During the reign of Sultan Abdulhamid II, public education was viewed as one of the more important sites of transformation, debate, and contestation. Public education was understood to be a means through which the Ottoman government nationalized/Ottomanized subjects throughout the empire and inculcated distinct Ottoman values. This paper provides an analytic description of one aspect of the late nineteenth-century Ottoman educational project: the curriculum. The paper seeks to accomplish two goals: re-construct the contours of morality as a separate subject of study and tease out the multiple sources of authority referenced in public school discussions on morality. This analysis is based on a late nineteenth-century Ottoman-Turkish secondary public school textbook: Cocuklara Talim-i Fazail-i Ahlak (hereafter Fazail-i Ahlak). In the past ten years, significant interventions have been made in the historiography of late Ottoman education by arguing that morality as a subject of study exemplifies the traditional and "Islamic" characteristics of the Hamidian educational project. This paper presents an alternative analysis that problematizes the "Islamic" categorization and attempts to recover the significance of the emergence of morality as a separate subject of study in Ottoman public schools. Through a close reading of Fazail-i Ahlak, this paper explores and identifies the multiple sources of authority that the author of the textbook pulled from a nineteen-century Ottoman cultural toolbox. My reading of Hamidian public school morality vis-a-vis Fazail-i Ahlak identifies and engages the implications of juxtaposing disparate and seemingly contradictory authoritative sources like God, the Prophet(s), the Sultan, reason (akil), religious leaders (ulema), everyone (herkes), wise people (aklan), social utility (faideh), Islamic law (seriat), human laws (kavanin-i insanieh), individual conscience (vicdan), and social acceptance. In so doing, this paper attempts to connect the reasoning and argumentation of the morality text to the historical specificity of the nineteenth-century interconnected and transitional Ottoman world in which it was produced.

The pre-eminence of non-Muslim merchants in the Ottoman ports cities of Smyrna, Salonika, Beirut and Trabzon is a topic that has been heavily discussed and documented in the relevant literature. The success of non-Muslim merchants and the socioeconomic medium in which they operated has been seen as precursor to Turkish nationalism. Little attention, however, has been paid to the Muslim merchant families of the Empire, who with their trade networks and political connections were no less important than many of their non-Muslim counterparts. Trabzon, the port of Eastern Anatolia and part of the route of the international transit trade with Iran, always had, alongside its Armenian and Persian counterparts, a strong Turkish-speaking, Muslim merchant community that was involved in both regional and international trade. Historians' lack of interest in the Muslim merchants of the Empire has resulted in an inadequate and partial understanding of the economic and political history of these influential Muslim merchants My focus falls on the Nemlizadeler, a great merchant dynasty from Trabzon in the second half of the nineteenth century, that had branches in Erzurum, Samsun, Batumi and Istanbul, acquired enormous capital and developed a wide network of political relations that was maintained at least for four generations and left its mark not only on the history of the Black Sea Coast but also on the Empire and the new republic. In my study, based on archival research and published primary and secondary sources, I aim to reconstruct the history of the Nemlizade family, its economic and political power, its involvement in international trade in the era of integration of the Ottoman economy into the world economy and its relations with foreign actors such as the Ottoman Tobacco R gie. I also intend to explore the limits of their power by examining competition with other Muslim merchants of the region. The current study is an attempt to question our general understanding of the role of the Muslim merchants in local-politics, in entrepreneurial activities and in international trade, through an examination of an understudied history of one of the greatest merchant 'dynasties' of the Ottoman Empire.

The era of Sultan Abdulhamid II (1876-1909) was characterized by a massive transformation of infrastructure, an increasing emphasis to maintain the legitimacy of the state and the Sultan, as well as the consolidation of modern state formation which marked the 19th century Ottoman Empire. This process has mostly been narrated from a top-down perspective, excluding the role of lower classes. This perspective have also been upheld by the Ottoman labor history studies, especially concerning the period preceding the Revolution of 1908, which have mostly concentrated on avowed, violent, collective forms of struggle, i.e. the strikes, making the agency of the workers invisible. However, as we shift our focus to alternative ways of discontent, such as the petitions, we could come across a rich repertoire of working class struggle in this period. This paper, based on primary documents, will examine how Ottoman port workers and the workers of the Imperial Dockyard in Istanbul effectively used and manipulated the institution of petition-writing to such an extent that it became an arena of struggle against the state and/or foreign companies. Although it was a traditional practice, the use of which, at most times, was encouraged as a legitimate means of complaint by the state authorities, the workers so aggressively and efficiently exploited it that the authorities came to see even this practice as a form of contention against the system. Through these petitions, we will see how the workers utilized the conflicts and contradictions among the elites, how they manipulated the very rhetoric which elites used to draw upon to maintain the loyalty of the subjects of the state, and how they compelled the elites to meet their demands. They also show that the public ceremonies, in which these petitions were supposed to be collected by the Sultan, such as the Friday Prayer Ceremony, came to be seen as an opportunity to show their discontent and to promote their rights and interests against the state, transforming some of the most symbolic places designed to consolidate the Sultan's hegemony into an arena of struggle. Thus, the petitions of the workers offer us a fertile area to reconsider the agency of the working classes in the making of Ottoman history and to rupture the relations of dominance between the workers and the elites through the "history from below" perspective.

