Heather Ferguson's The Proper Order of Things is an ambitious, conceptually sophisticated work that seeks to trace the ways in which “the production of specific record-keeping genres and administrative discourses served to shape and augment imperial authority as the Ottoman Empire rapidly expanded in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries” (12). Arguing that “documentary production and statecraft were mutually constitutive projects” (107), the author does not present a plain, straightforward treatment of the major textual genres and practices associated with the early modern Ottoman bureaucratic apparatus, but rather strives to offer a new, multi-layered understanding of the nature of early modern Ottoman statecraft and governance through an exploration of the interplay between evolving textual genres, administrative practices, conceptualizations of power and sovereignty, and principles of governance from the mid-fifteenth through the early seventeenth centuries.

The book consists of six chapters in three distinct parts. Part One, “Establishing Genres,” comprises the first three chapters, and discusses the evolution of some major aspects of Ottoman statehood and sovereignty, with the attendant development of spatial and textual forms of formulating and asserting state authority. Chapter 1, “The Sovereign State,” highlights the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 as “a spatial assertion of centralized rule” and a defining moment in the Ottoman polity's transformation from a loose “confederacy” to an absolutist empire with ambitions for universal rule. The Ottoman dynasty's claims to absolute rule were projected both spatially, that is, the imposition of spatial divisions between public and private areas in Mehmed II's newly built palace aimed at accentuating and sacralizing the dynast's power, and textually, through the evolution of distinct forms of expressing sultanic will generated by an increasingly complex bureaucratic apparatus. Chapters 2 and 3, “The State of Stability,” and “The Bureaucratic State,” respectively, further discuss specific forms of textual authority, highlighting the development of Ottoman record-keeping, with an emphasis on cadastral surveys that mapped regional resources, and (dynastic) legal regulations (kanun) which helped actively manage these resources to the benefit of the centralizing state. Chapter 3, in particular, delves into the workings of the imperial chancery, the formalization of registry practice, and the collaborative interrelationship between dynastic (kanun) and sacred (shari‘a) law and their two leading proponents in the Ottoman context—the chancellor (ni şancı) and the chief jurisconsult (şeyhülislam), respectively.

Part Two, “Performing Practices” (Chapters 4 and 5), turns to the ways in which textual and legislative authority operated in the actual practice of governance, asserting sultanic legitimacy and the state's sovereignty through the projection of a set of categories, values, and norms that constituted an actionable, “systematized grammar and structure of rule” (106). Exploring Ottoman registers of outgoing imperial orders (mühimme defterleri) from the mid-sixteenth through the first half of the seventeenth centuries, Ferguson focuses on two areas where Ottoman sovereignty was continuously contested—Ottoman Hungary (Chapter 4) and the province of Tripoli in Greater Syria (Chapter 5). Both case studies highlight the limits of Ottoman authority and the ways in which the anxieties and vulnerability of imperial power were managed through the articulation of textual authority in a process of reformulation and renegotiation of sovereignty with the prominent participation of Ottoman provincial officials, local notables, and foreign agents, which often included alternating co-operation with and opposition to the imperial center. Part 3, “Objectifying Generic Politics and Practices,” contains the last chapter, “On the Perfect State: An Ottoman Vision of Order” and the book's conclusion. “On the Perfect State” presents a good overview of the Ottoman “literature of reform” from 1580 to 1650, a period of acute crisis and definitive reordering of political structures and power relationships in Ottoman state and society, whereby prominent contemporary political thinkers strove to objectify an “ancient” Ottoman way, thus creating an idealized vision of Ottoman governance, which ought to serve as a model for political and administrative reforms.

I have two major sets of concerns in relation to the present work. First, despite the work's clearly stated ambition to offer “a new mapping of Ottoman imperial practice” and a new understanding of the nature of Ottoman governance and sovereignty, it has little new to offer to a specialist in the field. The major themes and sources featured in the book have been the subject of numerous publications, and Ferguson quite often just states the obvious, or the well-known. The persistent use of “high academic language” does not make up for this deficiency. My second set of concerns, admittedly the graver one, relates to the abundance of mistakes, both substantive and philological, many of which are plainly puzzling. To give just a small sample (with the appropriate corrections): the Janissary corps’ original source of recruitment was not the dev şirme (as stated on page 3), but the pencik levy; sahib-kıran is a title that implies claims to universal rule, while sultan suggests regional limitations to sovereignty, and not vice versa (54–55); kanunname is not a “tax register” (75, 78); Selim I did not conquer the Akkoyunlu sultanate (88), the latter was already incorporated in the Safavid Empire; imamü’l-Müslimin does not mean “administrator of the Muslims” (125, 134); ‘isyan does not mean “rebellious elements” (169), that would be ‘avasi; yarār diller does not refer to “useful/advantageous language” (170), but to “useful (human) informers”; maliyyeden müdevver does not mean “ministry of finance” (242), but “transferred from the ministry of finance” (referring to a major collection in Istanbul's Prime Ministry's Ottoman archive); the assertion that “[A]fter the collapse of the ‘Umayyad dynasty in 750, the Muslim community was no longer led by God's vice gerent and Muhammad's successor” (238) is puzzling. These and numerous other comparable errors suggest that the author may have significant lacunae in her training as a historian, researcher, and philologist, which casts a shadow of doubt over the reliability of the work.