History of Science, Ottoman or Otherwise
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What did it mean to pursue science in the Ottoman Empire? Who practiced it and why? And how should scholars approach the topic today? This series of podcasts introduces new research that challenges the traditional story of science in the Ottoman Empire. Setting aside long-held assumptions of the passive reception of European science or of a golden age stymied by religious obscurantism, these podcasts explore how artisans, scholars, and others made sense of the natural world. Some examine topics and actors traditionally regarded as outside the bounds of science, such as alchemy, while others reveal connections to broader worlds of intellectual exchange. Yet others situate seemingly cerebral sciences like astronomy or medicine in the everyday contexts of religion and charity. Together they reveal a new and vibrant intellectual world that has been too often overlooked.
Currently our series contains 26 podcast episodes featuring 35 contributors available for play or download through our podcast feeds. Let us know what you'd like to hear next!
Introduction
by Nir Shafir
A new wind has come to the study of the history of science in the Middle East as scholars reorient a field that has for so long clustered around two poles. At one end was the ingenuity of a medieval Islamic golden age and the other was the quick adaptation of Western science in the nineteenth century. The many centuries in-between, which coincidentally covered almost all of Ottoman history, were labeled an age of decline, so much so that I had been repeatedly told that there simply was no science in the Ottoman Empire. (click for more)
On the face of it, such a claim seemed reasonable. One could point, and many still do, to the seemingly straight progression of geniuses in early modern Europe like Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton. Each generation expanded human knowledge and challenged the forces of ignorance and religion until scientific modernity was achieved. In contrast, scholars of Ottoman science found few such geniuses to champion and could only weave the barest thread of a narrative of scientific thought. To the degree that there was a narrative at all, it was of a solitary scholar, like the astronomer Taqi al-Din ibn Maʿruf or the polymath Katib Çelebi, inevitably overwhelmed by the forces of religious extremism and obscurantism. Then, according to this narrative, science from Europe eventually started to make small and partial inroads in the late eighteenth century until it finally was adopted, albeit derivatively, in the late nineteenth century.
Today this traditional narrative is being challenged as Ottoman science is increasingly studied on its own terms. In the most basic sense, this means suspending judgment as to whether or not Ottoman science measured up to some ideal standard or timeline of Western science. It also means setting aside the attempt to find some heretofore overlooked Muslim genius who made such and such discovery well before such and such European. When we dispense with the teleology and simply start to examine who in the Middle East systematically studied the natural world and how, we actually begin to find a wealth of activity and writing.
Take, for example, the field of astronomy. For the past century, the prevailing question was whether or not scholars in the Ottoman Empire were aware of heliocentric models of the universe once they were first proposed by Copernicus. Underlying this question was the presumption that a heliocentric model inherently challenged the religious worldview of premodern societies and therefore was a core marker of intellectual modernity. Thus the destruction of the short-lived Ottoman observatory in Galata in 1580 was an act of backwardness as it could have potentially led to such discoveries. The long and short of it is that there was a number of scholars in the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century who knew of the heliocentric model yet for the most part neither they nor others cared. The concept of a heliocentric universe did not spread because people were hostile to it, but rather, because the model failed to provide better data than what was already to be found in the astronomical tables. People needed astronomy for astrological readings and determining correct prayer times (just as in Europe), not for challenging cosmological principles. When we move past the obsession over the heliocentric model and its implicit comparison to Europe, we actually find a large variety of treatises on astronomical instruments, cosmology, astrological calendars, and other materials that have yet to be examined.
