Gypsies In The Ottoman Empire PDF Download

This dissertation explores the position of Gypsies in the sixteenth century Ottoman Empire in an engagement with the formidable material, historiographical and conceptual challenges that this venture entails. These challenges stem from the limitations of the sources on Gypsies, the variety of narratives produced in contemporary scholarship on the history of Gypsies and deployment of contested concepts such as "marginality," "ethnicity" and "race" with almost no problematization, contextualization and historicization. Chapter one discusses theoretical and conceptual challenges through looking at various studies on those positioned on the margins, chapter two deals with the material challenges and introduces the historical sources and their limitations. Here I pay particular attention on the court records and how they have been used in Ottoman historiography up until now, as the court records of Üsküdar extending from 1530-1585 constitute the backbone of this dissertation. Following this methodological overview of the sources, Chapter three and four are a macro analysis of Ottoman social and moral landscapes. Here an attempt is made to position Gypsies within this contested landscape. Then the thesis takes a rather micro turn, though it should not be considered as a micro-history. In chapter five, Üsküdar's local court and its records are introduced as well as some of the problems encountered in studying Gypsies through the prism of these court records. Chapter six is where my argument comes together and binds the various parts of the dissertation. Reading the court records in communication with the kanunnames, mühimme registers and published research on the tahrir registers, it is an attempt to demonstrate hybridity and diversity within the community of Gypsies. After demonstrating this diversity within the category 'Gypsy', chapter seven attempts to analyze how the Ottoman Imperial state appropriated what I call a "community in motion" at various levels into its ...