What do you know about the Tanzimat? How familiar are you with the history of the Young Ottomans movement? The answers to these and other similar questions will unfortunately colour your perspective of M. Alper Yalçinkaya's excellent book on the subject of science, state and society in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire. The main point of this review will be to elaborate why I believe it is necessary to put the adverb ‘unfortunately’ so close to the adjective ‘excellent’ when talking about Learned Patriots.

The Ottoman Empire has not received much attention among historians of science. As a field of study, it is much more popular among historians of empires or with scholars of oriental studies. For someone not fluent in Turkish, the books that deal with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ottoman science, such as those of Berrak Burçak and Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, can be counted on the fingers of one hand. If we also include journal articles and take into account modernization studies, things are marginally better, with scholars such as Roderic Davison, Fatma Müge Göçek and Yakup Bektas, among others, filling up some of the blanks. But this is a poor harvest indeed, if we consider the political, cultural and intellectual power that the Ottoman Empire exerted for five centuries over an area that, at its height, extended from the Persian Gulf to Budapest and from Baku to Algiers.

It is this lacuna that M. Alper Yalçinkaya aims to address in his book. He starts with a deceptively simple question: ‘What were the Ottomans talking about when they talked about science?’ Or, to put in more words, what it meant for ‘literate Turkish-speaking Muslim Ottomans themselves to debate science in the nineteenth century’? (p. 12). The answer proposed is also deceptively simple: it meant they were talking about people. Science for the Ottoman literati, Alper Yalçinkaya argues, was about morality, nationalism and proper conduct. It was about constructing a discourse ‘about the virtues (or vices) of the representatives of science’, and how this new knowledge could be used to defend an empire which found itself increasingly on the defensive (p. 15). To support this argument, Learned Patriots takes us through a tour of almost a century of Ottoman history, starting from the late eighteenth century, to the Tanzimat era that began with the 1839 Decree of the same name and culminating in the rise of the Young Ottoman movement and the reign of Abdülhamid II (1876–1909). In the process, we learn about such colourful personalities as Sadik Rifat Pasha (1807–1856), the admirer of Metternich who served as an ambassador to Austria; Beșir Fuad (1852–1887), the poet and military veteran who took his own life; and Hüseyin Hulki (1861–1894), the leading Ottoman physician who worked with Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur, but did not see the need for science to augment or supplement Islam. We also get to read about the workings of unique institutions, such as the powerful Translation Bureau, active from 1821, which produced most of the leading bureaucrats of its era, and the short-lived but highly anticipated Ottoman University of the 1850s. Alper Yalçinkaya draws from journal articles and books of the era, from official documents and European and Ottoman memoirs and correspondence, to prove that in this Ottoman case, science had a lot more to do with how people perceived its role within an existing, but changing, national discourse than with performing experiments or articulating theories. He does so with a noteworthy theoretical sophistication, correlating his work with Bourdieusian findings, with Steven Shapin's work on science and morality, and with careful discussion of how, and to what extent, terms like ilm and fen adequately describe what today's historians call nineteenth-century science. In each case the author provides us with a sober account of how and why he finds these and other works relevant to the point he tries to make.

As is to be expected, Learned Patriots touches upon a bewildering number of subjects. A partial list would include the relation of Islam to scientific knowledge coming from Europe; education in science vis-à-vis traditional Ottoman education; the role of prominent minorities such as the Greeks within the Ottoman Empire; the institution of a specialized press; and the interplay between science, literature and poetry in the emergence and critique of the new discourse about science within Ottoman lands. Each time a new theme arises, the author takes great pains to provide an abundance of primary sources and quotes to support his arguments. He is also very careful to avoid easy groupings or taxonomies, such as science versus religion, or tradition versus modernity. His analysis is much more complex, nuanced and multifaceted, describing with precision the many different factors, factions and agents active in each era. The author also takes great care to delineate exactly what his analysis includes and what it does not. Strangely enough, this is where my main gripe with this exciting book lies.

The main accomplishment of Alper Yalçinkaya is to bring to the attention of non-Turkish-speaking scholars the many complexities of the Ottoman case, while touching upon many of the themes that the historiography of science already tackles. In each chapter, sometimes on each page, the interested reader will find some tantalizing reference, such as to how education affects scientific practice (p. 34–37, 124–131); the role of linguistic practices (p. 162); debates on science and literature that pre-date C.P. Snow's Two Cultures (1959) by a century (p. 165–170); and, of course, a fascinating account of the interaction of Islam, modernity, morality and science. In each case, the reader expects some of the possible implications of these findings to be at least mentioned and discussed. However, Alper Yalçinkaya never strays from his path and instead always targets his main argument head-on, leaving other considerations aside. He also takes it for granted that most readers will have a fair working knowledge of the political, social and cultural contexts of the Ottoman Empire, providing only brief discussions of each. By doing so, the author limits the size of his audience, which I believe includes many who are not experts on Ottoman history. Thus Learned Patriots is one of the few, rare cases where clarity of scholarly focus ends up undermining the potential of the author's research. By the end of the book, there is no doubt in the mind of the reader about the validity of Alper Yalçinkaya's thesis on Ottoman science as something delineated, discussed and appreciated by specific people (the literate Turkish-speaking Ottomans), for specific people (the Ottoman populace), in a specific context (the ailing but still very powerful Ottoman Empire). There is also no doubt that Learned Patriots is an excellent, meticulously researched addition to nineteenth-century historiography of science, opening almost single-handedly a whole new area of research. Unfortunately (here is this adverb again), one is left wishing that the author had taken it upon himself to at least pursue some of the avenues of research he himself so carefully brings to the fore.