Many of these new histories have been spurred by a rather seismic shift in the field of European history of science. What this movement has done since it began in earnest in the 1980s is to deconstruct much of the idealized narrative of Western science as the inevitable progression of increasingly correct theories about the natural world. These scholars have attempted to understand the scientific ideas and practices rejected as false today not simply as objectively untrue but as important windows onto the cultural and social forces that molded knowledge at the time. They did so by bringing science down from the disembodied world of pure thought and placing it squarely in the local contexts of its creation. When they did, they found it was often quite difficult to draw a line between science and superstition or between science and religion. Similarly, a variety of previously marginal actors and practitioners became central to the narrative. Thanks to such research, the story of Western science is no longer that of the ineluctable rise of modernity but a highly contingent and diffuse development incorporating all layers of society. And now that the history of science encompasses the seemingly irrational, religious, and failed aspects of science, a reexamination of Ottoman science, previously outside the purview of “science,” has also begun to shed light on the social and cultural worlds from which it emerged.
The results for now are only beginnings, initial investigations and theories from a long neglected field, rather than a grand narrative. The series revolves around four major and often intersecting themes. Many of these themes represent classical topics from the past generation of history of science scholarship as well as some of the newer approaches currently in vogue among historians of science.
1) Everyday contexts and practitioners of science: While science is sometimes undertaken by great thinkers attempting to solve deep philosophical problems, it more often emerges from the everyday, often commercial, actions of timekeepers, tinkerers, and traders. Ceramicists learn chemistry through the manufacture of glazes and sailors explore unknown lands while the geographers stay in libraries. The transmission of knowledge across social strata is one of the perennial questions of history of science. Likewise what might seem like major institutions of scientific research might have had much more prosaic interests. For example, hospitals in the medieval world were not the site of medical discoveries but part of a larger charity infrastructure.
2) The blurred boundary between religion and science: As noted above, religion has often been cast as the traditional opponent of science, a worldview based on faith and belief rather than objectivity and verification. When we examine the motivations and presumptions of early thinkers, whether European or Ottoman, we find their religious and scientific thought to be so intertwined as to be undistinguishable. Many of the discussions we consider today to be scientific can be found in works of theology and jurisprudence. Likewise, aspects of Sufism/saint-based Islam permeated the study of many disciplines like alchemy.
3) The material world of science: We often think of science as a particularly cerebral affair, sublimating from the minds of thinkers. But practicing science is a very bodily and material action. It requires tools and instruments. The physical books that scholars use change how they interact with their information. Even the structure of a table used to record data in a notebook can be significant. In other words, all the objects that scientists encounter and use affect the type of knowledge produced. Students of Ottoman history are finally beginning to examine manuscripts in particular as a particular medium that impacted the practice of knowledge-making but this can be extended even further. Looking at the material life of science means taking technology and infrastructure as seriously as abstract thought.
4) Connected worlds of science: If science emerges from local contexts how does it spread to other locations? The world, of course, is not divided into discrete and isolated entities, like Ottoman and European and Chinese, never interacting. Yet, it is never as simple as the seamless transmission and adoption of an idea from one place to another. Often it is not ideas that move but people and objects. Many of the podcasts look at how knowledge has moved and forged connections both within the empire and beyond it through encounters with humans and objects. From Venice to South Asia in the early modern period to England and Japan in the nineteenth and twentieth century, the history of science and knowledge in the Ottoman Empire has always been connected to the different areas of the globe. Understanding these processes and conduits of transmission allows us to go beyond a plain diffusion model of knowledge transfer to understanding how complex ideas like Darwinism or iatrochemical medicine were adopted and transformed as they made their way into and beyond the empire.
| An Introduction to the History of Science in the Ottoman World Contributors: Nir Shafir, Samuel Dolbee, Arianne Urus, Chris Gratien Episode No. 124 Release Date: 25 September 2013 Location: Kurtuluş, Istanbul |  |
While science was once understood by historians as a rational means of arriving at objective truths about the natural world, over the past decades, historians of science have illustrated the numerous ways in which scientific production is rooted in social and material contexts. In part one of this two-part series on the history of science, Nir Shafir leads us in an exploration of some of the main shifts in views of science and its history. In part two, we discuss the field of history of science in the Ottoman Empire and broader Islamicate world and explore the state of current historiography and where it is headed.
