In 1617, Fatma Hatun, an ordinary Ottoman woman, agreed to pay the Venetian merchant Pavlo to save her son, a war captive imprisoned on Chios Island. Fatma Hatun’s ability to contact Pavlo reveals various crucial points related to contact, fluidity, and interdependence in 17th-century Galata, the main commercial and diplomatic district of the Ottoman capital Istanbul. This paper takes as its subject the lived experiences of Europeans and local Ottoman subjects with a specific emphasis on their sociocultural interactions at the ground level. As evidence, I utilize an extensive set of archival sources composed of legal court records, commercial records, consular reports, diplomatic correspondence, and personal writings. In tracing individual trajectories of Galata’s permanent and temporary residents, this paper combines micro- and macro-historical approaches. In doing so, it aims both to conduct an in-depth analysis of the interactions and networks within Galata and to connect this Mediterranean hub with world-historical processes of the seventeenth century. First, by utilizing a micro-historical perspective, it closely investigates the everyday lives of Galata’s heterogeneous inhabitants through evaluation of issues like network formations, marriage, illness, housing, and socialization at coffeehouses, public baths, brothels, and taverns. Second, it establishes linkages between larger processes, such as the changes in global trade and politics, and the local and regional dynamics of the Mediterranean hub of Istanbul. The combination of these two historical approaches provides a vivid picture that situates within a coherent narrative the social and cultural interactions between Europeans and local Ottomans subjects and the ways in which Galata’s local history intertwines regional and global histories. Besides its epistemological objectives, this paper tackles several important historiographical questions through the case of Galata: whether and to what degree is a micro history of a dynamic and well-connected port-town meaningful?; what are the uses and limits of legal court records in writing micro-histories of early modern port-towns?; and how micro- and macro-historical processes can be tied together in a meaningful way within a single narrative? By seeking answers to these questions, I aim to contribute to the growing yet insufficient body of literature on micro and everyday histories of the Middle East. I argue that micro histories of early modern port-towns like Galata can help us understand early modern European-Middle Eastern interactions on their own terms without transferring modern habits of thought to its study.

Ottoman political culture, its practicalities and the confessional identity went through multiple transformations during the nineteenth century, which led to power re-configurations in localities across the Empire, and thus, have been the subject of sustained scholarly interest. Provincial magnates of this period, however, have long been associated with the Muslim local notables such as the ayans of the earlier periods in the Ottoman context, while Christian or Jewish provincial power holders such as the Chorbadzhis have remained neglected despite their remarkable roles in Ottoman world. This paper examines the cross-cultural and complex networks of these Ottoman individuals neglected by current scholarship. Using networks of specific Chorbadzhis in Ottoman borderlands of the Balkans and Eastern Anatolia between 1790 and 1860 as a lens, it approaches the Ottoman socio-political culture from a provincial stand point and decenters the Ottoman Empire in multiple levels. It shifts the focus from imperial center to localities; from institutions to peoples; from official narratives to practicalities; from Muslims to Non-Muslims; from imperial archives to local archives. Exploiting a wide range of archival sources including interrogation records, family archives, local correspondences, petitions and unpublished manuscripts of local chroniclers in Ottoman archives in Istanbul, Turkey, and at the National Library of Bulgaria in Sofia, Bulgaria, my paper puts Chorbadzhi families under a microscope. First, I explore their local and global commercial networks, their identity shifts, and the ways they bargained power with the Ottoman State by taking advantage of the inter-imperial rivalry at the borderlands, which reached beyond the assumed boundaries of the Millet system and the institutionalized categorizations. Then, through a detailed analysis of Chorbadzhi murder cases, I analyze inter-elite rivalry over wealth and power as neglected yet central motives for negotiations and causes for conflict in the provinces. Building upon these, I argue that microhistories of provincial actors like Chorbadzhis whom and whose networks cannot be contained within the conventional narratives enable us to gain insights into the true practicalities in the empires. Providing microhistories that focus on the complex networks, fluid identities, conflicts, murders of Chorbadzhis during a period that is assumed to belong to separate historiographies, this paper offers an example of history writing which connects small scales to larger frameworks and individuals to Empires.

