Beshara B. Doumani. Family Life in the Ottoman Mediterranean: A Social History

Year 2019, Volume: 24 Issue: 46, 0 - 0, 01.08.2019

Şeyma Nur Temel

https://doi.org/10.20519/divan.614181

Abstract

Beshara Doumani’s book deals with the family dynamics in the Ottoman

Arab lands before the Western hegemony ruled over there, focusing on

“three of the areas usually ignored in the scholarship: provincial regions,

the middle centuries of the Ottoman rule, and middling propertied urban

groups.” (p. 39) Challenging “big isms” such as Orientalism or Islamism,

he aims at historicizing family in Nablus and Tripoli in order to offer a new

and better frame for family, gender and property of this time and freeing

them from stereotypes. The relatively large time period of this study is two

centuries spanning from 1660 to 1860 on the ground that “family life is

best measured by generations, not decades.” (p. 40) The author primarily

relies on the Ottoman court records and utilizes stories of people derived

from these records as the skeleton of the chapters. To him, these registers

create a “communal textual memory,” therefore worthy of attention of not

only legalists, but also of social historians to delve into daily life of ordinary

individuals.

Keywords

Ottoman History, Mediterranean Social History

References

• Beshara B. Doumani. Family Life in the Ottoman Mediterranean: A Social History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.