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Sections
Scientific Encounters
History of Science in a Global Perspective
The Enlightenment and the Ottoman World popular postContributors: Harun Küçük, Nir Shafir Episode No. 127 Release Date: 27 October 2013 Location: Üsküdar, Istanbul |  |
The Enlightenment, a cultural movement emphasizing reason and individualism, is recognized as a phenomenon of increasingly early origins that pervaded early modern European intellectual circles. As one of Europe's largest polities of the period, how then was the Ottoman Empire also party to this intellectual trend? In this episode, Harun Küçük describes what he defines as an Ottoman Enlightenment and explains the ways in which the movement of individuals and ideas linked the Ottoman capital of Istanbul to the broader cultural shifts of the day.
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| Bobovius and the Republic of Letters Contributors: Michael Tworek, Nir Shafir, Polina Ivanova, Shireen Hamza Episode No. 250 Release Date: 24 July 2016 Location: Cambridge, MA |  |
A man known as Wojciech Bobowski to some, Albertus Bobovius to others, and Ali Ufki to yet others, is one of the prime examples of an early modern intermediary operating in the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire. In this podcast, we discuss with Michael Tworek the fascinating figure of the Bobovius, from his childhood in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, to his capture in a Tatar slave raid, to his numerous translations both from and to Ottoman Turkish. These included musical treatises, the translation of the New Testament, the Genevan Psalter and more. In particular, we focus on how Bobovius mediated and developed his image as an inter-imperial mediator to his correspondents in the Republic of Letters.
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| Darwin in Arabic popular post Contributors: Marwa Elshakry, Chris Gratien Episode No. 140 Release Date: 10 January 2014 Location: Columbia University, NY |
Given the paradox of the identification of a would-be universal form of rational knowledge known as science with the particular historical experience of Europe, how have new forms of scientific knowledge been translated, received, assimilated, and engaged outside of the cultural contexts within which they were produced? In this episode, Marwa Elshakry examines the case of Arab engagement with and translation of Darwin's theory of evolution, which is the subject of her recently published book entitled Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860-1950.
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| Sexology in Hebrew and Arabic Contributors: Liat Kozma, Chris Gratien, Susanna Ferguson Episode No. 196 Release Date: 19 August 2015 Location: Okmeydanı, Istanbul |  |
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, scientists and physicians the world over began to think of sex as something that could be studied and understood through rational methods. In places like Germany, these sexologists were associated with progressive political movements that combated stigmatization of homosexuality and contraception and broke taboos regarding issues such as impotence and masturbation. In this episode, Liat Kozma examines how sexology traveled and transformed in Middle Eastern contexts through the writings of Egyptian doctors and Jewish exiles.
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Science, Knowledge, and Society
Transformations in the Ottoman Cosmos
Alchemy in the Ottoman Empire editor's pickContributors: Tuna Artun, Nir Shafir Episode No. 132 Release Date: 1 December 2013 Location: Kuzguncuk, Istanbul |  |
Alchemy has traditionally been understood as a pseudoscience or protoscience that eventually gave way to modern chemistry. Less often have the writings of alchemists been studied on their own terms. Yet, given the endurance and prolific nature of the alchemical traditions and the involvement of important figures of "modern science" such as Isaac Newton in the field of alchemy, a teleological understanding of the transition from alchemy to chemistry seems inadequate for discussing how science was practiced in the past. This may be particularly true for the Ottoman context, where a longstanding tradition of alchemy becomes subsumed under a larger narrative of the triumph of Western science during the nineteenth century. In this podcast, Tuna Artun explores the world of alchemy and discusses its transformation during the Ottoman period.
