scholarly journals Sanctifying Domestic Space and Domesticating Sacred Space: Reading Ziyāra and Taṣliya in Light of the Domestic in the Early Modern Ottoman World

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Parkes Allen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Travel Literature ◽  
Sacred Space ◽  
Domestic Space ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Domestic Spaces ◽  
Attitudes And Practices ◽  
Physical Evidence

Shrine-visitation (ziyāra) and devotion to Muḥammad (such as expressed in taṣliya, the uttering of invocations upon the Prophet), both expressed through a range of ritualized practices and material objects, were at the heart of everyday Islam for the vast majority of early modern Ottoman Muslims across the empire. While both bodies of practice had communal and domestic aspects, this article focuses on the important intersections of the domestic with both shrine-visitation and Muḥammad-centered devotion as visible in the early modern Ottoman lands, with a primary emphasis on the eighteenth century. While saints’ shrines were communal and ‘public’ in nature, a range of attitudes and practices associated with them, recoverable through surviving physical evidence, travel literature, and hagiography, reveal their construction as domestic spaces of a different sort, appearing to pious visitors as the ‘home’ of the entombed saint through such routes as wall-writing, gender-mixing, and dream encounters. Devotion to Muḥammad, on the other hand, while having many communal manifestations, was also deeply rooted in the domestic space of the household, in both prescription and practice. Through an examination of commentary literature, hagiography, and imagery and objects of devotion, particularly in the context of the famed manual of devotion Dalā’il al-khayrāt, I demonstrate the transformative effect of such devotion upon domestic space and the ways in which domestic contexts were linked to the wider early modern world, Ottoman, and beyond.

Qing Connections to the Early Modern World: Ethnography and Cartography in Eighteenth-Century China

2000 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 623-662 ◽  
Author(s):  
LAURA HOSTETLER
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Literary Sources

‘Consulting literary sources is not as satisfactory as observation . . . If one wants to control the barbarian frontier area, one must judge the profitability of the land, and investigate the nature of its people.’—Qian Shu‘If one does not differentiate between their varieties, or know their customs, then one has not what it takes to appreciate their circumstances, and to govern them.’—‘Miaoliao tushuo’

scholarly journals THE INNER LIVES OF EARLY MODERN TRAVEL

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 349-373 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARK R. F. WILLIAMS
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Grand Tour ◽  
Cultural Engagement ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Many ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century

AbstractThis article assesses the role of memory, interiority, and intergenerational relations in the framing of early modern experiences and narratives of travel. It adopts as its focus three generations of the Clerk family of Penicuik, Scotland, whose travels through Europe from the mid-seventeenth century onward proved formative in the creation of varied ‘cosmopolitan’ stances within the family. While such widely studied practices as the ‘Grand Tour’ have drawn on discourses of encounter and cultural engagement within the broader narratives of the ‘long’ eighteenth century, this article reveals a family made deeply anxious by the consequences of travel, both during and after the act. Using diaries, manuscript correspondence, memoirs, and material objects, this article reveals the many ways in which travel was fashioned before, during, and long after it was undertaken. By shifting focus away from the act of travel itself and towards its subsequent afterlives, it explores the ways in which these individuals internalized what they experienced in the course of travel, how they reconciled it with the familiar, quotidian world to which they returned, and how the ‘cosmopolitan’ worldviews they brought home were made to inform the generations that followed.

Knowledge and divergence from the perspective of early modern India

2008 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 361-387 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tirthankar Roy
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Institutional Setting ◽  
Modern World ◽  
The Cost

AbstractThis article explores the origins of divergent technological pathways in the early modern world, and the role that artisanal knowledge played in this process. It rejects older explanations based on societal differences in entrepreneurial propensities and incentives, and a more modern one based on factor cost. It argues instead for the importance of conditions that facilitated transactions between complementary skills. In India, the institutional setting within which artisan techniques were learned had made such transactions less likely than in eighteenth-century Europe. The cost of acquiring knowledge, therefore, was relatively high in India.

