Middle East
Part three, "The Age of the Ayans, 1699-1812," by
McGowan, takes up "Population and Migration," "The
Elites and Their Retinues," "Peasants and Pastoralists," "Merchants and Craftsmen," "The State and the
Economy," and "Trade." McGowan employs a more
impressionistic narrative style that students especially
will find appealing, but the approach occasionally
opens the way to dubious assertions. These are all the
more striking given the restraint of the preceding
sections. Among other claims, the idea that "few great
mosques were built in the eighteenth century" because
of "a lack of confidence" needs rethinking not only in
the light of imperial practice regarding mosque funding but also in terms of the relationship between
domestic sociopolitics and the built environment. In
fairness to McGowan, however, much of the research
that is opening up the study of the eighteenth century-on women, household formation, consumption
practices, and eighteenth-century urbanism and architecture-was published after this volume was written.
Quataert's "The Age of Reforms, 1812-1914" delivers a strong finish for the volume with interesting
essays on "Population," "Transportation," "Commerce," "Agriculture," and "Manufacturing." Readers
will find especially instructive Quataert's comparative
framework, which views the Ottoman economy within
the context of international and regional trends. By
setting Ottoman production, growth rates, per capita
incomes, and the like alongside data from other national economies, many of them outside Western
Europe and the Middle East, the section is an effective
antidote to the "Islam and the West" reductionism that
elsewhere has haunted the field.
Throughout the volume, the chapter headings do
not do justice to the wealth of research, judgment,
sifting, and spadework that a survey of this kind, for so
complex a geopolitical presence, entails. Errors and
inconsistencies remain, but they are remarkably few
given the range of the scholarship. Readers may wish
that the book had taken a stronger or different theoretical slant or that it had added general summaries for
individual sections, but the study's enormous value to
the field dwarfs all of these concerns and will continue
to do so for many years to come.
MADELINE C. ZILFI
University of Maryland,
College Park
L. CARL BROWN, editor. Imperial Legacy: The Ottoman
Imprint on the Balkans and the Middle East. New York:
Columbia University Press. 1996. Pp. xvi, 337. $49.50.
Almost eighty years have passed since the demise of
the Ottoman Empire, and an objective assessment of
the Ottoman impact on history has yet to be written. A
more recent generation of writers is attempting to
evaluate Ottoman history on its own terms and not
through the prism of nationalism and ideology. For
that reason, this volume edited by L. Carl Brown, is
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
489
most welcome, although there are questions that require further elucidation.
The book contains seventeen essays (including an
introduction and an epilogue), seven maps, fifteen
illustrations, and an excellent index. The contributors
have advanced challenging interpretations and insights. The diverse experiences, cultures, lengths of
Ottoman rule, types of Ottoman association, and
geographic location pose problems in addressing and
assessing the Ottoman legacy. The length and character of Ottoman rule explain why the Ottoman influence is more profound in some instances than in
others.
Brown looks at the Ottoman Empire as a kind of
continuum of earlier Near Eastern and Mediterranean
empires, particularly those of Rome and Byzantium.
He provides an overview of the Ottoman Empire from
its emergence in the thirteenth century to its demise at
the end of World War I and sees the Ottoman Empire
as "the successor state to the Byzantines, just as the
Byzantine Empire was the successor to Rome" (p. 1).
The Ottoman Empire was also a Muslim state, which
"represented the fullest flowering of Islamic political
institutionalization, building on the foundations put in
place by the earlier Muslim polities" (p. 1). Halil
inalclk writes on the image of the Ottoman Empire in
world, regional, and national history. He examines
some of the general legacies of the Ottoman Empire
and endeavors to show that national, confessional, and
ideological blinders prevented the West from understanding the scope of the Ottoman legacy. Norman
Itzkowitz contends that past and present perceptions
of the Ottoman Empire have led to distortions of
western Balkan, Arab, and modern Turkish views of
the Ottoman Empire. He says that Western writers
often denigrated the achievements of the Ottoman
Empire, which they misnamed the Turkish Empire or
Turkey. But he fails to note that the Ottomans, and
even present-day Muslims, looked down on Westerners; the historiography of both sides made use of
unflattering epithets. While one can agree with itzkowitz that the growth of nationalism led to the breakup of
the Ottoman Empire after the early nineteenth century, it is significant to note that the breakup was
preceded by two centuries of Ottoman institutional
decline, internal disorder, and military setbacks in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Four essays in the book deal with the Ottoman
legacy in a regional context, examining particularly
Ottoman influence on the Balkans, Yugoslavia, and
the Arab world. Maria Todorova's essay presents
intriguing analyses of two interpretations of the Ottoman legacy: the more negative nationalist or Marxist
view of the Ottomans as an alien retrogressive force in
the Balkans, and the more positive view of the Ottomans as instrumental in creating a symbiotic cultural
milieu that allowed for the coexistence of both Islamic
and Christian religio-cultural traditions. Todorova discusses how the Ottomans influenced the Balkans in
politics, culture, economy, and society. Of consider-
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490
Reviews of Books
able interest is Denison Rusinow's essay on the Ottoman and Habsburg origins of pluralism and multiculturalism in Yugoslavia, especially in Bosnia. Rusinow
sees the breakup of Yugoslavia not as a product of
Ottoman rule or old ethnic animosities but as a result
of twentieth-century national/ideological developments. Karl Barbir and Andre Raymond explore the
Ottoman influence on the Arab Middle East and the
development of modern Arab nation-states.
