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. Bayly's The Birth of the Modern World to Niall Ferguson's Empire, and even Hardt and Negri's meditation on American empire have served many purposes in debates about history and, no less, contemporary politics.Footnote 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.Footnote 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, 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studies in toto) to one in which it serves as an antidote to all that is unsatisfying about the nation-state form that superseded empire across the globe in the course of the twentieth century.Footnote 3 In empires past we are free to imagine a different kind of political belonging, off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 diversity, flexibility, and indeterminacy of imperial subjecthood can be counterposed to the homogenizing, micro-managing modern nation-state and the reductionist, 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 history”—another concept that has taken off anew in recent decades, this time as an attempt to depart from the Hegelian template—that make no explicit reference to the present.Footnote 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 normative 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 these—states that billed themselves as empires at one point or another—have understandably gravitated toward the question of comparative empires.Footnote 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 Gibbon's 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 rendition of Human Civilization).Footnote 6 Not coincidentally, Gibbon's history of the Roman Empire was written as his own British Empire was striving to hold onto the American colonies and expand into India, both projects justified, in part, by the perceived superiority of British civilization.Footnote 7 In short, the empires that count are those that yielded the greatest outcomes—of 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 one's framework for empires, at once the most spectacular loser and the greatest winner in world history. On the one hand, the Ottoman Empire (1300–1922) 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 predecessors would hardly have garnered them any cache on the stage of world history.Footnote 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.Footnote 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-man's-land somewhere between the Roman, Chinese, and British archetypes 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 Lieven's Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals.Footnote 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 antecedents 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, Rifa‘at ‘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 European) historical occurrences.Footnote 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 Lieven's 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?Footnote 12 How have recent studies of the internal 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.
OUTCOMES AND CULTURE
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 virtually 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.Footnote 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 empire's history have been retooled since the 1990s away from a vocabulary of apogee and decline to one of crisis, adaptation, transformation, and simply change.Footnote 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 Kafadar's Between Two Worlds and Heath Lowry's 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.Footnote 15 Taking up early modern crises, Abou-El-Haj's Formation of the Modern State and more recently Baki Tezcan's 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.Footnote 16 Examining the later nineteenth century's dilemmas of empire, Selim Deringil's 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 Hamidian period.Footnote 17 Meanwhile, Virginia Aksan's 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 fundamental 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 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 othersFootnote 20; urban studies by, most recently, Fariba Zarinebaf, Shirine Hamadeh, James Grehan, and Ebru Boyar and Kate FleetFootnote 21; and cultural studies, such as Marc Baer's Honored by the Glory of Islam, which seeks to understand the culture of conversion in the seventeenth-century empire, or Miri Shefer-Mossensohn's study of the cultural history of Ottoman medicine.Footnote 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 Singer's study of sixteenth-century Palestine and Jane Hathaway's work on the Arab provinces in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries come to mind, as does Molly Greene's A Shared World and Anton Minkov's analysis of conversion in the Balkans.Footnote 23 Others have turned away from the Mediterranean core of the 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 different, small-scale rise-decline narrative.Footnote 24
Still others have explicitly synthesized outcomes and culture in formulating 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.Footnote 25 In her work on religious conversion, Tijana Krstić 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.Footnote 26 By the same token, studies of peoples who moved between empires—between the Venetian and Ottoman worlds or between Russia and the Ottoman Empire for example—reveal comparative possibilities for understanding ideas of governance, difference, and accommodation.Footnote 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 cultural history are informed by state-centered questions.Footnote 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 one's 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 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 cultural histories of economic actors like merchants, artisans, laborers, property owners, and so forth. Timur Kuran's work begins from the question of why the Middle East—which for him usually means the Ottoman Empire—“fell behind the West” in developing capitalist institutions and modes of exchange.Footnote 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.”Footnote 30 Kuran, however, does not take the Ottoman Empire's economic “retardation” in producing a normative notion of capitalism as a foregone conclusion.Footnote 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.Footnote 32 For example, Hanna's study of one Egyptian merchant at the turn of the seventeenth century brings to life the connections and relationships that this merchant maintained and that also served to sustain sectors of the early modern Cairene economy.Footnote 33 In these works of social and cultural economic history, the ends of the Ottoman Empire in the twentieth century do not 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.Footnote 34 Instead of a teleology of ends, pathways, and mechanisms, we have a thick descriptive world of relationships, contradictory 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 Lewis’s question “what went wrong?” and Richard W. Bulliet's “what went on?”Footnote 35 Lewis's is a civilizational question with a civilizational answer; Bulliet's is a historical one with a historical answer. On the spectrum of Ottoman economic history, Kuran's work stands closer to the civilizational end, while Hanna's, Faroqhi's, Doumani's, 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 outcomes 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 Confessionalization, 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.Footnote 36 Why so many ages in Ottoman history? Beyond the sheer fact that very few historians can fathom the entirety of the empire's 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 present—from 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 particular ages with their own characteristics, features, and cultural attributes allows one to see how a given period's 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. Furthermore, it allows for a different, synchronic mode of comparison with other empires.
