The Early Modern Ottomans: Remapping the Empire

by Edited by Virginia H. Aksan , Daniel Goffman

• ISBN13: 9780521520850
• ISBN10: 0521520851
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-08-06
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

A groundbreaking reinterpretation of the middle years of the Ottoman Empire, from the conquest of Byzantium in 1453 to the establishment of the Tanzimat in 1839. This period saw the evolution of the Empire from the height of its powers to- as the traditional view has it - an empire in decline, unable to modernise in the face of globalisation and European ascendancy. The contributors challenge this view, demonstrating how the Ottomans came to be modern on their own terms. They explore the Ottomans as politicians and diplomats, military reformers, artists and historians. They also map out and redefine the material worlds which they inhabited - the courthouse, the cemetery, the Turkish garden. This book, which represents a turning-point in the intellectual history of the Ottoman Empire, promises to become a key text for students, scholars and anyone interested in the Ottoman world.

Author Biography

Virgina H. Aksan is Associate Professor of History at McMaster University, Ontario. Her publications include An Ottoman Statesman in War and Peace: Ahmed Resmi Efendi, 1700-1783 (1995) and Ottoman Wars 1700-1870: An Empire Besieged (2007). Daniel Goffman is Professor of History at DePaul University and author of Britain in the Ottoman Empire (1998), Izmir and the Levantine World (1990), The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe (2002) and The Ottoman City Between East and West: Aleppo, Izmir, and Istanbul (1999).

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	p. vii
Notes on contributors	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xi
A note on transliteration and the use of foreign words	p. xii
Introduction: Situating the early modern Ottoman world	p. 1
Mapping The Ottoman World	p. 13
Imagining the early modern Ottoman space, from world history to Piri Reis	p. 15
Limits To Empire	p. 59
Negotiating with the Renaissance state: the Ottoman Empire and the new diplomacy	p. 61
Information, ideology, and limits of imperial policy: Ottoman grand strategy in the context of Ottoman-Habsburg rivalry	p. 75
The Ottomans in the Mediterranean	p. 104
Military reform and its limits in a shrinking Ottoman world, 1800-1840	p. 117
Evocations of Sovereignty	p. 135
Genre and myth in the Ottoman advice for kings literature	p. 137
The politics of early modern Ottoman historiography	p. 167
Boundaries of Belonging	p. 199
Inside the Ottoman courthouse: territorial law at the intersection of state and religion	p. 201
The material world: ideologies and ordinary things	p. 213
Urban voices from beyond: identity, status and social strategies in Ottoman Muslim funerary epitaphs of Istanbul (1700-1850)	p. 233
Who is a true Muslim? Exclusion and inclusion among polemicists of reform in nineteenth-century Baghdad	p. 256
Aesthetics Of Empire	p. 275
Public spaces and the garden culture of Istanbul in the eighteenth century	p. 277
Bibliography	p. 313
Index	p. 353
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