Giancarlo Casale

The ethnic composition of Ottoman ship crews and the "Rumi challenge" to Portuguese identity

Although the confrontation between the Ottoman and Portuguese navies in the sixteenthcentury Indian Ocean is commonly described as a struggle between “indigenous Muslims” and “European intruders,” in reality the seafarers of both fleets were overwhelmingly Mediterranean in origin. Yet despite these shared origins, the crews of Ottoman and Portuguese ships nevertheless conceived of themselves in different ways: the Portuguese as part of a blood-based “nation,” and the Ottomans as part of a cosmopolitan “empire.” And ultimately, this difference profoundly influenced relations between the two powers. Since the Ottomans, unlike any of the indigenous peoples of the Indian Ocean, were so obviously racially and ethnically similar to the Portuguese, their self-confident cosmopolitanism posed a threat to the underpinnings of Portuguese ethnic solidarity, just as the strength of their navy posed a threat to Portuguese hegemony at sea.

Journal of Early Modern History: Editorial

The early modern period of world history (ca. 1300-1800) was marked by a rapidly increasing level of global interaction. Between the aftermath of Mongol conquest in the East and the onset of industrialization in the West, a framework was established for new kinds of contacts and collective self-definition across an unprecedented range of human and physical geographies. The Journal of Early Modern History, the official journal of the University of Minnesota Center for Early Modern History, is the first scholarly journal dedicated to the study of early modernity from this world-historical perspective, whether through explicitly comparative studies, or by the grouping of studies around a given thematic, chronological, or geographic frame.

Tordesillas and the Ottoman Caliphate: Early Modern Frontiers and the Renaissance of an Ancient Islamic Institution

This article revisits the question of the “Ottoman caliphate,” the doctrine defining the Ottoman sultan as the universal sovereign and protector of Muslims throughout the world in addition to the territorial ruler of the Ottoman Empire itself. In existing scholarship, a wide gap divides those who describe this doctrine as a construct of modernity, with a history that goes back no farther than the late eighteenth century, and those who maintain a direct line of transmission from the earlier Abbasid caliphate to the Ottoman dynasty. This article proposes an “early modern alternative” to these two opposing narratives, which acknowledges a dynamic history of reinvention for the caliphate but locates its rebirth not in the period of colonial modernity but rather in the sweeping reconfiguration of space, time, and sovereignty ushered in by the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494.

The “Environmental Turn”: A Teaching Perspective

Undeclared ambitions for the future notwithstanding, my current research profile is one that could qualify me as an “environmental historian” by only the most indulgent of standards. My contribution to this roundtable will thus be written less in the mode of a practicing researcher in the field and more from the perspective of a teacher (at a U.S. public land-grant university) currently in the process of trying to “environmentalize” two large survey courses in history.