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The Material Life of the Ottoman Middle Class
Author(s) -
AbouHodeib Toufoul
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
history compass
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.121
H-Index - 1
ISSN - 1478-0542
DOI - 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2012.00866.x
Subject(s) - westernization , modernity , middle class , ottoman empire , scholarship , social class , socioeconomic status , history , sociology , aesthetics , modernization theory , political science , art , law , demography , population , politics
Recent scholarship on the Ottoman Empire and Egypt pays close attention to the relationship between changing material culture and modernity in the late 19th and early 20th century. This has led to a better understanding of how, for a nascent middle class, objects and commodities served to define both its relationship to modernity as well as its social position. Nevertheless, conceptualizing changing aspects of material life does not go beyond the use of objects to represent and signal socioeconomic positions at the desires and whims of their users. Accordingly, objects have only served to reaffirm scholarly claims about the fragmentation and Westernization of the Ottoman middle class. Using conceptual perspectives on material culture and specific examples from the Levant, particularly Beirut, this article investigates how material culture can further push the understanding of the rise of the middle class by shedding light on anxieties shared across the religious divide and by demystifying the concept of ‘Westernization’.