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George Hay, 8th Earl of Kinnoull, was an unconventional ambassador. A Scottish aristocrat who had been imprisoned for his Jacobite sympathies and almost bankrupted by his involvement in the South Sea Bubble, Lord Kinnoull had no previous diplomatic experience when he was unexpectedly appointed ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in 1729. Leaving his wife and family of ten at their Yorkshire home, Lord Kinnoull departed England for Constantinople with his political, financial and personal suitability for the role all in doubt. How would he cope with the complex world of international politics? Or negotiate the sensitive relationship between Muslims and Christians? And why was he subsequently recalled to England in disgrace?"The Earl and His Butler in Constantinople" traces Lord Kinnoull's eventful journey to the heart of the Ottoman Empire, where he served as ambassador for seven years - and back again. His butler, Samuel Medley, was his constant companion throughout this time and his is almost the only surviving servant's diary from the period. From this unique and colourful source, as well as from Lord Kinnoull's despatches and family letters, Nigel and Caroline Webb have produced a remarkable biography which casts fresh light on the Ottoman Empire and British politics in the 18th century. It also offers vivid portraits of the cosmopolitan city of Constantinople at this critical stage in its history and of an idiosyncratic Earl and his exceptional butler which will captivate readers.
In English Explorers in the East (1738-1745). The Travels of Thomas Shaw, Charles Perry and Richard Pococke, Rachel Finnegan examines the influential travel writings of three rival explorers, whose eastern travel books were printed within a decade of each other.
The present case studies on early modern travelers, dispersed often by unintended consequences of war, curiosity, economic or political reasons in the Mediterranean, the Americas and Japan, ask for what ́power(s) ́ and agency they still had, perhaps counterintuitively, abroad.
The British Embassy in Istanbul was unique among other diplomatic missions in the long eighteenth century in being financed by a private commercial monopoly, the Levant Company. In this detailed study, Michael Talbot shows how the intimate relation between commercial interest and diplomatic practice played out across the period, from the arrival of an ambassador from the restored British crown in 1661 to the sudden evacuation of his successor and the outbreak of the first Ottoman War in 1807. Using a rich variety of sources in English, Ottoman Turkish and Italian, some of them never before examined, including legal documents, financial ledgers and first-hand accounts from participants, he reconstructs the detail of diplomatic practice in rituals of gift-giving and hospitality within the Ottoman court; examines the at times very different meanings that they held for the British and Ottoman participants; and traces the ways in which the declining fortunes of the Levant company directly affected the ability of the embassy to perform effectively within Ottoman conventions, at a time when rising levels of British violence in and around the Ottoman realm marked the journey towards British imperialism in the region. MICHAEL TALBOT is Lecturer in History at the University of Greenwich.
The Second Sight of Zachary Cloudesley is a sparkling historical novel of wild and wonderful mechanical automata, love in a variety of forms, and gentle themes of identity, with a cast of fabulous characters. In 1755, Abel Cloudesley, a London watchmaker and creator of remarkable mechanical automata, is mourning his wife, Alice, who died giving birth to their son, Zachary. Six years later, Abel is further devastated when a freak workshop accident takes Zachary’s eye. With his new eye made of gold and lapis by Abel’s soft-spoken apprentice Tom, Zachary, now with an astonishing gift of second sight, is sent to live with his eccentric Aunt Franny in the country. Abel buries himself in work until he is coerced by shadowy figures into designing a chess-playing automaton and delivering it to Constantinople to spy on the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. After meeting the Sultan, Abel is not heard from again. Years later, teenage Zachary receives a letter suggesting that his father is still alive, a prisoner of the Sultan. Zachary sets off on a perilous journey to the Levant, determined to find Abel and bring him safely home. A BBC Between the Covers Book Club pick and London Sunday Times Historical Fiction Book of the Month, for fans of Pandora, The Essex Serpent, and The Night Circus. Longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2023 and the Goldsboro Books Glass Bell Award 2023.