Novel was not only a literary form in the nineteenth-century. It was also a means of social critique in 'capitalist society', in which social relations were determined by unequal economic relations. Starting with French realists (e.g. Stendhal and Balzac), many writers told stories of ordinary people, who were in constant struggle for survival, to criticize or even present alternatives (e.g. Zola's novels) to the capitalist social relations. Some writers, such as American author Horatio Alger, Jr., went beyond social criticism and turned novel into a 'survival manual' in a capitalist society. In this genre, the main goal of the writer was not merely criticizing poverty and inequality, but showing ways of getting through under these conditions. These popular 'dime novels' based on some exemplary rags-to-riches stories were showing 'ways to wealth' to the poor working class. Novel, in the Ottoman Empire, appared as a new literary form in the late nineteenth-century when the Ottoman statesmen and intellectuals were struggling with the grueling problems of 'modernization'. Under these circumstances, some Ottoman intellectuals were inspired by 'Western' examples and used this new literary form as an effective tool to educate the masses. For example, the most prominent intellectual of the era, Ahmed Midhat Efendi, penned many rags-to-riches stories, in addition to his critical stories about harmful effects of conspicuous and wasteful consumption. Other examples such as Mehmed Murad's Turfanda mi, Turfa mia or Recaizade Mahmud Ekrem's Araba Sevdasi were also based on similar ideas. These Ottoman writers were telling imaginary stories of some ideal 'Ottoman heroes' who achieve social success through hard-work, thrift and economic enterprise. The authors of these works were not only criticizing 'Westernized' life-styles, as the scholars have suggested so far, but they were also aiming a bottom-up social transformation through promotion of a new work-ethic. The economic messages given in these stories attribute separate roles to men, as the general directors of the family unit, and women, as the 'household managers'. This study analyzes the economic content and relevant gender roles in the late nineteenth-century Ottoman novels and shows how novel was used as a tool of 'social engineering' in the modernization process. The conclusions of the study illuminate three fields: the intellectual content of the Ottoman novel, the idea of economic development in the late Ottoman Empire, and the assumed gender roles in the Ottoman modernization.

This paper intends to analyze the social and political impact of an intricate underground network in the Ottoman Empire that emerged in the late nineteenth century and helped to facilitate the illegal migration of thousands of people from Eastern Anatolia to North America (for the purpose of the paper defined as the United States and Canada)..From the years 1880-1915, over 75,000 Eastern Anatolian peasants, laborers, craftsmen, and professionals migrated to North America. For many, migration was only meant to be temporary, and during this same period, several thousand of these sojourners returned to their home communities. Until 1908, the Ottoman government actively enforced legal prohibitions on migration from Eastern Anatolia to North America as well as return migration to the Empire. Despite its de jure legalization after 1908, fears of conscription-dodging led to continued attempts by the "Young Turk" regime to curtail migration to North America. Official attempts to limit mobility and curb migration abroad, coupled with the perilous nature of the journey between isolated Eastern Anatolia and North America, fostered the emergence of a geographically expansive underground "migration industry" in the Ottoman Empire. This dense network of village headmen, human smugglers (kacakcilar), foreign shipping agents, government officials, dockworkers and boatmen (kayikcilar) were key to facilitating migration abroad, but this often came at a steep economic and physical cost to potential migrants. By using documents from several catalogues in the Prime Ministry Ottoman Archives, American consular reports, village histories, and letters to unpack and analyze the numerous novel--but frequently exploitative--socio-economic relationships born out of the migration process, this paper seeks to shed new light on the history of migration and mobility in the late Ottoman Empire. Furthermore, this paper aims to place non-elites at the center of analysis by exploring the creative ways these migrants challenged both official state repression and exploitation at the hands of those involved in the migration industry. This paper is part of a broader doctoral dissertation project on the political, social, and economic impacts of migration to North America on sending communities in Eastern Anatolia. It is the aim of the larger project to use the fascinating history of overseas migration from Eastern Anatolia to provide a much-needed glimpse into the still poorly understood and contentious social and political history of Eastern Anatolia at the turn of the twentieth century.