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| Dreams in Ottoman Society, Culture, and Cosmos Contributors: Aslı Niyazioğlu, Chris Gratien, Nir Shafir Episode No. 64 Release Date: 13 August 2012 Location: Etiler, Istanbul |  |
Dreams are an essential part of the human experience but are attributed different significance in various times and places. For many Ottomans, dreams were a forum for the revelation of hidden or unseen knowledge, and dream narratives as well as their interpretations found their way into many Ottoman texts. In this podcast, Aslı Niyazioğlu explains the role of dreams within Ottoman society, focusing on dream narratives in biographical dictionaries of the early modern era, and we discuss possible changes over time in the understanding of dreams in the Ottoman world.
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| Time and Temporal Culture in the Ottoman Empire editor's pick Contributors: Avner Wishnitzer, Chris Gratien Episode No. 152 Release Date: 8 May 2014 Location: Kurtuluş, Istanbul |  |
In daily life, time appears as an unavoidable fact. It marches forward uniformly, and much like money, is a fungible commodity that can be spent, wasted, and saved. However, this view often obscures the fact that our engagement with time is mitigated through socially-constructed ways of understanding, measuring, and using time. In this episode, Chris Gratien talks to Anver Wishnizter about his research in this realm of social time--what he describes as "temporal culture"--and the changes in such a temporal culture during the late Ottoman period.
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| Astronomy and Islam in Late Ottoman Egypt Contributors: Daniel Stolz, Nir Shafir Episode No. 169 Release Date: 10 August 2014 Location: Paris, France |  |
The movements of celestial bodies had long been of tremendous importance within the social and religious spheres throughout the Muslim world. As new understandings of space and time began to emerge during the nineteenth century, longstanding astronomical practices in places such as Egypt witnessed a profound transformation. In this episode, Daniel Stolz discusses the importance of astronomy in nineteenth-century Egypt and the overlapping scientific traditions they practiced.
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Close Section | Kapat
Mapping and Global Imagination
Cartography and the Early Modern World
| Mapping the Medieval World in Islamic Cartography editor's pick Contributors: Karen Pinto, Nir Shafir Episode No. 220 Release Date: 12 January 2016 Location: Brown University |  |
Hundreds of cartographic images of the world and its regions exist scattered throughout collections of medieval and early modern Arabic, Persian, and Turkish manuscripts. The sheer number of these extant maps tells us that from the thirteenth century onward, when these map-manuscripts began to proliferate, visually depicting the world became a major preoccupation of medieval Muslim scholars. However, these cartographers did not strive for mimesis, that is, representation or imitation of the real world. These schematic, geometric, and often symmetrical images of the world are iconographic representations—‘carto-ideographs’—of how medieval Muslim cartographic artists and their patrons perceived their world and chose to represent and disseminate this perception. In this podcast, we sit down with Karen Pinto to discuss the maps found in the cartographically illustrated Kitāb al-Masālik wa-al-Mamālik (Book of Routes and Realms) tradition, which is the first known geographic atlas of maps, its influence on Ottoman cartography, and how basic versions of these carto-ideographs were transported back to villages and far-flung areas of the Islamic empire.
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| Mapping the Ottomans Contributors: Palmira Brummett, Chris Gratien Episode No. 221 Release Date: 23 January 2016 Location: Providence, RI |  |
Where did the Ottomans fit within the geographical understandings of Christian kingdoms in early modern Europe? How did Europeans reconcile the notion of "the Turk" as other with the reality of an Ottoman presence in the Balkans and Eastern Europe? What was the relationship between the maps and representations of Ottoman space in Europe and the self-mapping carried out by the Ottomans in maps and miniatures? These are some of the major questions addressed by our guest Palmira Brummett in her new book Mapping the Ottomans, which uses maps to study early modern space and time, travel, the flow of information, claims to sovereignty, and cross-cultural encounters between the Ottomans neighboring Christian polities.
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| Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe Contributors: Ayesha Ramachandran, Chris Gratien Episode No. 223 Release Date: 30 January 2016 Location: Yale University |  |
We often speak of physical and abstract worlds as if they were self-evident. But the concept of "the world" has been forged and continually remade through imagination and debate. In this podcast, Ayesha Ramachandran discusses the historical context of the world's ascendance as a meaningful concept and offers a preview of her new book entitled Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe.
