tajine

with Jessica Marglin

hosted by Brittany White

| In 1873, Nissim Shamama died suddenly at his palazzo in Livorno. He was quietly one of the richest men in the Mediterranean. A Tunisian Jew born in the Ottoman Empire, Shamama had taken his place among the mercantile elite of a newly-unified Italy. He was a man who belonged to many places. But to whom would his vast inheritance belong? Our guest Jessica Marglin has published an award-winning book, The Shamama Case, that marshals an impressive array of archival sources to investigate how this question was resolved. As she demonstrates, the decade-long legal dispute over Shamama's estate was an international affair involving Tunisian officials, rabbis from throughout the Mediterranean, and some of Italy's foremost legal minds. In this conversation, we talk to Marglin about some of the highlights of the Shamama case, what it taught her about the history of citizenship and nationality in the 19th century Mediterranean, and the power of microhistory for disrupting conventional framings of the period.

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with Justin Stearns

hosted by Shireen Hamza and Taylor Moore

| When you think of the history of science, what people and places come to mind? Scientific knowledge production flourished in early modern Morocco, and not in the places you might expect. This episode transports us into the intellectual and social worlds of Sufi lodges (zawāya) in seventeenth-century Morocco. Our guest, Justin Stearns, guides us through scholarly and educational landscapes far removed from the imperial urban centers of Fez and Marrakech. We discuss his new book, Revealed Sciences, which examines the development of the natural sciences through close study of works produced by rural Sufi scholars. Challenging the idea that the early modern period was one of intellectual decline, Stearns reveals the vibrant multi-ethnic, intellectual networks of the early modern Maghreb and the implications of their story for the history of science and the writing of history. We speak about paper mâché astrolabes, Borgesian fantasies, resisting the lure of triumphant narratives, and the importance of failure for creativity and innovation.

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Episode 452

with William Granara

hosted by Chris Gratien

During the 9th century, Arab armies from North Africa conquered Sicily, leading to four centuries of Muslim history on the island, which is now part of Italy. Sicily during that period has often been portrayed as an interfaith utopia where Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived side by side, giving rise to a cultural synthesis, but as our guest William Granara explains, the reality was more complex. In this conversation with Granara, author of Narrating Muslim Sicily, we explore the history of Muslim societies in Sicily, grappling with questions of representation and reality as well as conflict and coexistence. We also discuss what this history means today centuries after the departure of Sicily's last Muslims, as a new wave of Muslim migration arrives on the island.

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Episode 446

featuring Emrah Safa Gürkan, Joshua White, and Daniel Hershenzon

narrated by Chris Gratien

with contributions by Nir Shafir, Taylor Moore, Susanna Ferguson, and Zoe Griffith

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Piracy is often depicted as a facet of the wild, lawless expanses of the high seas. But in this episode, we explore the order that governed piracy, captivity, and ransom in the early modern Mediterranean and in turn, how these practices shaped early modern politics, Mediterranean connections, and the emergent notions of international law. Emrah Safa Gürkan talks about Ottoman corsairs and the practicalities of piracy in the early modern Mediterranean. Joshua White discusses facets of Islamic law and gender in the realm of piracy. And Daniel Hershenzon explores the paradoxical connections forged by slavery, captivity, and ransom on both sides of the Mediterranean. 

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Episode 409

with Jennifer Sessions

hosted by Chris Gratien

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In 1827, Hussein Dey, the Ottoman governor of Algiers, hit a French consul on the nose with a fly whisk during a dispute over unpaid French debts. And as the story goes, the rest is history. France soon invaded Algeria and stayed for over 130 years. But as our guest in this episode Jennifer Sessions explains, France's decision to invade and colonize Algeria beginning in 1830 was far less arbitrary and far more intertwined with domestic French politics than lore would have it. And while the invasion was partially about political divisions in France, even as French politics transformed French colonization in Algeria became a national consensus over the course of the 19th century. In this episode, we examine the importance of the early decades of French colonialism in Algeria for understanding what followed, and we consider the legacy of French colonialism in Algeria for France and Algeria today.

