Nora Lafi is a French historian of Algerian origin, born in 1965 in Istres, near Marseilles. She is currently a researcher with the Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) in Berlin. She is a specialist of the history of the Ottoman Empire and specifically of Arab towns of North Africa and the Middle-East during the Ottoman period. She chairs, with Ulrike Freitag, the research field "Cities compared: cosmopolitanism in the Mediterranean and beyond", part of the EUME programme at Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin. She is co-founder and editor of H-Mediterranean (H-Net, Michigan State University). Nora Lafi is a significant expert in the following fields: History of the Ottoman Empire History of Libya, Tunisia and Algeria The notion of old regime Comparative history Urban Studies Middle-East.
Monographies
Esprit civique et organisation citadine dans l'empire ottoman, Leiden, Brill, 2018, 360p.
Une ville du Maghreb entre ancien régime et réformes ottomanes. Tripoli 1795-1911, Paris, 2002
Edited and Co-Edited Books
Understanding the City through its Margins, Abingdon, Routledge, 2017, 190p. (Ed. with U. Freitag and A. Chappatte)
Urban Violence in the Middle East, Oxford, Berghahn, 2015, 334p. (Ed. with U. Freitag, N. Fuccaro, C. Ghrawi)
Urban Governance Under the Ottomans, Abingdon, Routledge, 2014, 238p. (Ed. with U. Freitag)
The City in the Ottoman Empire, Abingdon, Routledge, 2010, 288p. (Ed. with U. Freitag, M. Fuhrmann, F. Riedler)
Municipalités Méditerranéennes, Berlin, K. Schwarz, 2005, 370p.
The history of the Mediterranean region and of the cultures and people of the Mediterranean Basin is important for understanding the origin and development of the Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Canaanite, Phoenician, Hebrew, Carthaginian, Minoan, Greek, Persian, Illyrian, Thracian, Etruscan, Iberian, Roman, Byzantine, Bulgarian, Arab, Berber, Ottoman, Christian and Islamic cultures. The Mediterranean Sea was the central superhighway of transport, trade and cultural exchange between diverse peoples encompassing three continents: Western Asia, North Africa, and Southern Europe.
The Ottoman Empire was an empire that controlled much of Southeast Europe, Western Asia, and Northern Africa between the 14th and early 20th centuries. It was founded at the end of the 13th century in northwestern Anatolia in the town of Söğüt by the Turkoman tribal leader Osman I. After 1354, the Ottomans crossed into Europe and, with the conquest of the Balkans, the Ottoman beylik was transformed into a transcontinental empire. The Ottomans ended the Byzantine Empire with the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 by Mehmed the Conqueror.
Tripoli is the capital and largest city of Libya, with a population of about 1.1 million people in 2019. It is located in the northwest of Libya on the edge of the desert, on a point of rocky land projecting into the Mediterranean Sea and forming a bay. It includes the port of Tripoli and the country's largest commercial and manufacturing center. It is also the site of the University of Tripoli. The vast Bab al-Azizia barracks, which includes the former family estate of Muammar Gaddafi, is also located in the city. Colonel Gaddafi largely ruled the country from his residence in this barracks.
The present day Republic of Tunisia, al-Jumhuriyyah at-Tunisiyyah, is situated in Northern Africa. Geographically situated between Libya to the east, Algeria to the west and the Mediterranean Sea to the north. Tunis is the capital and the largest city ; it is near the ancient site of the city of Carthage.
The Tanzimat was a period of reform in the Ottoman Empire that began with the Gülhane Hatt-ı Şerif in 1839 and ended with the First Constitutional Era in 1876.
Home to one of the Cradles of Civilization, the Middle East—interchangeable with the Near East—has seen many of the world's oldest cultures and civilizations. This history started from the earliest human settlements, continuing through several major pre- and post-Islamic Empires through to the nation-states of the Middle East today.
The terms Barbary Coast, Barbary, Berbery or Berber Coast were used in English-language sources from the 16th century to the early 19th to refer to the coastal regions of North Africa or Maghreb, specifically the Ottoman borderlands consisting of the regencies in Algiers and Tripoli, as well as the Beylik of Tunis and the Sultanate of Morocco. The term originates from the name of the Berbers.
The Barbary pirates, or Barbary corsairs or Ottoman corsairs, were Muslim pirates and privateers who operated from North Africa, based primarily in the ports of Salé, Rabat, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli. This area was known in Europe as the Barbary Coast, in reference to the Berbers. Their predation extended throughout the Mediterranean, south along West Africa's Atlantic seaboard and into the North Atlantic as far north as Iceland, but they primarily operated in the western Mediterranean. In addition to seizing merchant ships, they engaged in Razzias, raids on European coastal towns and villages, mainly in Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal, but also in the British Isles, the Netherlands, and Iceland. The main purpose of their attacks was to capture slaves for the Ottoman slave trade as well as the general Arab slavery market in North Africa and the Middle East. Slaves in Barbary could be of many ethnicities, and of many different religions, such as Christian, Jewish, or Muslim.
