At the start of a transitional 19th century, the Eastern Mediterranean became the center of emerging Great Powers’ intrigues. Bookended by the rise and fall of Napoleon and several powerful Ottoman-appointed governors (ayan)—most notably Ali Pasha of Tepelena and Muhammad Ali of Egypt—what had once been a stable arena for trade throughout the Ottoman domains turned volatile zones of temporary administration and would-be successor states. Starting with the creation of the Septinsular Republics (1800-1807) and subsequent break away of Morea/Peloponnese’s Greco-Albanian communities, a century long period of political change uprooted large polyglot, religiously diverse communities. The resulting reconfiguration of these dispersed communities took place under the administrative oversight of what I call aftermath regimes, the reactionary foreign funded operations that often is misleadingly associated with the “age of revolution.” As argued in this lecture, the temporary rise of these post-imperial governments and the ideological framing of the resulting violence signaled a key juncture in the modern state building period forever changing the Eastern Mediterranean. At the heart of these tensions were the organized, rapidly shifting, and thus often contradictory, responses by various indigenous communities who changed forever the Habsburg/Ottoman/Romanov empires.
Isa Blumi (isa.blumi@su.se) Associate Professor, Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Stockholm University. He holds a PhD in History and Middle Eastern/Islamic Studies from New York University (NYU-2005) and a Master of Political Science and Historical Studies (1995) from The New School for Social Research, New York. Author of seven monographs, he researches societies in the throes of social, economic, and political transformation. He compares how Austro-Hungarian, Russian, Italian, British, Dutch, Spanish, and French imperialist projects in the Islamic world intersected with, and were thus informed by, events within the Ottoman Empire. His latest work covers the late Ottoman period and successor regimes, arguing that events in the Balkans and Middle East are the engines of change in the larger world. This in turn informs the story of the Atlantic world, especially the emergence of modern European imperialism and the Americas.
Comissão Organizadora
Pablo Sánchez León (CHAM)
Organização
CHAM / NOVA FCSH — Linha temática Teoria e Metodologia
Instituto de História Contemporânea (IHC)
IN2PAST, o Laboratório Associado para a Investigação e Inovação em Património, Artes, Sustentabilidade e Território
