Mediterranean Encounters

Trade and Pluralism in Early Modern Galata

Fariba Zarinebaf author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:University of California Press

Published:31st Aug '18

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Mediterranean Encounters cover

Mediterranean Encounters traces the layered history of Galata—a Mediterranean and Black Sea port—to the Ottoman conquest, and its transformation into a hub of European trade and diplomacy as well as a pluralist society of the early modern period. Framing the history of Ottoman-European encounters within the institution of ahdnames (commercial and diplomatic treaties), this thoughtful book offers a critical perspective on the existing scholarship. For too long, the Ottoman empire has been defined as an absolutist military power driven by religious conviction, culturally and politically apart from the rest of Europe, and devoid of a commercial policy. By taking a close look at Galata, Fariba Zarinebaf provides a different approach based on a history of commerce, coexistence, competition, and collaboration through the lens of Ottoman legal records, diplomatic correspondence, and petitions. She shows that this port was just as cosmopolitan and pluralist as any large European port and argues that the Ottoman world was not peripheral to European modernity but very much part of it.

"Zarinebaf’s work offers historians and social scientists a refreshing glimpse of how individuals and small social encounters both fuel political economic affairs, and also get swept away by them. . . . [the] book offers important scholarship." * Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa *
"Chapters are each long and detailed, grounded in archival detail, and often threading together several related but distinct topics." * Journal of Interdisciplinary History *

ISBN: 9780520289925

Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 30mm

Weight: 726g

424 pages