Comparative Studies in Society and History 2012;54(4):721745.

0010-4175/12 $15.00 # Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2012
doi:10.1017/S0010417512000394

The Ottoman Empire and the Imperial

Turn
A L AN M I KH A I L
History, Yale University

C H R I S T I N E M. PH I L L I O U
History, Columbia University

Empire is back like never before. Having faded from the world map in the
middle of the twentieth century, empires have burst onto the scholarly map
since at least the dawn of the twenty-first. A profusion of works from C. A.
Baylys The Birth of the Modern World to Niall Fergusons Empire, and
even Hardt and Negris meditation on American empire have served many pur-
poses in debates about history and, no less, contemporary politics.1 While one
such purpose in this turn to empire is to justify (Ferguson) or critique (Hardt
and Negri) American political ambitions and misadventures in the post-Cold
War world, another seems to be to use past pre-national imperial projects as
a way of exploring the possibilities for an emergent post-national order.2 A
major effect of this renewed usability of empire is that the very concept of
empire has shifted in valence, from the rather negative one associated with
colonialism and imperialism in the twentieth century (think V. I. Lenin,

Acknowledgments: Over the year of conversations that produced this article, we benefited greatly
from the input of our graduate studentsespecially those in Phillious seminar on comparative
empires and Mikhails on Ottoman historyfrom discussions at the Yale International History
Workshop and the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton, and from the
help of the following individuals: Jeremy Adelman, Tarik Amar, Persis Berlekamp, Partha Chatter-
jee, Deborah Coen, Patrick Cohrs, Laura Engelstein, Mge Gek, Adam Kosto, Ussama Makdisi,
Dan Rodgers, Edith Sheffer, Amy Singer, Ron Suny, Adam Tooze, and Francesca Trivellato.
Dominic Lieven generously offered insight that proved formative to the arguments advanced
here. Finally, we thank David Akin, Andrew Shryock, and the anonymous CSSH reviewers for
making this article a reality.
1
C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 17801914: Global Connections and Compari-
sons (Malden: Blackwell, 2004); Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World
(New York: Penguin, 2004); Michael Hardt and Antonia Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 2000).
2
For a recent critical take on what not to do if one is serious about understanding empire, see
the following review of both Fergusons and Hardt and Negris works: Alexander J. Motyl, Is
Everything Empire? Is Empire Everything? Comparative Politics 38 (2006): 22949. The quote
is from page 246.

721
722 ALAN MIKHAIL AND CHRISTINE M. PHILLIOU

Frantz Fanon, and post-colonial studies in toto) to one in which it serves as an

antidote to all that is unsatisfying about the nation-state form that superseded
empire across the globe in the course of the twentieth century.3 In empires
past we are free to imagine a different kind of political belonging, off the
grid of the national, neoliberal state that was often the ideal but rarely a
reality in the twentieth century. In early modern empires in particular, the diver-
sity, flexibility, and indeterminacy of imperial subjecthood can be counterposed
to the homogenizing, micro-managing modern nation-state and the reduction-
ist, Manichean, and violent histories that have been generated in its service.
While part of the impetus to study the pasts of empires has surely to do
with the exigencies of the present, much ink has been spilled over empires in
world historyanother concept that has taken off anew in recent decades,
this time as an attempt to depart from the Hegelian templatethat make no
explicit reference to the present.4 Indeed, empire has now become an object
of study in its own right and need not be justified further before one
embarks on research into a specific time or place. Empire has become, in
other words, a normative category of scholarly inquiry, and, as with most nor-
mative categories, it is now largely unquestioned. The quintessential empires
looking back over world history remain of course the Chinese, Roman,
and, in the modern age, the British, and those seeking the characteristics
common to states such as thesestates that billed themselves as empires at
one point or anotherhave understandably gravitated toward the question of
comparative empires.5
But the fact that the study of comparative empires is implicitly part of a
world-historical framework means that the question of outcomes for specific
empires comes to define each one in that larger framework. No doubt in the
shadow of Gibbons monumental Enlightenment-era The History of the
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (originally published between 1772
and 1789) there is still an assumption on the part of many who study
empires that particular empires are worthy of consideration to the extent that
they contributed to world history (which in this case connotes a newer rendi-
tion of Human Civilization).6 Not coincidentally, Gibbons history of the
Roman Empire was written as his own British Empire was striving to hold

3
For a more in-depth historical discussion of this change in the uses and understandings of
empire, see Dominic Lievens chapter Empire: A Word and Its Meanings, in Empire: The
Russian Empire and Its Rivals (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 326.
4
For the most recent work on the role of empires in world history since antiquity, see Jane
Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). In this regard, see also John Darwin, After Tamer-
lane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405 (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008).
5
On the importance of Rome and China for the more general study of empire, see Burbank and
Cooper, Empires in World History, 2359; Lieven, Empire, 2786.
6
Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 8 vols. (London:
John Murray, 19031914). For an analysis of various uses and understandings of the notion of
 THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND THE IMPERIAL TURN 723

onto the American colonies and expand into India, both projects justified, in
part, by the perceived superiority of British civilization.7 In short, the
empires that count are those that yielded the greatest outcomesof military
might, political power, and, by extension, artistic and technological innovation.
Such a framework presents a problem, of course, for empires that were not the
Chinese, Roman, or British, since most of these other empires look like losers
to varying extents.
Enter the Ottoman Empire, which was, depending on ones framework for
empires, at once the most spectacular loser and the greatest winner in world
history. On the one hand, the Ottoman Empire (13001922) started to lose
the game of world-historical outcomes in the late sixteenth century and went
steadily downhill until the late eighteenth century, when it went more steeply
downhill in new kinds of ways for more than a century, before going out
with a cataclysmic bang of violence in the course and aftermath of World
War I. On the other hand, as historians and social scientists have begun to
point out more recently, the Ottomans were the longest-lived dynasty in
Eurasia, surviving through what we now call the medieval and early modern
eras and continuing well into the modern period. In terms of political survival,
the Ottoman dynasty was a great winner of Eurasian and, by extension, world
history. Add to this the geographic location and expanse of Ottoman realms:
smack in the middle of Eurasia, covering the same general area (and sometimes
more) as the Eastern Roman/Byzantine Empire; including the littorals of the
eastern Mediterranean, the Black Sea, Red Sea, and at times Caspian Sea;
from the Nile to the Danube and the Euphrates. In many ways the heir to
Roman/Byzantine and Chinese/Mongol traditions of empire, neighbor-rival
of the Habsburgs, Romanovs, and Safavids (to name just a few), and eventual
object of British and French domination, the Ottoman Empire, it seems quite
obvious, should have a central place in the comparative study of empires.
And yet the Ottoman Empire has consistently spelled trouble for students
of comparative empires, as have comparative empires for students of Ottoman
history. Part of this trouble surely has to do with the hybrid nature of the
Ottoman imperial formation. In the nineteenth-century age of modern
empires, when world history first took shape as a scholarly endeavor, the
Ottomans looked like the bastard sons of both the Romans and the Abbasids.
Trying in vain to imitate the British or to call attention to their Mongol prede-
cessors would hardly have garnered them any cache on the stage of world

civilization in different imperial settings, see Kenneth Pomeranz, Empire & Civilizing Mis-
sions, Past & Present, Daedalus 134 (2005): 3445.
7
One might read another recent book by Niall Ferguson as expressing a justifying ethos similar
to that of Gibbon about how the civilization of the west can nevertheless still hold out in the
face of perceived political and economic challenges from the rest: Civilization: The West and
the Rest (New York: Penguin Books, 2011).
724 ALAN MIKHAIL AND CHRISTINE M. PHILLIOU

history.8 As we now look back on empires in world history and try nobly to
form a non-normative typology, we see that the Ottomans were both a land-
based and a maritime empire, at times ruling indirectly through indigenous
elites and at times sending out settlers to colonize new areas.9 In these and
myriad other ways, the Ottoman Empire, therefore, confounds conventional
efforts to categorize empire into sub-types. The Ottomans seem caught in a
no-mans-land somewhere between the Roman, Chinese, and British arche-
types of empire.
A turning point in the comparative history of empire, particularly for those
who study non-Western European empires, was the publication in 2000 of
Dominic Lievens Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals.10 Lieven
broke open a new type of comparative history for empire by situating the
Russian Empire at the center of his analysis, positing it between the two ante-
cedents of China and Rome and considering it alongside its many rival empires.
This approach serves as a viable alternative to normalizing a Western European
(Roman-British) model of empire in world history, but also to a kind of static
comparison between empires as structures. Rather than simply searching for
structural analogues between the Russian and other empires, Lieven explores
how the nature of power in the Russian Empire changed in response to conflicts
and tensions with its many rival empires.
In Ottoman studies, a few years before Lieven published Empire, Rifaat
Ali Abou-El-Haj urged a new kind of comparative approach to Ottoman
history, arguing that orientalist assumptions about the Ottomans as an aberrant
state formation had prevented scholars from seeing phenomena in the empire as
part of larger historical processes or as examples of more general (even Euro-
pean) historical occurrences.11 Since the late 1990s a veritable flood of studies
have been published that shed new light on Ottoman history and the workings
of the Ottoman Empire as an empire, in many cases as part of a response to
Abou-El-Haj and less often Lievens work. The task of the current article is
to critically assess the profusion of scholarship on Ottoman history that has
been generated since the 1990s, in part by discerning the modes of comparative
analysis that have been used. In short, how has the Imperial Turn over the past
decade affected Ottoman studies?12 How have recent studies of the internal

