Ottoman history has produced few biographies. For the period before the late nineteenth century, we hardly have anything. Only a few isolated studies have appeared; and in recent years, it has sometimes seemed as though the field has given up. The main reason for this apparent lack of interest is the sheer difficulty of writing them. Historians have few materials from which to work up individualized portraits. Ottoman literary tastes did not favour confessional writing and did not predispose authors to say much about their personal reflections and feelings or indeed to drop many details about their everyday experience at all. Writing was for scholarship and law, or put itself in the service of poetic expression, which cared little for mundane observation or self-disclosure.

These perennial difficulties have not deterred Ethan Menchinger from offering an engaging new study of Ahmed Vasıf Efendi (1735–1806), one of the foremost Ottoman historians of the eighteenth century. By Ottoman standards, Vasıf is a promising subject. He was a leading Ottoman statesman, rising through the bureaucracy to appointment as chief scribe at the end of his life. His paper trail is extensive and allows Menchinger to track him over several decades. More than a high-ranking official, Vasıf also served as official court historian, and gained recognition as one of the most accomplished stylists in eighteenth-century Ottoman letters. Along with several books and treatises, he wrote his masterpiece, an official chronicle of Ottoman history that covered most of the late eighteenth century.

Despite having such a suitable subject, Menchinger continually runs into the limitations of Ottoman biography. Originally from a mid-level family of scholars in Baghdad, Vasıf gradually made his way as a young man from Iraq to the imperial capital, and switched from a religious to a bureaucratic career, in which prospects were decidedly better for provincial newcomers. The sources tell us little about this stage of his life. Only from middle age did Vasıf begin to leave a fuller stream of records. Menchinger owes much of his portrait to careful research in the Ottoman archives, which preserves the vicissitudes of Vasıf's career. He pulls a few extra bits of colour from Vasıf's extensive literary output.

What emerges from all this careful combing of archives and libraries is, as Menchinger readily concedes, more of an intellectual biography than a sketch of a person in the flesh. Menchinger has little choice. Vasıf's writings invariably turn to intellectual, political, and historical matters, leaving little else for the historian to examine. As a result, the reader gets a tour mainly of intellectual circles in eighteenth-century Istanbul. Menchinger is adept at decoding their abstruse debates. Philosophical treatises on ethics, he explains, were really heated debates about politics. The crux of the matter for Vasıf's generation was a series of shocking military defeats, starting with the Ottoman–Russian war of 1768–74. The old Ottoman self-image of superiority crumbled. Officials quarrelled about who was responsible for this weakness and what was to be done about it. With the ascension of Selim III (r. 1789–1807), the court would commit itself to the ill-fated New Order, a programme for reforming the army and administration openly modelled on European techniques and fiercely opposed by entrenched interests like the Janissaries. Reformers tried to make the case that borrowing from Europeans was both necessary and unobjectionable and did nothing to compromise Ottoman legitimacy.

Fully in the reform camp by the 1790s, Vasıf's full-throated advocacy for the New Order tempts Menchinger to declare him the “first modern Ottoman”. He flirts with the debate, now more than three decades old, about the possibility of an eighteenth-century “Islamic Enlightenment”. With his emphasis on “free will” in historical affairs and demotion of divine intervention, Vasıf seems to become an exponent of greater “rationality”. Subsequent pages essentially walk back this claim. The eye-catching title (perhaps to please the publisher) yields to a more subtle assessment of Vasıf and other reformers standing at the dawn of an age that they understood imperfectly. They were not really “modern” in their instincts; they were “pragmatic” thinkers and officials who continued to “look to the past”. To the extent that Vasıf appears modern, his reaction begins to look very much like a matter of circumstance, not the principle of free-thinking reason that Enlightenment philosophes would espouse. Perhaps Menchinger would have been better off setting his study within a more global framework, instead of forcing parallels with intellectual currents in the Atlantic world. Why not measure Vasıf against Russian statesmen and intellectuals? Or those, say, in India, whose experiences with European power were not so different?

More fruitful is Menchinger's investigation of Ottoman thought on its own terms. He demonstrates the enduring creativity of received intellectual paradigms. Vasıf and his contemporaries did not mindlessly adhere to inherited doctrine. They refashioned it to the needs of the day. The reader watches statesmen and intellectuals entering a new and unwelcome era of forced choices and compromises. There were no ready-made programmes or policies. Underscoring the makeshift nature of eighteenth-century thought is the intellectual journey of Vasıf, which Menchinger is able to show in fascinating detail. We follow Vasıf through the thick of political intrigue and manoeuvre. More than he (or any other Ottoman author) might have liked to admit, his ideas evolved with circumstances. In retrospect, we can pick out glaring inconsistencies or watch as his ideas suddenly shift with the twists and turns of court politics.

We never quite meet Vasıf as an individual. But if we cannot have biography as we would like it, then perhaps we can, like Menchinger, make the most of intellectual biography. Given the nature of the sources at our disposal, Menchinger has surely set an instructive example to future researchers.