This chapter makes four historical interventions. First, It argues that the relief program of the Ottoman central state during the continuum of crisis aimed to maintain agriculture, cities, and the army, but not pastoralists. Although pastoralists lost millions of herd animals, their source of food, financial capital, and sociopolitical power, available historical documents indicate that the Hamidian government did not distribute grain or flocks to pastoralists, and neither did they lend money to rebuild their herds, as they did for peasants. It is unclear whether this was a deliberate policy of the state in order to turn pastoralists into taxable agriculturalists. What is clear is that the traditional Ottoman famine relief policies contributed to mounting ecological and economic disequilibrium between peasants and pastoralists in times of crises and to irreversibly expanding this imbalance in the political ecology of Kurdistan in the post-crises period by triggering displacement, migration, and proletarianization among pastoralist communities.

This chapter engages with Antioch’s church, highlighting pastoral figures and their role in leading the local community.

Chapter 8 continues this discussion, noting that Moses and Elijah are both held in honour by Jews, Christians and Muslims, as is Jesus by Christians and Muslims (following Christian scholars such as David Thomas). Although there are important and abiding doctrinal differences between these Abrahamic Faiths, particularly about the status of Jesus and Mohammed, this chapter argues that there are crucial ethical commonalities that could and should help to move the world beyond religiously inspired violence. The chapter ends with an extended discussion of Raimon Panikkar’s inspiring vision of the Cosmic Christ in his collected works Omnia Opera.

Research has proliferated on several topics that have invited new methodological approaches: the rural setting, gendered relations between men and women, communal status of minorities (Christians and Jews), and religious diversity among Muslims, in particular among those who identified as Sufi mystics. New sources and revisionist interpretations of them continue to transform the field of Mamluk Studies. Yet in many instances, findings on these subjects are confined to discoveries of information on discrete conditions or isolated events that do not lend themselves to comprehensive analysis. They often depend on a single source or fragmentary data set, and require imaginative speculation to formulate hypotheses that apply to questions about their broader contexts in society. The chapter will outline the state of research on these subjects and their potential to open new lines of inquiry by highlighting examples that have influenced revisionist interpretations.

The Merchant of Venice establishes a connection between racial and religious identity, between outside (body features) and inside (blood and faith), through examining Jessica’s relationship to her father Shylock; the play interrogates the extent to which father and daughter share the same flesh and blood. Two distinct but interrelated understandings of race in the early modern period emerge in the play: race as marked by bodily features and behaviors, and race as defined through the blood that connects individuals to a line of descent. Through alluding to religious teachings and discourses that pointed to bodily and genealogical differences between Jews (and black Africans) and white Christians, The Merchant of Venice racializes religious identity, asserting that both racial and religious identity are inherited from one’s ancestors, passed from parents to children through sexual reproduction, and express themselves on the body and through the body’s behaviors.

The stereotype of the ‘terrible Turk’ has long existed alongside the romantic view of a multicultural, cosmopolitan Ottoman Empire. Assertions of Ottoman ‘tolerance’ have been very enduring even in the academic literature. In recent decades Ottoman historians have worked hard to historicise both violence and more peaceful relations, between both state and society and within society itself. Tolerance is now better understood as a strategy of rule rather than a value in and of itself. In addition, this was a far-flung empire that lasted for over 600 years, and no one model can hold for all places and all times within the sultan’s domains. Beginning with the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans in the fourteenth century, this chapter considers not only more familiar topics, such as non-Muslim conversion to Islam, but also highlights the fact that most religious persecution in the empire, when it occurred, was directed at non-conforming Muslims, however defined. The rise of the Shi’a Safavid Empire in the east and the ruling elite’s close relationship to Sufi Islam were both major sources of tension and, at times, outright violence. At the same time, communal elites usually shared a strong interest in the maintenance of religious boundaries; this attitude contributed to social peace.

The early modern period, 1500–1800, was one of the most volatile periods of Vietnam’s long history. It saw three dynastic transitions, the separation of the nation into two autonomous realms beginning in the early seventeenth century, and a succession of popular rebellions that dominated the historical landscape of the eighteenth century. The contours of these upheavals were driven variously by internal political tensions, the expansion of Vietnamese state authority into new regions, questions of dynastic legitimacy, and, ultimately, economic hardships caused in part by a collapse of foreign trade and currency fluctuations. Violent rebellions were a prominent feature of these events, some driven by inter-family rivalries among elites, others sparked from among rural populations in protest at economic woes. The effects of all of these challenges to state authority were profound. Large-scale dislocation of populations was a prominent element, as was forced military and labour service that only caused further discontent among peasant farmers. This chapter traces these events chronologically within a larger analytical framework that contextualises upheaval in terms of large-scale political, economic and sociological phenomena.