8
By the twenty-first century even the Mongols have been rehabilitated. See Stephen Kotkin,
Mongol Commonwealth? Exchange and Governance across the Post-Mongol Space, Kritika 8
(2007): 487531.
9
For the elaboration of a normative typology of empire, see Niall Ferguson, The Unconscious
Colossus: Limits of (& Alternatives to) American Empire, Daedalus 134 (2005): 1833.
10
Lieven, Empire.
11
Rifaat Ali Abou-El-Haj, Formation of the Modern State: The Ottoman Empire, Sixteenth to
Eighteenth Centuries (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991).
12
For a comparable analysis of the Imperial Turn in Russian history, see Michael David-Fox,
Peter Holquist, and Alexander M. Martin, The Imperial Turn, Kritika 7 (2006): 70512. See
also Ilya Gerasimov, Jan Kusber, and Alexander Semyonov, eds., Empire Speaks Out: Languages
 THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND THE IMPERIAL TURN 725

dynamics and localities of the Ottoman Empire, from the fourteenth century to
the twentieth, used comparison as a tool, and in what ways have they changed,
and could they change, the larger discussion about comparative empires? As
will be clear from what follows, students of Ottoman history have answered
the call to compare empires. The time has come to take stock of the results.

O U T C O M E S A N D C U LT U R E

Looking within the field of Ottoman studies, we can see that the larger Imperial
Turn has brought out a highly productive tension that can be traced through vir-
tually all the works that have been published since the late 1990s: this is a
tension between what we are calling outcome-focused political history and
culture-focused studies of Ottoman governance. The extreme case of the
outcome-focused approach for the metanarrative of Ottoman history was, of
course, the decline thesis, which has now been all but abandoned, at least in
an explicit sense.13 While the decline thesis and its critiques most obviously
affected scholarship on the era of supposed decline itself (the late sixteenth
to the early nineteenth centuries), all phases of the empires history have
been retooled since the 1990s away from a vocabulary of apogee and decline
to one of crisis, adaptation, transformation, and simply change.14
Particular studies have tried to dismantle the decline thesis by revising the
underpinnings of the metanarrative at particular points in time. Starting from
the medieval phase of Ottoman state-formation, Cemal Kafadars Between

of Rationalization and Self-Description in the Russian Empire (Leiden: Brill, 2009). Although we
are largely sympathetic to Antoinette Burtons project, ours, as we have been explaining so far, is a
very different understanding of the imperial turn than the one she offers in her critique of scholar-
ship on the nation. She writes, We take the imperial turn to mean the accelerated attention to the
impact of histories of imperialism on metropolitan societies in the wake of decolonization, pre- and
post-1968 racial struggle and feminism in the last quarter century. In: Introduction: On the Inade-
quacy and the Indispensability of the Nation, in A. Burton, ed., After the Imperial Turn: Thinking
with and Through the Nation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 2.
13
The classical accounts of Ottoman decline are: Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern
Turkey (London: Oxford University Press, 1962); and idem., Some Reflections on the Decline
of the Ottoman Empire, Studia Islamica 9 (1958): 11127. For some of the many critiques, see
Mehmed Gen, Osmanl Maliyesinde Malikane Sistemi, in Osman Okyar, ed., Trkiye ktisat
Tarihi Semineri Metinler/Tarmalar (Ankara: Hacettepe niversitesi Yaynlar, 1975), 23196;
Cemal Kafadar, The Question of Ottoman Decline, Harvard Middle Eastern and Islamic
Review 4 (199798): 3075. For reviews of the literature and critiques of decline, see Donald Qua-
taert, Ottoman History Writing and Changing Attitudes towards the Notion of Decline, History
Compass 1 (2003): 19; Dana Sajdi, Decline, Its Discontents and Ottoman Cultural History: By
Way of Introduction, in Dana Sajdi, ed., Ottoman Tulips, Ottoman Coffee: Leisure and Lifestyle
in the Eighteenth Century (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2007), 140.
14
For examples of the use of this new vocabulary, see Karen Barkey, Bandits and Bureaucrats:
The Ottoman Route to State Centralization (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); Gbor
goston, A Flexible Empire: Authority and Its Limits on the Ottoman Frontiers, International
Journal of Turkish Studies 9 (2003): 1531; Nicholas Doumanis, Durable Empire: State Virtuosity
and Social Accommodation in the Ottoman Mediterranean, Historical Journal 49 (2006): 95366.
726 ALAN MIKHAIL AND CHRISTINE M. PHILLIOU

Two Worlds and Heath Lowrys later work, The Nature of the Early Ottoman
State, argue that the hybridity and eclecticism of the early Ottomans were
precisely what allowed them to emerge victorious in the chaotic political and
military environment of fourteenth-century Anatolia.15 Taking up early
modern crises, Abou-El-Hajs Formation of the Modern State and more
recently Baki Tezcans The Second Ottoman Empire argue that key features
of what had been termed decline actually signaled a transformation in political
representation and even the beginnings of a kind of indigenous federalism or
democratization.16 Examining the later nineteenth centurys dilemmas of
empire, Selim Deringils The Well-Protected Domains employs an explicitly
comparative framework to understand the inherent contradictions between
the geopolitical and domestic imperial role of the Ottoman state in the Hami-
dian period.17 Meanwhile, Virginia Aksans Ottoman Wars chooses to focus
on the changing military capacity of the empire in the long nineteenth
century as a kind of case study in state transformation in a time of European
and Russian military supremacy.18 All of these works engage quite directly
with the military-political persona of the Ottoman state in its geopolitical
(and therefore world historical) environment, an environment inhabited by a
changing array of rival imperial formations.19 The underlying questions at
play in these works have to do with the legitimacy, capacity mechanisms,
and techniques and strategies of governance that allowed the Ottoman
Empire to defeat other empires or forces of opposition within its realms
issues that directly determined the outcomes each imperial formation
managed to effect. In other words, what was it about the Ottoman state that
caused it to be formed, to be transformed from a frontier principality into a
world empire in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, to adapt to the crises in
its realms in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and to survive the funda-
mental redefinition of the role of the state in the nineteenth century? These are
all very different questions than the older ones about what made the empire so

