The Ottoman Story Today
Virgina Aksan
McMaster University

Reprinted from the Middle East Studies Association Bulletin, Summer  2001 (with changes in orthography to HTML standards).
Copyright 2001 by the Middle East Studies Association of North America

Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire, by Jason Goodwin. 351 pages, map, illustrations, index. New York, NY: Henry Holt, 1999. (Cloth) ISBN 0-8050-4081-1; also published in London, UK: Chatto & Windus, 1998.

The Ottoman Turks: An Introductory History to 1923, by Justin McCarthy. 406 pages. London: Longman, 1997. (Paper) ISBN 0-582-25655-0

The Ottoman Empire, 1700-1922, by Donald Quataert (New Approaches to European History). 205 pages, illustrations, maps, index. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000. (Cloth) ISBN 0-521-63328-1

The Ottomans, by Andrew Wheatcroft. 322 pages, index. London: Viking, 1993. (Cloth) ISBN 0-670-84412-8. Issued in paper with the title: The Ottomans: Dissolving Images. 315 pages. London, UK: Penguin, 1995. ISBN 0-14-016879-6

Quataert dedicates his new book to his brothers and sisters, “in the hopes this book will help them to understand my whereabouts over the years” (p. [v]). Anyone who works and writes about the Ottomans will instantly recognize his lament. Where in fact are we? As one who has wrestled with the spatial, disciplinary, and aesthetic location of the Ottomans and their elusive empire for more than a decade, I leapt at this opportunity to reflect on the spate of works published in recent years on the Ottoman Empire.

Why this sudden revival of interest in an empire that A. J. Toynbee included in the category ‘arrested civilizations?’ Fouad Ajami, in his review of Goodwin’s book noted one reason: “The furies of nationalism in former Ottoman dominions in the Balkans have made urgent a retrospect of that world.”[1] Nationalism in Ottoman successor states seems only the most obvious factor contributing to the attraction, which may be driven just as much by distance from the original events, and by the continued presence and demands of Republican Turkey on Europe’s eastern borders. A general public appetite for the exotic and titillating has always guaranteed an audience, something publishers vigorously compete for in the ‘Information Age.’ Scholarly interpretations of ‘empires’ past, present, and future, however, also account for the renewed interest in the Ottomans, as part of reflections on the Soviet demise, or as part of the general lamentation for (celebration of?) the imminent death of the nation-state. Perhaps the most intriguing reason for the resurging fascination is the ‘neo-Ottomanism’ debate that has emerged in Turkey itself over ownership of the pre-Republican past. ‘Islamists’ and ‘secularists’ contest the nature of their own history, exemplified most recently in the state celebration of the seven hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Ottoman Empire, when surviving members of the dynasty, whom the Republic previously treated as pariahs, were included in the ceremonies. Study of the Ottomans has become a growth industry.

The four books under consideration all attempt a comprehensive narrative of an imperial tradition that spanned over six centuries. Strikingly, two of them, Goodwin and Wheatcroft, retell a resilient Oriental tale that has persisted into the twenty-first century. It is the peculiar fate of the Ottoman story to reside on the borderline of fact and fiction in the pantheon of civilizations.[2] That particular problem is why I have chosen to compare two ‘popular’ works with two academic, university texts by McCarthy and Quataert, senior scholars in the North American academy. Goodwin and Wheatcroft are neither Ottomanists nor practicing historians, but are part of the British tradition of public intellectual life which assumes a widely read and literate audience.

