Narrated Empires is a significant new contribution to the growing list of works that deal with the legacy of the Ottoman and Habsburg empires, two neighboring entities that ruled over a diverse set of populations spread over a vast expanse of contiguous territory. Both empires collapsed and devolved into several nation-states (or mandates) at the end of World War I, in which they had fought as allies despite their centuries-long history of rivalry and warfare. While their entangled histories carry many points of comparison and contrast, the Habsburgs and Ottomans are rarely considered together as a subject of analysis. Habsburg and Ottoman historians are generally trained in the methodologies of two separate and relatively insular historiographical traditions: European and Middle Eastern, which only overlap in the small and nation-centric subfield of Southeast European studies. They seldom attend the same conferences, let alone the same sessions. Narrated Empires is the product of a conference that brought them together: “Viribus Unitis: Myths and Narratives of Habsburg and Ottoman Multinationalism, 1848–1918,” that was convened at the University of Copenhagen in November 2018. Another element that distinguishes Narrated Empires from similar efforts is its combination of historical and literary approaches, building on the strength of recent developments in both fields.
The chapters address a large array of topics across a wide chronological and geographic spectrum. The editors’ clever use of “narratives” as the book's main conceptual anchor manages to bring coherence to a collection that otherwise might seem as lacking in focus. All chapters are attached to the overarching theme of tensions between nationhood and imperial belonging: how the fluid, multipurpose, and contingent ways of belonging gave way to the demands of modernity and nation-states, and how imperial narratives endured and were repurposed as tools of meaning production by the new national elites.
The book consists of sixteen chapters, evenly divided among Ottoman and Habsburg themes, and an epilogue. The first chapter, by Chovanec and Heilo, opens with an extensive inventory of works on the theme of “empire” in the Ottoman and Habsburg contexts. In the second chapter, Heilo further expounds on the theme of “imperial narratives” from antiquity to modernity, teasing out the similarities between the Ottoman and Habsburg empires in their handling of the challenges posed by modernity. The chapter by Salim Çevik is particularly helpful in providing a framework for the book. Çevik critically evaluates the notion of “official nationalism,” or multiethnic empires’ efforts to counter the rise of ethnocentric movements with loyalty to the dynasty and state as an alternative source of nationhood. He presents the Habsburg (emphasis on plurality) and the Romanov (emphasis on homogeneity) empires as two poles in the articulations of official nationalism and argues that the Ottomans vacillated between the two from the Tanzimat period until the end of the empire. Çevik's chapter is also the only one in the volume that makes a deliberate attempt to consider both “narratives,” and it explores points of comparison between the two empires. The following chapter by Alp Eren Topal is engaged with the precise meaning of the term “Ottomanism,” while Madeleine Elfenbeim makes a convincing case that the often-overlooked non-Muslim actors considered themselves stakeholders in the empire's survival and were not simply auxiliaries in the making of Ottomanism. Stephan Guth presents a perspective from the Arab periphery in the final chapter of this section, in which he considers the shifting receptions of Ottomanism among the Arab intelligentsia.
The next section of the book includes two chapters each on the formation of collective identities in the Ottoman and (post-)Habsburg lands. Marijan Bobinac's chapter on the “Zrinski-Myths” presents two intriguing figures that came from a Croatian aristocratic family that later became Magyarized and known alternatively as Zrinski (Croatian) or Zrínyi (Hungarian). Bobinac analyzes two literary texts on these heroic figures to show how they served as sources of national mythmaking—for different nationalisms. Ayşe Özil presents an analysis of the Islahat Fermanı (reform decree) of 1856, one of the basic texts of the Ottoman reform period. She argues that the decree was primarily concerned with practical matters regarding the administration of non-Muslim communities and their communally held properties, and shows how these issues were connected to internal, preexisting currents that shaped the relationship between non-Muslim communities and the Ottoman center. Isa Blumi's chapter exposes the complicated layers of identity building among Albanian elites and their transimperial networks. The confusion and fear following the Austrian Republic's decision to “nationalize” its civil service, the last bastion of a pluralistic imperial state, is the subject of Therese Garstenauer's chapter.
The next three chapters, by Andrea Seidler, Tamara Scheer, and Milka Car, are about the role of the press, particularly the German-language press, in reinforcing national (and not imperial, as one might expect) identity in different and competing ethnic realms by serving as a lingua franca for modernizing national intelligentsias with expansive political visions. In the final section, chapters by Christine Magerski, Johanna Chovanec, and Jelena Spreicer deal with the theme of melancholy as a trope in postimperial Austrian and Turkish novels by reading them against the background of Claudio Magris's classic work Der habsburgische Mythos in der modernen österreischischen Literatur. The epilogue, by Nora Fisher-Onar, draws attention to recent iterations of Habsburg and Ottoman legacies as “imperial nostalgia,” and shows how this nostalgia manifests itself in the opposing myths of a “multicultural” past versus a religiously (and/or racially) “pure” past.
One failure of the volume I must note, however, is the conspicuous absence of Bosnia. Ottoman and Habsburg sovereignties and legacies were nowhere more intertwined than in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and yet the volume does not have a single chapter dedicated to it. There is an excellent literature on the region's Ottoman, Austrian, Yugoslav, and post-Yugoslav pasts, which also has not entered any of the contributors’ radar. This omission is hard to comprehend in an otherwise rich contribution to a nascent field. Scholars of the Ottoman and Habsburg empires alike will learn a great deal from Narrated Empires, and, one hopes, draw inspiration for further, truly synthetic work.
