This book is about the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and the transition from Ottoman to post-Ottoman statehood in the Balkans and the Middle East, with a specific focus on whether ethno-national or religious identities have driven this process of transition and whether the regulation of state-society relations remained primarily Islamic or was somehow Westernized beginning in the early nineteenth century. The book was a pleasure to read and is to be recommended for any graduate course on Ottoman history, advanced courses on Balkan and Middle Eastern politics, and courses on nationalism in the Balkans and the Middle East. The book is ambitious and impressive in terms of its geographic and chronological breadth, covering all the lands from Bosnia to Jordan and extending from the early 1800s to the Arab Spring of the 2010s. It has two interrelated but analytically distinct main arguments, or grand themes, both of which are contrary to what the majority of the literature suggests about late Ottoman and post-Ottoman politics and society, which also contributes to it being an exciting read. However, it should be noted that the argument that is more original and fascinating is not the one that is emphasized by the author and the publisher in the title, on the back cover, and in the introduction of the book.

The author’s primary argument, in his words, is that “the Ottoman state retained an Islamic political identity from its beginning to its end, that the populations under its control similarly identified themselves primarily by religious criteria in affairs transcending the purely local, and that nationalism has been essentially an artificial, post-Ottoman construction that has had from its inception fundamental weaknesses as a basis for long-term political stability” (p. 4). This is contrary to the prevailing view in the literature that Christian populations in particular (Greeks, Serbs, Bulgarians, etc.), but even non-Christian populations (Arabs, Albanians, etc.) as well, had developed an ethno-national identity as their primary identity by the late nineteenth century, and that moreover, even the Ottoman elite and the Ottoman state started to perceive itself primarily as an ethnically Turkish elite and a Turkish state (as opposed to a supra-ethnic Muslim state/elite). Anscombe convincingly demonstrates his argument for most groups in the Ottoman Empire, as well as for post-Ottoman Bulgaria, Bosnia, Greece, Romania, Serbia, and Turkey. In contrast, the same argument is not so convincing when it comes to post-Ottoman Albania, Egypt, or Syria. Given the large Christian minorities found in these three states, as well as the prominence of Christian minorities in the construction of Albanian and Arab nationalism, it is difficult to accept the claim that religious identity trumped (or still trumps) nationalism in Albania, Egypt, and Syria. In order to convince this reader in regards to these three nations, Anscombe would have needed to give concrete examples, litmus tests if you prefer, of instances where religious kin were preferred over ethnic or linguistic kin in determining who was “us” as opposed to being the “other” (e.g., in the fields of naturalization and immigration policy). He does indeed mention such examples for some of the Balkan countries he examines, but to make his main argument more convincing, he would have done well to use such examples for every country discussed in the book.

Anscombe is strongest when he discusses the Ottoman Empire and post-Ottoman Turkey, Greece, and Serbia, but there his argument is not entirely original. Among others, the author of this review has published an article entitled “Persistence of the Islamic Millet as an Ottoman Legacy: Mono-Religious and Anti-Ethnic Definition of Turkish Nationhood,” making essentially the same argument that religion has mattered far more than ethnicity, language, or any other criteria in determining who is a Turk, with many examples from citizenship and immigration policies where non-Turkish Muslims have been systematically favored over Turkish-speaking or ethnically Turkish non-Muslims.Footnote ¹ A book chapter by Kemal Karpat pointing to the incongruity of Ottoman millets and nations is another contribution in the same direction, although it does not make exactly the same argument.Footnote ² More than half a century ago, Elie Kedourie also made the argument that nationalism in the Middle East is an artificial construct, akin to an intellectual disease contracted through Western/European education and supported by foreign imperial (e.g., British) instigation.Footnote ³ However, neither Kedourie’s works nor those of Aktürk and Karpat are cited by Anscombe. If the work under review was a research note or a short article, such oversight could be an excusable error. Had Anscombe referred to these earlier works, it would have been easier to identify the ways in which his contribution to our understanding of the relationship between religious and national identities is novel and original.

