Animal in Ottoman Egypt

"Since humans first emerged as a distinct species, they have been locked into relationships with other animals. Humans ate, fought, prayed, and moved with animals. In this original and conceptually rich book, historian Alan Mikhail puts the history of human-animal relations at the center of the transformations of the Ottoman Empire from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. He uses the history of the empire's most important province, Egypt, to explain how human interactions with livestock, dogs, and charismatic megafauna changed more in a few centuries than they had for millennia. The human world became one in which animals' social and economic functions were diminished. Without animals, humans had to remake the societies they had built around the intimate and cooperative interactions between species. The political and even evolutionary consequences of this separation of people and animals were wrenching and often violent. In tracing these interspecies histories, this book offers a bold program for Ottoman historians--highlighting a new capacious periodization of the empire's history, integrating environmental history and other methodologies, and opening up archives in close to a dozen countries. The wide-ranging and creative analyses on offer also push far beyond Ottoman history to engage issues in animal studies, economic history, early modern history, and environmental history. Carefully crafted and compellingly argued, The Animal in Ottoman Egypt tells the story of the high price humansand animals paid as they entered the modern world"--

Product details

• Authors: Alan Mikhail, Alan (Professor of History Mikhail, Mikhail Alan
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 30.01.2014
• EAN: 9780199315277
• ISBN: 978-0-19-931527-7
• No. of pages: 336
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > History > Regional and national histories; Non-fiction book > History > Miscellaneous; Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900, SOCIAL SCIENCE / General, Ottoman Empire, Egypt, HISTORY / Africa / North, HISTORY / Middle East / Turkey & Ottoman Empire, 19th century, c 1800 to c 1899, 18th century, c 1700 to c 1799, Animals & society, 17th century, c 1600 to c 1699, Middle Eastern history, African History, Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700, Animals and society, 16th century, c 1500 to c 1599, Modern Period, C 1500 Onwards, African history: pre-colonial period, HISTORY / Middle East / Egypt