This article provides a microhistorical case study centered on a Roma couple residing in Istanbul’s renowned Romani settlement, Sulukule. It sheds light on three significant historical processes related to modernity that influenced the interactions of the individuals involved: land commodification, the 1881 census reform, and the rise of both inclusive and conservative Orientalist discourses within the Ottoman ruling elite. At the heart of the narrative are Sadık and Züleyha, who aimed to purchase waqf land subdivided and offered for sale by Mehmed Efendi in Yenibahçe. Their goal was to escape the spatial segregation they experienced. They leveraged the new census policy, which eliminated the classification of Muslim "Gypsy” from official records, allowing them to present themselves as Muslim refugees from Bulgaria. However, upon discovering the couple’s Roma identity from Sulukule, their new neighbors initiated a legal dispute, resulting in the Internal Affairs Section of the Council of State voting to annul the transaction. The differing opinions among council members highlighted the competing inclusive and conservative Orientalist discourses. The article first reconstructs the case and examines the associated historical processes using extensive primary and secondary sources.

This article examines the subject of Ottoman shipping in the Indian Ocean in the two and a half centuries after 1650. With reference to both Ottoman and European sources, it first grapples with the empirical problems involved in studying the subject. It then explores how a combination of trade dynamics in the Gulf and the economic preferences of both Ottoman state and private actors attenuated the expansion of Ottoman shipping. Taken together, these factors confirm that the comparative dearth of Ottoman vessels in the Indian Ocean trade was a product of geopolitical and ecological contingency rather than entrepreneurial neglect or state aversion. Even so, as shown by two case studies, Ottoman subjects of one type or another were found in ports from Surat to Batavia at various moments before 1800. The analysis then turns to later nineteenth-century attempts by Ottoman state actors to augment Ottoman shipping. These efforts were inhibited by the contrasting incentives of private Ottoman seafarers, the dominance of European and Indian ships in the empire’s trade with India, the dislocation of nominal Ottoman territories in the Gulf, and the political economy of the Ottoman Gulf itself. Despite the fact that state-sponsored shipping came to grief, the presence of Ottoman ships in the Indian Ocean invites reflections on the highly mutable character of Ottoman identity and sovereignty, as well as the empire’s relative position in the wider commercial world of the Indian Ocean, across these centuries.

Aerial perspectives are often used to strategic ends by providing the valuable survey view instrumental to military operations, while also contributing to damage assessment and potentially to accountability efforts in the aftermath of such initiatives, via before-and-after diptychs. Precision is the lauded principle of military visioning and targeting, whereas uncertainty or ambiguity is frequently a governing characteristic of aerial photographs in civilian contexts. Aerial photographs are examples of what Allan Sekula refers to as “instrumental images” (images with primarily logistical purposes), a term that sits adjacent to Harun Farocki’s “operational images” (“pictures that are part of an operation”).1 Commenting on the instrumentality of aerial reconnaissance photographs in the context of the First World War, Sekula remarks that these images “seem to have been devoid of any rhetorical structure” so that their interpretation demanded that each photograph “be treated as an ensemble of ‘univalent,’ or indexical signs—signs that could only hold one meaning, that could only point to one object. Efficiency demanded this illusory certainty.” Given this imposed limitation of meaning, Sekula concludes, “Within the context of intelligence operations, the only ‘rational’ questions were those that addressed the photograph at an indexical level, such as ‘Is that a machine gun or a stump?’”2

In December 1936, producer Walter Futter announced that he had discovered a Sudanese princess named Kouka to play the romantic lead opposite Paul Robeson in Jericho (Thorton Freedland, 1937). “Princess Kouka” was not Sudanese, nor was she royalty, nor was she unknown. Kouka (née Nagiya Ibrahim Bilal; 1917–79) was an Egyptian actor who had been cast in supporting roles in Egyptian films. This article examines what media coverage of Kouka’s brief moment in the international limelight (1936–38) reveals about differing constructions of race across three race-conscious societies: the United Kingdom, where the film is made; the Jim Crow United States that Paul Robeson left behind; and colonial Egypt.

Many of the cartographic and environmental terrains gathered under the area studies rubric of the Middle East and North Africa are seismic zones. Geological study defines seismic zones as areas where earthquakes tend to focus and classifies these zones into different levels of seismic hazard.1 World maps of seismic hazard show differently colored bands sweeping across the globe (Fig. 1). A continuous swath of varying colors winds across the northern coast of Africa, with the yellows, oranges, and reds that indicate increasingly elevated hazard concentrated on spans of the Middle and High Atlas Mountains, extending outward in greens and blues to surrounding plains and coasts. Long lines of orange and red trace the highest levels of hazard around Iran and Turkey. From there, some bands double back West across the northern Mediterranean. Others widen across the whole of central Asia, embrace the entire Pacific rim, and spill over Oceania. Interrupting the colored seismic zones are projections of nation–state borders, presenting a visual contrast between continuity and discontinuity that is suggestive of the way that seismicity may disrupt other geographical and conceptual terrains.

By examining the history of the Ahvāz pipe mill in the 1960s and 1970s, this article investigates the manner in which competing understandings of Iran's modernizing trajectory among Pahlavi officials were bound up with the material aspects of steel, such as weight, volume, and form. The mill was built to provide pipe for the First Iran Gas Trunkline, a sprawling system intended to gather, refine, and transport natural gas to Iranian cities and the Soviet Caucasus. Officials overseeing the project debated whether the mill's design should prioritize serving the pipeline project or, more ambitiously, establish a new pipe rolling industry able to serve domestic and regional markets. Argued in this article is the significance of attending to infrastructure and materiality in understanding Iran's twentieth-century history of developmentalism.