The aim of the project is to explore the dynamics of rural-urban relations in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman empire in the period between 1750 and 1850 from the perspective of the “rural”. The period usually counts as a time of profound transformation, in the form of both momentous change and long-term developments, in an increasingly globalized world. This study regards the disparities characteristic of this process and puts the primary focus on the rural side. It aims at developing a new perspective of how to understand the multi-scalar, multi-layered and uneven processes related to the phenomenon of “urbanisation” which is understood here in a two-fold way. The concept refers to the often uneven and non-linear growth of towns and cities in terms of inhabitants and built-up space, and the ways it was organised, as well as to new urban life-styles and the development of norms and values related to the new political and social actor gradually taking the shape of the “citizen”.
The project wants to bring to light how rural societies participated in these processes. The dynamic and co-constitutive relationship between the rural and the urban as well as the diversity of rural spaces is a given that guides our work. Accentuating the agency of people of a rural background in terms of economic activities, but also in politics, administration and the military as well as in the cultural and religious life of the time, the project asks for the actors of change, their settings and impact, but also for those who resisted these changes. By advocating a bottom-up perspective of the transitions on the economic, social, political and cultural level, we challenge the exclusive focus on urban societies that prevails in much of the scholarly literature pertaining to the history of the Middle East.
The project starts with developing a more comprehensive framework of how to apply such questionings to Middle Eastern societies in the transition period from the early modern to the modern. To test the applicability of such a model, it will proceed with a narrowly circumscribed comparative study of two select cases, before formulating the goals of a more comprehensive research programme. Case studies will be chosen to highlight the diversity of rural communities, but also take into account the possibilities of interdisciplinary cooperation and the availability of source material, including various kinds of both textual (literary and archival) and material sources (archaeological finds, environmental data).