The Ragusa Road and the Ottoman Balkans

Jesse Howell

hosted by Sam Dolbee

| In this episode, Jesse Howell discusses the history of the early modern caravan route between Ragusa (modern-day Dubrovnik) and Istanbul. In attending to the long-distance connections between the early modern Ottoman state and the Mediterranean world, he reveals the multi-ethnic communities that came together on the caravan route, the ways that Ottoman state established infrastructure to support mobility and circulation along these pathways, and the material afterlives of these layers of history in very different historical eras. We also talk about the challenge of not getting the information we want from sources, and how to grapple with that absence. In Jesse’s case, that struggle has included riding along a portion of the road on a bicycle, a trip that was chronicled in an earlier episode.

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In this episode, Jesse Howell discusses the history of the early modern caravan route between Ragusa (modern-day Dubrovnik) and Istanbul. In attending to the long-distance connections between the early modern Ottoman state and the Mediterranean world, he reveals the multi-ethnic communities that came together on the caravan route, the ways that Ottoman state established infrastructure to support mobility and circulation along these pathways, and the material afterlives of these layers of history in very different historical eras. We also talk about the challenge of not getting the information we want from sources, and how to grapple with that absence. In Jesse’s case, that struggle has included riding along a portion of the road on a bicycle, a trip that was chronicled in an earlier episode.

Contributor Bios

Jesse Howell is Associate Director of the AM Program at Harvard University's Center for Middle Eastern Studies. He is a historian of the early modern Mediterranean, and completed his dissertation "The Ragusa Road: Mobility and Encounter in the Ottoman Balkans (1430-1700)" as part of Harvard's joint program in History and Middle East Studies. Prior to his work as a historian, he was a professional dance theater performer in California and Germany.

Sam Dolbee is Assistant Professor of History at Vanderbilt University, where he teaches classes on environment, disease, and the modern Middle East. His book Locusts of Power will be out in early 2023 from Cambridge University Press.

Credits

Episode No. 552
Release Date: 11 October 2023
Recording Location: Cambridge, MA
Sound production by Sam Dolbee

Music: Chad Crouch, "Pacing"; Zé Trigueiros, "Petite Route," "Chiaroscuro"
Bibliography courtesy of Jesse Howell

Further Listening

	Jesse Howell and Marijana Mišević	529 9/16/22	Water from Stone
	Leyla Amzi-Erdoğdular	192 8/28/15	Late Ottoman Bosnia and the Imperial Afterlife
	Dženita Karić	406 3/17/19	Bosnian Comrades on Hajj
	András Riedlmayer	305 3/9/17	Documenting the Destruction of Balkan Waqf Institutions
	Emrah Safa Gürkan, Joshua White, Daniel Hershenzon	446 1/28/20	The Mediterranean in the Age of Global Piracy
	Fariba Zarinebaf	507 7/23/2021	Galata and the Early Modern Mediterranean World

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