Economic Conditions in Early Modern Bengal: A Contribution to the Divergence Debate

2010 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 179-194 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tirthankar Roy
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Income Growth ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Average Income ◽  
European Colonization

This article contributes to the debate on relative levels of living in the early modern world by estimating the income and probable range of income growth in Bengal before European colonization. The exercise yields two conclusions, (a) average income in Bengal was significantly smaller than that in contemporary Western Europe, and (b) there is insufficient basis to infer either growth or decline in average income in the eighteenth century.

scholarly journals Fantasies of Immediacy, or, the Boundaries of the Book in Eighteenth Century Travel Narratives

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthias Buschmeier
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Travel Literature ◽  
Travel Narratives ◽  
The Other ◽  
Structural Shift ◽  
The One ◽  
Early Modern Travel Literature

This article explores a structural shift in techniques of representation in eighteenth-century travel literature as a reaction to the changing needs of cameralist governance, one in which space is no longer grasped as enyclopedic and all-encompassing. Instead of being understood as static territory, space is increasingly represented as a dynamic and continually updatable dataset. As a consequence, travel literature itself goes in search of new representational modes appropriate to this new understanding of space. And as I show, the medium of the book becomes increasingly problematic in this regard. As early modern travel literature (ars Apodemica) largely splits in the eighteenth century into statistics and geography on the one hand and literary travel experiences on the other, each of these categories requires new forms of mediation for their successful presentation. Common to both, however, remains a desire to communicate an immediacy of perception through representation. Taking Friedrich Nicolai’s Beschreibung einer Reise durch Deutschland und die Schweiz im Jahre 1781 as my primary example, I show how the medium of the book arrives at its own media boundary, one whose transgression necessarily results in failure because it can no longer account for an epistemological divide that has already transpired. This difference has far-reaching implications for the place of the book within the humanistic sciences today.

The Smugglers' World

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Cromwell
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Modern World ◽  
French Caribbean ◽  
Illicit Trade ◽  
Political Protests ◽  
Moral Necessity

The Smugglers’ World: Illicit Trade and Atlantic Communities in Eighteenth-Century Venezuela reinterprets the meaning of illicit commerce in the early modern Atlantic. More than simply a transactional relationship or a political economy concern of empires, smuggling became a societal ethos for the communities in which it was practiced. For most of the colonial period, subjects of the commercially neglected province of Venezuela depended on contrabandists from the Dutch, English, and French Caribbean. These illegal yet scarcely patrolled rendezvous came under scrutiny in the eighteenth century as Bourbon reformers sought to regain control and boost productivity in the province. Subsequent crackdowns on smuggling sparked colonial tensions. Illicit trade created interimperial connections and parallel communities based around provisioning as a moral necessity. It threw the legal status of people of color aboard ships into chaos. Smuggling’s participants normalized subversions of imperial law and proffered mutually agreed-upon limits of acceptable extralegal activity. Venezuelan subjects defended their commercial autonomy through passive measures and occasionally through violent political protests. This commercial discourse between the state and its subjects was a key part of empire making and maintenance in the early modern world.

The Urban/Rural Divide in the Early Modern Period

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-84
Author(s):  
Jesse Siragan Arlen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Urban Rural ◽  
Rural Dwellers

Abstract The major developments of the early modern period had an uneven impact on urban and rural dwellers, leading to divergences in worldview and mentality between the two demographics. This article reflects upon these differences through a microhistorical study of an episode in Joseph Emin’s Life and Adventures, where Emin, an eighteenth-century “port Armenian” encounters Armenian villagers in the Ottoman town of Jinis. My reading of this episode provides a focus for broader reflections on the growing divergences between the viewpoints of a port Armenian like Emin, who was connected to the developments taking place in the early modern world, and that of rural dwellers like the local villagers and priest of Jinis, who were largely disconnected from the same developments.

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