In The Age of Beloveds, Walter G. Andrews and Mehmet Kalpaklı demonstrate 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.”Footnote 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 everywhere.”Footnote 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 constellation of phenomena that we call the late Renaissance.”Footnote 39 Thus, in their words, “by inventing” a temporal unit called the Age of Beloveds, Andrews and Kalpaklı are able to argue for a shared literary and urban culture stretching from England to Istanbul.Footnote 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 sexuality and desire emerge across continents. In wanting to offer both a new chronology and a new geography of the Ottoman Empire, Andrews and Kalpaklı 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 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.”Footnote 41 Exemplary of other works identifying ages within Ottoman history, The Age of Beloveds usefully explores the possibilities 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 disconnected 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 resonances in the periodization of the empire. With ages, we focus less on transitions than on consistencies over time—piecemeal 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 empire—not in a specific age and certainly not over centuries.Footnote 42
EVERYWHERE EMPIRE
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 Finkel's 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.Footnote 43 Significantly, apart from Lord Kinross's 1977 book, a study largely written within the framework of epic nineteenth-century imperial history, Finkel's is perhaps the only single-volume, single-authored English-language scholarly book attempting to cover the entire chronology of Ottoman history.Footnote 44 Other important multi-authored collaborative works of course exist—the foundational An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire and the more-recent Cambridge History of Turkey, to name the obviously indispensable.Footnote 45 And still other historians have employed focused conceptual frames as organizing principles to examine the entire span of Ottoman history.Footnote 46
In thinking through the empire's six centuries, Karen Barkey's 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.Footnote 47 One of Barkey's 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 sociologist's answer to Dominic Lieven's 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 question 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 linkages and the malleable compacts established between state and social actors.”Footnote 48 Linguistic, religious, and cultural differences were, therefore, unproblematic 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 Doumanis's words, the Ottoman Empire was “a master of metamorphosis.”Footnote 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 empire's longevity, Barkey's is an inventive and largely successful solution to the potential contradiction between outcomes and cultural history.Footnote 50 It remains, though, a structural solution, which still aims at explaining the empire's ultimate outcome—longevity as opposed to decline—and which also serves her explanation of what happened to the empire once it tried to adapt to Western European modes of rule in the nineteenth century. As in other of the larger synthetic works attempting to address the totality of Ottoman history, Barkey's 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 inextricable 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 relationships—a 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 time—from the simple escape of farmers from tax burdens to the all-out armed rebellions of imperial provincial governors.Footnote 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 Barkey's 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 state's vertical monopolization of power relations.
THE (EARLY) MODERN CONDITION
Despite these few larger works on the whole of Ottoman history, the preference among Ottoman historians—both comparativists and otherwise—has, as we have already noted, been to focus in on just one imperial “age.” Of all the periods of the empire's 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 centuries.Footnote 52 The attention paid to these centuries is a relatively new phenomenon 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 Ottomans 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 empire—its greatest geographic expanse, the reign of Sultan Süleyman, and the most sophisticated articulation of Ottoman governing institutions.Footnote 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 empire's purported 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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).
The empires of the early modern world therefore offer the most recent historical 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 modernity 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 justice—a 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 empire's administration.Footnote 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 contemporary moment, in which, despite assertions of supposedly globalized citizenship, the nation-state nevertheless continues to exert overwhelming power in the determination of political, economic, and cultural belonging.Footnote 57 Early modernity—cleansed of the power relations and elitism that sustained the empires of that era—thus 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 nineteenth 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 Empire.Footnote 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 constitutional politics, state and society relations, governance, environmental politics, or modernization theory.Footnote 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 fence—roughly 1760 to 1840—but 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 nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Within the larger framework of the Imperial Turn, Barkey's 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 empire's 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.Footnote 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 “modernization” 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 Lieven's treatment of the question of empire. Lieven asserts that the key dilemma of empire in the long nineteenth 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 one's 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 legitimacy were increasingly coming to be based on the idea and will of homogeneous ethno-linguistic entities (nation).Footnote 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.Footnote 62 The Ottomans, more so than their fellow “Great Powers,” however, were facing it from a severely compromised position in the geopolitical neighborhood they inhabited.
