Slavery and Household Formation in Ottoman Aleppo, 1640-1700
Abstract Focusing on a seventeenth-century Syrian city, this study examines the practice of slavery as a strategy for building elite households in the Ottoman Empire. After an overview of the slave trade and the social and political conditions which sustained it, it constructs a demographic profile of the slaves and slaveholders and concludes with case studies of how slaves were integrated into selected military-administrative, merchant and ulama families. Valued as servants, soldiers, companions, and business agents, slaves were integrated to a wide range of elite households, in some cases providing critical human resources for the households’ continuity.
Bureaucratic Reform in the Ottoman Empire: The Sublime Porte, 1789-1922
From the author's preface: Sublime Porte--there must be few terms more redolent, even today, of the fascination that the Islamic Middle East has long exercised over Western imaginations. Yet there must also be few Western minds that now know what this term refers to, or why it has any claim to attention. One present-day Middle East expert admits to having long interpreted the expression as a reference to Istambul's splendid natural harbor. This individual is probably not unique and could perhaps claim to be relatively well informed. When the Sublime Porte still existed, Westerners who spent time in Istanbul knew the term as a designation for the Ottoman government, but few knew why the name was used, or what aspect of the Ottoman government it properly designated. What was the real Sublime Porte? Was it an organization? A building? No more, literally, than a door or gateway? What about it was important enough to cause the name to be remembered?In one sense, the purpose of this book is to answer these questions. Of course, it will also do much more and will, in the process, move quickly onto a plane quite different from the exoticism just invoked. For to study the bureaucratic complex properly known as the Sublime Porte, and to analyze its evolution and that of the body of men who staffed it, is to explore a problem of tremendous significance for the development of the administrative institutions of the Ottoman Empire, the Islamic lands in general, and in some senses the entire non-Westerrn world.
Transient nonlinear thermal stability analysis of metro cable under pulse power
The load of metro cable system varies a lot from morning rush hours to the evening closure time. With many trains hopping in the rush hours, the long term and economical short term thermal stability become a big issue as a result of the large difference between thermal time constant and the electrical time constant of cable. Based on a 10kV three-core XLPE metro power cable model, the theoretical thermal capacity was calculated according IEC standard. Then, a Finite Element Method (FEM) was employed to analyze the transient electro-thermal phenomena, taking into account various types of power loss in cable system and the non-linear electrical conductivity of the conductor. Finally, the thermal distribution inside the cable was presented as a function of time, and the maximum thermal capacity was predicted in metro cable.