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Episode 388

with Karim Bejjit

hosted by Graham Cornwell

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Tangier is in the midst of a massive renovation and expansion -- a new ferry and cruise port, a duty-free zone, and the massive Tangier Med shipping facility all meant to make the city and Morocco into a critical juncture of the global flows of goods, people, services, and capital. Of course, Tangier’s proximity to Europe and position astride the Strait of Gibraltar has long provided it with a cosmopolitan, international character, typified by the International Zone days during European colonial rule of Morocco in the first half of the twentieth century. But Tangier’s polyglot, imperial past goes back much further. In this episode, we turn to one of those more distant episodes: the English occupation of Tangier from 1661 to 1684. It was a brief interlude: control of the city itself was part of Catherine of Braganza’s dowry to King Charles II, but English forces quickly found the situation (under intermittent but heavy resistance from local Moroccan tribes) unsustainable. The period produced some interesting characters on both sides--Samuel Pepys, for one, was a resident--but has generally been overlooked by scholars in favor of the Portuguese imperial enclaves on the Atlantic coast. What made English Tangier unique? Why did it fail, and how did the experience shape Moroccan-English relations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries?

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Episode 362

with M’hamed Oualdi & Hayri Gökşin Özkoray

hosted by Andreas Guidi

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Our latest podcast in collaboration with The Southeast Passage examines how slavery flourished in the Ottoman Mediterranean in the wake of growing connectivity with other world regions and territorial expansion. The discussion draws out the ambiguity between slavery and servitude in the case of the Mamluks of the Tunisian Beylik during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Which economic processes, legal interpretations, and geographic routes impacted the evolution of the slave trade from the sixteenth century until its abolition? What are the possibilities for and problems in retracing the self-narratives of those directly involved in the slave trade?

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Episode 351

with Seth Kimmel

hosted by Nir Shafir

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In 1609 the Moriscos were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula, marking the end of a hundred year effort to assimilate as New Christians these former Muslims. In this podcast, Seth Kimmel speaks to us about the impact of these conversions and expulsions on Iberian intellectual history. We discuss how Spanish officials and scholars attempted to force Moriscos to abandon practices like speaking Arabic and going to the bathhouse. In the process, each of these groups had to define the line between religion and culture, not only for Islam but also for Christianity. At the same time, the need to explain the failure of Morisco integration required new techniques of narration, source usage, and philological expertise. Taken together, these are unexpected intellectual and religious developments from a tragic chapter of history.

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Episode 343

with Taieb Belghazi & Abdelhay Moudden

hosted by Graham Cornwell

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How do we assess fizzling protest movements? How do social scientists account for difficult-to-quantify facets of political engagement like emotion and momentum? In this episode, we discuss ihbat, or disillusionment, in the failures of Morocco’s February 20th movement. Part of the Arab Spring movements across the region, the coalition of groups that comprised February 20th rather quickly ground to a halt a few months later. In a major speech in March 2011, King Mohammed VI pledged major reforms, a new constitution, and a new election. In July of that year, Moroccans voted overwhelmingly in favor of stability and “consultation” and approved the new constitution. The euphoria of the early days of the movement subsided and gave way to feelings of ihbat. But disillusionment, as we discuss here, is not as one-dimensional nor permanent as one might think. Taieb Belghazi and Abdelhay Moudden point towards a possible new direction in political science research that uses literary and artistic sources to get at the emotional aspect of political engagement and organization.

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Episode 302

avec Pierre Daum

animée par Dorothée Myriam Kellou et Aurélie Perrier

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Depuis la fin de la guerre d’indépendance, la question des harkis agite les consciences en France comme en Algérie. Pierre Daum, journaliste au Monde Diplomatique et auteur du livre Le dernier tabou : les « harkis » restés en Algérie après l’indépendance, est parti à la rencontre de ces supplétifs de l’armée française et de leurs descendants. Dans cet épisode, il explore avec nous les non-dits et tabous qui entourent cette question : qui sont ces plus de 400,000 Algériens, qui à un moment ou un autre entre 1954 et 1962, se sont engagés aux côtés de la France? Quelles étaient leurs motivations, et quel fut leur sort suite à l’indépendance de 1962? Au fil de la discussion, Pierre Daum bat en brèche un certain nombre d’idées reçues sur les harkis et explore leur signification dans l’imaginaire français et algérien.

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