This chapter examines Gaza’s socio-spatial organization and the demographic features of its population. It presents Gaza’s main urban features during the late Ottoman period, including divisions into neighborhoods, main landmarks and thoroughfares. It then offers an in-depth portrayal of Gazan society, including data on economy and lifestyles, social hierarchies, marriage patterns, migration and health, based on a detailed analysis of the Ottoman census of 1905 and surviving court records (1857–1861), in light of evidence from the literature, maps and images.

This introduction to Section 4 of the volume on court judgements and related works discusses the nature of recent research on the subject and comments on the increased availability of primary sources (in the form of sijillāt) from the Ottoman period onwards, including a representative bibliography of recent scholarship on the subject.

The chapter explores what type of sources can help us understand multilingualism in the past. Since direct observation and elicitation techniques are not available, tackling the “poor data problem” is one of the key issues in the study of historic multilingualism. The chapter focuses on the late Habsburg Monarchy and its linguistically exceptionally diverse populations. Scholars frequently draw on the ethnographic maps, demographic data, and language laws that have come down to us from historic times to make sense of this diversity. Important as these sources are, they only offer a bird’s eye view of the realm’s multilingualism. Other sources are needed to explore its functioning in day-to-day life in particular communities. The chapter argues that memoirs, late-Habsburg satirical magazines, and criminal court records can all serve this purpose. They afford unique glimpses into everyday life in the past and allow us to reconstruct the workings of historical multilingualism in terms of its social underpinnings and linguistic outcomes.

This chapter visits sketches the contours of an “Ottoman lighting system,” that is, a centrally regulated network that procured lighting materials from the provinces and channeled them to Istanbul and other crucial points in the imperial power grid and set lighting priorities in line with its political needs. The main argument is that lighting was considered a basic commodity and its regular supply therefore concerned the state. Yet, access to light was extremely unequal, which, as shown in the next chapter, made light a shiny index of power.

Seeking to limit potentially invisible, incontrollable activity, official decrees, neighborhood communities, guilds, and moralists together created a powerful discourse that stigmatized the night, and a set of regulations aimed to impose visibility on those who nevertheless went out after dark. Yet, with vision impaired, the night continued to pose a challenge to urban order, and the authorities at times applied harsh punitive measures in order to project fear. These demonstrations of formal violence were meant to somewhat compensate for the rulers’ actually rather precarious control over the dark city.