15
Cemal Kafadar, Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1995); Heath W. Lowry, The Nature of the Early Ottoman State
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003).
16
Abou-El-Haj, Formation of the Modern State; Baki Tezcan, The Second Ottoman Empire:
Political and Social Transformation in the Early Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2010).
17
Selim Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the
Ottoman Empire, 18761909 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998).
18
Virginia H. Aksan, Ottoman Wars, 17001870: An Empire Besieged (Harlow: Longman/
Pearson, 2007). Carter Findleys works, several of which were published before the 1990s, have
been very influential in shaping understandings of bureaucratic change, itself so central to the Tan-
zimat project and the long nineteenth century. See Bureaucratic Reform in the Ottoman Empire:
The Sublime Porte, 17891922 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); and Ottoman Civil
Officialdom: A Social History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).
19
See, for example, Virginia H. Aksan, Locating the Ottomans among Early Modern Empires,
Journal of Early Modern History 3 (1999): 10334.
 THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND THE IMPERIAL TURN 727

powerful and innovative for part of the sixteenth century, when it presumably
had a piece of the Hegelian World Spirit, and after which it sank back into the
darkness of stagnation.
But other Ottoman specialists have reacted against the outcome-focused
decline thesis in a very different way: by relegating the geopolitical context
to the background of their work and choosing instead to focus on the subjective
experience of Ottoman actors, even (and often especially) in a period of crisis.
This cultural arena of Ottoman scholarship, while firmly on one end of our
outcome-culture spectrum, includes many productive new subfields for
Ottoman history, such as gender studies exemplified by the works of Leslie
Peirce, Madeline Zilfi, and others20; urban studies by, most recently, Fariba
Zarinebaf, Shirine Hamadeh, James Grehan, and Ebru Boyar and Kate
Fleet21; and cultural studies, such as Marc Baers Honored by the Glory of
Islam, which seeks to understand the culture of conversion in the seventeenth-
century empire, or Miri Shefer-Mossensohns study of the cultural history of
Ottoman medicine.22
Local studies, too, have gone far in illuminating the intricacies of imperial
governance in individual times and places, therefore laying the groundwork for
later comparisons within and across empires. Amy Singers study of sixteenth-
century Palestine and Jane Hathaways work on the Arab provinces in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries come to mind, as does Molly Greenes
A Shared World and Anton Minkovs analysis of conversion in the
Balkans.23 Others have turned away from the Mediterranean core of the

20
Leslie P. Peirce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); idem., Morality Tales: Law and Gender in the
Ottoman Court of Aintab (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Madeline C. Zilfi,
Women and Slavery in the Late Ottoman Empire: The Design of Difference (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2010); idem., ed., Women in the Ottoman Empire: Middle Eastern Women in the
Early Modern Era (Leiden: Brill, 1997); Amila Buturovi and rvin Cemil Schick, eds., Women in
the Ottoman Balkans: Gender, Culture and History (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007). See also the rel-
evant contributions to: Amira El-Azhary Sonbol, ed., Beyond the Exotic: Womens Histories in
Islamic Societies (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2005).
21
Fariba Zarinebaf, Crime and Punishment in Istanbul: 17001800 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2010); Shirine Hamadeh, The Citys Pleasures: Istanbul in the Eighteenth
Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008); James Grehan, Everyday Life & Consu-
mer Culture in 18th-Century Damascus (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007); Ebru
Boyar and Kate Fleet, A Social History of Ottoman Istanbul (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2010).
22
Marc David Baer, Honored by the Glory of Islam: Conversion and Conquest in Ottoman
Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Miri Shefer-Mossensohn, Ottoman Medicine:
Healing and Medical Institutions, 15001700 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010).
See also Baki Tezcan and Karl K. Barbir, eds., Identity and Identity Formation in the Ottoman
World: A Volume of Essays in Honor of Norman Izkowitz (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 2007).
23
Amy Singer, Palestinian Peasants and Ottoman Officials: Rural Administration around
Sixteenth-Century Jerusalem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Jane Hathaway,
The Politics of Households in Ottoman Egypt: The Rise of the Qazdals (Cambridge: Cambridge
728 ALAN MIKHAIL AND CHRISTINE M. PHILLIOU

Ottoman imperial experience and tried to carve out new regions of Ottoman
penetration, such as the far-flung Indian Ocean, and thereby argue for a differ-
ent, small-scale rise-decline narrative.24
Still others have explicitly synthesized outcomes and culture in formulat-
ing transimperial questions that inform their research. In The Ottoman Empire
and the World Around It, Suraiya Faroqhi, a doyenne of Ottoman studies, seeks
to marry the social history of the empire with its interimperial milieu.25 In her
work on religious conversion, Tijana Krsti likewise places Ottoman religiosity
in the context of similar processes occurring around the Mediterranean and in
contested spaces between the Ottoman, Habsburg, and Safavid realms.26 By the
same token, studies of peoples who moved between empiresbetween the
Venetian and Ottoman worlds or between Russia and the Ottoman Empire
for examplereveal comparative possibilities for understanding ideas of gov-
ernance, difference, and accommodation.27
One criticism regularly leveled at Ottoman historians has to do with their
preoccupation with the state. It is true that even some extreme forms of cul-
tural history are informed by state-centered questions.28 But one would have to
wonder if this is not justified to a large extent, for those seeking to understand
the Ottoman Empire as an empire. The hallmark of being Ottoman was ones
relationship to the ruling dynasty, without which the state would have lacked
any basis for legitimacy and, therefore, for effecting outcomes. Any study of
Ottoman history per se (as opposed to Egyptian or Mediterranean history)
would thus logically revolve around some understanding of the state. One
could imagine studies of remote areas of the Balkans or of, for instance,
Pomak folklore, that may have been untouched by the state apparatus and
yet existed within imperial realms. The logical question for an Ottoman

University Press, 1997); idem., A Tale of Two Factions: Myth, Memory, and Identity in Ottoman
Egypt and Yemen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003); Jane Hathaway, with con-
tributions by Karl K. Barbir, The Arab Lands under Ottoman Rule, 15161800 (Harlow: Pearson
Education, 2008); Molly Greene, A Shared World: Christians and Muslims in the Early Modern
Mediterranean (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Anton Minkov, Conversion to
Islam in the Balkans: Kisve Bahas Petitions and Ottoman Social Life, 16701730 (Leiden:
Brill, 2004).
24
Giancarlo Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
25
Suraiya Faroqhi, The Ottoman Empire and the World around It (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004).
26
Tijana Krsti, Contested Conversions to Islam: Narratives of Religious Change in the Early
Modern Ottoman Empire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011).
27
E. Natalie Rothman, Brokering Empire: Trans-Imperial Subjects Between Venice and Istanbul
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011); Cemal Kafadar, A Death in Venice (1575): Anatolian
Muslim Merchants Trading in the Serenissima, Journal of Turkish Studies 10 (1986): 191217;
Eileen M. Kane, Pilgrims, Holy Places, and the Multi-Confessional Empire: Russian Policy
toward the Ottoman Empire under Tsar Nicholas I, 18251855, (PhD diss., Princeton University,
2005).
28
See, for example, Baer, Honored by the Glory of Islam; Metin And, 16. Yzylda stanbul:
KentSarayGnlk Yaam (stanbul: Yap Kredi Yaynlar, 2011).
 THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND THE IMPERIAL TURN 729

historian caught in the Imperial Turn is then: is there a history separate from the
state, or can Pomak folklore only be seen as an example of the limits of
the Ottoman state and therefore, unwittingly perhaps, still be seen through
the lens of the state?
Economic histories of the Ottoman Empire have similarly divided
between studies of economic and, in turn, political outcomes and social or cul-
tural histories of economic actors like merchants, artisans, laborers, property
owners, and so forth. Timur Kurans work begins from the question of why
the Middle Eastwhich for him usually means the Ottoman Empirefell
behind the West in developing capitalist institutions and modes of exchange.29
His answer is that Islamic law did not provide the tools necessary to create
lasting economic institutions to build capital, to create joint-stock companies,
or to invest in corporations, thereby laying the seeds of a long divergence
in organizational development.30 Kuran, however, does not take the
Ottoman Empires economic retardation in producing a normative notion
of capitalism as a foregone conclusion.31 Quite to the contrary, his work
seeks to rigorously assess the specific strictures and processes that held
back the region.
In contrast, the work of scholars like Suraiya Faroqhi, Beshara Doumani,
Nelly Hanna, and others seeks to describe the economic worlds that brought
various sectors of Ottoman society and beyond into partnerships of trust,
credit, and commerce.32 For example, Hannas study of one Egyptian merchant
at the turn of the seventeenth century brings to life the connections and relation-
ships that this merchant maintained and that also served to sustain sectors of the
early modern Cairene economy.33 In these works of social and cultural econ-
omic history, the ends of the Ottoman Empire in the twentieth century do not