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Close Section | Kapat
Cultures of the Book
Technologies and Networks of the Written Word
| Ottoman Commentaries on Islamic Philosophy Contributors: Eric van Lit, Nir Shafir, Chris Gratien Episode No. 251 Release Date: 27 July 2016 Location: Yale University |  |
Commentaries are a common, even a nearly ineluctable, part of the textual landscape of the early modern Ottoman Empire. Especially when it came to philosophy, commentaries were perhaps the main venue of discussions. An earlier generation of scholars believed these commentaries to be derivative but we now see them as a major piece in the development of the philosophical tradition in the Middle East. In this podcast, we speak with L.W.C (Eric) van Lit about how to approach these commentaries and their effect on the intellectual life of the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth and sixteenth century.
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| Literacies and the Emergence of Modern Egypt Contributors: Hoda Yousef, Graham Pitts Episode No. 247 Release Date: 11 July 2016 Location: Georgetown University |  |
During the late nineteenth century, Egyptian society witnessed the rise of new debates and practices concerning reading and writing in the Arabic language. In this episode, Hoda Yousef explores the discources surrounding literacy in Egypt, which is the subject of her first book entitled Composing Egypt (Stanford University Press, 2016). This work examines how different actors from Islamic modernists and feminists to journalists and officials sought to produce particular kinds of Egyptians through language politics. Dr. Yousef demonstrates that emergent practices of reading and writing had impacts well beyond the conventionally-defined literate circles. Even for those who did not read and write, the written word became an important part of daily life. Through the medium of public exchange created by the writing, different segments of Egyptian society could engage in discussions regarding nation, home, and belonging.
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| A New History
of Print in Ottoman Cairo Contributors: Kathryn Schwartz, Nir Shafir Episode No. 249 Release Date: 15 July 2016 Location: Cambridge, MA |  |
We often regard print as a motor of social change, leaving revolutions in its wake, whether political and religious. For historians of the Middle East, this line of thought always leads to the (predictable) question: why didn’t Muslims or Ottomans or Arabs adopt print? In this episode, Kathryn Schwartz discusses why this question is often poorly posed and then delves into an in-depth look at how and why people used print in one particular historical context—nineteenth-century Cairo. Touching upon topics such Napoleon, Mehmed Ali, and the Bulaq press, we explore how print slowly and haphazardly embedded itself into various aspects of Egyptian learned life. This fresh history casts nineteenth-century Egypt in a new light by examining the technological adaptation of print not as an act of unstoppable and transformative modernity, but as a slow and incremental expansion of already existing practices of book production.
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| Ottoman Qur'an Printing Contributors: Brett Wilson, Chris Gratien, Nir Shafir Episode No. 95 Release Date: 3 March 2013 Location: Arnavutköy, Istanbul |  |
Printing in Ottoman Turkish first emerged during the eighteenth century. Yet, even when print had arrived in full force by the middle of the nineteenth century, it remained forbidden to print the text most sought after by Ottoman readers: the Qur'an. In this episode, Brett Wilson discusses the rise of print and Qur'an printing in the Ottoman Empire as well as the emergence of Turkish translations of the Qur'an in the late Ottoman and early Republican eras.
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Close Section | Kapat
Bodies and Brains
Medical Knowledge in the Middle East
| Islamic Hospitals in Medieval Egypt and the Levant editor's pick Contributors: Ahmed Ragab, Nir Shafir Episode No. 193 Release Date: 26 July 2015 Location: Harvard University |  |
From Baghdad to Cairo to Edirne, hospitals were major and integral components of medieval and early modern Islamic cities. But what role did they play in these cities and their societies? Were they sites for the development of medical knowledge? In this podcast, Professor Ahmed Ragab examines the history and significance of hospitals in Mamluk Egypt and Syria. He argues that we must view these medieval hospitals as charitable institutions that provided needed services and drugs to the urban poor, rather than the early progenitors of our modern medical institutions. Over the course of the interview we explore how these hospitals functioned as charitable institutions, what type of medical theories and treatments they employed, why medieval rulers regarded them as so important, and why their importance decreased after the sixteenth century.
