Christine Philliou

The Ottoman Empire and the Imperial Turn

As a polity that existed for over six centuries and that ruled on three continents, the Ottoman Empire is perhaps both the easiest and hardest empire to compare in world history. It is somewhat paradoxical then that the Ottoman Empire has only recently become a focus of students of empires as historical phenomena. This approach to the Ottoman Empire as an empire has succeeded in generating an impressive profusion of scholarship. This article critically assesses this literature within the larger context of what we term the Imperial Turn to explain how comparative perspectives have been used to analyze the empire. In doing so, it sheds new light on some older historiographical questions about the dynamics of imperial rule, periodization, and political transformation, while at the same time opening up new avenues of inquiry and analysis about the role of various actors in the empire, the recent emphasis on the empires early modern history, and the scholarly literature of comparative empires itself. Throughout, the authors speak both to Ottoman specialists and others interested in comparative imperial histories to offer a holistic picture of recent Ottoman historiography and to suggest many possible directions for future scholarship. Instead of accepting comparison for comparisons sake, the article offers a bold new vocabulary for rigorous comparative work on the Ottoman Empire and beyond.

The Paradox of Perceptions: Interpreting the Ottoman Past through the National Present

On a sunny day like so many others in the autumn of 2000 I was conducting research in the Gennadius Library in Athens for my doctoral dissertation at Princeton. I had taken what I thought was a detour from research in the Ottoman archives of Istanbul to read the papers of Constantine Musurus (1807–91), the Ottoman Ambassador to London for much of the nineteenth century (1851–85). Most of his correspondence was in Greek, French, and English, but as I browsed through the catalogue, handwritten in a blue standard-issue Greek school notebook, I noticed the final entry: ‘Old Turkish Documents.’ According to the catalogue, which had been drawn up in the early 1970s, there was one box of these documents, although the curator of the archive had never heard of these papers. I opted to be polite and not push the matter, so resumed my research in the fascinating Greek documents that had enjoyed scarcely more attention in late twentieth-century Athens than these phantom ‘Old Turkish’ documents. About a month after this incident, the curator approached me, smiling, and said she had located the box of ‘Old Turkish Documents’ in an off-site depot, and that indeed she had never heard about them or seen them before this. She deposited a sizeable box, tied up with string, in front of me and invited me to have a look. That day I unearthed approximately 800 Ottoman Turkish documents – the Ottoman Turkish archive of Musurus Pasha, a.k.a. Constantine Musurus. Given the pivotal role Britain had played in Ottoman affairs of the nineteenth century, the inestimable value of the London-based Ottoman Ambassador’s papers was hard to ignore. And yet no one, neither scholar nor archivist, neither Greek nor Turk nor Brit, had bothered to notice this treasure trove until the dawn of the twenty-first century. Far from a coincidence, this failure to notice is a vivid illustration of the perception, and lack thereof, of the Ottoman legacy in the Balkans and the Middle East. The Ottoman legacy in the Balkans and the Middle East is everywhere – from the hamams, mosques, and bedestan covered markets in Salonica and Damascus, to the cuisine, music, colloquialisms, and some say even the common culture of everyday bureaucracy from Egypt to Turkey to Albania. But beyond these whimsical and somewhat clichéd examples, the Ottoman legacy is what is present but not perceived. It is in the graveyards with beautiful pencil-shaped headstones, Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 44, No. 5, 661–675, September 2008

Communities on the Verge : Unraveling the Phanariot Ascendancy in Ottoman Governance

Phanariots were an Ottoman Christian elite which, despite structural impedi ments, imperial ideology, and religious doctrine that would preclude their par ticipation in Ottoman governance, ascended to power in multiple political arenas between the 1660s and 1821. Their rise came about just as the larger imperium was undergoing profound military and political crises precipitated by both internal threats and periodic invasions by the Russian and Habsburg Empires. While some Phanariots were stalwart servants of the sultan, others exacerbated these crises, allying with Russian officials and planning a secessio nist uprising that would later unfold into the Greek War of Independence. Their ascendancy, however, is an Ottoman story?a specific outcome of Ottoman responses to the dilemmas of empire in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.1 There is no single existing framework in which to adequately situate this Pha nariot ascendancy. This is in part because the vicissitudes of Ottoman governance at the turn ofthe nineteenth century have been swept away by the two competing and intertwined historiographies of modernization and nationalism, historiogra phies that grew out of the very changes that ultimately buried this elite.