29
Timur Kuran, The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2011), 5.
30
Ibid.
31
Ibid., ix.
32
Suraiya Faroqhi, Artisans of Empire: Crafts and Craftspeople under the Ottomans (London:
I. B. Tauris, 2009); idem., Men of Modest Substance: House Owners and House Property in
Seventeenth-Century Ankara and Kayseri (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987);
idem., Making a Living in the Ottoman Lands, 1480 to 1820 (Istanbul: Isis Press, 1995);
Beshara Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700
1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Nelly Hanna, Artisan Entrepreneurs in
Cairo and Early-Modern Capitalism (16001800) (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2011);
idem., In Praise of Books: A Cultural History of Cairos Middle Class, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Cen-
turies (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003); idem., Making Big Money in 1600: The Life and
Times of Ismail Abu Taqiyya, Egyptian Merchant (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1998);
Suraiya Faroqhi and Gilles Veinstein, eds., Merchants in the Ottoman Empire (Paris: Peeters,
2008); Kate Fleet, European and Islamic Trade in the Early Ottoman State: The Merchants of
Genoa and Turkey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Ann Elizabeth Mayer, ed.,
Property, Social Structure, and Law in the Modern Middle East (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1985).
33
Hanna, Making Big Money.
730 ALAN MIKHAIL AND CHRISTINE M. PHILLIOU

obviously set the agenda; rather, these studies seek to further our understanding
of the early modern Ottoman Empire by fleshing out a robust set of examples of
economic actors and their interests.34 Instead of a teleology of ends, pathways,
and mechanisms, we have a thick descriptive world of relationships, contradic-
tory business alliances, and clusters of interests.
The contrast between these two modes of Ottoman economic history and
indeed of the larger tension between outcomes and cultural history is usefully
crystallized by two questions recently posed in purposeful opposition to
one another: Bernard Lewiss question what went wrong? and Richard
W. Bulliets what went on?35 Lewiss is a civilizational question with a civi-
lizational answer; Bulliets is a historical one with a historical answer. On the
spectrum of Ottoman economic history, Kurans work stands closer to the civi-
lizational end, while Hannas, Faroqhis, Doumanis, and others work tends
more to the historical end.

EMPIRE FOR THE AGES

If the state has been central to the Ottoman historiography of the Imperial Turn,
then so too have questions of periodization. Indeed, one of the most common
strategies Ottoman historians have employed to square macro-political out-
comes with the lived experiences of Ottoman subjects is to carve out a
notion of ages. These have so far included the Age of Beloveds, the
Ottoman Age of Exploration, an Age of Revolution, the Age of Confessiona-
lization, the Age of Discovery, the Age of Sinan, the Age of the Ayans, the Age
of Reforms, the Golden Age, and, of course, the Classical and post-Classical
Ages.36 Why so many ages in Ottoman history? Beyond the sheer fact that

34
The final chapter of Nelly Hannas most recent book does address Egyptian economic history
into the twentieth century, arguing that there were multiple forms of capitalism in the early modern
period and that the development of forms of artisan capitalism were later subsumed by more
dominant ones (Artisan Entrepreneurs, 194).
35
Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle
East (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Richard W. Bulliet, The Case for Islamo-
Christian Civilization (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 4793.
36
See, respectively, Walter G. Andrews and Mehmet Kalpakl, The Age of Beloveds: Love and
the Beloved in Early-Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society (Durham: Duke Univer-
sity Press, 2005); Casale, Ottoman Age of Exploration; Christine M. Philliou, Biography of an
Empire: Governing Ottomans in an Age of Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2011); Tijana Krsti, Illuminated by the Light of Islam and the Glory of the Ottoman Sultanate:
Self-Narratives of Conversion to Islam in the Age of Confessionalization, Comparative Studies
in Society and History 51 (2009): 3563; Palmira Brummett, Ottoman Seapower and Levantine
Diplomacy in the Age of Discovery (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994); Glru
Necipolu, The Age of Sinan: Architectural Culture in the Ottoman Empire (London: Reaktion,
2005); Bruce McGowan, The Age of the Ayans, 16991812, in Halil nalck with Donald Qua-
taert, eds., An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire: Volume Two, 16001914
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 637758; Donald Quataert, The Age of
Reforms, 18121914, in Halil nalck with Donald Quataert, eds., An Economic and Social
History of the Ottoman Empire: Volume Two, 16001914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997), 759944; John Freely and Augusto Romano Burelli, Sinan: Architect of Sleyman
 THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND THE IMPERIAL TURN 731

very few historians can fathom the entirety of the empires more than six
hundred-year full stretch, the larger significance of these divisions is that
they help to break up a unitary teleology leading to the presentfrom tribal
principality in the sphere of waning Byzantine sovereignty, to rising imperial
power, to consolidated empire, to declining administrative state, to fractured
empire, to nation, to state. Ages, in other words, help to forestall reading
Ottoman history as only a story of imperial outcomes and ends. Identifying par-
ticular ages with their own characteristics, features, and cultural attributes
allows one to see how a given periods political life affected culture,
economy, and society. Suspending the question of outcomes for a moment
thus makes it possible to understand a given period on its own terms. Further-
more, it allows for a different, synchronic mode of comparison with other
empires.
In The Age of Beloveds, Walter G. Andrews and Mehmet Kalpakl demon-
strate the utility of a notion of ages in Ottoman history. They carefully explain
what they mean by an Age of Beloveds, a periodization that is for them not just
a marking of time but also a conceptual tool.37 The Age of Beloveds
extended from the late fifteenth century to the early seventeenth. It was a
period in both Europe and the Ottoman Empire during which love was every-
where.38 In the authors words, We want to talk about certain cultural and
social phenomena as they were made manifest in the urban centers of the
Ottoman Empire during a period from the late fifteenth century through the
early seventeenth. But we also want to talk about those phenomena in a
more general context, as if they were a part of that European period and con-
stellation of phenomena that we call the late Renaissance.39 Thus, in their
words, by inventing a temporal unit called the Age of Beloveds, Andrews
and Kalpakl are able to argue for a shared literary and urban culture stretching
from England to Istanbul.40 Their discussion thus clearly shows how a notion
of ages can also easily become a spatial comparative analysis between the
Ottoman Empire and Europe, where commonalities and specificities of sexu-
ality and desire emerge across continents. In wanting to offer both a new chron-
ology and a new geography of the Ottoman Empire, Andrews and Kalpakl
raise a cautionary note: Early-modern Ottomans would have rejected as
absurd the contention that they behaved as much like Europeans as they did
like Persians. And, as we have already pointed out, it would be equally as

the Magnificent and the Ottoman Golden Age (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992); Halil nalck,
The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age, 13001600, Norman Itzkowitz and Colin Imber, trans.
(New York: Praeger, 1973).
37
Andrews and Kalpakl, Age of Beloveds, 24.
38
Ibid., 22.
39
Ibid., 23 (original emphasis).
40
Ibid.
732 ALAN MIKHAIL AND CHRISTINE M. PHILLIOU

difficult for us to assert that Europeans or Ottomans were consciously imitating

one another. Nonetheless, we are suggesting that there are informative and
interesting commonalities to social and intellectual life in the Mediterranean
world that extend far into Europe and the Middle East and transcend perceived
cultural and religious boundaries.41 Exemplary of other works identifying
ages within Ottoman history, The Age of Beloveds usefully explores the possi-
bilities of a deep comparative analysis, in both space and time, of sexuality and
desire.
The multiple benefits of thinking of the Ottoman Empire as a set of ages,
however, also come with their drawbacks. One of these is that we are left with a
series of temporal descriptions that do not obviously (or even historically)
connect to one another in any immediately transparent way. These become dis-
connected floating moments in time that may make sense on their own, but not
necessarily when one tries to explain how one age derives from or leads to
another. Therefore, the interpretative challenge posed by the conception of
the Ottoman Empire as a closed system or as a set of outcomes also has its res-
onances in the periodization of the empire. With ages, we focus less on tran-
sitions than on consistencies over timepiecemeal temporal chunks rather
than a full chronological arc of empire. The dynasty did indeed exist for
over six centuries, but there was not necessarily any fixed ideology of power
or statecraft in the empirenot in a specific age and certainly not over
centuries.42

E V E RY W H E R E E M P I R E

In attempting to link various Ottoman ages to one another, several noteworthy

recent works do push us to think beyond piecemeal temporal histories in favor
of more holistic sweeps of the entirety of Ottoman history. Caroline Finkels
synthetic narrative account of the empire covers the entire period from 1300
to 1923, showing some of the ways to treat the empire as a unitary historical
phenomenon.43 Significantly, apart from Lord Kinrosss 1977 book, a study
largely written within the framework of epic nineteenth-century imperial
history, Finkels is perhaps the only single-volume, single-authored English-
language scholarly book attempting to cover the entire chronology of
Ottoman history.44 Other important multi-authored collaborative works of

