Over the past two decades, the scope and profile of Ottoman history within the field of Middle Eastern studies has expanded greatly, so much so that the field has largely become synonymous with the history of the region in general. Whereas until recently students would learn Arabic first and then tepidly dip their foot into Persian, it has now become de rigueur for them to study Arabic or Turkish from the get-go. Instructors who wished to incorporate the empire into their classes, however, had limited options when it came to a textbook or a general overview. Halil İnalçık's foundational work, The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age 1300–1600 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973), has held its ground, even though it was originally written in 1973. Yet, İnalçık refused to extend his book's narrative beyond the 17th century, the supposed age of decline. More recent works, such as Colin Imber's The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1650: The Structure of Power (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), were too dry and too institutional. Caroline Finkel's Osman's Dream (New York: Basic Books, 2006) fashioned a detailed yet readable narrative of political events that went well into the 20th century but often failed to provide strong analytical heft. Douglas Howard's new textbook on the Ottoman Empire finds a sweet spot and promises to become the field's standard textbook in the coming years.

Howard's most significant contribution is his choice of chronology. He covers the whole temporal scope of the Ottoman dynasty from its unassuming start as a minor principality outside of Nicaea to its ultimate dissolution in 1924 and each of its seven chapters covers one Islamic century during the reign of the empire and is given equal space within the book. Students of Ottoman history will find Howard's narrative progressing through the familiar territory of the birth of a small emirate abutting a curtailed Byzantine Empire in the 14th century, that consolidates into a major empire in the 15th and 16th centuries, and adapts multiple times to changing conditions over the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. What makes it novel though is that Howard sticks to his initial declaration that “no era is more or less important than any other” (p. 6). There is no notion of a classical or ideal form of Ottoman political structure here and the biological metaphor of birth, growth, maturity, and senescence is purposefully and refreshingly absent. Consequently, there is no mention of the “decline narrative” whose refutation has preoccupied Ottomanists of the past generation, including Howard himself. While readers looking for a response to earlier scholarship might be surprised by Howard's decision to pass over the word “decline,” even to refute the concept, it is ultimately a wise one. Not only does it make it easier to explain Ottoman history to students but it also marks the maturity of Ottoman studies as a field, no longer so obsessed with questions about the centrality of the state.

Howard's book is likewise a précis of the past generation of scholarship on the Ottoman Empire. The syncretism of late medieval society in Anatolia and the Balkans is explained clearly and eloquently as are the financial reforms of the 16th and 17th centuries and the rise of provincial powerholders in the 18th century. More impressive than his broad coverage is that he is able to pithily and effectively summarize major historical developments, but retains enough telling examples and details to give the text some flavor. In particular, Howard fills the grey infoboxes, an indispensable feature of textbooks today, with pleasant segments of high Ottoman poetry and literature, pieces of Ottomanica that are often difficult for many to access. His incorporation of cultural concepts as well as political events is one of the distinctive features of the book as compared to other introductory texts which have generally focused solely on formal political and institutional functions of the empire. These cultural aspects are part of his large attempt to capture an “Ottoman worldview” built from the three layers of the political dynasty, its economic prosperity, and its spiritual beliefs (pp. 4–5). Howard most likely chose to depict the Ottoman Empire as a cultural entity to move away from the traditional developmental narratives of the empire, but the claim can ring a bit hollow at times, as when he emphasizes in the introduction that for Ottoman writers, “ruins stood for the loss that lay at the heart of everything” (p. 3). In the body of the text itself, however, the cultural history approach serves the central narrative well and allows him to integrate, at least partially, the empire's substantial non-Muslim populations into the narrative. His personal observations and photographs, like his snapshot of a minaret in the sky of Vidin or a bilingual Turkish-Hebrew inscription from 19th-century Bergama, gracefully draw out this shared cultural life and give readers a small glimpse into the material remains of the empire.

As a textbook, the faults in Howard's work are few and far between. He has a particular gift for providing just enough information, never overwhelming the reader with too many details, but making his references easily accessible at the end of each chapter. While some might find its frame too lean, it gives instructors the option to supplement the book with material from other sources. In particular, social historical glimpses into the life of ordinary Ottoman subjects are a bit sparse and the burgeoning field of environmental history is still poorly represented. And Howard's book won't suffice as the primary textbook for a general course on Middle Eastern history. Perhaps this is a symptom of the aforementioned larger trend in the scholarly community of overly aligning the history of the Middle East as a whole with the Ottoman Empire, leaving places such as Iran, the Caucasus, and the Maghreb on the margins. Yet, it also points to the one ironic flaw of this history of the Ottoman Empire as a broader work: it is too Ottoman. Readers may find it difficult to see how the empire fits into a larger early modern world in Howard's book. Where did the political and cultural frontiers of the empire lie? How did it compare to its neighbors in Muscovy or Isfahan and what connections and disruptions crafted its Mediterranean space? These questions inevitably emerge from its purposeful choice of a culturalist framework, but it is ultimately a minor complaint to an otherwise wonderful work that will serve the field well for years to come.