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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 March 2016
Since the middle of the twentieth century there have been three waves of historiography on the late Ottoman world. Each rose to prominence in a different global setting, functioned as a broad intellectual orientation, and was replaced by another somewhat less hegemonic theoretical current after about two decades. The key differences between the three episodes are evident in terms of their thematic priorities, analytical frameworks, and the research designs and methodological choices of scholars. These three waves of Ottoman history writing can be classified as modernization approaches, macro models, and post-structural agendas.
1 For a three-wave periodization of African historiography emphasizing political structure, economy, and culture respectively, see Cooper, Frederick, “Decolonizing Situations: the Rise, Fall and Rise of Colonial Studies, 1951-2001,” French Politics, Culture and Society vol. 20(2) (2002), pp. 47–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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31 Makdisi directs attention to the domestic aspect of the Ottoman modernization project where the sociological imagination of the Ottoman bureaucratic class produced a backward east which increasingly coincided with distinct religious (non-orthodox Islam), ethnic (Arab) and spatial (Western Asia) identities. Makdisi, Ussama, “Ottoman Orientalism,” American Historical Review 107 (3) (2002), 768–796Google Scholar; for the widening mental gap between the bureaucratic class and imperial subjects, see also Deringil, Selim, ‘“They Live in a State of Nomadism and Savagery’: the Late Ottoman Empire and the Post-Colonial Debate,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 45 (2) (2003), 311–342.Google Scholar
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33 The idea here is to see imperial ideology as a new layer of inclusive social identity which in most cases did not contradict with local, ethnic and religious affiliations of the social actors involved. This dimension of late Ottoman rule and its demise during the early Turkish Republic has been captured in two recent articles, Kasaba, Reşat, “Dreams of Empire, Dreams of Nations,” Eshcrick, Joseph W., Kayali, Hasan, Young, Eric Van (eds.) Empire to Nation – Historical Perspectives om the Making of the Modern World (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 198–225Google Scholar; Birtek, Faruk, “Greek Bull in the China Shop of Ottoman ‘Grand Illusion’: Greece in the Making of Modern Turkey,” Birtek, Faruk and Dragonas, Thanos (eds.) Citizenship and the Nation-State in Greece and Turkey (London: Routledge, 2005), 37–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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