41
Ibid., 30.
42
For a deeper discussion of this point, see Molly Greene, The Ottoman Experience, Daeda-
lus 134 (2005): 8899.
43
Caroline Finkel, Osmans Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire, 13001923 (New York:
Basic Books, 2006).
44
Lord Kinross, The Ottoman Centuries: The Rise and Fall of the Turkish Empire (New York:
Morrow, 1977). Stanford Shaws two-volume work is also important in this regard. See Stanford
Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 19761977).
 THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND THE IMPERIAL TURN 733

course existthe foundational An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman

Empire and the more-recent Cambridge History of Turkey, to name the
obviously indispensable.45 And still other historians have employed focused
conceptual frames as organizing principles to examine the entire span of
Ottoman history.46
In thinking through the empires six centuries, Karen Barkeys Empire of
Difference in many ways represents the culmination of efforts to connect the
historiography of decline, statist conceptions of Ottoman imperial history,
questions of periodization, and other metanarratives of Ottoman history to
the larger concerns of the Imperial Turn.47 One of Barkeys chief achievements
is her particular synthesis of outcomes and culture. In culling from, combining,
and juxtaposing a wide range of specific studies, from both before and after
what we have dubbed the Imperial Turn, Barkey constructs an analytical
approach that is at once informed by theories of empire derived from those
beyond the Ottoman realm but still ensconced in the specificities of the logic
and workings of the Ottoman imperial system. In thereby investing the
Ottoman case with theorizable potential, Empire of Difference can be seen as
an Ottoman historical sociologists answer to Dominic Lievens Russocentric
Empire.
Barkey shifts from the paradigm centered around decline, largely already
eschewed in myriad specific ways in those studies discussed above, to an
approach centered around longevity. She argues that the answer to the ques-
tion of the longevity of empire can be found in analyses of the organizations
and networks connecting large segmented and constantly changing structures,
and by focusing on the multivalent, networked, vertical, and horizontal lin-
kages and the malleable compacts established between state and social
actors.48 Linguistic, religious, and cultural differences were, therefore, unpro-
blematic from the perspective of the imperial elite since it was perfectly willing
to maintain differences as long as it could still achieve its desired outcomes
through negotiation. In short, to use Nicholas Doumaniss words, the
Ottoman Empire was a master of metamorphosis.49
Thus, skating along meso-level network structures that link macro-level
events and phenomena to macro social and political outcomes to theorize the
reasons for the empires longevity, Barkeys is an inventive and largely

45
Halil nalck with Donald Quataert, eds., An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman
Empire, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); The Cambridge History of
Turkey, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 20062012).
46
In this regard, see, for example, Reat Kasabas A Moveable Empire: Ottoman Nomads,
Migrants, and Refugees (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009), which uses the study of
mobility to understand the entire temporal scope of Ottoman history.
47
Karen Barkey, Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008).
48
Ibid., 6.
49
Doumanis, Durable Empire, 955.
734 ALAN MIKHAIL AND CHRISTINE M. PHILLIOU

successful solution to the potential contradiction between outcomes and cul-

tural history.50 It remains, though, a structural solution, which still aims at
explaining the empires ultimate outcomelongevity as opposed to
declineand which also serves her explanation of what happened to the
empire once it tried to adapt to Western European modes of rule in the nine-
teenth century. As in other of the larger synthetic works attempting to
address the totality of Ottoman history, Barkeys focus is not on any one
specific crisis in the course of Ottoman history, but rather on the larger patterns
that maintained imperial hegemony across a wide expanse of time and space
through all manner of crises. To this end, intermediaries and brokers were inex-
tricable from the Ottoman variant of empire, from its late thirteenth-century
inception until its protracted crisis in the long nineteenth century. Such
brokers facilitated the flexibility and negotiation necessary for such a large
and socio-culturally diverse subject population.
To explain the long-term durability of Ottoman rule, Barkey moreover
puts forth a hub-and-spoke model where the hub represents the imperial
center and the spokes the periphery. She argues that the beauty and success
of the Ottoman mode of rule was the vertical integration of horizontal power
relationshipsa theoretical twist, suggesting, all roads lead to Istanbul.
Again, in an outcome-focused study this appears to be true, but if one were
to carve the Ottoman period into separate ages, or incarnations, one wonders
if certain horizontal relationships did not present a mortal threat to Ottoman
hegemony at several points in timefrom the simple escape of farmers from
tax burdens to the all-out armed rebellions of imperial provincial governors.51
Certainly, loyalists to the Ottoman central state would no doubt have wanted
to project the image of a hub-and-spoke mode of rule to both imperial
subjects and the outside world alike. And, indeed, it seems Barkeys model
of hubs and spokes holds firmest for the period before the end of the eighteenth
century, when various spokes began forming horizontal relationships of
their own, thereby challenging the states vertical monopolization of power
relations.

THE ( E A R LY ) M O D E R N C O N D I T I O N
Despite these few larger works on the whole of Ottoman history, the preference
among Ottoman historiansboth comparativists and otherwisehas, as
we have already noted, been to focus in on just one imperial age. Of all
the periods of the empires history, perhaps none has received more attention
in the comparative work of the past few decades than the early modern
or middle period, by which we mean the seventeenth and eighteenth

50
Barkey, Empire of Difference, 17.
51
On the role of large-scale rebellions in Ottoman history, see Jane Hathaway, ed., Mutiny and
Rebellion in the Ottoman Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004).
 THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND THE IMPERIAL TURN 735

centuries.52 The attention paid to these centuries is a relatively new phenom-

enon within Ottoman Studies and one that deserves some explanation.
Ottoman historiography first cut its teeth on the sixteenth century and, to a
lesser extent, the nineteenth as well. These were two periods when the Otto-
mans presented, respectively, the greatest threat to and the greatest proof of
the master narrative of European supremacy. The sixteenth century, moreover,
was the supposed apex of the empireits greatest geographic expanse, the
reign of Sultan Sleyman, and the most sophisticated articulation of Ottoman
governing institutions.53 In a post-Saidian era in which culture and empire as
inherent, monolithic, bounded, and fixed categories no longer made sense,
Ottoman historians turned to the period after the beginning of the empires pur-
ported decline from its sixteenth-century pinnacle both to dilute the hegemony
of this century and to understand more fully how the empire functioned in a
period we still know relatively little about.54 The result has been a wealth of
studies over the past few decades on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Beyond these reasons internal to the field of Ottoman Studies, Ottomanists
have more generally been part of larger scholarly trends across disciplines and
geographic specializations that have seen an upswing in interest in the early
modern world.55 Work done on South Asia, China, the Mediterranean, the
Atlantic World, and elsewhere has all put the early modern world more squarely
on the map of historical inquiry. And, it must be said, much of this work is in
the mode of comparative empires or other forms of comparative analysis. This
attraction to the early modern period is largely an outgrowth of our presentist
ambitions for a post-national age. If the twentieth century taught us anything,
it is that nation-states perpetrate violence on a massive scale, inculcate a hatred
of certain problematic peoples and ideas, and create gaping disparities in
wealth and resources. At the start of the twenty-first century, the perhaps
utopian ambitions of some are for a post-national world in which people,
money, and ideas move; borders are porous, fictitious, and easily crossed;
and political and economic organization takes place at levels other than the
nation-state (for example, the European Union and the Gulf Cooperation
Council, but also initiatives like microcredit).