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| Tracing Plague in the Ottoman Empire Contributors: Nükhet Varlık, Nir Shafir Episode No. 252 Release Date: 29 July 2016 Location: Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton |  |
Geneticists and historians are generally considered strange bedfellows. However, new advances in bio-archaeology and genetics are facilitating this odd coupling. In this episode, we speak to Nükhet Varlık, author of Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World : the Ottoman experience, 1347-1600 (Cambridge University Press), about how genetic evidence has transformed the study of the Plague in the past ten years, allowing geneticists to more readily identify the presence of Yersinia pestis bacteria in a human remains. Whereas before historians had been hesitant to diagnose diseases posthumously, they can now speak with greater certainty about the presence of plague. We then discuss the life of plague in the early modern Ottoman Empire in particular, focusing on the creation of ‘plague capitals’ in the urban centers of the Ottoman Empire following the conquest of Constantinople and how integrating the Ottoman experience of plague changes the story of how historians of medicine approach the topic. To inspire future collaborations among our listeners, we end with a peek at the process of working with geneticists and what such approaches can contribute to the study of the history of the Middle East.
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| Disease and Landscape in Medieval and Early Modern Europe Contributors: Lori Jones, Chris Gratien, Nir Shafir, Andreas Guidi Episode No. 270 Release Date: 19 September 2016 Location: Paris, France |  |
Genomic research is resolving old questions about the history of plague, revealing, for example, that the Black Death was caused by the same species of plague that exists today and demonstrating the complex ways in which plague moved throughout the medieval and early modern world. Yet even as scientific methods today shed light on the history of plague, past understandings and depictions of disease remain both highly relevant and ignored. In this episode, we chat with Lori Jones about early modern European views of plague and explore the relationship between disease, landscape, and geography within the European imagination. We talk about the origins of environmental understandings of disease and how plague became increasingly associated with eastern and southern locales such as the Ottoman Empire and Southern Europe. We also have a separate conversation (beginning at 32:30) about the misuse of medieval images concerning disease and medicine in the 21st century as digital media facilitate both the spread and disembodiment of historical images.
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| Venetian Physicians in the Ottoman Empire Contributors: Valentina Pugliano, Nir Shafir Episode No. 232 Release Date: 18 March 2016 Location: San Francisco, CA |  |
Starting in the fifteenth century, medical doctors from the Italian peninsula began accompanying Venetian consular missions to cities in the Mamluk and Ottoman empires. These doctors treated not only Venetian consular officials, but also local artisans and rulers. In this podcast, Valentina Pugliano discusses the experiences of these travelling doctors both in the Italian peninsula and in the Middle East. We explore their interactions with the local population and their effect on the medical ecology of the Middle East as well as the sources we use to write such histories. Together, the experiences of these doctors point to the connected histories of medicine and science in the early modern Mediterranean.
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| Experimenting with Plague in 18th Century Egypt Contributors: Edna Bonhomme, Chris Gratien Episode No. 225 Release Date: 20 February 2016 Location: Manhattan, NY |  |
As research on the early modern period increasingly shows, bubonic plague played a formative role in the making of state policies and medical practice, and concern over plague created new connections between different regions of the Mediterranean. In this episode, Edna Bonhomme joins us again to talk about her research on plague in North Africa, its relationship with the issue of the global slave trade, and the ways in which experimenting with plague became a practice among Europeans residing in 18th-century Egypt.
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| Osmanlı'da Mecnun Olmak Contributors: Fatih Artvinli, Seçil Yılmaz Episode No. 159 Release Date: 13 June 2014 (Türkçe) Location: Acıbadem University |  |
While in the past madness may have been associated with divine revelation or punishment, during the nineteenth century, the emergence of modern psychiatry in the Ottoman Empire heralded a shift towards biological understandings of this phenomenon. In this episode, Fatih Artvinli explores the emergence of psychiatric institutions and practices during the late Ottoman period.
