The problematic status of the historical urban core raises analogous questions for city planners in cities otherwise as diverse as Paris, Istanbual, or Mexico City. In the case of medinas of the Islamic world the historical core is less the site of monuments pertaining to our common heritage than it is a discrete part of the urban fabric which, while adapting somewhat to larger milieu, still stands apart as a striking testament to a peculiarly local way of life.

This paper reports the outcome of computations of indexes for total agricultural output and for apparent consumption of basic food: cereals and pulses in Egypt during the period 1886/87–1967/68.

Historians, among others, expose the lies and deceptions of politicians, dead and alive. But historians themselves often are deceived by the limitations of their own approaches to history. While they themselves may act emotionally or sometimes irrationally in their personal lives, they are too often committed to seek rational explanations for the behavior of statesmen. Grossly understimates in many instancees is the power of retionalization as a factor in the ‘decisionmaking process.’ Often great decisions have been made on the basis of inadequate or false information, with consequences that the decision-makers could not foresee. Sometimes decisions are the result of muddleheadedness. Sometimes a governmental decision seems to be the product of a succession of miscalculations. But it is the natural impulse of those in positions of authority to justify their decisions by some explanations that relate to their zeal for the ‘national interest.’ In so doing they do not necessarily deliberately lie; often they deceive themselves as well as others. Reasons developed after the fact provide a cerebral gloss for unintellingent decisions leading to unintended actions. The background for the occupation of Egypt in 1882 provides an illustration.

One of the few predictable opportunities for the exercise of free will that comes the way of most human beings is the bestowal of names upon their children. To be sure, local or national custom may legally restrict or otherwise limit the scope of that freedom in some cases; but by and large, there is normally some choice to be made, and the beneficiary of the choice, the child, is inevitably powerless to influence it.

A synthesis of Ottoman administrative history has yet to be written, and it is unlikely that one will appear in the near future. The task is enormous, and more glamorous subjects continue to receive priority. Even now the field of administrative history exists largely as an ancillary to the study of Ottoman diplomatic instruments or as a foundation for the study of the moderization of traditional society. In the latter case it has fallen under the spell of institutional history, where three theses and at least one ‘antithesis’ scurry in their murine way across the tiles of the Ottoman edifice. Despite the fact that a developed literature is lacking, speceialists in other disciplines have used the Ottoman example for broad comparative studies of bureaucratic empires. Their premature attempts have perpetuated the notion already endemic in Islamist circles that what we know of Islamic government is all there is to know and need be known. Several themes, however, have dominated the study of governing institutions in the Middle East with a force that has surely impeded progress and fresh thought. Our first results from the four theses referred to earlier are terribly outdated at worst or in need of modification at best. New source materials in the Ottoman archives and new readings of older materials long subject to scholarly scrutiny call for a reexamination of those leading themes and the theses they inspire before any attempt at synthesis and comparison is made.

The 1877–1878 Russo-Turkish War left the Ottoman Empire burdened with a new debt that was to play a crucial role in the relations between Russia and Turkey in subsequent years. Diplomatic and financial histories, however, have largely overlooked this indemnity for a number of reasons. Foremost among them is the timing of the ratification of the indemnity treaty. The actual agreement governing the procedure for the payment of the indemnity was drawn up four years after the San Stefano negotiations and the Congress of Berlin. While monographs concerned with these events mention the indemnity, they fail to follow it up. Second, in the post-Berlin period the European bondholders of the Ottoman Public Debt were primarily interested in securing control over the administration of the revenues servicing their debt. The indemnity, however, remained apart from those revenues ceded to the Ottoman Public Debt Administration. The standard financial histories naturally concentrate on the projects of the bondholders and refer to the indemnity only in passing.

Anthropologists have devoted a good deal of attention recently to what they call ‘complex society’. This rather vague concept developed in contrast with ‘primitive’ or ‘simple’ society, the small-scale, isolated, local-oriented, non- literate grouping of like social parts which anthropologists made, or fancied, their primary object of study. This is Tonnies’ gemeinschaft, held together by Durkheim's ‘mechanical solidarity.’ ‘Complex society’ on the other hand, is more similar to Tonnies’ gesellschaft, bases to some degree upon Durkheim's ‘organic solidarity’; it has many differentiated parts, ingeniously interwoven into elaborate structures, with specializations and rankings and overlappings and other imaginative complications. More and more anthropologists found themselves, whatever their original intentions, involved in studies that were manifestly of ‘complex society.’ This was the result of two developments: One was the encapsulation of most ‘simple’ societies by colonial or national societies, and the concomitant engagement with government, economic markets, and development (or under development). This encapsulation was not something completely new that happened during the course of anthropological investigation, but something which had been going on and which anthropologists ‘discovered’ and began to devote attention to. The other development was the carrying of anthropological research to the areas of the ‘great civilizations’ in East Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East. In these areas, long-recorded histories, literate traditions, great states and empires, and sophisticated technologies belied the notion of ‘simple’ society, and raised embarrassing questions about classical anthropological methodology, ‘participant observation’ in a constricted area for one or two years.

The archives of the imperial German government, 1871–1918, are an important but somewhat neglected source for late Ottoman and Middle East history. These collections fell into Soviet, American, French, and British hands after World War II and are presently divided between the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) and the German Federal Republic (West Germany).