“Emotions in the Ottoman Empire: Politics, Society and Family in the Early Modern Era,” a new book by Dr. Nil Tekgül of the Department of History, is one of the first monograph-length studies to analyze emotions in the political, social and familial ties of the early modern Ottoman society. Published by Bloomsbury Publishing, the book explores what it meant and how it felt to protect and be protected in the early modern society and how Ottoman subjects conceptualized the unequal power relations. Drawing on Ottoman primary sources, such as advice manuals, judicial court records and imperial decrees, the book claims that the contested concept of “protection” was culturally specific and historically contingent and that it stands at the center of all debates about how the Ottoman empire and society itself employed the politics of difference. The central argument of the book is that it was emotions in the early modern era that provided the meaning of the concept of “protection.”
