The public bath or hamam was fixture of most Ottoman towns. When interest in seaside summer spaces grew during the nineteenth century, this urban space was adapted to an aquatic one in the form of sea baths that littered the Bosphorus and appeared in some

The capitulations, a series of bilateral agreements with European states and merchants, are sometimes held up as symbols of early Ottoman concessions to European powers and the beginnings of Ottoman economic decline. This misreading, which is in part the

The Ottoman Empire occupies an unusual place among the competing imperial powers of the nineteenth century. On one hand, a weak military position often forced the Ottomans to accept unfavorable economic and political arrangements while playing other empir

As part of its EU accession candidacy, a number of reforms related to "democratization" have been applied to Turkey's legal and administrative apparatuses. One such reform regarded the conduct and practices of police and law enforcement. In this episode,

In this episode, Chris Gratien examines the life and times of Ahmad Baba, a scholar from Timbuktu, and his engagement with issues of race and slavery in a time of rising Atlantic empires and expanding global trade during the seventeenth century.