Population and Reproduction in the Late Ottoman Empire

Ottoman History Podcast

E 421 | How did the experience of pregnancy and childbirth change in the Ottoman Empire in the context of nineteenth-century reforms? In this episode, we discuss how the question of managing a "population" become a key concern for the Ottoman state, bringing new opportunities and difficulties for Ottoman mothers and midwives alike. Questions about childbirth also became enmeshed in late-imperial demographic and cultural anxieties about the relationship between the Empire and its non-Muslim populations. As pregnancy and childbirth drew the attention of medical men, state bureaucrats, and men and women writers in the emerging periodical press, new technologies, regulations, and forms of medical knowledge changed what it meant to give birth and raise a child. See more at: https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2019/08/populationreproduction.html Gülhan Balsoy is Associate Professor of History at İstanbul Bilgi University. She is the author of The Politics of Reproduction in Ottoman Society, 1838–1900 (Routledge, 2013). The Turkish translation of this book, Kahraman Doktor İhtiyar Acuzeye Karşı, won the 2016 Yunus Nadi Social Sciences and Research Award. Dr. Balsoy's research interests include late Ottoman social history, history of women and gender, and history of medicine. Currently she is working on a book project that explores the urban experiences of destitute women in late nineteenth-century Ottoman Istanbul. Tuba Demirci is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Altınbaş University. Her research focuses on the making of gender regimes, history of family and social policy, feminist movements, feminist historiography, and women's lives in the Middle East in general and Ottoman-Republican Turkey in particular. CREDITS Episode No. 421 Release Date: 7 August 2019 Recording Location: Istanbul, Turkey Audio editing by Susanna Ferguson Music: Ze Trigueiros, Sombra Images and bibliography courtesy of Gülhan Balsoy and Tuba Demirci. Cover image courtesy of the Getty Available at: https://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2019/08/populationreproduction.html