This is the first systematic scholarly study of the Ottoman experience of plague during the Black Death pandemic and the centuries that followed. Using a wealth of archival and narrative sources, including medical treatises, hagiographies and travellers' accounts, as well as recent scientific research, Nükhet Varlik demonstrates how plague interacted with the environmental, social, and political structures of the Ottoman Empire from the late medieval through the early modern era. The book argues that the empire's growth transformed the epidemiological patterns of plague by bringing diverse ecological zones into interaction and by intensifying the mobilities of exchange among both human and non-human agents. Varlik maintains that persistent plagues elicited new forms of cultural imagination and expression, as well as a new body of knowledge about the disease. In turn, this new consciousness sharpened the Ottoman administrative response to the plague, while contributing to the makings of an early modern state.
Since the early twentieth century the resident embassy has been supposed to be living on borrowed time. By means of an exhaustive historical account of the contribution of the British Embassy in Turkey to Britain’s diplomatic relationship with that state, this book shows this to be false. Part A analyses the evolution of the embassy as a working unit up to the First World War: the buildings, diplomats, dragomans, consular network, and communications. Part B examines how, without any radical changes except in its communications, it successfully met the heavy demands made on it in the following century, for example by playing a key role in a multitude of bilateral negotiations and providing cover to secret agents and drugs liaison officers.
Was the emperor as sovereign allowed to seize the property of his subjects? Was this handled differently in late medieval Roman law and in the practice and theory of zabt in Mughal India? How is political sovereignty relating to the church ́s powers and to trade? How about maritime sovereignty after Grotius? How was the East India Company as a ́corporation ́ interacting with an Indian Nawab? How was the Shogunate and the emperor negotiating ́sovereignty ́ in early modern Japan? The volume addresses such questions through thoroughly researched historical case studies, covering the disciplines of History, Political Sciences, and Law. Contributors include: Kenneth Pennington, Fabrice Micallef, Philippe Denis, Sylvio Hermann De Franceschi, Joshua Freed, David Dyzenhaus, Michael P. Breen, Daniel Lee, Andrew Fitzmaurice and Kajo Kubala, Nicholas Abbott, Tiraana Bains, Cornel Zwierlein, Mark Ravina.
Devastating epidemics of untreatable smallpox caused not only deaths but dire disfigurements of face and body as well as one third of all blindness. In the 20th century mortality was estimated at 300 million up to 1978, the year it was proclaimed to be eradicated. Historically, the fact has been overlooked, often forgotten, that the preventative practice of variolation for smallpox was widely adopted internationally during the 18th century and was the precursor to refinement as cowpox vaccination. Never previously traced was the extensive global adoption of the technique or the impetus for this transmission and how, in these countries of its adoption, variolation was the prime mover for a national concept of public health with the establishment of free institutions. The global adoption of the first invasive medical prophylaxis for any disease, the origin of immunity, deserves its place in history.
In recent years, global historians have painted an impressionistic picture of what they call the 'connected world' of the seventeenth century. Inspired perhaps by the globalised world in which they write, scholars have emphasised how the circulation of people, objects, and ideas linked the distant reaches of the early modern world. Yet for all the advocates of such a 'connected history', we are only beginning to make sense of what global connectedness meant in practice in the lives of ordinary people. To this end, The Whispers of Cities explores interactions between early modern Europe and the Ottoman Empire through the kaleidoscope of communication. It does so by focusing on how information flows linked Istanbul, London, and Paris in the late seventeenth century. Because individuals were at the heart of communication, the book offers a micro-historical reading of the experiences of Sir William Trumbull, English ambassador to Istanbul from 1687 to 1692. It follows Trumbull as he was transformed from a civil lawyer and state official in London to a European notable at the heart of Ottoman social networks in Istanbul. In this way, The Whispers of Cities reveals how information flows between Istanbul, London, and Paris were rooted in the personal encounters that took place between Ottomans and Europeans in everyday communication. At the intersection of global history and the history of communication, therefore, the author argues that worlds of information tied Europeans to their Ottoman counterparts long before the age of modernisation, as news, stories, and even fictions transcended linguistic and confessional boundaries and connected people across Europe and the Mediterranean world. What emerges here is a picture of globalization that is as much about networks, flows, and circulation as it is about the imperfections, asymmetries, and unevenness of connectedness in the early modern world.