The most important and iconoclastic contribution of the book is Anscombe’s other, interrelated argument that the Ottoman Empire was firmly based on the rule of law, and to a much greater degree than any of the post-Ottoman nation-states, especially in terms of the limits that Islamic law (sharia) placed on what the sultan and his government could and could not do vis-à-vis the subjects of the empire. This is a refreshing and welcome corrective to the notions of “arbitrary rule” attributed to the Ottomans, let alone accusations of “Oriental despotism.” From the comparative historical perspective that this book offers, the post-Ottoman nation-states of the Balkans and the Middle East (including the Republic of Turkey) appear to have been much more arbitrary and unrestricted in their transgressions of individual and communal rights than the Ottoman Empire. Consider the following passage, emblematic of this grand theme running throughout the book: “The need to acknowledge Islamic principles of law and justice had been the moral brake upon the Ottoman state, and Islam had been the vehicle for protest against perceived despotism” (p. 13). Anscombe argues that this was also the case for non-Muslims, who could and did utilize Islamic law to protect and advance their interests. In contrast, royal fratricide and the practice of devshirme are given as two exceptional cases of unjust political practices that obviously contradicted and transgressed the limits imposed by Islamic law (p. 28–9). For example, Selim III’s (r. 1789–1807) hesitation to use force to crush the dissenters against his reforms is explained by the limits that Islamic law imposed upon the ruler “by the reigning sense of what constituted justice, which rested upon observance of shari’a and kanun” (p. 56).

The sense of justice and limited government were threatened during the critical fifty years of existential crisis (1789–1839) that the Ottoman Empire suffered, particularly, according to the book, due to the unprecedented transgressions of Mahmud II (r. 1808–1839). However, legitimacy was eventually restored, also in an Islamic fashion, through the Tanzimat and other reforms (the Mecelle laws, etc.) that followed. This also represents a radical departure from well-known depictions of Tanzimat reforms as attempts at “Westernization”: Anscombe argues that, on the contrary, these reforms were primarily aimed at restoring an Islamic sense of justice and the rule of law in the eyes of Muslims and non-Muslims. According to Islamic law, Mahmud II’s actions transgressed the limits put on the state and infringed on the inalienable rights of subjects, thus opening a deep wound in state-society relations—a great “deficit of legitimacy” if you will, although Anscombe does not use such a term. The Tanzimat reforms were then couched in Islamic terms as a restoration of “justice” (adalet), a key or perhaps the key Islamic principle in terms of regulating state-society relations. As such, one of the main themes of the book is a permanent and continuing crisis of legitimacy in the Balkans and the Middle East, which resulted from the collapse of the Ottoman-Islamic rule of law that had maintained a sense of justice for centuries.

Anscombe emphasizes the primary and decisive role of external, mostly Russian, intervention in transforming any local rebellion into a “nationalist war of independence,” and he boldly but convincingly argues that “there never was any successful, even serious, domestic nationalist uprising against Ottoman authority” (p. 21). The Greek, Serbian, Bulgarian, and Arab revolts are among those interpreted in this manner. Nonetheless, I must emphasize that Anscombe’s discussions of the Balkans are much more detailed than those concerning the Middle East, especially in the post-Cold War period. The parallel between the failures of Communism and Arabism in the Balkans and the Middle East, respectively, is interesting insofar as it points to the failures of two types of authoritarianism, but these two sets of failures are not entirely analogous in relation to the core concerns of Anscombe’s book, since the failure of Communism in the Balkans was followed by a revival of ethno-nationalism, and hence it certainly was not a failure of “nationalism,” whereas the failure of Arabism in the Middle East was indeed an unmistakable failure of nationalism.

I cannot, within the limits of a brief book review, do full justice to such a book covering almost a dozen countries over a period of two centuries. Anscombe’s book is a tour de force with a wealth of minute details ranging from the reasons for local disturbances in Sarajevo to the legal system of Kuwait, all woven together within a grand narrative of Ottoman and post-Ottoman order and disorder. It might be labeled a bold revisionist historiography of the Ottoman Empire and its aftermath. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in a remarkably different interpretation of politics and society in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman Balkans and the Middle East.