Ottoman Governance and the House of Phanar

Episode 294

with Christine Philliou

hosted by Susanna Ferguson and Zoe Griffith

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In this episode, Christine Philliou traces the story of Istanbul's Phanariots, a group of wealthy, "Greek-identified" families who rose to play a central role in Ottoman foreign policy and diplomacy in the 17th and 18th centuries. What happened to these families in the tumultuous years preceding and following Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1832? In this episode, we explore the biography of Phanariot Stephanos Vogorides and ask what his story has to offer Ottoman history. His story and that of the Phanariots shed light on Ottoman governance and diplomacy, as well as relations between Muslims, Christians, Ottomans, and Greeks in the important but often-overlooked moment just prior to the 19th century reforms known as the Tanzimat.

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Contributor Bios

	Christine Philliou is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. She specializes in the political and social history of the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey and Greece, and is the author of Biography of an Empire : Governing Ottomans in an Age of Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
	Susanna Ferguson is a Ph.D. Candidate in Middle Eastern History at Columbia University. She is currently working on a dissertation entitled "Tracing Tarbiya: Women, Gender and Childrearing in Egypt and Lebanon, 1865-1939."
	Zoe Griffith is a doctoral candidate in History at Brown University working on political economy and governance in Egypt and the Ottoman Mediterranean. Zoe is a co-curator of the OHP series on legal history in the Ottoman Empire and Islamic world.

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Credits

Episode No. 294
Release Date: 19 January 2017
Recording Location: University of California, Davis
Audio editing by Chris Gratien
Music: archive.org - Harmandali - Recep Efendi, Cemal Efendi
Special thanks to Muhtelif for the use of "Ta Paidia & Lamma Bada"
Bibliography courtesy of Christine Philliou

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Select Bibliography

Campos, Michelle. Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2010.

Kitromilides, Paschalis. The Enlightenment as Social Criticism: Iosipos Moisiodax and Greek Culture in the Eighteenth Century. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992.

Makdisi, Ussama. The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon. Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, 2000.

Petrov, Milen V. "Everyday Forms of Compliance: Subaltern Commentaries on Ottoman Reform, 1864-1868." Comparative Studies in Society and History 46, no. 4 (2004): 730–59.

Philliou, Christine May. Biography of an Empire: Governing Ottomans in an Age of Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011

Salzmann, Ariel C. "Measures of Empire: Tax Farmers and the Ottoman Ancien Regime, 1695-1807." Ph.D. diss, Columbia University, 1995.

Symposium L'Époque Phanariote, and Kleoboulos D Tsourkas. Symposium L'Époque Phanariote 1970. À La Mémoire de Cléobule Tsourkas. Thessaloniki, 1974.