The Ottoman Empire from Present to Past: Memory and Ideology in Turkey and the Arab World

he Ottoman Empire died in 1923 with the disestablishment of the sultanate and the proclamation of a new Turkish republic. For some years the empire had led merely a shadow existence. Defeated in World War I, shorn of its sovereignty, occupied by foreign armies, wracked by civil war, torn by ethnic conflict, and stained by state- led massacres of Armenian citizens, the empire ended badly and was little mourned. Paraphrasing Charles Dickens, one could accurately have said that the empire was dead to begin with. There was no doubt about that. But as the articles in this collection reveal, the death of the empire involved a creative rupture. This rupture involved both a dramatic break from each successor state’s imperial past as well as a continual reference to it, through successive iterations of what the Ottoman legacy could or should mean. Initially, elites in the Ottoman successor states wasted little time disowning the memory of the multinational state that they once had served. Political leaders, educators, and governments promoted ethnic nationalist ideologies (especially Turkish and Arab) as new, modern sources of political legitimacy. The Ottoman past, packaged as a story of political oppression, cultural stagnation, and long military decline, served mainly as a foil for the nationalist narrative, as an antithesis to the nation’s glorious past and its imminent rebirth. Yet so many centuries of history could not easily be tucked away. Nationalist narratives were, themselves, based on selective remembering and on wholesale suppression or forgetting. At moments of national crisis, or during episodes of acute power struggles within successor states, the Ottoman past broke its silence. Sometimes this past was invoked (negatively) as a “ghost” haunting the present, and other times as a rich reservoir of historical experience. Either way, the empire and its legacy proved not to be as dead as once imagined. 1 The articles collected here highlight a number of themes in understandings and evaluations of the Ottoman past from some of the empire’s successor states along the southern and eastern Mediterranean shores, areas conventionally lumped together as part of the “Islamic World.” Yet as these contributions demonstrate, they are areas that exhibit a fascinating diversity of issues and impasses associated with the Ottoman past. Contributors discuss con

Fixers in Motion. A Conversation

Since taking the editorial helm of CSSH in 2006, I have watched several intellectual trends shift and gather momentum. Postsocialist and postcolonial studies are merging into a more generalized interest in the politics of empire. Critical impulses once associated with the “post” approaches have found their way into studies of secularism, conversion, translation, and state effects. Increasingly, these topics are analyzed as transregional processes that operate across religious and political logics. In 2009, our first CSSH Conversation dealt with matters of tolerance and conversion in the Ottoman Empire, and in 2010 we filled an entire issue with essays on secularism (52-3). In each case, the ground we explored was contested, but themes of governmentality and moral transformation were central, and the terms of debate were broadly shared.

Women in the Ottoman Balkans: Gender, Culture and History

As in so many other societies, women in the Ottoman Balkans were marginal to the formal operations of state. This, among other factors, has contributed to their further marginalization in the modern historiography of the Ottoman Empire, a historiography which relies so heavily on state-generated archival sources. With regard to the Balkans in particular, the very concept of ‘Ottoman Balkans’ is one that goes against the grain of so many separate and compartmentalized national historiographies that have developed in the region over the last 200 years. The editors and contributors of Women in the Ottoman Balkans: Gender, Culture, History, then, should be commended for making the most of a difficult situation by using an array of sources and approaches to shed light on experience and memory regarding women in the trans-national and comparative framework of the Ottoman Balkans. According to the editors, Amila Buturovic and Irvin Cemil Schick, the aim of the volume is to ‘address questions of acculturation across religious and ethnic boundaries as they inflected gender relations in the daily lives of women’ (p.3). In offering a counterpoint of ‘religious and ethnic diversity’ and ‘centuries of peaceful coexistence among Christians, Muslims, and Jews’, to recent images and stereotypes of violence and bloodshed in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo’, they have advanced a field that is still, sadly, in its infancy. Again in the interest of encouraging nuance and complexity, they also point out that they have refrained from imposing headings of any kind to group the contributions together, preferring to let the reader ‘explore the common links based upon methodological, theoretical, thematic, and historical considerations’ (p.4). Indeed, there are multiple levels of connections between the 12 contributions that make up the volume. Contributions range geographically from the Romanian Principalities to Bosnia, emergent Greece, modern-day Bulgaria, and the coastal Black Sea Pontus region (technically outside the Balkans but with important cultural and historical ties). In terms of sources, articles that make meticulous use of Shari’a court records (Svetlana Ivanova, Sophia Laiou), fatwa texts (Selma Zecevic) and vakif documents (Kerima Filan) are joined by contributions that rely on evidence from folktales (Patricia Fann Bouteneff), ballads (Amila Buturovic), poetry (Mirna Solic), press (Gila Hadar; Angela Jianu) and Western European art and literature (Olga Augustinos, Irvin Cemil Schick), reminding us of the cultural as well as political life of women in the Ottoman Balkans. Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 44, No. 6, 1009–1012, November 2008