A Grandvizier life by French Ambassador Achille de Harlay de Sancy: Relation de la vie & de la mort de Nassouf Pasha
EMİRHAN ÖZÇELİK
Achille de Harlay de Sancy (d. 1646), French ambassador to the Ottoman capital between in the early decades of the XVIIth century (1611 and 1619), conducted the diplomatic relations between the Ottoman Porte and his government, which has evolved from a military alliance to a commercial partnership in the Mediterranean. In this period of relative peace, the French ambassador had a chance to collect Hebrew manuscripts available in the imperial domains, to prepare consulary reports concerning the current political situation in the Empire. The most noteworthy of his services and contribution for our concerns, however, was the biographical work on the life and career of famous Nasuh Pasha, the grand vizier of Ahmed I (r. 1603-1617). Harlay de Sancy was acquainted with him during Pasha’s grand vizirate between 1612-14, and after his death he sent Louis XIII (r. 1610-1643) his manuscript titled “Relation de la vie & de la mort de Nassouf Pasha”, in which he provides some missing information concerning Nasuh’s early life, political and military career. In this article, Harlay de Sancy’s biographical work is studied, and the life and career of the grand vizier is reconstructed in the light of new details provided by the French ambassador and compared nwith the Ottoman contemporary accounts. It narrates the story of Nasuh Pasha from a hero to traitor through the eyes of Harlay de Sancy.
Keywords: Achille de Harlay de Sancy, Nasuh Pasha, Grand Vizier, Biography, Safavids
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Fathers and sons: Russian patriotism at the turn of the 19th century
STANISLAV TARASOV
The main questions of this article are what patriotism is as an idea and an emotion and how it is transformed through generations. It offers a conceptualization of the patriotic phenomenon by exploring the evolution of Russian nobility’s patriotism from the late 18th to the early 19th century. The analysis employs the history of ideas and the history of emotions to examine how two generations reordered the meanings of the Russian emotional culture of patriotism. The case study of the eighteenth-century “fathers” and their nineteenth- century “sons” allows for tracing how the Russian “love of the fatherland” shifted its focus, first, from the monarch to the fatherland and the common good in the 1780s, and then to the nation in the 1810s. This article also points out the importance of patriotic conceptual-emotional shifts in creating socio-political tensions. One emotional community of the post-Napoleonic era’s sons, known as the Decembrists, removed the ruler from their love of the fatherland and rebelled on December 1825 against Russian autocracy.
Keywords: Patriotism, Russian emotional culture, Decembrists, fatherland, intergenerational impact
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The “Turkish Wars” theme, Ottoman image and the Venetian painting of “The Battle of Lepanto” in the 1910 Munich Islamic art exhibition
FUNDA BERKSOY
The Exhibition of Masterpieces of Muhammadan Art in Munich (Ausstellung von Meisterwerken muhammedanischer Kunst), held in Theresienhöhe, Munich in 1910, has been one of the most important events that refashioned scientific studies on Islamic arts. In the eighty rooms of the venue, various artifacts from different historical periods and regions (such as Persia/Iran, Central Asia, Syria, India, Egypt, North Africa, Spain, Ottoman territories) were put on display. The last section of the exhibition, which included twelve rooms where a variety of Ottoman artifacts were exhibited, had a focus on the concept of “war” and featured the theme of “Turkish wars”. In this section, arms, body armours, janissary headdresses were displayed along with European drawings/paintings among which the Venetian depiction of the battle of Lepanto (Die Schlacht von
Lepanto) from the curator Friedrich Sarre’s own collection had a distinctive place. Various artworks from the Ottoman Empire such as ceramics, book arts and silk fabrics from the fifteenth to nineteenth century also complemented the cultural-historical focus on “Turkish wars”. This article explores the discursive narrative and the political rationality embedded within the Ottoman section’s design in the exhibition. It argues that its pattern, that focused on the “Turkish wars”, was a visual manifestation of the discourse of “Turkish threat” (Türkengefahr) –which was employed as a concept for the first time in European historiography at the end of 19th century– and the narrative in the section singled out “war” as the key mode of being in relation with the Empire. The design of the section represented the Ottomans first as a menacing counter-centre of power and then, as an “enemy”/“ adversary”/“threat” that had been subdued by the European powers. The article also argues that the arrangement here constituted a spectacle of German Empire’s penetration into the Ottoman territories, which could be achieved via imperial policies pursued by Kaiser Wilhelm II (r. 1888-1918) and demonstrated to local as well as international audience that the Empire had a dominant presence in the region.
Keywords: Islamic Art Exhibition, Ottoman Empire, Turkish Wars, TurkishThreat, German Imperialism
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Turning points of A Path which from empathy to forget: Halide Edib, ‘Ayn-Tura, Ottoman Armenians and Wilsonian Principles
BAKİ TEZCAN
With her newspaper article “Those who died and those who killed”, Halide Edib was one of the rare late Ottoman intellectuals who showed their empathy with Ottoman Armenians in the aftermath of the 1909 Adana Massacre. In the 1920s, the same Halide Edib became one of the architects of the defensive national liberation narrative that was built upon the erasure of the memory of the Armenian Genocide. This article aims to evaluate Halide Edib’s transformation within the context of contemporary developments and identify its causes.
