Ottoman history has been slow to emerge from the shadows, and every contribution providing insight into the workings of a state that survived for more than six centuries and governed large parts of the globe must be welcomed. Obstacles to greater understanding are formidable. Not least is the prejudice of generations, both in the “European world” and also in the successor states of the empire in the Balkans and Middle East. Another is the general ignorance that gave impetus to Christine Woodhead's decision to edit the collection of articles under review. She writes in the preface that “Without the constant need to rethink, explain and justify to a sceptical audience…”, she would not have taken on the task. Woodhead is interested in the fundamental question of whether there was such an entity as the “Ottoman world”. What did it mean for the sultan's subjects to live under an umbrella that stretched from Algeria to Iraq, and from Hungary to the Hejaz? Was there a sense of “Ottoman-ness” that was more than resigned acceptance of the sultan's government? Thirty authors take such abstract questions as their starting-point, and explore them in the context of their own research. The result is evidence of the dynamism of the field at the present time.
The first section of the volume, “Foundations”, deals with the empire's earliest times, and the underpinnings of its subsequent development; “Ottomans and others” concerns what was meant by the term “Ottoman” and what constituted “the other”; “The wider empire” focuses on Ottoman frontiers and borderlands, and connections with the world beyond; “Ordinary people” considers aspects of the daily lives of the sultan's subjects; and “Later Ottomans” looks at the vexed matter of how Ottoman the people of the provinces felt themselves to be in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Many papers are geographically specific, which is a bonus because for too long, with only a paucity of micro studies of particular places available, Ottoman history has been written with Istanbul as the focus.
Limitations of space thwart mention of each essay, so I will comment on one from each section that I found of particular interest.
Derin Terzioğlu's article “Sufis in the age of state-building and confessionalization” questions the dichotomy according to which Ottoman religion is often analysed. This posits that the Ottomans were always Sunni, but accommodated folk Islam in the shape of Sufi practices until the political threat posed by the Shia Safavids from around 1500 forced them to espouse a more orthodox attitude to religion that sidelined the Sufis. We should be wary, she writes, of analogies to a “church” model dictating right belief, or of comparing Sufi orders to contemporary European religious brotherhoods. Instead, supported by contemporary writings, she argues that we should acknowledge the fluidity and complexity of religious affiliations in early Ottoman times, and view the Sunnitization of the Ottomans as a highly-charged and dynamic process that continued to enliven society.
Stefan Winter's research also undermines the analytical categories of orthodoxy and heterodoxy. In “The Kızılbaş of Syria and Ottoman Shiism”, he focuses on the Shiite Imami clans of the western Syrian highlands, and finds that the term Kızılbaş was used strategically, to define them when tax collection or military action against them required justification – Ottoman officialdom does not seem to have connected Syrian Shiites with the Iranian Kızılbaş question. When the Harfush dynasty attacked some villages in 1579, and deprived the fisc of tax revenues, the Ottomans denounced them as “heretics” but still relied on them to keep order – indication that castigation couched in religious rhetoric was less salient than concerns about obstruction to Ottoman economic wellbeing. Surprisingly, perhaps, the first time Syrian Shiites were referred to and persecuted as “Kızılbaş brigands” was around 1690, when accusations of usurpation of Sunni tax farms provoked state violence against the Hamadas clan. Winter sees this usage as a legal device, and a pejorative label, in what amounted to an attempt to classify Syrian Shiites as rebels rather than question their religious inclinations.
In “The peripheralization of the Ottoman Algerian elite” Tal Shuval traces how the frontier province of Cezayir-i garb, at first directly ruled from Istanbul, became peripheral to imperial concerns, yet the “Turkishness” of the elite demonstrated the continuing will and need of this stratum to belong to the empire. The tripartite ruling structure established at the outset – governor, land army and corsair fleet – remained in force for three centuries, but the equilibrium between these bodies fluctuated greatly, as did the intensity of ties to Istanbul. Careerists from the centre came to replace local rulers connected to the household of Hayreddin Barbarossa, the first governor, following the 1580 truce with Philip II and the division of the province into three, while the influx of mainly Anatolian janissaries thereafter maintained the link to the centre.
A new generation of scholars of the Arab provinces accepts their “Ottoman-ness”, and in “Masters, servants and slaves: household formation among the urban notables of early Ottoman Aleppo”, Charles L. Wilkins considers the ubiquitous presence of slaves and free servants within Ottoman households in a specific Arab context. Working from individual cases inscribed in local court records, he observes a variety of relationships between master and slave or servant, all of which were intended to contribute to the foundation and maintenance of the notable's household, as elsewhere in the empire.
Of all the writings here, only Ariel Salzmann's, “The old regime and the Ottoman Middle East” ventures into more conceptual territory. She outlines how macro-environmental conditions in the Mediterranean, namely the culmination of the “little ice age”, can explain longer-term shifts in the power relationship between city and countryside and between officials at the centre and agents in the provinces. She describes the pervasiveness of the state in the life of the sultan's subjects, and indicates the changes in Middle Eastern society that resulted from the creation of life-lease tax farming at the end of the seventeenth century. Saliently, the opportunity for even those of modest means to hold shares gave these individuals a stake in the Ottoman order. And if we understand better the many decades when local actors effectively governed the provinces, she suggests, we will be better able to appreciate that the reforms of the Tanzimat period derived their momentum also from political and societal experiences played out far from the capital.
There are many fine essays in this volume, from familiar names and also younger colleagues who are making their mark. Some papers usefully re-evaluate received wisdom, while others bring together disparate aspects of an imperfectly known topic. Taken together, they show that Ottoman populations were not merely passive subjects, but that local people held sufficient negotiating power to push government to accommodate their demands in very different geographical and political environments and to embrace new strategies in order to keep the empire intact. And, despite the variety and diversity of Ottoman communities, another conclusion must be that they shared commonalities that were recognizably Ottoman.
