through this long trajectory, from the imperial system to the modern state system, the Ottoman government increased its power over its ‘population’, and, simultaneously, its taxonomic power     

Young Turk Governance in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War

Abstract

The article analyses the system of government of the Ottoman Empire during the First World War by looking at three elements: the constitutional-parliamentarian monarchy, the Committee of Union and Progress and the army. The analysis takes place along two axes: one in which the functioning of, and the power relations between, the different institutional elements are analysed, and one based on a series of case studies of important decision-making moments of the years 1914–18.

The civil-military relations as they developed during the war years are studies in a comparative framework. The Ottoman situation is analysed against the backdrop of changes in the balance of power between military and civilian authorities in other belligerent countries in Europe.

The conclusion is that the Ottoman Empire was a constitutional and parliamentarian monarchy only in name, but that its governance did not turn into a form of military rule either. It was run by the Committee of Union and Progress, but within that, key decisions were taken by changing informal coalitions of power brokers in such a way as to make sure that the two dominant factions, the civilian one led by Talât and the military one led by Enver were in agreement.     

The War with the Ottoman Empire: The Centenary History of Australia and the Great War Volume 2

The War with the Ottoman Empire: The Centenary History of Australia and the Great War Volume 2. By Jeffrey Grey (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. x + 238. 16 Maps. AU$59.95 (cloth).