The Second Ottoman Empire [SOE] focuses primarily on the period between 1618 and 1623 that witnessed not just three depositions but also, in May 1622, a regicide. The story of who engineered these leadership changes is told in considerable detail but, although some new sources are examined (for example the dispatches of the French ambassador, the Baron de Sancy, cited on pp. 109–14), our knowledge of the motivations and allegiances of the principal actors remains, as Tezcan acknowledges, somewhat obscure and speculative; cf. p. 112: “Ali Pasha might have had access …” and “Mustafa Agha … must have been in contact …”. Apart from such detective work, the SOE pursues the larger aim of suggesting a revisionist interpretation and novel periodization of Ottoman history implied in the book's contentious title The Second Ottoman Empire.
At the outset Tezcan declares his awareness that what he dubs his “grand narrative” (p. 10) and his attempt to link the Ottoman rebellions of the seventeenth century with the history of democracy may appear “too anachronistic for the modern reader” (p. 7), but Tezcan then abandons caution and wades into an account of the “democratization” process in the post-sixteenth-century Ottoman empire. In so doing, he disregards two dangers: first that of distortion resulting from the examination of the past through the prism of the present (see Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History, London, 1931); and, second, that of false resemblance when comparing two radically different political traditions of the same era, i.e. the English and the Ottoman. Tezcan insistently repeats (pp. 5, 6 and 217) his view that developments in the English Civil War and its aftermath in the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, resulting in the proclamation of the first Bill of Rights in December 1689, can be likened to the deposition of Mehmed IV in 1687, but offers no concrete account of significant institutional change under Sultan Mehmed's successors. Mehmed's deposition had as much to do with the crisis of confidence that resulted from the ruler's inability to regain the military initiative following the Ottoman defeat at Vienna in 1683 as it did with “constitutionalism”. Even Osman II's forced abdication and murder in 1622 – despite much speculation offered by Tezcan about possible political motives and socio-economic forces militating for change – boils down to similar doubts about the young ruler's military competence following his mismanagement of the campaign against Hotin in 1621. In none of these cases of Ottoman dethronements is there a clear division of forces with polarized political views and agendas comparable to the “Roundhead” and “Cavalier” split which dominated English politics in the seventeenth century.
Tezcan's transference of the term “common” or “commoner” from the West to Ottoman social contexts is problematic, as is his attempt to apply the concept to the context of the membership of artisanal guilds, especially as he himself seems to be rather doubtful about its applicability; cf. p. 208, par. 2: “unfortunately it is not clear …”; “what we are observing might well be …”; “therefore one may assume …”. Likewise, Tezcan's attempt to identity a movement towards the “political nation” (p. 16, p. 233 passim) in the Ottoman provincial world is simply not sustainable.
Tezcan's characterizations of social forces, classes and “corporate” groups in SOE are based on idealized pure “types” rather than the messier complexity of real-world behaviour. For example, in the early sixteenth century members of the military establishment or askeri class were not (as Brummett has revealed in her book Ottoman Seapower and Levantine Diplomacy in the Age of Discovery, Albany, 1994, p. 137) as detached from the world of commercial activity and investment nor so perfectly devoted to their “military” duty as has often been supposed. If this “myth” of perceived perfection was never true in the first place, then its corruption and abandonment in the era after 1580 whose trajectory Tezcan purports to chart in the Second Ottoman Empire must be considered equally mythical. The notion (pp. 225–6) that: “the government recognized the independence of the janissaries as a corporation” (emphasis mine) is likewise over-simplistic. Were the janissaries barracked at Istanbul, Damascus, Cairo and Belgrade really all the same? This question needs to be examined systematically on a case-by-case basis before we leap to conclusions about how “the” janissaries acted as a unified force for political change.
Tezcan's highly politicized reading of Ottoman history and his assumptions about the unitary “corporate identity” of the “new style” soldiers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries expressed in the growing “democratization” of Ottoman politics at the centre ignores the fact that the bulk of Ottoman soldiers were not based or barracked at the political centre, i.e. Istanbul. Similarly, his assessment of the ayan (provincial notables) and their supposed role in the enhancement of local representation in the eighteenth-century Ottoman empire misconstrues the nature of their own personal ambition. Tezcan applauds (p. 197) the ayans' role in promoting: “power sharing and proto-democratization … at the local level”. In reality their aim was to consolidate power to promote their own interests, and in order to do so they had to remain closely linked to the political centre that both sanctioned and perpetuated their local influence. The career of a figure such as Djazzar Ahmad Pasha, a Bosnian who retained the governorship of Sidon for 29 consecutive years between 1775 and 1804, illustrates this. He successfully remained in the good graces of his sovereign not by virtue of the services rendered to his local constituents, the Arab and Jewish residents of his governorship, but by the consistency of his loyalty to the sovereign. The pattern of political opposition to the “absolutist” tendencies devised by the centre that Tezcan seeks to elaborate in The Second Ottoman Empire does not seem to square very well with the pattern of close co-operation, collaboration and mutual dependence observed on the ground. His assertion (pp. 225–6) that: “the court recognised … the local autonomy of the notables as representatives of legitimate socio-political interests in the provinces” also seems to be at variance with the real power dynamic. Tezcan's observation that the tug-of-war between centre and periphery resulted in change favouring “absolutist” tendencies in the late eighteenth century is also not borne out by the facts. Throughout the century the state consistently sought strong figures to represent its interests at the local level and commonly found ways of “flexing its muscles” (p. 226) in that arena. The Azm family of Damascus is another case in point. It is aptly observed of such provincial strongmen that once entrenched in a given region across more than one generation, more often than not: “the government succeeded in incorporating them into the imperial elite” (Philipp, “al-Azm family”, EI3, Brill Online). In this sense they were not a counter-balance to “absolutist” tendencies in government but rather agents and enhancers of these tendencies. The case of Djazzar Ahmad Pasha cited above thus represents continuity rather than change.
Given the diversity, complexity and often self-contradictory character of both the Ottoman ilmiyye institution (not to be confused with the independent judiciary of the West, despite Tezcan's rather crude attempts to characterize it as such) and the Ottoman military institution, whose primary role – despite what Tezcan asserts here – was fighting and not commerce, it is not very plausible that either separately, or still less in unison, they could have developed a common political purpose whose aim was either “constitutionalism” or “proto-democratization”; at least not on the scale Tezcan suggests. Therefore, it would seem that, as a new paradigm for understanding the post-1600 Ottoman empire, the case Tezcan makes for refocusing our attention on the emergence of the “political nation” is at best an anachronism (p. 7) and at worst invalid and unconvincing.
