mirza malkum khan nazem al-dowleh, the famous iranian thinker and politician of the nineteenth century, spent about ten years in the ottoman empire during the period of tanzimat and was associated with important figures in tanzimat and the first ottoman constitutional era such as foad pasha, aali pasha and medhat pasha. later, he claimed that he had written the important tanzimats figure, foad ...

Following World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the political and population dynamics of the Middle East changed dramatically. New national borders, defined either by western mandates or by local sovereignties, included peoples and architectural legacies from a variety of religions and ethnicities. Under the unifying pressures of national ideologies, the diverse groups of the Midd...

By the end of the eighteenth century, Palestine's once busy medieval trade in medicinal substances and high standard of medical services had reached their nadir. The main reason for this was the prolonged and continuous decline of the Ottoman empire, in conjunction with serious insanitary conditions, poverty and ignorance, as well as a lack of public health facilities. In the absence of suffici...

The first man reported in the world literature exhibiting habitual quadrupedal locomotion was discovered by a British traveler and writer on the famous Bagdad road near Havsa/Samsun on the middle Black Sea coast of Turkey (Childs, 1917). The man most probably belonged to a Greek family, since the region of Havsa was populated by Greek people during the time of the Ottoman Empire. He possibly be...

This essay studies Moses Galeano, a Jewish scholar with ties to Crete and the Ottoman Sultan's court, who traveled to the Veneto around 1500. After describing Galeano's intellectual milieu, it focuses, first, on circumstantial evidence that he transmitted information central to the rise of Renaissance astronomy. Galeano knew of theories that strongly resemble portions of astronomy texts written...

As attested by diff erent sources, the period between WWI and WWII was fertile in proposals regarding science, society, and humankind all over Europe. Th e fi eld of medicine was characterized by the perception of a crisis in its theoretical and practical fundaments and the emergence of numerous movements oriented towards their reformulation. Most of them were confi ned to the realm of speciali...

This article offers a quantitative analysis of wealth inequality in the Ottoman Empire, employing data from probate inventories (terekes) of eighteenth-century Kastamonu, a town located in northern Anatolia. Extracting information on the wealth levels and personal characteristics of individuals, we estimate aggregate measures of wealth inequality, namely the Gini Coefficient, the coefficient of...

The invention of a new ICT, the printing press, may have been a fundamental turning point in knowledge transition. But did Gutenberg’s printing press succeed in Europe because of, or despite of, government intervention? To answer the question, this paper endeavours to make a comparative analysis of the role of governments in the invention, adoption and dissemination of the printing press in Eur...

More than democratic deficit, most countries of the Middle East suffer from the fundamental problem over their national identity. More than three-quarters of a century after the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire from which most of them emerged, these states have been unable to define, project, and maintain a national identity that is both inclusive and representative. None of the countries o...