Imperial Interventions in Daily Life: The Eastern Mediterranean under Early Ottoman Rule

The following article considers the imperial as experienced through the daily lives of peasants in southern Syria during the early Ottoman period. Control of critical resources was a flashpoint in the relationship between the state and village communities; thus, it is through the lens of land use th...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Historical archaeology 2023-12, Vol.57 (4), p.1177-1194
Main Author: Walker, Bethany J.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Archaeology
Original Article
Social Sciences
Citations: Items that this one cites
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:The following article considers the imperial as experienced through the daily lives of peasants in southern Syria during the early Ottoman period. Control of critical resources was a flashpoint in the relationship between the state and village communities; thus, it is through the lens of land use that peasant dependency and agency in the face of the Ottoman state can be best evaluated. Two archaeological sites in Jordan and Israel provide data for detailed investigation of patterns noted in the scholarly literature. After a critical assessment of the contributions of archaeology to the large field of (overwhelmingly text-dominated) Ottoman studies, I turn to three areas of peasants’ lives that reflected, to different degrees, encounters with the imperial: land tenure and land use, household consumption, and material culture.
ISSN:0440-9213
2328-1103
DOI:10.1007/s41636-023-00442-y