On a summer day of 1884, Ten-year-old Fatima found herself facing a tragic alternative: either becoming a prostitute or marrying her rapist. After having abused her, the perpetrator had taken her to a Q??i in Port Said’s “Arab village.” He had ordered her to declare she was an orphan and she wanted to marry him, while threatening her she would otherwise end up in a brothel. The marriage did not eventually took place and her mother abandoned her in Port Said shortly after the rape: it is possible that Fatima did indeed wind up in a house of ill-repute. But, for the time being, she was taken in by the Soeurs du Bon Pasteur in town. “Veritable sinners” like Fatima, apparently, were not lacking in Port Said and the nuns had their hands full. Among others, Claire, Anna, and Marie had all ended up in the port-city where they had apparently developed a penchant for drunkenness, debauchery, and magic. The story of Fatima, who had just moved into town, raises many questions. First, authorities disagreed on her identity: was she Algerian or was she Egyptian? While her nationality remained ambiguous, her identity as an outsider to the city was reified. Secondly, what was to do with her and others like her? Should she be repatriated or locked up in an institution? Thirdly, as many other migrant girls and women who either sought shelter with the nuns or staunchly refused to do so, she and her reputation occupied very vulnerable positions. On the whole, Fatima’s affair allows for an historical reconstruction of the jurisdictions and policing systems that overlapped in late nineteenth-century Port Said and Egypt. At the same time, her microscopic story illuminates broader histories of migration, gender, and vice as they unfolded in an Egyptian, Middle Eastern, and Mediterranean port-city. By examining the records of the Egyptian National Archives, the papers of various religious institutions, as well as British, French, and Italian diplomatic documents, my paper seeks to connect and integrate different scales of analysis. It thus aims to rejoin the lives of infamous individuals, who would have remained obscure had it not been for a few fleeting moments in which they got in trouble, to “national,” regional, and world histories. I argue that none of these scales of analysis can be shunned if historians want to remain truthful to historical actors and to their often mundane lives.

On 31st October 1931, in southern Bombay, a group of men attacked a dozen Iranian owned tea shops, bakeries and hotels, which the Iranian consul called a “riot”, and the British Indian government a “disturbance”. Ostensibly an expression of resentment on the part of “Indian Mahomedans” (Sunnis) towards “Moghuls” (Shia Iranians in Bombay) the origins of the violence was in a minor fight. A chauffeur who had ordered tea at an Irani hotel, punched the young serving boy when the latter accidentally spilt tea on him. The Shia Iranian owner of the shop however, remonstrated on behalf of his Sunni employee with the offending Sunni chauffeur, which then spiraled into a fight between the two and their friends, and later a wider attack on “Moghul” establishments. The difficulty with studying histories of the everyday lives of non-elite urban inhabitants in Indian Ocean port cities is that these lives appear in colonial archives precisely at the moment of the disruption of the quotidian, when the agents of law are called in to restore order. As some subaltern historians have begun asking, can we only study subaltern lives at the moments when they rebel? And yet, as this small-scale riot between Iranian “Moghuls” and Indian “Mahomedans” in early twentieth century Bombay reveals, such moments of disturbance can often be the best means of extrapolating the norms of the everyday. Thus from the records around the 1931 riot we know that a large number of Iranians living in the port city of Bombay in the late nineteenth early twentieth centuries were tea shop, hotel and bakery owners, that their clientele consisted largely of the working class inhabitants of the city of different religions, and that religion often provided the occasion for discord and difference in the city but was not necessarily always or even most often the primary cause of it. The management of the riot on the other hand brings into evidence the role of the British and Iranian governments in trying to manage the flow of migrants between the two countries. Studying the discourse around the small riot of 1931 alongside the Bombay government’s records on naturalization requests from Iranian publishers and deportations of Iranian “gypsies”, this paper examines how the micro histories of everyday lives of Iranian communities in twentieth century Bombay were both influenced by and in turn shaped the apparatuses of empire.