Inventing Laziness

Inventing Laziness
Author: Melis Hafez
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2021-12-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108667511

A lively and original study tracing the development of 'laziness' as a social problem in the Ottoman Empire over the long nineteenth-century. Hafez explores the anxiety about productivity that generated reforms as well as new understandings of morality, subjectivity, citizenship, and nationhood among the Ottomans.

Inventing Laziness

Inventing Laziness
Author: Melis Hafez
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2021-12-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108427847

A lively and original study tracing the development of 'laziness' as a way to understanding emerging civic culture in the Ottoman Empire.

The Sublime Post

The Sublime Post
Author: Choon Hwee Koh
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2024-09-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300270534

A history of the postal system that once connected the Ottoman Empire Before the advent of steamships or the telegraph, the premier technology for long-distance communication was the horse-run relay system. Every empire had one--including the Ottoman Empire. In The Sublime Post, Choon Hwee Koh examines how the vast Ottoman postal system worked across three centuries by tracking the roles of eight small-scale actors--the Courier, the Tatar, Imperial Decrees, the Bookkeeper, the Postmaster, the Villager, Money, and the Horse. There are stories of price-gouging postmasters; of murdered couriers and their bereaved widows; of moonlighting officials transporting merchandise; of neighboring villages engaged in long-running feuds; of bookkeepers calculating the annual costs of horseshoes, halters, and hay; of Tatar couriers and British travelers sharing drunken nights at post stations; of swimming with horses across rivers; and of hiding from marauding bandits in the desert. By weaving together chronicles, sharia court records, fiscal registers, collective petitions, appointment contracts, and imperial decrees from the Ottoman archive, this study of a large-scale communications infrastructure reveals the interdependence of an empire and its diverse imperial subjects. Koh traces this evolving interdependence between 1500 and 1840 to tell the history of the Ottoman Empire and its changing social order.

Learning Perl

Learning Perl
Author: Randal L. Schwartz
Publisher: "O'Reilly Media, Inc."
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2008-06-27
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 0596551851

Learning Perl, popularly known as "the Llama," is the book most programmers rely on to get started with Perl. The bestselling Perl tutorial since it was first published in 1993, this new fifth edition covers recent changes to the language up to Perl 5.10. This book reflects the combined experience of its authors, who have taught Perl at Stonehenge Consulting since 1991. Years of classroom testing and experience helped shape the book's pace and scope, and this edition is packed with exercises that let you practice the concepts while you follow the text. Topics include: Perl data & variable types Subroutines File operations Regular expressions String manipulation Lists & sorting Process management Smart matching Using third party modules Perl is the language for people who want to get work done. Originally targeted to sysadmins for heavy-duty text processing, Perl is now a full-featured programming language suitable for almost any task on almost any platform-from short fixes on the command line to web applications, bioinformatics, finance, and much more. Other books may teach you to program in Perl, but this book will turn you into a Perl programmer.

The Diffusion of “Small” Western Technologies in the Middle East

The Diffusion of “Small” Western Technologies in the Middle East
Author: Uri M. Kupferschmidt
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2023-10-04
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 3110777223

In recent years we have become interested in the diffusion of “small” Western technologies in the countries of the Middle East during the 19th and 20th centuries, the era of Imperialism and first globalization. We postulated a contrast between “small” and “big” technologies. Under the latter category we may understand railway systems, electricity grids, telegraph networks, and steam navigation, imposed by foreign powers or installed by connected local entrepreneurs. But many “small” Western technologies, such as sewing machines, typewriters, pianos, eyeglasses, and similar consumer goods, which had been developed and manufactured in Europe and America, were wanted, and willingly acquired by the agency of individual users elsewhere. In a few cases, however, the inventions had to be adapted, or were overstepped, and even delayed. Some were adopted as social markers or status symbols only by elites who could afford them. Processes of adoption and diffusion therefore differed according to cultural settings, preferences, and needs. Social and cultural historians, and social scientists, not only of the Middle East, will find in this collection of essays a new approach to the impact of Western technological inventions on the Middle East.

The Routledge History of Happiness

The Routledge History of Happiness
Author: Katie Barclay
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 641
Release: 2024-05-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 1040020704

Unmatched in originality, breadth, and scope, The Routledge History of Happiness features chapters that explore the history, anthropology, and psychology of happiness across the globe. Through a chronological approach that ranges from the Classical and Postclassical to the twenty-first century, this volume balances intellectual-history treatments and wider efforts to deal with relevant popular culture and experience, including consumerism. It explores how and why the history of happiness has emerged in recent decades, as well as psychological and social science approaches to happiness, with a history of how relevant psychological research has unfolded. Chapters examine early cultural traditions concerning happiness, including material on Buddhist and Chinese traditions, and how they continue to influence ideas about happiness in the present day. Overall, each section emphasises wide geographical coverage, with particular attention paid to East Asia, Latin America, Europe, Russia, and Africa. The Routledge History of Happiness is of great use to all undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars interested in the global history of emotions.

