Ottoman Reform
Assigned Reading:
Quataert, chapter 4.
Primary Sources: Hatt-i şerif of Gülhane and Islahat Fermanı (edited by James Gelvin).
Seminar Questions:
- To what extent were the Ottoman reformers imitating Europe?
- How did military and bureaucratic reform change the balance of power among different groups in Ottoman society?
Further Reading:
Virginia Aksan, Ottoman Wars, 1700-1870: An Empire Besieged (Longman, 2007).
Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha’s Men: Mehmed Ali, His Army and the Making of Modern Egypt (American University in Cairo Press, 2002).
Khaled Fahmy, Mehmed Ali: From Ottoman Governor to Ruler of Egypt (Oneworld, 2009).
Benjamin Fortna, Imperial Classroom: Islam, the State and Education in the Late Ottoman Empire (Oxford UP, 2002).
Benjamin Fortna, "The Reign of Abdulhamid II," Cambridge History of Turkey, vol. 4: Turkey in the Modern World (Cambridge UP, 2008).
Carter Vaughn Findley, Bureaucratic Reform in the Ottoman Empire: The Sublime Porte, 1789-1922 (Princeton UP, 1980).
Halil İnalcık, “Application of the Tanzimat and its Social Effects,” Archivum Ottomanicum 5 (1973).
Şerif Mardin, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought: A Study in the Modernization of Turkish Political Ideas (Syracuse University Press, 2000).
Brinkley Messick, The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society (University of California Press, 1993). *NB This is a much wider ranging book about writing, law and authority in Yemen up until the 1970s, but it has some very interesting reflections on the impact of the Tanzimat in Yemen, in particular chapter 3 on the codification of Islamic law.
Rudolph Peters, “Administrators and Magistrates: The Development of a Secular Judiciary in Egypt, 1842-1871,” Die Welt des Islams n.s. 39 (1999).
Rudolph Peters, "From Jurists' Law to State Law, or What Happens when the Shari'a is Codified?" Mediterranean Politics 7 (2002), 82-95.
Donald Quataert, “The Age of Reforms, 1812-1914,” in An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, ed. Halil İnalcık and Donald Quataert (Cambridge UP, 1994).
Avi Rubin, Ottoman Nizamiye Courts: Law and Modernity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
June Starr, Law as Metaphor: from Islamic Courts to the Palace of Justice (State University of New York Press, 1992).
Rifa‘a Rafi‘ al-Tahtawi, An Imam in Paris: Account of a Stay in France by an Egyptian Cleric, 1826-1831 (Saqi Books, 2011).