In August 1894, as if by prearranged signal, a series of Muslim attacks on the Gregorian Armenian subjects of the Porte broke out in eastern Anatolia and spread gradually, province by province, throughout most of Asiatic Turkey. These disorders raged sporadically for two years until finally, in August 1896, they culminated in a similar assault on the Gregorian Armenian community of Istanbul, beneath the very windows of the embassies of the Great Powers. European estimates placed the total of Armenians killed throughout this period at between 250,000 and 300,000 men, women, and children, and 10 percent of the entire Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire.

The study of Ottoman history must move out of Istanbul and into the provinces and, in so doing, it must come to grips with the derebeys, local rulers of Anatolia whose independence contributed to the weakness of Ottoman government in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The derebeys of Cilicia are of special interest because they were the last to succumb to the expanding control of the nineteenth-century reformers. The purpose of this article is to examine the nature and extent of the power of these autocrats and to see why they were able to continue in defiance of the Porte until 1865.

Political modernization is a difficult concept to grapple with1. The traditional approach is to view the political systems of industrially developed Western countries as a model of, or sometimes even as a synonym for, a politically developed polity.

The course of events in the Middle East since 6 October 1973 has been as surprising and as unexpected as the very events of that day. In retrospect, of course, the surprises of that day have been depreciated and obscured by journalists, scholars, and politicians who have begun to treat the outbreak of the war as part of a chain of natural developments initiated in June 1967, or in May 1948, or in 1897 depending upon their historical bent. But hindsight notwithstanding, no one expected war to break out in the Middle East in 1973. For this reason, the decision to launch a war against Israel must be examined for what it was: a complex calculation encompassing not one or two but a broad range of considerations. The decision to go to war is never a commonplace decision, nor is it one taken lightly or made naturally – not even in the Middle East. Rather, it is a complex phenomenon whose threads must be unraveled in order to be understood.

The following is a report of a pilot study on nomad-sedentary relations viewed in terms of exchange. The study was conducted in the Zagros Mountains of Iran and in the central Hazarajat of Afghanistan during the summer of 1971. The research involved the application in a field situation of a theoretical framework that links exchange and social structure. In previous research we had investigated the relationship between social structure and exchange in societies having a particular kind of exchange system—the potlatch. Utilizing Levi-Strausss approach to structure, we have taken certain kinds of rules, preferential marriage rules or rules of succession, and built models of social structure on the basis of such rules (Levi-Strauss, 1963). These were related to other models based upon the analysis of exchange behavior. In an earlier volume, Feasting with Mine Enemy, we demonstrated the applicability of this approach in our analysis of six Northwest Coast societies by relating their different forms of social structure to the variations they exhibited in their potlatch activity (Rosman and Rubel, 1971). The purpose of the pilot study reported on here was to apply our conceptual framework relating exchange and social structure to more complex social systems.

The very nature of colonialism—the extension of authority by one nation over another people—precludes any valid consideration of the system within a mere examination of its political and economic exploitative elements. The primary of these motives, however, has often overshadowed other traditional emphases of the colonizer himself in seeking advancement of his corrosive system. Reference to the mission civilisatrice, the cultural and moral mission of the colonizer, preoccupied and prejudiced continued justification for the colonial institution. Yet, the fallacy of the major objectives of the system revealed the untenable character of its moral, humanitarian, and cultural aspects.

Over the past two decades scholars have become aware of the great importance of the so-called Cairo Geniza documents as a primary source for medieval Mediterranean socioeconomic history. This awareness is due principally to the indefatigable work of S. D. Goitein. The Geniza documents also provide an important source for one aspect of the art history of the period. The some 750 trousseau lists from the Cairo Geniza, in combination with ancillary Geniza records, offer a wealth of information—hitherto unexploited—on the attire of Jewish women in medieval Egypt, and by extension, the attire of Muslim women as well. The trousseau lists dating mainly from the Fatimid and Ayyubid periods (969–1250)—and to a lesser extent from the Mamluk (1250–1517)—contain the complete wardrobe of a medieval Egyptian bride.

The events that took place in Iraq in 1941, commonly called Rashid Ali al-Kaylani or the Revolution of 1941 by the Iraqis, were very important to the subsequent political development of that country. They led Iraq to war with Britain, and most of what happened after that date, including the July 14, 1958, Revolution, can be explained in one way or another as an extension of what happened in May 1941.