Overview

A revision of the history of modern sports in late Ottoman Istanbul, showing how Muslims, Christians, and Jews created a shared sports culture that was simultaneously global, imperial, and local. The history of sports in Turkey is deeply contested. Over the decades, journalists, pundits, non-professional historians, and everyday people have offered competing narratives about the origins of modern sports in the late Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman World of Sports tells the story of how Istanbul’s Muslims, Christians, and Jews-gymnastics teachers, football coaches, weightlifters, journalists, athletes, and fans-created a gendered and class-stratified civic project that promoted athletics as a source of fun, beauty, and moral education. Influenced by the emerging global vogue for organized sports, all boys from the expanding middle class of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century imperial capital were expected to exercise and compete on the playing field in order to develop into moral men. Yet even as the embrace of modern athletics transcended ethno-religious divisions, it did not erase them. Drawing on a wide range of archival research in multiple languages, historian Murat Yıldız shows that sportsmen created new communal boundaries in team affiliations, fandom, and sports media. Adeptly reconstructing Istanbul’s imperial culture as it was experienced more than a century ago, The Ottoman World of Sports recovers a lived imperial culture whose defining features were shaped by its multiethnic, multireligious, and multilingual sportsmen.

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9781477332863

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Reviews

Murat Yıldız provides a fascinating description and analysis of the emergence of sports as a shared imperial project, which simultaneously served as a site for ethnic mobilization for Ottoman Turkish, Armenian, Jewish, and Greek sports aficionados and athletes. The material from diverse sources echoes the multivocality of the empire and at the same time it indicates the emergence of a shared bodily culture. Furthermore, the book contextualizes this emerging imperial culture in other modern projects in late Ottoman Istanbul.--Tamir Sorek, author of The Optimist: A Social Biography of Tawfiq Zayyad The Ottoman World of Sports stands as both the definitive study of the development of modern sports in the final decades of the Ottoman Empire and a vivid portrayal of late Ottoman cosmopolitanism as manifested in its capital, Istanbul. Yıldız brings to life the Ottomans' complex visions of community and intercommunality through the prism of sporting culture. Meticulously researched across a multiplicity of archives (many previously untapped), written with elegance, and dazzlingly illustrated, the book has an appeal that goes beyond students of social history and popular culture to general readers with an interest in the history of sport in the non-Western world.--Hasan Kayali, author of Imperial Resilence: The Great War's End, Ottoman Longevity, and Incidental Nations

Author Information

Murat C. Yıldız is an associate professor of history at Skidmore College.

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