52
For a very useful recent snapshot of some of this work from the past decade or so, see Virginia
H. Aksan and Daniel Goffman, eds., The Early Modern Ottomans: Remapping the Empire (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
53
This narrative of the sixteenth century is recounted in Halil nalcks The Ottoman Empire.
54
For the Saidian critique, see Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books,
1978); idem., Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993).
55
For critical evaluation of this trend, see Jack A. Goldstone, The Problem of the Early
Modern World, Journal of the Social and Economic History of the Orient 41 (1998): 24984;
Randolph Starn, The Early Modern Muddle, Journal of Early Modern History 6 (2002): 296
307. See also the articles in the following very useful publication: The Eurasian Context of the
Early Modern History of Mainland South East Asia, 14001800, special issue of Modern Asian
Studies 31 (1997).
736 ALAN MIKHAIL AND CHRISTINE M. PHILLIOU

The empires of the early modern world therefore offer the most recent his-
torical precedent for a world of highly idealized fluidity supposedly free from
the violence, destruction, and hatred inherent in the nation-state. This then is
perhaps the most important reason that historians, Ottomanist and otherwise,
have become more and more interested in early modern history. Early moder-
nity has become a repository and testing ground for our post-national ambitions
and desires.
Early modern castings of concepts like subjecthood, for example, seem to
offer an alternative to the rigidity of militarily defended modes of belonging
sanctioned and protected by the modern nation-state. For the Ottomans, such
notions of belonging were articulated through the older concept of the circle
of justicea statement of imperial governance meant to ensure peace and
security so that rural cultivators could produce agricultural goods that would
benefit their own lives and ultimately sustain the empires administration.56
Without overstating the supposed justice of this system, it is true that both
the early modern state and its subjects (reaya) had responsibilities and rights
against each other, largely mediated through imperial institutions, and that
differences of various sorts were allowed, encouraged, and accommodated.
This understanding of subjecthood is wholly different from that of our contem-
porary moment, in which, despite assertions of supposedly globalized citizen-
ship, the nation-state nevertheless continues to exert overwhelming power in
the determination of political, economic, and cultural belonging.57 Early mod-
ernitycleansed of the power relations and elitism that sustained the empires
of that erathus emerges as the last best example of a different and desirable
model.
Despite the upsurge in studies of the early modern period in the Ottoman
Empire and elsewhere, the problematics of a periodization built around
ages remain. In Ottoman historiography, we still do not fully understand how
or why early modernity is integral to the study of the nineteenth century.
Surely it is, since the nineteenth century did not come from nowhere. As
yet, though, the field of Ottoman history has remained divided between
those who work on the early modern period and those who work on the nine-
teenth century. This fact is largely a vestige both of Orientalism and its
critiques and, relatedly, of periodizations that accept European colonial
encounters as fundamental turning points in the history of the Ottoman

56
On the Ottoman circle of justice, see Cornell Fleischer, Royal Authority, Dynastic Cyclism,
and Ibn Khaldnism in Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Letters, Journal of Asian and African Studies
18 (1983): 198220.
57
For an analysis of some of the potentials and possibilities of what certain forms of post-
national belonging might look like, see Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and
Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Press, 2004). See especially their invocation
of the specter of premodern societies in what they term the twilight of the peasant world: ibid.,
11527.
 THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND THE IMPERIAL TURN 737

Empire.58 In this literature, early modernity thus appears as simply background

to the main event of the nineteenth century.
The comparison of empires is, however, one of the few frameworks that
has offered the potential to bridge this divide between early modern and
modern in Ottoman Studies. Most of this work does not explicitly compare
the Ottomans to other empires, but rather attempts to understand the
Ottoman Empire within wider comparative interpretative frames like consti-
tutional politics, state and society relations, governance, environmental politics,
or modernization theory.59 One of the important collective contributions of this
work has been to help us reimagine the empire beyond a discrete set of ages.
Each of these works, however, not only offers a periodization that straddles
the early modern-modern fenceroughly 1760 to 1840but each also seeks
to challenge or change some of the interpretative lenses we have for explaining
early modernity, the nineteenth century, and relationships between the two.
A similar historiographical tension in linking chronologically consecutive,
though usually hermetically sealed periods maintains in works on the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries. Within the larger framework of the Imper-
ial Turn, Barkeys Empire of Difference again offers a useful way of thinking
about how and why the flexibility that seemed to characterize the early
modern period of the empires existence turned into a bloody mess in 1915.
Barkey herself edited a separate volume with Mark von Hagen, After
Empire, which sought to compare the ends and afterlives of the Ottoman,
Russian, and Habsburg Empires.60 Cleaving the questions of longevity and
violent demise into two demonstrates the difficulty, indeed near impossibility,
of weaving together the early modern empire with the presumptive modern one.
The brokers who proved so crucial to the long-term survival of the empire from
the thirteenth through the eighteenth centuries were precisely the ones who
were pushed out of the system when the reforms we associate with moderniz-
ation and westernization were instituted in the nineteenth century. And yet
we are only beginning to understand in all their complexities the final tests of
diversity, crisis, and change that buried the empire in the twentieth century.
In searching for a connection between the early modern Ottomans and the
end of the empire, we again find insight in Lievens treatment of the question of
empire. Lieven asserts that the key dilemma of empire in the long nineteenth

58
On these points, see Dror Zeevi, Back to Napoleon? Thoughts on the Beginning of the
Modern Era in the Middle East, Mediterranean Historical Review 19 (2004): 7394.
59
See, respectively, Tezcan, The Second Ottoman Empire; Dina Rizk Khoury, State and Provin-
cial Society in the Ottoman Empire: Mosul, 15401834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997); Philliou, Biography of an Empire; Alan Mikhail, Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: An
Environmental History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Ariel Salzmann, Tocque-
ville in the Ottoman Empire: Rival Paths to the Modern State (Leiden: Brill, 2004).
60
Karen Barkey and Mark von Hagen, eds., After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-
Building: The Soviet Union and the Russian, Ottoman, and Habsburg Empires (Boulder: Westview
Press, 1997).
738 ALAN MIKHAIL AND CHRISTINE M. PHILLIOU

century, and the dilemma that leads us straight into World War I, grew out of the
following inherent contradiction. On one hand, if one wanted ones state to
matter on the stage of international (world) politics, one had to control territory
on a continental scale (empire), and yet, the principles of sovereignty and legiti-
macy were increasingly coming to be based on the idea and will of homo-
geneous ethno-linguistic entities (nation).61 In this sense, the Ottomans were
facing the very same contradiction that the Russians, Germans, and British
(in Ireland as well as India) were facing: how to square the business of
empire with the idea of nation and the governing practices of a modern
state.62 The Ottomans, more so than their fellow Great Powers, however,
were facing it from a severely compromised position in the geopolitical neigh-
borhood they inhabited.
The two greatest comparables to the Ottomans in their nineteenth-century
iteration are lately the Russian and British Empires. While Lievens Empire
suggests highly interesting and useful comparisons between the Ottoman and
Russian empires, other recent works have been devoted to particular aspects
of this comparison. Linking up in many ways with the scholarship on
Ottoman strategies for governing Christians, Robert D. Crewss For Prophet
and Tsar, as well as Mustafa Tunas more recent work, explore the ways
Muslims in Russian territories fit into the ever higher aspirations of the
central state to exert control over its subjects and potential citizens.63 All
these studies are reflective of a larger trend in both Russian and Ottoman histor-
iography toward illuminating the experiences of non-dominant confessional
and ethnic groups. In the Ottoman case, however, this pursuit of the history
of non-Muslim communities is laden with the burden that these groups were
central to the devolution of the empire over the course of the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. Once again, the diversity and tolerance of the early
modern empire toward non-Muslims runs up against the violence and
bloodshed of the long nineteenth century.
For their part, Ottoman-British comparisons tend to grow out of the ques-
tion of how the Ottomans remade themselves in the nineteenth century and

61
Lieven, Empire, xiii.
62
On some of the many lingering effects of empire on the modern nation-state, see Partha Chat-
terjee, The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power (Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 2012); idem., Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
63
Robert D. Crews, For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 2006); Mustafa Tuna, Madrasa Reform as a Secularizing
Process: A View from the Late Russian Empire, Comparative Studies in Society and History 53
(2011): 54070. For work on Ottoman Christians, see Bruce Masters, Christians and Jews in the
Ottoman Arab World: The Roots of Sectarianism (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2001); Christine Philliou, Communities on the Verge: Unraveling the Phanariot Ascendancy in
Ottoman Governance, Comparative Studies in Society and History 51 (2009): 15181; Ussama
Makdisi, The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century
Ottoman Lebanon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
 THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND THE IMPERIAL TURN 739

attempted to reconquer some of their own tenuously held territories. Thus,

works comparing the Ottoman and British Empires have focused on how the
Ottomans were or were not a colonial state like the British in India, on imperial
ideologies of rule and sovereignty, and on comparative attempts at state mod-
ernization in the nineteenth century.64 Inspired largely by comparative studies
of British imperialism, Ussama Makdisi and Selim Deringil have also usefully
analyzed, respectively, Ottoman Orientalism vis--vis the Arab world and the
Ottoman Empires uncomfortable positionality in postcolonial studies.65
Others have taken this inter-imperial comparison between the Ottomans and
British as an opportunity to develop intra-imperial comparisons across
Ottoman localities.66
The Tanzimat reforms (18391876), state-led efforts to rationalize
Ottoman administration and remake the principles and laws of political belong-
ing in the empire, are ordinarily the centerpiece of any treatment of the Ottoman
nineteenth century. As an object of study the reforms themselves can be seen to
lie somewhere between the Russian-Ottoman and British-Ottoman compari-
sons. They were the main institutional strategy used both for the control of
the Ottoman central statethe British often pushed these reforms at
moments when they had the greatest leverageand for the Ottoman central
state to remake itself into a state of continental proportions that would matter
on the new stage of imperial and international politics. The Tanzimat reform
project has, of course, generated a large volume of scholarship, and yet it
has inspired a relatively small range of questions, most of which are still dis-
cussed on the spectrum of success or failurein other words, as outcomes.
Recent work, however, is moving the study of the Tanzimat in new directions.
Milen V. Petrov, for example, productively departs from the dominant historio-
graphy of the Tanzimat era with his analysis of the administrative reorganiz-
ation of nizami courts in the vilayet of Danube, a pilot province as he
calls it.67 Reat Kasabas A Moveable Empire creatively shows how the