The Arab Nahda as Popular Entertainment

The Arab Nahda as Popular Entertainment
Author:
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 191
Release: 2023-11-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0755647424

What was popular entertainment like for everyday Arab societies in Middle Eastern cities during the long nineteenth century? In what ways did café culture, theatre, illustrated periodicals, cinema, cabarets, and festivals serve as key forms of popular entertainment for Arabic-speaking audiences, many of whom were uneducated and striving to contend with modernity's anxiety-inducing realities? Studies on the 19th to mid-20th century's transformative cultural movement known as the Arab nahda (renaissance), have largely focussed on concerns with nationalism, secularism, and language, often told from the perspective of privileged groups. Highlighting overlooked aspects of this movement, this book shifts the focus away from elite circles to quotidian audiences. Its ten contributions range in scope, from music and visual media to theatre and popular fiction. Paying special attention to networks of movement and exchange across Arab societies in Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and Morocco, this book heeds the call for 'translocal/transnational' cultural histories, while contributing to timely global studies on gender, sexuality, and morality. Focusing on the often-marginalized frequenters of cafés, artist studios, cinemas, nightclubs, and the streets, it expands the remit of who participated in the nahda and how they did.

Losing Istanbul

Losing Istanbul
Author: Mostafa Minawi
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 390
Release: 2022-12-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1503634051

Losing Istanbul offers an intimate history of empire, following the rise and fall of a generation of Arab-Ottoman imperialists living in Istanbul. Mostafa Minawi shows how these men and women negotiated their loyalties and guarded their privileges through a microhistorical study of the changing social, political, and cultural currents between 1878 and the First World War. He narrates lives lived in these turbulent times—the joys and fears, triumphs and losses, pride and prejudices—while focusing on the complex dynamics of ethnicity and race in an increasingly Turco-centric imperial capital. Drawing on archival records, newspaper articles, travelogues, personal letters, diaries, photos, and interviews, Minawi shows how the loyalties of these imperialists were questioned and their ethnic identification weaponized. As the once diverse empire comes to an end, they are forced to give up their home in the imperial capital. An alternative history of the last four decades of the Ottoman Empire, Losing Istanbul frames global pivotal events through the experiences of Arab-Ottoman imperial loyalists who called Istanbul home, on the eve of a vanishing imperial world order.

Bedouin Bureaucrats

Bedouin Bureaucrats
Author: Nora Barakat
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 433
Release: 2023-04-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 1503635635

In the late nineteenth century, the Ottoman government sought to fill landscapes they legally defined as "empty." Both land and people were incorporated into territorially bounded grids of administrative law. Bedouin Bureaucrats examines how tent-dwelling, seasonally migrating Bedouin engaged in these processes of Ottoman state transformation on local, imperial, and global scales. As the "tribe" became a category of Ottoman administration, Bedouin in the Syrian interior used this category both to gain political influence and to organize community resistance to maintain control over land. Narrating the lives of Bedouin individuals involved in Ottoman administration, Nora Elizabeth Barakat brings this population to the center of modern state-making, from their involvement in the pilgrimage administration in the eighteenth century and their performance of land registration and taxation as the Ottoman bureaucracy expanded in the nineteenth, to their eventual rejection of Ottoman attempts to reallocate the "empty land" they inhabited in the twentieth. She places the Syrian interior in a global context of imperial expansion into regions formerly deemed marginal, especially in relation to American and Russian empires. Ultimately, the book illuminates Ottoman state formation attempts within Bedouin communities and the unique trajectory of Bedouin in Syria, who maintained their control over land.

Reassessing the Moral Economy

Reassessing the Moral Economy
Author: Tanja Skambraks
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2023-10-06
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 3031298349

This book examines the concept of moral economy originally established by E.P. Thompson, focusing on the impact of religious norms on economic practice. With each chapter discussing a different empirical case study, the interrelations of the economy and religion are explored from antiquity through to the 20th century. The long-term trajectory and comparative perspective allows for moral economy to be seen in relation to ancient Greek commerce, medieval pawn-broking, Christian and Jewish economic ethics, urban social politics during the Plague, the Jesuit mission in Paraguay, the Ottoman Empire, religion in modern American capitalism, and Catholic attitudes toward taxation. This book aims to provide insight into how moral thinking about the economy and economic practice has evolved from a long historic perspective. It will be relevant to students and researchers interested in economic history and cultural economics.