Ottoman Legacies Seminar Syllabus, Fall 2020

The Ottoman Empire: A History, 2022

The Ottoman Empire was the last of the great empires that had dominated the Middle East and Mediterranean since the dawn of the history of civilisation. The Ottoman Empire began around 1300 as a late-medieval entity, and it transformed several times over its six centuries of existence as it adapted to the conditions of the early modern and modern periods, until its ultimate demise at the end of the First World War. The Ottoman Empire: A History surveys six hundred years of Ottoman history in a single, concise volume. This book covers the major political, diplomatic, and military events and social, economic, financial, administrative, and legal institutions of the Ottoman Empire from the early fourteenth to the early twentieth century. It also explores the political-administrative and socio-economic transformations the empire has undergone over the centuries. The book frames Ottoman institutional history in terms of the concept of the Circle of Justice in the Middle Eastern state tradition. In the conclusion, Çetinsaya discusses three key questions and offers some answers to them: What is the relative place of the Ottoman Empire in world history vis-à-vis that of other empires? What factors account for the great longevity of the Ottoman Empire? And how to deal with the controversial legacy of the empire in its successor states? In addition to a series of box texts and tables on various subjects throughout the book, a basic timeline of key dates and events is offered at the beginning of every chapter, and a list of suggested readings at the end.

2021

Course Description: During the last two or three decades generations of Ottoman scholars carried out extensive research and published with almost a snowball effect numerous articles and books on differing themes and topics. Since the 1980s English language Ottoman historiography has always been in contact with historiographical currents of Europeanists; yet during this time span social theory and European historiography passed thorough major paradigmatic turns, which, without any time lag, influenced Ottoman historiography. To put in a very brief form, one major early shift is from structuralism to post-structuralism, that is from an epistemology that privileges "the social and economic" to one that totally overpowers capital as an abstract conception with a capacity to adjudicate social relations. Modernization paradigm, and its orientalist and eurocentrist premises, as the informing ideology of American hegemony and its developmentalist capitalism during the post-WWII era is seemingly over. The new social history approach of early 2000s has already produced plenty of works perhaps naively empowering divergent and under-vocalized social groups and moving far beyond overgeneralized conceptions of class and national identity. Following the collapse of post WWI political order in our region and the political chaos that followed in the Balkans, the Caucasus, and the Middle East the belief in ethnic and national identities as analytical concepts resurfaced. Notwithstanding this broad restructuring of the social and political world that we live in, the students of Ottoman history are turning to new topics and paradigms such as history of intercommunal conflicts, population displacements, law and legality, public opinion, history of ideas, and history of environment and epidemics. Is there a new shift in Ottoman historiography? Perhaps a shift reflecting an attempt to move away from nation form, and even empire form, that is the so-called boundaries of political systems, a shift encouraging transregional/transnational and transcultural sensibilities, both in the political, social and environmental realms. This seminar aims to locate main trends in Ottoman historiography and provide a critical reading of recent scholarship. We will first read general articles aimed at providing an assessment of what's going on in Ottoman historiography. We will also pay attention to parallel debates among European historians related to shifts in interest and focus in the field. Next, we will focus on specific themes for in-depth reading and critical assessment. Throughout the semester we'll organize two or three public seminars (with invited colleagues as lecturer or discussant) on selected topics that we cover in the class.

Journal of Islamic Studies, 2009

4 0 4 T H E H I S T O R I A N 4 0 5 B O O K R E V I E W S of a constructive model for the ideal Islamic democracy of the twenty-first century.

Contributions to the History of Concepts, 2019

In this article, we discuss the pitfalls and benefits of conceptual history as an approach to Ottoman studies. While Ottoman studies is blossoming and using a wider set of tools to study the Ottoman past, Ottoman intellectual history is still resigned to a life-and-works approach. Th is absence of synthesizing attempts has left intellectual history in the margins. In addition to the lack of new, theoretically sophisticated accounts of how Ottoman intellectual and political changes were intertwined, the old Orientalist works still hold canonical status in the field. Drawing on recent developments in social and political history, conceptual history may be a good way of doing self-reflective longue durée intellectual history. Ottoman conceptual history may also off er nonspecialists more sophisticated bases for comparison with non-Ottoman cases.

The International History Review, 2003

Reflecting on the state of Ottoman social history poses a paradox. On the one hand, it is impossible not to appreciate the great strides accomplished over the past three decades. Earlier approaches have been challenged, topics that were previously untouched or unimagined have been studied, and the foundations of a meaningful dialogue with historiographies of other parts of the world have been established. On the other hand, the theoretical sophistication and methodological debates of Ottoman social history still look pale compared to European and other non-Western historiographies in the same period.