Keywords: Halide Edib / Halide Edip Adıvar, Ottoman Armenians, the Aintoura Orphanage, Armenian Genocide, Wilsonian Principles, the armistice period
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The merger of İtibar-ı Milli Bankası and İş Bankası (1927): Rethinking on historyography and Muslim/Turkish bourgeoise through the bank merger
Y. DOĞAN ÇETİNKAYA
The merger of İtibar-ı Milli Bankası and Türkiye İş Bankası in 1927 was explicated in the literature within the framework of the alleged assassination attempt on Mustafa Kemal in 1926 and the liquidation of the Unionists. The bank of the Unionists was shut down and joined to the Mustafa Kemal’s bank, Türkiye İş Bankası. This process, in which “the small fish ate the big fish” thanks to a political intervention, was also described as a “life blood” for the young bank of the republic. Türkiye İş Bankası was not a small fish compared to the other one. Focusing on the details of the process, this article argues that Türkiye İş Bankası and İtibar-ı Milli Bankası were merged with a “monistic” approach focused on the most efficient use of scarce resources and national institutions, as a requirement of the National Economy and within the framework of the economic rationality of the period. It was a political initiative that came to the fore in an environment where there was no Central Bank and the credit demands of the business world were intense all over the country. In this sense, it was not only a manifestation of the political elite’s understanding of state and administration, but also a product of the class demands of its social base, the
Muslim/Turkish entrepreneurial class. This political step took place within the framework of market instruments and legal procedure, not through administrative and political decisions and mechanisms.
Keywords: İtibar-ı Milli Bankası, Türkiye İş Bankası, Muslim/Turkish Bourgeoise, National Economy and Credit
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Merchants in the development of the bourgeoisie in Turkey: Muslim-Turkish families and their trade networks
NESLİŞAH L. BAŞARAN LOTZ
This article explores the activities of the commercial bourgeoisie in the founding of the Turkish Republic, focusing on the Muslim-Turkish identity. The article argues that the Muslim-Turkish bourgeoisie, which can also be called “national” and which dates to the last two centuries of the Ottoman Empire, enriched largely through commercial activities, increased its commercial and entrepreneurial activities with the support of the national government in the early years of the Republic and influenced economic life through trade networks, especially in port cities such as Istanbul and Trabzon. To support this claim, the commercial activities of 23 Muslim-Turkish merchant families covering Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, Trabzon, and Samsun from 1914 to 1932 are analyzed together with a special focus on the activities of Muslim-Turkish merchant families in Trabzon, an important port city in the Black Sea region. The article also focuses on the trade networks of the Nemlizade Family of Trabzon origin and their influence in political and cultural life. The article criticizes the argument that the Ottoman bourgeoisie was almost entirely composed of non-Muslims, and therefore, a “national” bourgeoisie did not survive into the Republican era; that the government of the Committee of Union and Progress and later the Kemalist government had to “create a national bourgeoisie” and instead argues that a bourgeoisie that could be called “national” developed as a local dynamic through trade networks and cooperation among itself in the port cities of Anatolia and Istanbul from the late Ottoman Empire and in Ankara from the foundation of the Republic.
Keywords: Bourgeoisie, Nemlizade, Merchant, Trade networks, National Bourgeoisie, Muslim-Turk, Trabzon, Port city
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The Nemlizades: Searching for the National Merchant in the political economy of the Early Republican Era
YAŞAR TOLGA CORA
The male members of the Nemlizade family were among the most prominent merchants of the Early Republican period. The power of merchant family is based on the international trade in Black Sea ports in the middle of the nineteenth century. Thanks to their involvement in tobacco trade, the younger generation of the family continued to be important local and national actors in the early republican era. Midhat Nemli was the most important member of that generation. He was in the administration Chamber of Commerce of Istanbul since its Turkification in the 1920s and he continued to occupy that position until 1960s. The family firm which undertook major projects like the railroad of the Samsun Port, was not able to transfer its power into the Turkish politics and economy which was under transformation after the 1960s. This article aims to present the characteristics of the “National Merchant” of the Republican era through focusing on relations between generations and particularly the members of the Nemlizade family in the republican era. The article examines the relations between the “National Merchants” economic activities, politics and their cultural capital in the context of the political economy of the Republican era. The article distances itself from the scholarship on the formation of “National Merchants” in the Republican era because that scholarship does not take into account the imperial legacy of these merchants. Moreover, the article criticizes the historiography of the economic history of the Republican Era, as it fails to discuss the fact that the narratives were results of the nationalist discourses of forming classes society in that period.
Keywords: National Merchant, commercial bourgeoise, economic history of the republican period, tobacco
