In From the “Terror of the World” to the “Sick Man of Europe”: European Images of Ottoman Empire and Society from the Sixteenth Century to the Nineteenth Aslı Çırakman argues that European attitudes towards the Ottoman Empire were extremely variable in the 16th and 17th centuries, hardening into a simpler picture as Europeans became more self-confident and more self-critical: “one can observe that in the eighteenth-century images of Ottomans there is more agreement than controversy as to the nature of this peculiar form of government and people” (p. 108). The author seeks to challenge Edward Said's arguments in Orientalism, stating flatly that Said oversimplified early modern attitudes to smooth the way for a teleological argument that European attitudes started out reflexively hostile and only became more so with the rise of imperialist and colonialist agendas in the region. Specifically, she argues that earlier travelers and essayists displayed a more wide-ranging curiosity and therefore produced more diverse perspectives on the Ottoman Empire than did their counterparts in the 18th century.

This argument hinges in part on proving that 18th-century writers were more eager to fit data into preconceived notions, primarily of despotism, than were their predecessors, and that despotism came to be defined “as an Oriental form of regime” used to critique European regimes vis-à-vis Asian regimes (pp. 108–109). Many of our Europeanist colleagues are eager for a book that puts these materials in context of their European origins and reception, as well as their accuracies and inaccuracies in the portrayal of Ottoman history. Çırakman analyzes a wide variety of early modern sources in the original English or in English translation to make her case, with some reference to Postel and a few others in the original French. The secondary literature is drawn from English, French, and modern Turkish, and the work bears the welcome promise of bringing our colleagues' Turkish-language discussions of Orientalism, many of which have not been published in English, into wider discussion. This promise is not fulfilled, however, as there are only a few passing references to works in Turkish (pp. 93–94).

Unfortunately, sloppy editing does a great disservice to Çırakman's work, with an accumulation of simple errors from front matter through misdirected indexing that, taken together, give a distressing impression of a book that could have been far better. The bulk of the book is in two unwieldy chapters, one on the 15th and 16th centuries, and another on the 18th, each disorganized in format and narration. The editor allowed basic grammatical and spelling errors to remain on every page, which detracts from the fluency of arguments and narrative and suggests a basic discourtesy, at best, to a junior scholar publishing a first monograph in a second language. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, for example, is repeatedly referred to as “Lady Mary Wortley Montague.” There is a basic error on page 139, equating “escheat” in European feudalism with confiscation of timar holdings at the death of the timariot. This error might have originated with the author as an error of fact or as an error in poorly edited prose, but by page 139 it is impossible to tell which. There are errors in the scholarly apparatus, as well, including some startling omissions in the secondary literature. It is not even clear in which library or libraries the primary sources were located; nor can one ascertain from the bibliography which editions were used of works published across three centuries, whether in the original or in facsimile. In addition, the prose is repetitious when the argument could be moving forward, a common failing of second-language writing that can easily be remedied by a vigilant editor.

There are, however, strong moments in the book. When Çırakman presents Anquetil-Duperron's original perspectives and his arguments against Montesquieu, for example, we are on the brink of understanding how an Orientalist (as Çırakman describes him) and contrarian challenged the rise of cliché and condemnation in popular essays. Anquetil-Duperron (1731–1805) is paraphrased and discussed rather than simply excerpted and summarized, as are other authors, and here one can see where Çırakman's promised disagreement with what she describes as Said's “monolithic” view of European writings on the Orient might play out. Perhaps we will learn how Anquetil-Duperron trained to study India, and why he became interested in the Qur

an, or even be given a list of his publications. But no. Instead, we are simply told that “Anquetil-Duperron's ideas did not receive much attention during the eighteenth century” (p. 130). It is hard to evaluate the merits of this claim without the basic elements of Rezeptionsgeschichte: when and where was the work under discussion published and by whom, how many editions or printings were made, and how many copies survive? Why was Ludovico Cartano's Good News to Christendome translated into English in 1620, for example, and by whom? What motivated Fynes Moryson to translate his own work from Latin into English in 1617 (not mentioned by Çırakman), and were any of the other works similarly taken from original Latin versions into vernacular languages? Even better-known authors such as Voltaire, Rycaut, and Knolles are presented without such context, their writings excerpted more often than not without dates of publication in the body of the book, with no data on how many printings their works went through. Instead, one is asked to rely on the author's statements of influence, easily accepted in the case of Knolles as Bodin's translator, but not proved elsewhere. This is a curious deficiency in a book about the development of ideas.

Çırakman likewise dismisses German authors in a lump with Hapsburg writers, while later mentioning Luther in passing and leaving the Reformation almost entirely out of the picture. Attempts to address the German-literature gap in Said's analysis have resulted in solid secondary-source analyses of the origins of German intellectual attitudes toward the East, such as Suzanne Marchand's studies of German archaeology and the construction of knowledge in Germany from the 1700s forward, so it is curious that Çırakman repeats Said's lacuna in this regard even as she seeks to challenge his discussions of early modern Orientalism. There are also several important gaps both in attribution and in analysis. For example, there is considerable overlap with Bouwsma's masterly 1957 analysis of Guillaume Postel in demonstrating Postel's voracious curiosity but also the uses to which he put his analyses of the Ottomans in internal European discourses about politics and abuses of power. One searches in vain, however, for engagement with a full range of more recent works, such as S. J. Bamforth's “Les Écrits de Guillaume Postel et Leurs Éditeurs” (French Studies 48 [1 January 1994]), or Goffman's Britons in the Ottoman Empire, 1642–1660 (1998), or even Macfie's reader on Orientalism (2000), which would have had the added merit of including articles in English, singularly lacking in the bibliography, which includes only a few articles from two English-language scholarly journals, Past and Present and Journal of the History of Ideas.

There is promise here of an incisive study of Enlightenment attitudes toward failing empires, but instead the reader is presented with shallow generalizations about the British and the French, such as, “[t]he English were interested in despotism because, for them, it was an alien regime while the French were concerned with despotism since, they thought, they had a different version of it” (p. 191). Which English and which French at which points in the 18th century? The period from 1700 to 1800 saw monarchy, revolution, and the birth of empire in France, as well as the many missteps of revolutionary regimes, which could safely be described at points as despotism by committee. Yet the events of the French Revolution and of Napoleon's rise are not analyzed. England was also wracked with debates about changing patterns of wealth and power in the 15th and 16th centuries, as well as the small matter of rebellious colonies in the 18th. Slavery is another promising topic, with distinctions drawn among civil, political, and military slavery by Europeans discussing the Ottomans, but Çırakman fails to acknowledge the debate over domestic slavery in Europe and its colonies. With Montesquieu's revival of ancient notions of humors and climates to justify the subjugation and explain the supposed submissiveness of human beings raised in hot climates, it is difficult not to consider the roles of domestic African slaves on the European continent, and chattel slaves in the colonies, in the rise of Europe's new attitudes of superiority and new ambitions in the Near East.

In sum, this book is sorely disappointing to those who seek a trenchant analysis of early modern attitudes toward the Ottoman Empire, even as it contains gestures toward important themes and excerpts from critically important works.