Biography of an Empire Governing Ottomans in an Age of Revolution

This vividly detailed revisionist history opens a new vista on the great Ottoman Empire in the early nineteenth century, a key period often seen as the eve of Tanzimat westernizing reforms and the beginning of three distinct historiesand#151;ethnic nationalism in the Balkans, imperial modernization from Istanbul, and European colonialism in the Middle East. Christine Philliou brilliantly shines a new light on imperial crisis and change in the 1820s and 1830s by unearthing the life of one man. Stephanos Vogorides (1780and#150;1859) was part of a network of Christian elites known phanariots, institutionally excluded from power yet intimately bound up with Ottoman governance. By tracing the contours of the wide-ranging networksand#151;crossing ethnic, religious, and institutional boundariesand#151;in which the phanariots moved, Philliou provides a unique view of Ottoman power and, ultimately, of the Ottoman legacies in the Middle East and Balkans today. What emerges is a wide-angled analysis of governance as a lived experience at a moment in which there was no clear blueprint for power.

"There is no doubt that this is an excellent, groundbreaking work."--Int'l Journal of Turkish Stds

"Highly recommended."--Jrnl of Interdisciplinary History

"Highly recommended."--Journal of Interdisciplinary History

“Imaginative. . . . Phillious prose is masterful. . . . An original and substantial contribution to late Ottoman history.” Heather Ferguson - Journal Of Interdisciplinary History

and#8220;There is no doubt that this is an excellent, groundbreaking work.and#8221;

“Highly recommended.” Int'l Journal Of Turkish Stds

and#8220;Highly recommended.and#8221;

and#8220;Imaginative. . . . Philliouand#8217;s prose is masterful. . . . An original and substantial contribution to late Ottoman history.and#8221;

In Extraterritorial Dreams distinguished historian Sarah Abrevaya Stein recounts the history of Sephardic and southeastern European Jewsandrsquo; experience of WWI, especially as it concerns the dizzying shifts in legal status so many experienced as the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire retracted, new states were created in its wake, and as Ottoman-born Jews living abroad found themselves andldquo;extra-territorialandrdquo; subjectsandmdash;citizens of no polity at a time when national identity and, even more, citizenship papers, were of ever greater import to the modern world. Based upon original research conducted in dozens of archives in Great Britain, France, Portugal, Italy, Israel, Tunisia, Algeria, and the United States, this book tells the history of the First World War through the intimate stories of Sephardic Jews struggling to find a place in a world ever more divided by political boundaries and competing nationalist sentiments. Among these stories is that of a young Ottoman Jewish man who reached wartime France as a stowaway on an ocean liner, only to be hunted by the Parisian police as a suspected spy; of Sephardic and#160;Jews in Manchester whoandmdash;in order to avoid internment in enemy alien campsandmdash;pleaded with the British Foreign Office to be treated like Armenian Christians and andldquo;accidental Turksandrdquo;; of the legal complexities spawned by the death of a fantastically wealthy Baghdadi-born and#160;Jew in Shanghai who willed his fortune to his Eurasian Buddhist wife. For Stein the Great War was an essentially legal battle that pitted Ottomanness against myriad other novel legal identities. It also strives to situate the history of the First World War in a longer arc reaching from the late nineteenth century to the Second World War. It was only during this second global conflict of the twentieth century that individuals experienced the definitive impact of their First World War legal statusandmdash;for some, legal identities obtained during the Balkan Wars and First World War resulted in salvation during the Second World War;and#160; for others, it proved an unlikely conduit to Auschwitz.

Sarah Abrevaya Stein is professor of history and the Maurice Amado Chair in Sephardic Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce and Making Jews Modern: The Yiddish and Ladino Press in the Russian and Ottoman Empires, and coeditor of A Jewish Voice from Ottoman Salonica: The Ladino Memoir of Sa'adi Besalel a-Levi and Sephardi Lives: