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The Politics of Poor Relief in the Late Ottoman Empire 1876-19141

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 July 2015

Nadir Özbek
Nadir Özbek*
Affiliation:
History Department, State University of New York at Binghamton
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Extract

This article examines the Ottoman state's increasing involvement in caring for the poor and the needy and the emergence of modern relief institutions and hospitals throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The particular focus will be on the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II (1876-1909) and the second constitutional period (1908-14) up until World War I.

Rather than presenting the emergence of poor-relief institutions in the Ottoman Empire as a function of increasing poverty and need, or as a function of the state's desire to control and regulate the urban population for various concerns, I concentrate on the dynamics of the political sphere. I will focus particularly on the political conflict between the sultan and the new political elite, whose identity was defined in relation to newly structured state functions and services.

Type
Articles
Information
New Perspectives on Turkey , Volume 21 , Fall 1999 , pp. 1 - 33
Copyright
Copyright © New Perspectives on Turkey 1999

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Footnotes

1

I would like to thank Jean Quataert for guiding my studies in the history of poverty and politics in Europe, and for reading an earlier version of this paper. I am also grateful to Donald Quataert, Kathryn Kish Sklar, Jennifer Pierce, and Cengiz Kırlı, who have read the drafts and offered useful advice. Thanks are also due to the editors of this journal for their valuable comments.

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