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| Traveling Oculists in Israel/Palestine Contributors: Anat Mooreville, Chris Gratien, Seçil Yılmaz Episode No. 138 Release Date: 28 December 2013 Location: Brooklyn, NY |  |
Medicine is not merely a practice that takes place in hospitals, clinics, and laboratories. It also involves the movement and operation of medical practitioners in different social spaces. In this episode, Anat Mooreville discusses traveling doctors in Israel/Palestine and their role not only in combating trachoma (a severe eye disease that causes blindness) but also as ethnographers and go-betweens within the framework of a Zionist national project.
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| Health and Home in a Turkish Village Contributors: Sylvia Wing Önder, Chris Gratien, Seçil Yılmaz Episode No. 210 Release Date: 16 November 2015 Location: Şişli, Istanbul |
The subject of health in the modern period is often discussed as a transition from traditional to scientific medicine and what Foucault has called "the birth of the clinic." Such perspectives view medicine and healing through the lens of changing methods, forms of knowledge, and types of authority. In this podcast, our guest Sylvia Wing Önder offers a slightly different approach to the subject in a discussion of her monograph "We Have No Microbes Here (Carolina Academic Press, 2007)," looking at continuities in the centrality of households and women in making decisions about medical care within a Black Sea village.
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People and Machines
Technology and Culture in the Middle East
| Hydropolitics and the Hajj Contributors: Michael Christopher Low, Chris Gratien Episode No. 101 Release Date: 12 April 2013 Location: Feriköy, Istanbul |  |
During the nineteenth century, imperial states became increasingly concerned with the management of disease and resources. For the Ottoman Empire, the issues of disease and water converged on the hajj pilgrimage, which brought annual throngs of thirsty disease vectors to the Hijaz region. In this podcast, Michael Christopher Low examines the su meselesi or “water issue” of the Ottoman Empire during the Hamidian era and its importance for understanding the ecological transformation of Saudi Arabia over the past century.
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| Across Anatolia on a Bicycle Contributors: Daniel Pontillo, Chris Gratien Episode No. 137 Release Date: 27 December 2013 Location: University of Rochester, NY |  |
What does it mean to wield or possess a certain technology? What are the limits to associational claims to technical expertise or superiority? In this podcast, Daniel Pontillo considers these cultural and social dimensions of technology through a study of the travel narrative Across Asia on a Bicycle, in which two American men set out in the heat of the late nineteenth-century bicycle craze to use their new technology to tame the rugged Asian geography. In our discussion, we focus on the first leg of their trip, which was carried out in Ottoman Anatolia, and examine how their bicycles served defining components of their self-definition throughout an encounter with the Ottoman other.
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Bibliography
Ottoman/Islamic History of Science
Adıvar, Abdülhak Adnan. Osmanlı türklerinde ilim. İstanbul: Maarif matbaası, 1943.
İhsanoğlu, Ekmeleddin. Transfer of Modern Science & Technology to the Muslim World: Proceedings of the International Symposium on "Modern Sciences and the Muslim World" (Istanbul 2-4 September 1987). İstanbul: Research Centre for Islamic History, Art and Culture, 1991.
Yılmaz, Coşkun, and Necdet Yılmaz. Osmanlılarda sağlik. Istanbul: Biofarma, 2006.
History of Science, General
Shapin, Steven, Simon Schaffer, and Thomas Hobbes. Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985.
Latour, Bruno. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1987.
Golinski, Jan. Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Smith, Pamela H. The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Cook, Harold John. Matters of Exchange Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age. New Haven [Conn.]: Yale University Press, 2007.
Dear, Peter. Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and Its Ambitions, 1500-1700. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001.
Raj, Kapil. Relocating Modern Science. New York (N.Y.): Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
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