The two greatest comparables to the Ottomans in their nineteenth-century iteration are lately the Russian and British Empires. While Lieven's 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. Crews's For Prophet and Tsar, as well as Mustafa Tuna's 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.Footnote 63 All these studies are reflective of a larger trend in both Russian and Ottoman historiography 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 question of how the Ottomans remade themselves in the nineteenth century and 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 modernization in the nineteenth century.Footnote 64 Inspired largely by comparative studies of British imperialism, Ussama Makdisi and Selim Deringil have also usefully analyzed, respectively, Ottoman Orientalism vis-à-vis the Arab world and the Ottoman Empire's uncomfortable positionality in postcolonial studies.Footnote 65 Others have taken this inter-imperial comparison between the Ottomans and British as an opportunity to develop intra-imperial comparisons across Ottoman localities.Footnote 66
The Tanzimat reforms (1839–1876), state-led efforts to rationalize Ottoman administration and remake the principles and laws of political belonging 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 comparisons. They were the main institutional strategy used both for the control of the Ottoman central state—the British often pushed these reforms at moments when they had the greatest leverage—and 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 discussed on the spectrum of success or failure—in 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 historiography of the Tanzimat era with his analysis of the administrative reorganization of nizami courts in the vilayet of Danube, “a ‘pilot’ province” as he calls it.Footnote 67 Reşat Kasaba's A Moveable Empire creatively shows how the 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.Footnote 68 In an analysis of some of these groups, Janet Klein opens up the long-neglected Hamidian period (1876–1909) 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 populations in eastern Anatolia in the 1890s.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 purposes—whether to illuminate a cultural phenomenon or to make a point about how the Ottomans stacked up against other world powers—the 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.Footnote 71
COMPARATIVE ENDS
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 prohibitions 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. Şükrü Hanioğlu on the Young Turks before 1908 and by Erik Jan Zürcher and Feroz Ahmad on the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) after 1908 set the stage for more recent studies of the Ottomans in the First World War, such as Michael Reynolds's comparative study of Ottoman eastern Anatolia and the Russian Caucasus during the war and Mustafa Aksakal's treatment of the Ottoman state's fateful decision to enter the conflict.Footnote 72 Other works about the end of the empire that have opened up previously unexplored topics include Fuat Dündar's study of the use of statistics in Young Turk demographic engineering, Ryan Gingeras's social and political 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 Akçam's fine-grained empirical account of the genocidal consequences of late-Ottoman Turkification policies on the empire's Armenian and Greek populations.Footnote 73
One work that stands out among these on the devolution of the empire is Uğur Ümit Üngör's The Making of Modern Turkey, which goes even further in time, tracking what he calls (following from Erik Jan Zürcher 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.Footnote 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 Republic, and has profound ramifications for our understanding of modern Turkey. A few other works have likewise bridged the gap from empire to republic—Carter Vaughn Findley's Turkey, Islam, Nationalism, and Modernity explores some of the cultural, literary, and political continuities of the entire period from 1789 to 2007; Fatma Müge Göçek's recent book also fuses the histories of the empire and the Republic into an indivisible unit; and likewise M. Şükrü Hanioğlu's biography of Atatürk both outlines the ways in which Atatürk's 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.Footnote 75
Üngör's 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 violence—which Üngör considers a typical feature of modern state-building—in Diyarbekir in eastern Anatolia. These phases involved not only the annihilation of the Armenian civilian population 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, Üngör 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 Lieven's 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 Üngör 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 Üngör's 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 formations 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. Üngör's book is one study that allows us to imagine a range of such possible connections.
CONCLUSIONS: COMPARISONS, CONNECTIONS, CROSSINGS
When Rifa‘at Abou-El-Haj and Dominic Lieven published their works nearly two decades ago and a decade ago, respectively, the Ottoman Empire was considered to be an incommensurable and incompatible empire—so different as to be a freak among history's other states. Since these foundational works, the name of the game in Ottoman Studies has been comparison—to make the case that the empire indeed was like other empires and states throughout history. This enormous historiographical pendulum swing has, as we have been discussing, produced many benefits for the field. The very strength of this collective 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 particularity. Abou-El-Haj challenged Ottoman historians to get past continually stressing the “differentness” of the empire.Footnote 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 understanding what power meant, first in an Ottoman context and then beyond. Difference—specificity not freakishness—must 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 contrary. 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 “between”—not the assumed void, but an arena of intense contestation between a panoply of forces, actors, and places. Only in this way can the empire's specificity—whether due to geography, history, demography, or so many levels of contingency and crisis—shine through in all its diversity and conflict.
The “meso-historical” solution to the divide between the historiographies of outcomes and cultural history in Ottoman Studies—a solution so-termed by Karen Barkey and carried out in the work of other scholars—is 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 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 comparable 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 historical experience while at the same time allowing the empire to be usefully engaged in comparative analysis.Footnote 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 historical 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 twentieth 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 imperial and deeply political ecosystem teeming with struggle, tension, mutuality, and sometimes violent contestation.
