This is a paper tracing the history of an ideology, in the classical Marxist sense of the term: a framework of thought which purports to make sense of reality but which in fact masks its real dynamics, and which is developed in the service of class interest (Marx, 1970). The ideology in question here has to do with the ways in which social scientists conceptualize and analyse the dynamics of those societies usually described as the Third World. In recent years, following the failure of functionalism and such developmentalist schemas as Rostow's stages of economic growth, there has begun to emerge an interest in thinking about Third World societies in terms of social and cultural pluralism. It is this framework of thought which is to be examined here.

During the final centuries of Byzantine rule, the city of Constantinople, unable to recover completely from the effects of the Fourth Crusade (1204) and continuously challenged from two directions by the western world and the Ottomans, could no longer live up to its former glory and reputation as the magnificent capital of a powerful empire. Yet, surprisingly, the critical circumstances of the late Byzantine period that negatively affected almost every aspect of life in the city did not affect its commercial function to the same extent. Hence, despite persistent political, social, economic, and demographic problems during the last fifty years preceding the Ottoman conquest, Constantinople still continued to function as a lively commercial center where Byzantine merchants operated side by side with foreigners, including Italians, Catalans, Ragusans, Ottomans, and others. But the most active group of foreign merchants operating in Constantinople were the Italians, particularly the Venetians and the Genoese, who had established more or less autonomous trade colonies in the city and enjoyed commercial privileges (most importantly exemptions from customs duties) since the eleventh-twelfth centuries. Amplified and made more extensive during the Palaiologan period (1261-1453), these privileges pushed the native merchants of the Byzantine capital into a clearly disadvantaged position vis-à-vis their foreign competitors.

Until recently, much of the discussion on globalization has been focused on trans- or supra-local forces at work, with relatively little attention paid to questions of locality—that is, people and groups situated in networks of social relations in a specific time and place. In most analyses, ‘the local’ was conceived in highly abstract and general terms, as the presumed site of reaction, resistance and opposition to the homogenizing forces of globalization. Today, mechanistic interpretations of globalization as an outside threat that engenders ‘local reactions’ has come under increasing criticism. The need to examine the specific socio-economic and cultural-ideological configurations, within which global flows are accommodated, in order to understand how people negotiate meaningful lives amidst changing power relations, has become apparent. The present study is an effort in this direction.

Turkey has adopted a new course in foreign policy toward Eurasia. This article employs the notion of geographic imagination to analyze how Turkish policy-makers have developed a new political rhetoric and foreign policy towards the Eurasian region, specifically Central Asia, the Caucasus and Russia. Turkish policy-makers aim to further Turkey's interests ranging from security, over regional trade, to energy issues in this geography, in addition to creating an environment of cooperation and eliminating regional power constellations. We conclude that Turkey's renewed activism has opened new horizons for its relations in this region and that this new foreign policy orientation is linked to reform and change in Turkey's domestic landscape.

Migration has been among the most decisive influences shaping contemporary German society, deeply influencing not only economics and demography but also societal discourse and political practice. Legal issues concerning foreigners and immigration have been hotly debated in German society and have played a central role in many elections at both federal and provincial levels. Recognition is an issue at the heart of these concerns. How are migrants viewed in Germany, as “immigrants” or as “foreigners”? As individuals who form a legitimate part of German society, or who have overstayed their temporary “invitation”? Who contribute to the economy and to public welfare, and or who live at the expense of German society? Who are essentially alien to German society and can at best achieve a liminal state of betweenness, or who actively and self-consciously assume a diversity of positions at all levels of society?

In the present paper, we deal with traders who crossed the border between the Ottoman Empire and Iran during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. These merchants are at once a topic of much scholarly debate and virtually unknown. Little trace has survived of their everyday activities, but they are repeatedly mentioned in Niels Steensgaard's well-known work on pedlars and European companies, in which he has analyzed the activities of merchants who confronted two great “protection-producing” and “redistributive” empires, namely the Ottoman and the Safavid, and who also needed to cope with competition from the European regulated companies (Steensgaard, 1974, pp. 22-59). Larger capital resources, advance knowledge of markets, and a commercial organization which enabled traders to take advantage of seasonally low prices were the companies’ advantages, while peddling merchants had but limited resources and were therefore vulnerable.

Women figure centrally in representations of modernity and of nations. This has caught the attention of researchers both in the West and in the context of “Third World” nationalisms. Yuval-Davis states: ”[I]t is women –not just (?) the bureaucracy and intelligentsia—who reproduce nations, biologically, culturally and symbolically” (1997, p. 2). However, an analysis of “women” as the subjects of the nation differs from a perspective that dwells on the representations of women produced by a (mostly) male elite. Jordanova argues that the Enlightenment in the West was a set of mental and practical activities of the male elite “who gained influence because of their ideas and ‘knowledge’” (1995, p. 64), and whose concern was “to establish the validity of their vision of the world” (p. 64). She shows convincingly that these activities were “sexual” in nature.

In this paper I will construct separate time series for the wage levels of agricultural and unskilled (and non-factory) urban workers in nineteenth-century Ottoman Anatolia. An earlier study (Boratav et al. 1985) was able to construct an annual time series for urban wage levels by utilising a weighted average of the wages of skilled and unskilled laborers in towns and cities. Production of a time series for agricultural wages, on the other hand, is important for seeing the wage variations in rural and urban areas in the nineteenth-century Anatolian context and is crucial for understanding the peculiarities of the Ottoman (and later Turkish) economic development. These variations, at least to a degree, were responsible for the differences in labor costs in various parts of the empire and thus determined the peculiarities of the Ottoman incorporation into, world-economy (Ergene 1995).

Every summer Wantijpark in Dordrecht, a small town in the western Netherlands, hosts a World Music festival called “Rainbowpark.” The performers of the 2002 season included Bun Sani from Surinam/The Netherlands, Ghalia Benali & Timnaa from Tunisia/ Belgium, Bayuba Cante from Cuba and Los de Abajo from Mexico. But the biggest star of the festival-that is, whose name was highlighted with the largest fonts in the posters and flyers-was Aziza A., presented as an artist from Turkey. In fact, this multi-faceted artist, whose real name is Alev Yıldırım, was born in Berlin in 1971 and has lived ever since. Her parents had lived in Germany as guest workers for 31 years and then returned to Turkey in 1999, but Aziza had stayed on in Berlin, which she now calls her home. I met her during the “Karneval der Kulturen” in Berlin (the Carnival of Cultures, which took place a month before the Rainbow festival) where she performed on the night of the grand parade.

Bulgarian historiography began to professionalize itself after the creation of an independent Bulgarian state (de facto in 1878, de jure in 1908), and the foundation of scholarly institutions. Until then historical writing had been dominated by enthusiasts (clergymen, teachers, local dilettanti), passionately serving the ideas of cultural revival and political independence through historical knowledge. Thus, Bulgarian historiography at its inception was shaped both by its romantic predecessors, whose noble (and only) aim was to stir national consciousness and legitimize national aspirations, and by the influence of the positivist and romantic historiographies then prevalent in Europe.

Blood, sexual honor, and “Muslim-ness” are related discourses that in Turkey produce national subjects in the service of the state. The national narrative brands a subject's perception of self, attributes of the body, and everyday practices with highly resonant markers of belonging. The maintenance of a national identity requires continual vigilance against the threat of forgetting, losing the coherence of the narrative, and disappearing. I will examine the role of purity and boundaries in reproducing Turkish national identity, with particular focus on two key metaphors of threat: the missionary and the headscarf.