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SoSe 21: Beyond the Gunpowder Empires: A Survey of Current Approaches to the History of the Early Modern Near East

Theodore S. Beers

Kommentar

In every region of the world, the early modern period (ca. 1500–1800 CE) brought a set of historical transformations whose magnitude is difficult to fathom, even for specialists. Many of the novel developments of this era, in fact, were global in their impact, in ways that would not have been possible before. The Cape of Good Hope was circumnavigated; the seaborne empires of the Portuguese, Dutch, and British were built; the New World was brought forcibly into contact with the Old. The printing press exploded in popularity (and was introduced to India by the 1550s); mastery of gunpowder weapons became a prerequisite for defending a polity of any significance; and many of the practices that we associate with modern banking emerged. The list goes on, seemingly without end. With regard to the Islamicate world, the history of the early modern period has often been studied under the rubric of the rise and fall of what Marshall Hodgson termed the “gunpowder empires”: the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals. Learning about these states and the societies that underlay them imparts, on the one hand, a sense of multiple enormous paradigm shifts relative to prior eras; and, on the other hand, an appreciation for the decisive importance of the early modern transformations in setting the stage for the conflicts—military, economic, religious, intellectual, etc.—that would define the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. (To take a single example, it was only under the Safavids that Iran became a predominantly Shi‘i country—a shift whose ramifications continue to be felt.) The study of the early modern Near East has, understandably, given rise to a number of thriving scholarly fields. Researchers have pushed beyond traditional historiographical models and developed new approaches, often drawing on multiple disciplines. This seminar can do little more than scratch the surface of a large and constantly growing body of scholarship; but the goal is to provide students with an introductory survey. We will review several topics of active debate in Safavid, Ottoman, and (to a lesser extent) Mughal history. The material will be organized thematically, with, for example, one unit focusing on the encounter between Europe and the Near East as reflected in travel writing, and another that examines the phenomenon of Persian literary cosmopolitanism from the Danube to the Deccan. This is designed to give students the opportunity both to build a foundation of understanding of the early modern period, and to become familiar with the kinds of scholarship that have driven the conversation in recent years (albeit mostly in English). Schließen