The Turkish people, or simply the Turks, are the world's largest Turkic ethnic group; they speak various dialects of the Turkish language and form a majority in Turkey and Northern Cyprus. In addition, centuries-old ethnic Turkish communities still live across other former territories of the Ottoman Empire. The ethnic Turks can therefore be distinguished by a number of cultural and regional variants, but do not function as separate ethnic groups. In particular, the culture of the Anatolian Turks in Asia Minor underlies the Turkish nationalist ideology. Other Turkish groups include the Rumelian Turks historically in the Balkans, today mostly living in Turkey; Turkish Cypriots on the island of Cyprus, Meskhetian Turks originally based in Meskheti, Georgia; and ethnic Turkish people across the Middle East, where they are also called "Turkmen" or "Turkoman" in the Levant. Consequently, the Turks form the largest minority group in Bulgaria, the second largest minority group in Iraq, Libya, North Macedonia, and Syria, and the third largest minority group in Kosovo. They also form substantial communities in the Western Thrace region of Greece, the Dobruja region of Romania, the Akkar region in Lebanon, as well as minority groups in other post-Ottoman Balkan and Middle Eastern countries. Mass immigration due to fleeing ethnic cleansing after the persecution of Muslims during Ottoman contraction has led to mass migrations from the 19th century onward; these Turkish communities have all contributed to the formation of a Turkish diaspora outside the former Ottoman lands. Approximately 2 million Turks were massacred between 1870–1923 and those who escaped it settled in Turkey as muhacirs. The mass immigration of Turks also led to them forming the largest ethnic minority group in Austria, Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands. There are also Turkish communities in other parts of Europe as well as in North America, Australia and the Post-Soviet states. Turks are the 13th largest ethnic group in the world.
The history of the Ottoman Empire in the 18th century has classically been described as one of stagnation and reform. In analogy with 18th-century France, it is also known as the Ancien Régime or Old Regime, contrasting with the "New Regime" of the Nizam-i Cedid and Tanzimat in the 19th century.
The Regency of Algiers was a state in North Africa lasting from 1516 to 1830, until it was conquered by the French. Situated between the regency of Tunis in the east, the Sultanate of Morocco in the west and Tuat as well as the country south of In Salah in the south, the Regency originally extended its borders from La Calle in the east to Trara in the west and from Algiers to Biskra, and afterwards spread to the present eastern and western borders of Algeria.
Ahmed or AhmadKaramanli or Qaramanli or al-Qaramanli, (1686–1745) was of Janissary origin and a Member from the Karamanids. He founded the Karamanli dynasty (1711–1835) of Tripolitania or Tripoli. He reigned (1711–1745), as the first Karamanli Pasha of Tripolitania.
Nelida Fuccaro, Ph.D., is a historian and professor of modern Middle Eastern history at the New York University Abu Dhabi.
Suraiya Faroqhi, is a German scholar, Ottoman historian and a leading authority on Ottoman history.
The following is a timeline of the history of the city of Algiers, Algeria.
The following is a timeline of the history of the city of Aleppo, Syria.
Ottoman Tunisia, refers to the episode of the Turkish presence in Ifriqiya during the course of three centuries from the 16th century until the 18th century, when Tunis was officially integrated into the Ottoman Empire as the Eyalet of Tunis. Eventually including all of the Maghrib except Morocco, the Ottoman Empire began with the takeover of Algiers in 1516 by the Ottoman Turkish corsair and beylerbey Oruç Reis. The first Ottoman conquest of Tunis took place in 1534 under the command of Barbarossa Hayreddin Pasha, the younger brother of Oruç Reis, who was the Kapudan Pasha of the Ottoman Fleet during the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent. However, it wasn't until the final Ottoman reconquest of Tunis from Spain in 1574 under Kapudan Pasha Uluç Ali Reis that the Turks permanently acquired the former Hafsid Tunisia, retaining it until the French occupation of Tunisia in 1881.
On 15 June 1858, 21 Christian residents of Jeddah, which was then an Ottoman town of 5,000 predominantly Muslim inhabitants, were massacred, including the French consul M. Eveillard and his wife, and the British vice-consul Stephen Page, by "some hundreds of Hadramites, inhabitants of Southern Arabia". 24 others, mostly Greeks, some "under British protection" plus the daughter of the French consul Elise Eveillard and the French interpreter M. Emerat, both badly wounded, escaped and took refuge, some by swimming to it, in the steam paddle wheel frigate HMS Cyclops.
The Ottoman Decline Thesis or Ottoman Decline Paradigm is an obsolete historical narrative which once played a dominant role in the study of the history of the Ottoman Empire. According to the decline thesis, following a golden age associated with the reign of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, the empire gradually entered into a period of all-encompassing stagnation and decline from which it was never able to recover, lasting until the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in 1923. This thesis was used throughout most of the twentieth century as the basis of both Western and Republican Turkish understanding of Ottoman history. However, by 1978, historians had begun to reexamine the fundamental assumptions of the decline thesis.
Isa Blumi is a historian. He is a senior lecturer and associate professor of Turkish Studies at Stockholm University Institute for Turkish Studies in Sweden.