Goodwin’s Lords of the Horizons has received the most attention in review journals and seems to have enjoyed the largest audience. When I checked Amazon.com for the comparative ranking of these four volumes, Goodwin’s work outranked them all, standing 1,414 in the ranks of sales (in the months after it appeared, its ranking was much higher).[3] For a book in English on the Ottomans, that represents a phenomenal success. So it seems appropriate to start with it. Handsomely printed, filled with black and white illustrations, Lords of the Horizons is a pleasure to pick up. The jacket reproduces a picture of Istanbul harbor in the late nineteenth century, designed to evoke “…the strange, dynamic empire created from the ‘thirty-six’ nations of the Balkans and the Black Sea and the Middle East, its faith Islam, its ceremony Byzantine, its dignity Persian, its wealth Egyptian, its letters Arabic” (back jacket). The prologue begins with an imaginary performance of Karagöz and Hacivat—shadow puppet satire of Ottoman street theater—in Bayezit Mosque. One can almost smell the tobacco, coffee, and tea of the fezzed spectators. This evocative beginning is followed by: “For the next three hundred years [after 1700], the empire defied prognostications of its imminent collapse. Fractious and ramshackle, its politics riddled with corruption, its purposes furred [furred?!] by sloth, it was a miracle of a kind, too, a prodigy of decay” (p. xiv).

Goodwin has produced, in other words, a riff on the Ottomans, a somewhat updated version of Paul Rycaut, whose Present State of the Ottoman Empire, published in 1668, continues to serve as a primary source for stories of the Ottoman Empire. Between then and now, it would appear that the only change in narratives of Ottoman history is the introduction of Gibbon’s ‘decline and fall’ paradigm in the eighteenth century, and some updating of the missing centuries. Authenticity, that is, the degree to which the individual author asserts his own authority as eyewitness and traveler, also distinguishes Ottoman histories. Goodwin’s text is remarkable in that latter regard, for nowhere does he confess to having visited Turkey, although of course he has (attested by his own journey, On Foot to the Golden Horn, published in 1993). In this approach, he resembles Knolles, the armchair traveler of the seventeenth century, another source of tales of the Ottomans, whose annals of the sultans preceded Rycaut by half a century.[4] I exaggerate, of course, but the jacket flap, quoting The Times of London, invites this comparison: “[Goodwin]…has a knack for catching the prevailing mood of the empire during all of its phases, which makes the book a perfect companion for anyone who visits Turkey and wants to make sense of it.”

The book is divided into three parts: “Curves and Arabesques,” “The Turkish Time,” and “Hoards.” The middle section especially, on Ottoman lack of interest in time or distance markers or any sort, emphasized by Ajami’s NY Times Book Review piece (itself illustrated with a pocket watch flying out of a latticed, obviously Middle Eastern window) provoked a flurry of indignant comment among Ottomanists.[5] The section on “Hoards” offers up the following:

An Austrian actually found six gold ducats in the stomach of a Turk killed at Vienna at 1683, whom he hoicked over the palisade on the end of a pike. A ransom—3,000 gold purses—was discovered cemented under Kara Mustafa’s bath after he had been executed for his failure at Vienna.…The garden of another disgraced grand vizier yielded three buried chests, eighteen bags with 60,000 sequins, and a chest full of precious stones.…Sultan Mustafa hurled money into the sea, saying the fishes needed money to spend; and Ibrahim (whose ill-omened name was never again used by the House of Osman) strewed his beard with pearls and jewels (p. 211).

For “Hoards,” we are also to read “hordes,” particularly the Albanians. In Part III, we read that a multitude of Albanians soon infested every major city of the Empire—11,000 in Constantinople joined Patrona’s rebellion in 1730. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, peering from her lumbering purdah carriage, fancied their soldiery immensely, in their gleaming white blouses. Byron adored them a century later, as much as they were detested by his Greeks—quite understandably, too, for whenever their luck ran out they would merrily sing that they had their ‘musket for vizier, and their carbine for pasha,’ and go off to terrorise their neighbors. They were especially dangerous to the Greeks, whose various rebellions from the last quarter of the eighteenth century they were detailed to quash; a task they performed in a leisurely way, cheerfully describing Missolonghi—the longest and bloodiest affray of the last Greek rebellion in the 1820s—as their bank (p. 284).