64
Dina Rizk Khoury and Dane Keith Kennedy, Comparing Empires: The Ottoman Domains
and the British Raj in the Long Nineteenth Century, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa
and the Middle East 27 (2007): 23344; Thomas Khn, Shaping and Reshaping Colonial Otto-
manism: Contesting Boundaries of Difference and Integration in Ottoman Yemen, 18721919,
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 27 (2007): 31531; C. A. Bayly,
Distorted Development: The Ottoman Empire and British India, circa 17801916, Comparative
Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 27 (2007): 33244.
65
Ussama Makdisi, Ottoman Orientalism, American Historical Review 107 (2002): 76896;
Selim Deringil, They Live in a State of Nomadism and Savagery: The Late Ottoman Empire and
the Post-Colonial Debate, Comparative Studies in Society and History 45 (2003): 31142.
66
See, for example, the following comparison between the Ottoman territories of Albania and
Yemen: Isa Blumi, Rethinking the Late Ottoman Empire: A Comparative Social and Political
History of Albania and Yemen, 18781918 (Istanbul: Isis, 2003).
67
Milen V. Petrov, Everyday Forms of Compliance: Subaltern Commentaries on Ottoman
Reform, 18641868, Comparative Studies in Society and History 46 (2004): 73059.
740 ALAN MIKHAIL AND CHRISTINE M. PHILLIOU

movement of itinerant, usually pastoral, populations, which often pitted them

against the sedentarizing impulses of the imperial administration, was recast
at the end of the empire as a means of ridding parts of the empire of unwanted
groups.68 In an analysis of some of these groups, Janet Klein opens up the long-
neglected Hamidian period (18761909) and examines the formation and use
of the Hamidiye Light Cavalry, a contingent made up of Kurdish tribal levies
that were trained and redeployed by the central state to police Armenian popu-
lations in eastern Anatolia in the 1890s.69 Klein goes so far as to compare the
Ottoman civilizing mission among Kurds to that of the United States against
Native American populations in the nineteenth century.70
Thus in both the early modern and modern periods, the Ottoman Empire
has emerged over the preceding few decades as up for comparative grabs. At
different times and for different purposeswhether to illuminate a cultural
phenomenon or to make a point about how the Ottomans stacked up against
other world powersthe Ottoman imperial experience has been compared to
that of Russia, Britain, Germany, China, Spain, the Habsburgs, the United
States, Mughal South Asia, Rome, and so on and so forth. Still, although the
durable empire seems durably comparable, whether or not the Ottoman case
can generate bases for comparison of its own, rather than simply importing
them from elsewhere, remains an open question.71

C O M PA R AT I V E E N D S

Particularly fascinating and controversial is recent and emerging scholarship

that is disentangling the many conflictual processes around World War I, the
final demise of the Ottoman Empire, and the formation of the Turkish Republic
in 1923. This subject has long been taboo in Turkish scholarship and society,
and was long neglected by scholars outside of Turkey due in large part to pro-
hibitions on access to Ottoman archives from the period. Several new and
important studies, however, have emerged since the Imperial Turn in
Ottoman Studies that deal with the empire in the first quarter of the twentieth
century. Earlier works by M. kr Haniolu on the Young Turks before
1908 and by Erik Jan Zrcher and Feroz Ahmad on the Committee of Union
and Progress (CUP) after 1908 set the stage for more recent studies of the Otto-
mans in the First World War, such as Michael Reynoldss comparative study of
Ottoman eastern Anatolia and the Russian Caucasus during the war and
Mustafa Aksakals treatment of the Ottoman states fateful decision to enter

68
Kasaba, A Moveable Empire.
69
Janet Klein, The Margins of Empire: Kurdish Militias in the Ottoman Tribal Zone (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2011).
70
For a further comparative view of civilizing missions, see Pomeranz, Empire & Civiliz-
ing Missions.
71
We borrow the phrase durable empire from Nicholas Doumaniss Durable Empire.
 THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND THE IMPERIAL TURN 741

the conflict.72 Other works about the end of the empire that have opened up
previously unexplored topics include Fuat Dndars study of the use of stat-
istics in Young Turk demographic engineering, Ryan Gingerass social and pol-
itical history of the ethnic violence that riddled the southern Marmara region of
western Anatolia in the first two decades of the twentieth century, and Taner
Akams fine-grained empirical account of the genocidal consequences of
late-Ottoman Turkification policies on the empires Armenian and Greek
populations.73
One work that stands out among these on the devolution of the empire is
Uur mit ngrs The Making of Modern Turkey, which goes even further in
time, tracking what he calls (following from Erik Jan Zrcher before him) the
CUP period, not 1908 to 1918, but rather 1913 to 1950. This is a revolutionary
periodization in that it considers the first twenty-seven years of the Turkish
Republic to be part of the CUP period.74 This undermines the periodization
maintained in the Kemalist paradigm, a periodization that insists on a total
rupture in 1923 from anything that came before the establishment of the Repub-
lic, and has profound ramifications for our understanding of modern Turkey. A
few other works have likewise bridged the gap from empire to republicCarter
Vaughn Findleys Turkey, Islam, Nationalism, and Modernity explores some of
the cultural, literary, and political continuities of the entire period from 1789 to
2007; Fatma Mge Geks recent book also fuses the histories of the empire
and the Republic into an indivisible unit; and likewise M. kr Haniolus
biography of Atatrk both outlines the ways in which Atatrks intellect was
shaped in and by the politics of the late Ottoman period and places the
history of the early Republic in comparative context alongside the early
Soviet Union.75

72
M. kr Haniolu, The Young Turks in Opposition (New York: Oxford University Press,
1995); idem., Preparation for a Revolution: The Young Turks, 19021908 (New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2001); Erik Jan Zrcher, The Unionist Factor: The Role of the Committee of Union
and Progress in the Turkish National Movement, 19051926 (Leiden: Brill, 1984); Feroz Ahmad,
The Young Turks: The Committee of Union and Progress in Turkish Politics, 19081914 (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1969); Michael A. Reynolds, Shattering Empires: The Clash and Collapse of the
Ottoman and Russian Empires, 19081918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011);
Mustafa Aksakal, The Ottoman Road to War in 1914: The Ottoman Empire and the First World
War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
73
Fuat Dndar, Crime of Numbers: The Role of Statistics in the Armenian Question (1878
1918) (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2010); Ryan Gingeras, Sorrowful Shores: Vio-
lence, Ethnicity, and the End of the Ottoman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009);
Taner Akam, The Young Turks Crime against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic
Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).
74
Uur mit ngr, The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia,
19131950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
75
Carter Vaughn Findley, Turkey, Islam, Nationalism, and Modernity: A History, 17892007
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); Fatma Mge Gek, The Transformation of Turkey:
Redefining State and Society from the Ottoman Empire to the Modern Era (London: I. B. Tauris,
2011); M. kr Haniolu, Atatrk: An Intellectual Biography (Princeton: Princeton University
742 ALAN MIKHAIL AND CHRISTINE M. PHILLIOU

