Evliya Çelebi is known to historians as an observer of public buildings, such as mosques, medreses and city walls, as a valuable source on languages and dialects and, much too rarely, as an artist of narration. Commerce was not his main area of interest, though when describing Anatolian towns, he paid due attention to covered and open-air markets, to khans and sometimes even to shops. As a member of the Ottoman upper class, he could finance his travels by minor official appointments and did not need to trade—or if he did occasionally engage in buying and selling, he did not discuss these activities in his travel book. But things were somewhat different when at the age of approximately sixty, he undertook the pilgrimage to Mecca. In the caravan from Damascus to Mecca and in the return caravan to Cairo, Evliya did not hold an official position, which means that he had to find his own mounts, equipment and supplies. In the sixteenth century, prominent (vacibûrreayet) personages had sometimes been offered mounts by the Ottoman administration, but by the year 1081/1670-71, when Evliya journeyed to Mecca, grants-in-aid of this kind only covered part of the expenses (Faroqhi, 1990, p. 60). Therefore Evliya acted in the same way as many less prominent pilgrims had done over the centuries, and engaged in trade as a sideline. After the pilgrimage had been completed, he visited Jiddah for the express purpose of buying some bales of coffee, which he proposed to resell in Cairo (Evliya, p. 796).

Peasant migration was the subject of careful regulation in the Ottoman Empire. The government tried to control peasant movement in order to ensure the supply of agricultural labor; peasants, on the other hand, used migration as one weapon against government abuses. This article examines Ottoman policy towards migration and recorded instances of peasant migration in sixteenth-century Palestine.

Peasant migration is most commonly considered in the context of seasonal labor movements, responding to large-scale agricultural enterprises or temporary labor shortages. Alternatively, migration may occur as a result of some disaster: war, famine, drought, or flood. Temporary migration suggests a short-term move, wherein people pull up stakes for a denned period and retrace their steps after some months or years. This article, however, examines migration as the action of individuals who appear to have left their former homes permanently.

Ziya Öniş and İsmail Emre Bayram seek to assess whether the rapid rates of growth experienced by the Turkish economy since it weathered a severe crisis in 2001 as measured by several indices—high levels of investment, especially foreign investment; sustained “export orientation;” increased outlays for education, research and development; sustained economic and political stability, and “favorable regional dynamics” as the European Union (EU) enlargement process—are merely a flash in the pan or sustainable over the long-run. To do this they cast the Turkish trajectory against the “miracle economies” of East Asia, as well as some other middle-and low-income economies in Latin America and elsewhere. Based on this analysis, they conclude that while there are some serious concerns—low domestic savings rate, large deficits in the current account, tapering off the EU accession process, dependence on foreign capital and export markets— long-term sustainable growth can be achieved in Turkey if these vulnerabilities are addressed.

On 17 August 2000, the somber first anniversary of the Marmara earthquake, the mainstream Turkish media found a sole reason for celebration. Alongside lengthy reports of vigils in remembrance of the dead and protests of the state's anemic relief efforts, the media celebrated its partnership with civil society and all but declared an end to a state that was at once heavy-handed and ineffectual. Amplifying this theme, an article that compiled a list of the earthquake's “winners” and “losers” placed the media and civil society in the former category and a host of state agencies charged with disaster response in the latter one. Hürriyet, a high-circulation mainstream newspaper, described this praise as well deserved, stating that journalists had effectively “exposed all the naked truths” of the state's inability to provide for its population.

One of the most significant developments in literary studies over the last twenty years has been the postcolonial discourse that emerged with Edward Said's groundbreaking Orientalism, which has been enormously beneficial in heightening awareness of a set of Western assumptions that had gone virtually unquestioned for centuries.

One of Said's role models, whom he mentions in both Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism and discusses at greatest length in his essay “Secular Criticism,” is Erich Auerbach, the Jewish-German scholar who wrote the literary history Mimesis during his exile in Istanbul. Auerbach's own explanation of his situation in exile occurs at the very end of Mimesis: “I may also mention that the book was written during the war and at Istanbul, where the libraries are not equipped for European studies …. On the other hand, it is quite possible that the book owes its existence to just this lack of a rich and specialized library” (Auerbach 1953, p. 557).

The main objective of this essay is to point out the missing links between neoliberalism on the one hand, and a comprehensive analysis of poverty and effective policies to tackle it, on the other. After identifying the main channels through which neoliberalism affects poverty, I will draw attention to the inadequacy of the neoliberal approach in coming to terms with the main reasons behind poverty, as well as in developing a comprehensive and effective mechanism for its alleviation. I emphasize the role of international institutions in determining the dominant development discourse and changes in the importance given to the issue of poverty over time. The essay links the ineffectiveness of existing poverty alleviation policies to distributional imbalances at both the global and domestic levels. Against the background of the main constraints and opportunities for effective poverty alleviation policies in individual countries, it emphasizes the need for a poverty alleviation strategy as an integral part of a broader development strategy and identifies its main premises. It calls for action on the academic, domestic and international fronts and stresses the central role of the state, a more balanced reliance on domestic and international markets, emphasis on productive employment creation, the development of effective redistribution mechanisms, and the creation of effective domestic and international constituencies as the main components of such a strategy.

We are accustomed to thinking about Ottoman reform of the laws governing personal status as a project undertaken under the liberal banner: such reform was progress, an attempt to lift oppression in the interests of justice and the modernization of the society. Insofar as we can speak of a dominant historical narrative in a field that has received very little scholarly attention, it is this image of liberal efforts to alleviate the oppression that women suffered as a result of the strict application of traditional Hanafi law in the Ottoman Empire that shapes our view of the reform project. Most of the established Western scholars of Islamic legal reform have concurred that society awoke to the injustice of this oppression in the course of the nineteenth century and undertook reform as part of an effort to improve the position of women. Responding to the “needs of society”, the reformers undertook to remedy some of the worst abuses.Their task was to introduce legal moralism into a system that had become hopelessly ossified and formalistic, and hence unresponsive to social imperative.

The privatization of security services, which implies the dispersal of the legitimate right to use force, has been traditionally understood as operating at the expense of state sovereignty. The increasing privatization of security services around the world and the substantial growth of the private security sector in Turkey create the need to reassess the nature of this privatization. Drawing upon the work of Michel Foucault and other scholars of governmentality, as well as our own field research, we try to make such an assessment, without falling back on the traditional state-market (state-society) duality. Research shows that the Turkish private security sector, reported as being tied to both the exigencies of the state and the rules of the market, has an amorphic nature marked by intricate relationships, formal and informal, with public law enforcement agencies. We argue that the sector's privatization, although defended by some as a way to grant accountability and transparency to security services, is neither a remedy for those gaps, nor does it imply a straightforward decline of the state; rather, it is proof that the idea of an autonomous, unitary “state” should be revised and a sign that a different and intricate network of state apparatus and private experts continue to govern our lives in ways unique to neoliberalism.