Goodwin includes an “Epilogue” that recounts all the lively tales of Istanbul’s dogs, whom I read as standing in place for the Ottomans, and who are finally rounded up and exiled to die on a “waterless island in the Marmara” (p. 326). Along the way, Goodwin cannot resist referring to “…the Albanian dogs [who] were a law unto themselves, seeming to obey the same harsh codes as their masters, who protected them with the absolute loyalty for which the Albanians were notorious” (p. 323). This is ethnic ‘profiling’ at its literary best. Goodwin’s prose is energetic and entertaining, anecdotal, and sensational. I find a remarkable sympathy to the historical dilemmas of modernization implicit in much of the writing. My problem is with its pretense at history. Even though the bibliography represents Ottoman historiography for the last three hundred years, including some of the best, not a footnote is to be found. The book’s sub-title, recall, is “A History of the Ottoman Empire.”

Wheatcroft, by contrast, denies he is writing history, but expressing “the idea of the Ottomans, and how, in the West, it became woefully separated from the reality.” He is willing to acknowledge that he approaches his subject from “a distance (‘the double veil’) of time and culture,” and notes: “To suggest, as some are now doing, that what happened under Ottoman rule a century or more ago somehow ‘justifies’ current barbarities is a travesty of history” (Viking ed., pp. xxi-xxii). From the outset, then, Wheatcroft is forthcoming about the difficulties inherent in studying the Ottomans, expressing the postmodern angst that we cannot actually write about anything except ourselves. In his laudable subtext he appears to combat racism. His work is richly illustrated, with multiple color reproductions of Orientalist paintings in the hardcopy edition (not included in the Penguin version, which, however, has the subtitle “Dissolving Images”). Chapter headings read like a Pierre Loti novel: “The World’s Last Day: The Fall of the Byzantine Empire,” “Strangled with a Silken Cord: The Constraints of Ottomanism,” “Dreams from the Rose Pavilion: The Meandering Path of Reform.”

Of most interest to this reviewer are the last chapters, called “The Lustful Turk” and “The Terrible Turk,” which attempt to address the popular resilience of the equation of Turk (and just as often Arab) “with lust, cruelty and filth” (p. 212), that explicitly punctuates the literature and histories of Europe and North America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and twentieth century works subliminally. Wheatcroft also includes cartoons from Punch as an indicator of public opinion of “Abdul the Damned,” or “Abdul the Red.” While this is a worthy exercise, the chapters complete a volume that has in fact made use of many of the very travelers’ tales that contributed to the construction of such stereotypes, the ultimate conundrum of writing the Ottoman story.

So I looked forward to McCarthy’s The Ottoman Turks, a new classroom text, published just in time for a course I taught on the Ottomans and the Balkans in 1997. McCarthy, a veteran, if controversial hand, has written extensively on the nineteenth century, more especially on demography and the Armenian question, the central debate about genocide that has dominated all political discourse about modern Turkey in the United States, and sends most Ottoman historians running for cover. McCarthy’s history has wonderful potential: the publisher was generous with photographs and maps, although the book does not include a bibliography, which I find an astounding piece of misjudgment. There is much to be mined concerning the social history of the nineteenth century—drawings of the typical house, examples of families and life-style, and a generally accessible style that fulfills its promise as a text. It remains, however, a polemic. One of the longstanding debates among Ottomanists is whether or not they considered themselves Turks. More recently, debates about when Turkish nationalism emerged have moved closer and closer to the modern age. McCarthy’s title reveals his position. One of my students says she counted more than two hundred uses of the word “Turk” or “Turkish” in the prologue alone. In spite of McCarthy’s own portrayal of the empire as multi-cultural, and its essence as Muslim (chapter four: “The Ottoman State”), it is the Turks who suffer the greatest “Human Disaster” (chapter ten). While much of that latter chapter supplies long-needed correctives about the extent of the tragedies of World War I to all Middle East peoples, the worthy aims get lost in McCarthy’s pugnacious insistence on the monolithic Turk.

