This book reveals multiple aspects of life in the Ottoman palace, in both its public space and private space. It does so by exploring the Sultan Abdülhamid I Tomb in Istanbul, investigating the paths that open to us through the graves of the royalty in the mausoleum and those of the courtiers, eunuchs, concubines and female harem managers in the garden graveyard around it. The treasure of information at this graveyard allows us to piece together a wide spectrum of details that illuminate the court funerary culture of the era as we come to an understanding of the role of royal cemeteries in strengthening the bonds between the reigning House and the populace and enhancing the legitimacy of the dynasty's rule.

It introduces the tomb complex to the reader, interpreting its architecture, art and poetry, before exploring the lives and careers of 65 of the 86 people interred. It reveals intriguing stories - from that of Sultan Abdulhamid's daughter Zeyneb, born when he was a prince and raised in secrecy outside the palace until he came to the throne, to that of Prince Murad, exhumed and reburied late one night in 1812. By exploring the history revealed through these life stories, the book sheds light on Ottoman palace life and culture in an era that witnessed the most wrenching changes of modern Ottoman history seen until then - the reforms forcibly introduced by Sultan Mahmud II after 1826 - and uncovers manifestations of these changes in this graveyard.

A vigorous translation scene across the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire - government and private, official and amateur, acknowledged and anonymous - saw many texts from European languages rewritten into the multiple tongues that Ottoman subjects spoke, read and wrote. Just as lively, however, was translation amongst Ottoman languages, and between those and the languages of their neighbours to the east. This proliferation and circulation of texts in translation and adaptation, through a range of strategies, leads us to ask: What is an 'Ottoman language'?

This volume challenges earlier scholarship that has highlighted translation and adaptation from European languages to the neglect of alternative translations, re-centring translation as an Ottoman 'hub'. Collaborative work has allowed us to peer over the shoulders of working translators to ask how they creatively transported texts between as well as beyond Ottoman languages, with a range of studies stretching linguistically and geographically from Bengal to London, Istanbul to Paris, Andalusia to Bosnia.

This book narrates the rise and fall of Kurdish nobility in the Ottoman Empire from the sixteenth through to the nineteenth-century. Focusing on one noble Kurdish family based in the emirate of Palu, a fortressed town in the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire, it provides the first systematic analysis of the hereditary nobility in Kurdistan.

The book centres on the crucial moment in the 1840s during which the Ottoman state set out to abolish the hereditary privileges of the Kurdish beys, confiscating their large landholdings and setting the stage for a conflict over the fertile lands of Palu that would last nearly six decades. This tug-of-war between Armenian financiers, Armenian and Muslim sharecroppers, the Kurdish beys and the Ottoman state ended in 1895 with a series of massacres against the Armenian population of Palu. Through exhaustive archival research in an untapped body of sources, this book sheds light on the impact this conflict-filled process had on the intercommunal relations in the locality. In doing so, the author brings the voices of Armenian and Kurdish commoners to the fore and highlights the important roles that they, too, played in the local struggles and wider changes in governance.

As the first study to present the dissolution of the Kurdish nobility using a social history lens, the book gets to the heart of the historical transformations that changed Palu from a diverse and economically affluent town into an ethnoreligiously homogenised, culturally conservative and economically deprived place.

From the Muscovites' annexation of the nearby Khanate of Astrakhan in 1556 to their expulsion from the region by the Ottomans and their allies in 1605, the North Caucasus was a contested borderland. This book considers the poorly understood first encounter between the Ottoman Empire and the Tsardom of Muscovy, drawing on both documentary and narrative primary sources. These Ottoman and Muscovite sources show the contrasting subject- and territory-making strategies in the early modern period. They also show how their rivalry brought about changes to the internal dynamics and strategies of the polities within the North Caucasus, shaping the region, its political structures and the lives of its peoples in the following centuries.