Historians of the Ottoman Empire have until recently characterized the 17th and 18th centuries as a period of decline, wedged in between the glorious age of Süleiman and that of the Ottoman recovery in the Tanzimat era. As such, the Ottoman conquest of the island of Crete that began in 1644 and ended with the fall of Candia (Iráklion) in 1669 has often been reduced to a footnote, at best, or confined to discussions of Ottoman military tactics and siege warfare. Greek nationalist historiography sees the conquest of the island as a tragic historic rupture, with the island's people slipping from the mini-renaissance they had enjoyed during the last decades of Venetian control to the despotism of the Tourkokratía. Despite the very important re-imagining of the Ottoman past that has occurred over the past decade as scholars have examined a wider range of archival sources throughout the Mediterranean basin, this thesis has gone largely unchallenged. Molly Greene's monograph on Crete before and after the conquest shatters that simplistic characterization with a well-written, and much needed, bit of historical revisionism.

In a challenge to the Greek nationalist interpretations, Greene chooses to emphasize the continuities between the Venetian and the Ottoman regimes during the first century of Ottoman rule. The very late date of the Ottoman acquisition of the island helped to prevent a radical transformation of the rhythms of its agricultural and commercial sectors in the transfer from Venetian to Ottoman hegemony. The Ottoman authorities surveyed the island soon after its conquest to divide the island's agricultural lands into timars, whereby its villages would be parceled out to resident cavalrymen who would collect the revenues in lieu of salary and serve the state at its beck and call. This replicated the process by which conquered territories elsewhere in the Balkans, Anatolia, and Syria were incorporated into empire. But Greene argues convincingly that this course of action was never implemented. Further supporting the argument for continuity, there was no attempt by the Ottoman state to settle on Crete Turkish-speaking, Muslim settlers from the mainland, as had been the case in Cyprus, another island conquered from the Venetians the century before. There was thus no trauma of colonization or dispossession. Rather, Cretan men converted to Islam in great numbers largely, it seems, to gain the right to plunder that being in the military conferred. As in the case of Bosnia and Albania, “Turks” on the island were largely indigenous, and the Ottoman military presence consisted largely of formerly Christian soldiers, an irony frequently noted by European visitors.

Greene also deftly challenges the thesis of Crete's steep economic decline after the Ottoman conquest. Although the formerly renowned wine trade of the island suffered in the transition to rule by Islamic law, she argues, other commodities, especially olive oil, emerged as viable exports. Greene cautions that the Western sources that speak of decline in trade should be balanced against evidence that trade began to flow northward toward Istanbul, eastward to Izmir, and south to Egypt, all ports controlled by the Ottomans. Local Greek Christian merchants and shipowners predominated in this trade and profited. This is an important finding, as it pushes the origins of an entrepreneurial Ottoman Greek merchant class back to the final decades of the 17th century and suggests that it emerged on Crete as well as in the smaller Greek isles of the Aegean Sea.

Greene's monograph on Crete is an example of the best of what is currently being produced in Ottoman history. Using Venetian, Greek, and Ottoman archival sources, the author of this work seems to have left no potential source untouched. Greene's understanding of a wide variety of sources in a number of languages, her ability to conceive the continuity in the patterns of Mediterranean commercial life, as well as the more apparent discontinuities, and her clear, jargon-free prose provide us with a multi-layered portrait of the island's incorporation into the empire in an “age of decline.” This work is unquestionably a major addition to Ottoman history. It forces us to rethink what the historical impact of the Ottoman conquest was on the people of Crete and the island's economy. Greek nationalist historians have depicted the Ottoman occupation as one of doom and gloom. Greene has shown that the picture was not nearly so bleak and that Cretans became adept at establishing a multitude of strategies, including their conversion to Islam, to profit from the change in regimes from Venetian to Ottoman.

Although Greene's book does much to integrate Crete's history into that of the larger Mediterranean region—of both the Latin West and the Ottoman world—it unfortunately has little to say about the Ottoman Empire's other Mediterranean island, Cyprus. A more explicit comparsion of their two very different experiences as part of the Ottoman Empire would have been useful. Nevertheless, this book, with its Braudelian vision of a Mediterranean world marked more by continuities than ruptures, is highly satisfying. It provides an important breakthrough in integrating Ottoman history into broader themes of Mediterranean history. With the appearance of a paperback edition (2002), it seems destined to become a standard text for the teaching of Ottoman and Mediterranean history to undergraduate students.