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Processes of Social Change in Ottoman Bilad al-Sham: Methodological Approaches to Material Culture - a research seminar with Stefan Weber
13 June 2007
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Professor Stefan Weber describes his research using material history to look at social change in Ottoman Bilad al-Sham.
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Assistant Professor Stefan Weber conducted a research seminar on his work in material history looking at architecture, urbanism and the process of social change in Ottoman era Bilad al-Sham (today's Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine).
Weber explained that the relatively new discipline of material history looks at the objects, architecture and art that people owned or used in order to reconstruct the historical context in which they lived. Alongside historical research, material history looks at how we decide what is heritage and how we exhibit and manage spaces for public use.
Material history looks at how people dressed, how their houses looked and what sort of materials they used in order to construct a reality of the person in question. An important aspect of material history is that it looks through the personality of individuals to their history and the history of their time.
"I would go to different spaces and look at the realities of society and personalities in time, their houses, their very private spaces, the neighbourhoods and the urban organisation, and to regional or interregional networks which might mean that they were part of an administration which acted on different geographical levels or that they travelled around as a merchant or corresponded with other merchants. Or, material history might be something that is not tangible, that it is the space that you look to, in the sense of their cultural horizons."
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Tripoli, 1934 (Source IFPO)
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During the seminar, Weber described the three elements of his research in material history: phenomenology - a description of the subject in terms of urban organisation, social structure and social realities; the analysis of dynamics - which looks at functions and their shifts as well as how people behave; and historiographical correlation.
Weber started by giving an example for phenomenology from his work in Tripoli , Lebanon. He described that after the Mamluks conquered the city in 1289, the inhabitants of the city were afraid that the crusaders would return. The Mamluks destroyed the old city on the seafront and created a new city further inland. As "New Tripoli" was the only important city founded in the region in the late Middle Ages and Early Modern Times it is seen to represent the best example of urban planning of its time.
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The water system in Hama , Syria.
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Weber described how the city developed around the bazaar (suq), which acted as a backbone for the city. Further to this, he spoke about the street layout in Tripoli, showing a pattern of market streets and how these developed. Tripoli, as a new founded city, recalled a much older pattern. Nearly all suqs of cities in the region developed out of older street patterns, most prominently out of streets patterns from antiquity and late antiquity. These can be seen to have developed through Byzantic and the Umayyad times and became the model of the suqs as we have come to know them over the centuries.
"As the suq developed out of this heritage we can understand along which pattern or to what ideas people planned the city and the suq. This raises an interesting point about knowledge - how it is brought from one generation to another, how something is developed further and the how the handover function of knowledge transfer occurs."
Providing another example of this, Weber described his experience with water supply based on pressure pipes in Syria, noting that although they had been developed in antiquity, the knowledge about this system has been transferred right up to the early 20th century. In the city of Hama the water supply uses a complicated system of water wheels to generate pressure and distribute water to different houses. Weber's research looks at different primary resources to determine who developed these water systems, why they had done it and what the organisation structures for allocating water resources were.
Weber's final description was about his work in Sidon, Lebanon where he looked at the homes of wealthy members of 18th century society. In order to better understand the history of the time through the people who lived there, Weber looked at reception halls and how the different styles and architectural features of the rooms reflect the past inhabitants. He explained that the features in these rooms express the social status of the inhabitant and that changes to architectural and interior design style express the political and social context in which people lived.
Following the talk, there was a discussion about material history and the different questions that it raises when studying history in a broader context.
External Links
Online Resources*
To listen to a recording (wma) of the seminar, please click here. 
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