That leaves Quataert’s The Ottoman Empire, 1700-1922, the latest of the narratives, and the one most influenced by developments in the world history movement. Quataert’s volume begins with 1700, because the Cambridge editors envisioned two new studies on the Ottomans to include in their series “New Approaches to Europe History,” one before and one after 1700.[6] Such an initiative is a welcome development, reflected in a number of other publishing houses. Cambridge, however, has been at the forefront of publishing new works on the Ottomans, such as An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, 1300-1914.[7] Quataert’s work is remarkably different from that of McCarthy in a number of ways, although his too is primarily a social, not a political history. Quataert is a nineteenth century specialist as well, but in labor history. Each chapter of his work has a bibliography of suggested reading, with the author’s preferences indicated by an asterisk. The introduction and the two concluding chapters confront many of the problems of writing about the Ottomans that I have alluded to here. He offers several reasons for studying the Ottomans: the astounding amalgam of cultures under their imperial umbrella, the role the empire played in resisting the colonialism of the nineteenth century imperial powers, and the model of inter-communal tolerance that characterized the early empire. He also argues that the profound Ottoman social and political influence on Europe, most particularly in the imaginative arts, commands our attention. His contribution is as much to describe an agenda for future research as to tell us where we are.

In chapters nine and ten, Quataert has to deal with the final contradiction: the ferocious intolerance of the later, disintegrating empire, especially under the Young Turk regimes. He argues that the ruthlessness for which that regime is known was caused more by the attempt to preserve the empire than emerging nationalisms. In the context of this discussion, he confronts the question of the Armenian genocide head on, and, I think, reflects much current repositioning as well as his own generosity in fostering dialogue between two intellectual extremes.[8] This is a graceful book, and in combination with Cemal Kafadar’s Between Two Worlds,[9] represents the best of this current crop, and considerable food for thought for college and university students. There is much more on the way, a veritable thaw after the long winter of neglect.
[1] New York Times Book Review, May 2, 1999, p. 7.

[2] A topic much debated in the post-Saidian world. See Aksan, “Is There a ‘Turk’ in the Turkish Spy?” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 6 (1994): 201-14; Asli Çirakman, “From Tyranny to Despotism: The Enlightenment’s Unenlightened Image of the Turks,” IJMES 33 (2001): 49-68; and Thomas Kaiser, “The Evil Empire? The Debate on Turkish Despotism in Eighteenth Century French Political Culture,” Journal of Modern History 72 (2000): 6-34.

[3] By contrast, Wheatcroft, published earlier of course, stood at 172,844, McCarthy at 173,059 and Quataert, the most recent, at 307,824 (March 2001). My apologies for making use of the present-day barometer of popularity, but it is telling, if only as a single snapshot.

[4] Richard Knolles, Generall Historie of the Ottoman Empire (London, 1603).

[5] The URL for the H-Turk postings archive: http://www2.h-net.msu/~turk/. A thread was started by Andras Riedlmayer 27 April 1999, called “Rehabilitating the Ottoman Empire: Review of a Review.” There he comments: “Ours is a field desperately in need of more well-written, well-researched works of popular history.”

[6] Dan Goffman’s pre-1700 volume is in press even as we speak.

[7] Edited by Halil Inalcik with Donald Quataert (Cambridge, 1994), and since divided into two paperback volumes for classroom use. Suraiya Faroqhi’s boundless energy should also be mentioned here, as her contribution in the Economic and Social History remains one of the most lucid accounts of the middle centuries of the empire. Furthermore, she has just published Subjects of the Sultan: Culture and Daily Life in the Ottoman Empire (London: I. B. Tauris, 2000), a translation from a 1995 German version. Others will review it, but it may well offer the antidote to Goodwin.

[8] As does, I think, the introductory chapter to a painful subject in a recent work: Lorna Touryan Miller and Donald Eugene Miller, Survivors: An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide (Berkeley, 1999).

[9] Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State (Berkeley, 1995).