Consolidating the Empire

FOR around four hundred years until 1914 the Ottoman empire dominated south-west Asia, eastern and south-eastern Europe, northern Africa and much of the Mediterranean. Europeans measured their societies against it out of fascination and fear in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and with an increasingly confident eye for commercial and diplomatic profit in the seventeenth and eighteenth. The music of the Janissary band, croissants baked in Vienna, turbans, tulips, carpets and, more controversially, coffee, brought elements of the Ottoman Muslim world into western homes and meeting places. British interest in the Ottoman empire reached a peak during the nineteenth century, through the work of such cultural communicators as the traveller Julia Pardoe and the lexicographer James Redhouse, as well as for diplomatic reasons. Constantinople was firmly fixed on the grand tour itinerary of the discerning young gentleman. Why then, given the demonstrable historical significance of the Ottoman empire and clear British engagement with the empire in relatively recent eras, has the imprimatur of academic history publishing in Britain, a Cambridge History, been so long in appearing? The cultural and linguistic difficulties of studying Ottoman history, the lack of adequate financial support for Ottoman studies and the legacy of a recently ‘failed’ empire rejected or only half-accepted by its various successor states all undoubtedly played a part. But, leaving aside these factors, one major intrinsic reason could perhaps be termed the ‘dead weight’ factor. The overwhelming scope provided by an empire that lasted half a millennium and stretched across parts of three continents intimidated a totally inadequate number of trained Ottomanists both within Turkey and outside through the sheer weight of its texts, documents and artefacts. Scholars had to spread themselves too thinly, spend too long deciphering unpublished materials, and had little time to look around them. In consequence, Ottoman history often lacked momentum and failed to attract outside attention. The excitement generated in the field since the 1980s by the involvement of a dozen or more scholars in debating a single topic, Wittek's gazi theory, is the principal exception which demonstrates the problem.1

Ancient history · Art · Aside · Empire · Fifteenth · Literature · Classics · History · Islamic Studies and History · Ottoman Empire History and Society

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