This week we consider the Ottoman ‘heritage’ by factoring the Ottoman Turks and why it is important to study Ottoman history and early Islam. We reconstruct the forces and interests the Ottomans had to deal with to expand and maintain their empire.

[LECTURE SLIDES]

Seminar Questions:

How can we explain the capacity of the Ottomans to rule the empire they did and such a large area for 6 centuries?

Is it useful to think of the Ottoman empire as a Muslim empire? To what degree was this a theocracy ruled by religious scholars (ulema)?

To what extent were center-provincial relations altered over the centuries in the maintenance of empire?

What was the Tanzimat?

How has the narrative of the shrinking Ottoman Empire or its apparent 'sickness' been explained?

Readings:

* Note that page numbers refer to online e-book pagination; page numbers may change if dowloaded as PDF.

*William Cleveland, A History of the Modern Middle East, 6^thed. (Westview Press, 2017), pp. 35-48 (chp. 3) and pp. 53-95 (chps. 4-5).

Donald Quataert, The Ottoman Empire, 1700-1922 (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 90-110 (see Reading List), 140-171 (download here). [Apologies for the pencil marks; the scanned copy is from a used edition]

Recommended Reading:

Albert Hourani, The Ottoman Background of the Modern Middle East: The third Carreras Arab lecture of the University of Essex, 25 November 1969 (1970).

Ussama Makdisi, “Ottoman Orientalism,” American Historical Review, 107 (2002), 768-96.

Selim Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876-1909(London: IB Tauris, 1998).

Carter Vaughn Findlay, Bureaucratic Reform in the Ottoman Empire: The Sublime Porte, 1789-1922 (Princeton University Press, 1980).

James Gelvin, The Modern Middle East: A History (Oxford University Press, 2015).

Şükrü Hanioğlu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).

Resat Kasaba (ed.), Cambridge History of Turkey, vol. 4: Turkey in the Modern World (Cambridge University Press, 2009).

Şerif Mardin, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought: A Study in the Modernization of Turkish Political Ideas (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000).

Christine Philliou, Biography of an Empire: Governing Ottomans in an Age of Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).

Daniel A. Stolz, The Lighthouse and the Observatory: Islam, Science, and Empire in Late Ottoman Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).