ngrs study, however, does more than just reperiodize Ottoman-

turned-Turkish history. It also takes a close-up look at multiple phases of
Ottoman and then Republican state violencewhich ngr considers a
typical feature of modern state-buildingin Diyarbekir in eastern Anatolia.
These phases involved not only the annihilation of the Armenian civilian popu-
lation but also the mass deportation of Kurdish populations and the resettlement
of nominally Turkish populations from the Balkans and western Anatolia to
formerly Armenian and Kurdish areas in the 1920s and beyond. The final
phase of state violence, ngr maintains, was the obliteration of the memory
of earlier phases and the construction of histories that blotted out these
events and the policies that led to them. Why is this a story of empire? Precisely
because it follows Lievens dilemma of empire to its logical conclusion: once
the continental-scale empire was lost, the ethnic, ideological, cultural, religious,
and political homogenization of the national territory that remained had to be
completed at all costs by those who were still operating in an imperial
mindset. As ngr demonstrates, leaders of the early Turkish Republic were
not only often the very same individuals as their Ottoman-CUP predecessors,
but were, more importantly, operating with a continuous logic as, not to
mention similar tactics to, these men.
Countless questions cascade from ngrs argument, many having to do
with the limits of empire. In what respects can power in an imperial context be
compared to power in non-imperial realms, whether sub-imperial state for-
mations in the pre-modern period or post-imperial nation-states? Is Turkey a
post-colonial state? Why are legacies of the Ottoman past not conventionally
examined in the framework of post-colonialism? Certainly one hopes that the
robust discussion of comparative empires will connect more substantively to
even larger discussions in the post-imperial fray. ngrs book is one study
that allows us to imagine a range of such possible connections.

C O N C L U S I O N S : C O M PA R I S O N S , C O N N E C T I O N S , C R O S S I N G S

When Rifaat Abou-El-Haj and Dominic Lieven published their works nearly
two decades ago and a decade ago, respectively, the Ottoman Empire was con-
sidered to be an incommensurable and incompatible empireso different as to
be a freak among historys other states. Since these foundational works, the
name of the game in Ottoman Studies has been comparisonto make the
case that the empire indeed was like other empires and states throughout

Press, 2011). Geks and ngrs studies are inextricable from the project known as the Workshop
for Armenian-Turkish Studies, which, over the past decade, has moved the scholarly discussion of
the Armenian Genocide and Ottoman history of that period forward in crucial ways. One of the
recent products of these collaborative efforts is: Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma Mge Gek, and
Norman M. Naimark, eds., A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the
Ottoman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
 THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND THE IMPERIAL TURN 743

history. This enormous historiographical pendulum swing has, as we have been

discussing, produced many benefits for the field. The very strength of this col-
lective work though has also proven to be perhaps its biggest drawback. The
Ottomans have become so comparable as to now be nearly devoid of any par-
ticularity. Abou-El-Haj challenged Ottoman historians to get past continually
stressing the differentness of the empire.76 It now seems we need to get
past its sameness as well.
Thus, the imperative in moving forward is to maintain the particularities of
the empire while at the same time opening it up to comparative analysis. Simply
stating that the Ottomans shared imperial ideologies of rule with Spain or the
Mughals in the early modern period or that the early modern past perhaps
offers a template for conceiving of an as-yet-unrealized post-national present
is not analytically productive enough to move us in the direction of understand-
ing what power meant, first in an Ottoman context and then beyond.
Differencespecificity not freakishnessmust come before similarity. The
crucial point is that the Ottoman Empire was not like any other empire. This,
of course, let us stress, does not mean it is beyond comparison. Quite the con-
trary. The Ottoman Empire was an elaborate and changing power formation
where the structures and mentalities of empire met more abstract ideologies
of early modern sovereignty, then nationalism and the exigencies of imperial
rivalry, and then colonialist contestation. It is in the interaction among all
of these forces that the dynamism of this empire takes center stage. Our
accustomed images of Ottoman sameness with Europe or Ottoman passivity
as the Sick Man of Europe or the binary opposition between traditionalism
and westernization within the empire thus come to look increasingly
and painfully two-dimensional. We should therefore begin to think beyond
these images to examine the positive processes going on in the space
betweennot the assumed void, but an arena of intense contestation
between a panoply of forces, actors, and places. Only in this way can the
empires specificitywhether due to geography, history, demography, or so
many levels of contingency and crisisshine through in all its diversity and
conflict.
The meso-historical solution to the divide between the historiographies
of outcomes and cultural history in Ottoman Studiesa solution so-termed by
Karen Barkey and carried out in the work of other scholarsis therefore
crucial as perhaps the first robust conceptualization of how to maintain
Ottoman particularity while at the same time offering an exportable analytical
toolkit for comparison. This starting point allows us, moreover, to push our
comparative questions even further. How do various actors in the
hub-and-spoke model interact with each other along different lines of

76
Abou-El-Haj, Formation of the Modern State, 2.
744 ALAN MIKHAIL AND CHRISTINE M. PHILLIOU

connection? When and how is the state involved and when and how is it
bypassed? How do imperial subjects cross spokes, move beyond the wheel
altogether, or constitute their own hubs of power and influence in ways com-
parable to historical actors in other times and places? These are lines of
inquiry usefully examined both within and beyond the empire. Thinking
about how certain institutions created empire-wide networks of ethical and
commercial interests or how particular elites both produced and were produced
by the specific context of Ottoman governance are possible ways of pushing on
the meso-historical front.77 In a very different way, showing, for example, how
global familial and trading links weaved in and out of the empire to benefit
from and challenge Ottoman commerce is yet another avenue of recent research
that allows us to reconcile (or break out of?) the tension between macro-
outcomes and cultural historical particularism.78 In these and numerous other
as-yet-unforeseen ways of doing some form of what Sanjay Subrahmanyam
calls connected history, we can preserve the specificities of the Ottoman his-
torical experience while at the same time allowing the empire to be usefully
engaged in comparative analysis.79
Why compare empires? It allows us to generate questions beyond our own
specific field specialties and to see particular phenomena as part of larger his-
torical processes. Why compare the Ottoman Empire? It was at the geographic
and political center of the world for over six centuries; it was the inheritor and
synthesizer of Roman, Mongol, Islamic, and other global traditions; it offers a
laboratory for thinking about practices of governance, culture, and economics
that were in continual transformation from the late medieval period to the twen-
tieth century. In stepping back from the precipice of comparative imperial
analysis and taking stock of where we have been and where we might go, it
is clear that comparison can be a gift for students of Ottoman history, but
only if it is taken not just as a collection of structural analogues, but as a
means of allowing us to see the Ottoman Empire in all its specificities as an

77
For these two examples, see, respectively, Amy Singer, Constructing Ottoman Beneficence:
An Imperial Soup Kitchen in Jerusalem (Albany: State University of New York, 2002); and Phil-
liou, Biography of an Empire.
78
Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and
Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009);
Christopher H. Johnson, David Warren Sabean, Simon Teuscher, and Francesca Trivellato, eds.,
Transregional and Transnational Families in Europe and Beyond: Experiences since the Middle
Ages (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011); Sebouh David Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to
the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2011).
79
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early
Modern Eurasia, Modern Asian Studies 31 (1997): 73562; idem., Explorations in Connected
History: From the Tagus to the Ganges (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005); idem., Explorations
in Connected History: Mughals and Franks (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005).
 THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND THE IMPERIAL TURN 745

imperial and deeply political ecosystem teeming with struggle, tension, mutual-
ity, and sometimes violent contestation.

Abstract: As a polity that existed for over six centuries and that ruled on three
continents, the Ottoman Empire is perhaps both the easiest and hardest empire
to compare in world history. It is somewhat paradoxical then that the Ottoman
Empire has only recently become a focus of students of empires as historical
phenomena. This approach to the Ottoman Empire as an empire has succeeded
in generating an impressive profusion of scholarship. This article critically
assesses this literature within the larger context of what we term the Imperial
Turn to explain how comparative perspectives have been used to analyze the
empire. In doing so, it sheds new light on some older historiographical questions
about the dynamics of imperial rule, periodization, and political transformation,
while at the same time opening up new avenues of inquiry and analysis about
the role of various actors in the empire, the recent emphasis on the empires
early modern history, and the scholarly literature of comparative empires itself.
Throughout, the authors speak both to Ottoman specialists and others interested
in comparative imperial histories to offer a holistic picture of recent Ottoman his-
toriography and to suggest many possible directions for future scholarship.
Instead of accepting comparison for comparisons sake, the article offers a bold
new vocabulary for rigorous comparative work on the Ottoman Empire and
beyond.