Imperial paths, big comparisons: the late Ottoman Empire

2008 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 289-311 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cem Emrence
Keyword(s):  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Analytical Tool ◽  
Specific Approach ◽  
Ottoman History ◽  
New Directions ◽  
Path Dependent ◽  
Historical Trajectory ◽  
Late Ottoman Empire ◽  
Late Ottoman

AbstractThe main goals of this article are to review historiographical trends and set new directions for late Ottoman history. First, the paper demonstrates that current research on the late Ottoman Empire still operates within the confines of the centre–periphery model, and sustains dualistic and state-centred narratives. Second, I argue that a ‘historical trajectory’ framework is a better analytical tool and empirical strategy. It is spatial, path-dependent, and comparative. With special reference to the Middle Eastern provinces, I show that the Ottoman Empire was characterized by distinct imperial paths during the nineteenth century, each representing an alternative route to state–society and local–global relations. The article further suggests that a trajectory-specific approach can provide new prospects for understanding Eurasian land-based empires from a comparative perspective.

scholarly journals EDITORIAL FOREWORD

2011 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-3
Author(s):  
Beth Baron ◽  
Sara Pursley
Keyword(s):  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Global Perspective ◽  
Local Analysis ◽  
European Expansion ◽  
The Third ◽  
State Bureaucracy ◽  
Late Ottoman Empire ◽  
Late Ottoman ◽  
Editorial Foreword

The first three articles in this issue, grouped under the heading “Politics and Cultures of Capitalism,” address various ways that Middle Eastern actors dealt with European capitalist expansion in the 19th and early 20th centuries. They all focus on cultural and political aspects of economic change and maintain a global perspective while constructing an intensely local analysis. Gad Gilbar and Jens Hanssen trace specific institutions and networks in Qajar Iran and the late Ottoman Empire, respectively, that operated within what Hanssen calls the “interstices” of state bureaucracy, local business concerns, and European expansion. The interstitial nature of the arguments made by both authors is underlined by the impressive range of sources they draw on: Persian, British, Russian, German, and French in the case of Gilbar and Turkish, Arabic, German, British, and French in the case of Hanssen. The third article, by Nancy Reynolds, takes us from late Qajar and Ottoman societies to Egypt during the first half of the 20th century and from general commerce to the marketing and consumption of particular commodities.

Economic Bases of Revolution and Repression in the Late Ottoman Empire

1986 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carter Vaughn Findley
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Ideology ◽  
The Political ◽  
Ottoman History ◽  
Young Turks ◽  
Late Ottoman Empire ◽  
Late Ottoman ◽  
Modern Sense

Central to late Ottoman history is a series of events that marks a milestone in the emergence of modern forms of political thought and revolutionary action in the Islamic world. The sequence opened with the rise of the Young Ottoman ideologues (1865) and the constitutional movement of the 1870s. It continued with the repression of these forces under Abdülhamid 11 (1876–1909). It culminated with the resurgence of opposition in the Young Turk movement of 1889 and later, and especially with the revolution of 1908. Studied so far mostly in political and intellectual terms, the sequence seems well understood. The emergence of the Young Ottomans—the pioneers of political ideology, in any modern sense, in the Middle East—appears to result from the introduction of Western ideas and from stresses created within the bureaucracy by the political hegemony of the Tanzimat elite (ca. 1839–71). The repression under Abdülhamid follows from the turmoil of the late 1870s, the weaknesses of the constitution of 1876, and the craft of the new sultan in creating a palace-dominated police state. The emergence of the Young Turks shows that terror ultimately fostered, rather than killed, the opposition. Too, their eventual revolutionary success shows how much more effective than the Young Ottomans they were as political mobilizers.

The Young Turks' Crime against Humanity

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Taner Akçam
Keyword(s):  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Religious Diversity ◽  
Armenian Genocide ◽  
Ethnic Cleansing ◽  
Turkish Republic ◽  
Young Turks ◽  
East And West ◽  
Late Ottoman Empire ◽  
New Evidence ◽  
Late Ottoman

Introducing new evidence from more than 600 secret Ottoman documents, this book demonstrates in detail that the Armenian Genocide and the expulsion of Greeks from the late Ottoman Empire resulted from an official effort to rid the empire of its Christian subjects. This book goes deep inside the bureaucratic machinery of Ottoman Turkey to show how a dying empire embraced genocide and ethnic cleansing. Although the deportation and killing of Armenians was internationally condemned in 1915 as a “crime against humanity and civilization,” the Ottoman government initiated a policy of denial that is still maintained by the Turkish Republic. The case for Turkey's “official history” rests on documents from the Ottoman imperial archives, to which access has been heavily restricted until recently. It is this very source that the book now uses to overturn the official narrative. The documents presented here attest to a late-Ottoman policy of Turkification, the goal of which was no less than the radical demographic transformation of Anatolia. To that end, about one-third of Anatolia's 15 million people were displaced, deported, expelled, or massacred, destroying the ethno-religious diversity of an ancient cultural crossroads of East and West, and paving the way for the Turkish Republic. By uncovering the central roles played by demographic engineering and assimilation in the Armenian Genocide, this book will fundamentally change how this crime is understood and show that physical destruction is not the only aspect of the genocidal process.

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