RECENT WRITINGS IN LATE OTTOMAN HISTORY

Extract

The books under review here variously demonstrate the progress made in the recent historical writing of the late Ottoman period (c. 1750–1922). They also reflect the problems that persist in this important sub-discipline of the historian's craft. In the West, the writing of Ottoman history began as an offshoot of European history, often the purview of historians interested in the “Eastern Question.” A notable example is William Langer's Diplomacy of Imperialism, a series of essays on various aspects of European diplomacy that gave prominent place to the Ottoman Empire.¹ These European specialists, well grounded in their discipline, correctly treated the Ottoman past as part of European history. For all their disciplinary skill, however, they studied the Ottoman experience from the outside, using a rich array of European-language material but not indigenous sources generated from within the Ottoman world. This scholarly pattern began to shift with the appearance of a number of seminal works that opened new paths for research into Ottoman history.² These studies are still noteworthy for their often extensive use of Ottoman primary sources, especially the writings of the Ottoman chroniclers and contemporary observers. The work of Bernard Lewis was particularly influential, expressing a paradigm that focused on Westernization during the Ottoman 19th century that inexorably—indeed, inevitably—led to the Turkish republican 20th century. Thus, these 1960s works also misdirected the field in a serious manner, creating a set of false assumptions that we live with now, in the present day—namely, all of them worked from the presupposition that “Ottoman Empire” and “Turkey” were synonymous terms. While speaking of the Ottoman past, their real agenda was to discuss the origins of the Turkish nation-state. In so doing, they dumped into the trash bin of history those Ottoman experiences that were not directly related to the formation of the Turkish republic. And so, the histories of the Balkan and Arab provinces of the empire became largely irrelevant and off the Ottoman historians' agenda.