Other parts of the collection include thematic aspects of the Ottoman legacy. An essay by Ergun
Ozbudun on the Ottoman legacy in state tradition in
the Middle East is followed by Carter Findley's analysis of the influence of the ninteenth-century Ottoman
administrative reforms in the modern Middle East.
Roderic Davidson traces the nineteenth-century history of Ottoman diplomacy and foreign relations and
points out that modern Turkey is the most direct heir
of the Ottoman Empire's diplomatic principles and
practices.
Two short but authoritative essays in the book are
on the imperial language. One of them, by Bernard
Lewis, examines the influence of Ottoman Turkish
upon modern political Arabic, and the other, by
Geoffrey Lewis, comments on the influence of the
imperial language on modern Turkish. Charles Assawi
and Dankwart Rustow probe the Ottoman legacy in
economics and war, while William Ochsenwald assesses the Ottoman legacy in Islam, and Joseph Szyliowicz discusses the Ottoman legacy in Middle East
education.
Despite the number of authors, there is no sharp
disparity in the scholarly and literary quality of the
essays. Each contribution is preceded by the editor's
helpful suggestions. The assessments of the Ottoman
legacy are objective, and are valuable as antidotes to
the nationalistic interpretations of the modern Balkans, Turkey, and the Arab States. If there are weaknesses in the book, they are not in interpretation but in
omission. In the thematic sections on politics, language, economics and war, and religion and culture,
not enough is said on the imperial legacy in the
Balkans. Analyses of the Ottoman legacy in Christianity and Judaism, and the Ottoman influence on Balkan
statecraft, military institutions, and education would
have enriched this already superior work.
A more encompassing inquiry into the Ottoman
impact on the Balkan national languages would have
been particularly useful. Except for a few paragraphs
in Geoffrey Lewis's essay, little is said on Ottoman
linguistic influence in the Balkans. While a large
number of Ottoman terms have been expunged from
Balkan official languages as well as from modern Turkish
and Arabic, many are still widely used in colloquial and
literary Balkan languages. Some of them are so domesticated that non-Turkish speakers cannot even sense
their alien origin. Much of the finest of Balkan literature
in this century could not have been written without the
use of Turkish terminology and motifs from Ottoman
life. Such authors as Ivo Andric, Nikos Kazantzakis, and
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
Ismail Kadare have made extensive use of Ottoman
themes and words in their works.
What is true for language and literature applies also
to music as, for example, the South Slav sevdalinka, an
urban love song cherished by Christians and Muslims
alike. The same can be said, more or less, of the Greek
rebetika and amanes particularly popular among
Greeks of Anatolian origin. Finally, an essay on the
influence of the Ottoman millet system upon the
development of the Orthodox Christian, Jewish, and
other scriptuarian communities in the Balkans and the
Middle East would be useful. The comments made
here should not detract from this excellent work,
however, which will have lasting value and be of
substantial interest to the scholar and informed reader.
WAYNE S. VUCINICH
Stanford University
FATMA MDGE G6<;:EK. Rise of the Bourgeoisie, Demise of
Empire: Ottoman Westernization and Social Change.
New York: Oxford University Press. 1996. Pp. vi, 220.
$45.00.
This book will interest all students of Ottoman social
history. Fatma Miige G6<;ek argues that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, war and commerce
"interacted with the existing social structure" to create
a bourgeoisie that was "segmented" along ethnoreligious lines (p. 3). This segmentation "led to the
demise of the empire (p. 138)" and, more problematically, to modern Turkey's relegation to the periphery
of the world system (pp. 3, 141). To substantiate her
interpretation, G6<;ek analyzes evidence of Westernization in goods, institutions, and ideas. While some of
her arguments are familiar, the quantitative analysis,
the consideration of Westernization in terms of material culture as well as ideas and institutions, and the
historical-sociological approach yield new insights and
a new perspective.
For G6<;ek, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
saw the emergence of bureaucratic and commercial
bourgeoisies able, "for the first time, to wrest resources ... from the sultan's control" (p. 44). The
bureaucrats emerged out of elite households, about
which G6<;ek offers original observations. The commercial bourgeoisie emerged among the non-Muslim
minorities, who were quicker than Muslims to Europeanize. The sultans sought to control both segments
through confiscation, visited on fallen members of the
ruling elite and on wealthy subjects, and through
educational reforms intended to train new elites to
defend the empire. In either case, cultural resourcesknowledge of languages and of the outside world-did
as much as material ones to empower the emerging
bourgeoisie (p. 81). Leaders of the commercial bourgeoisie escaped the sultan's control by acquiring commercial privileges and foreign protection under the
capitulations. The bureaucrats crossed a critical
threshold when their education led them to shift
allegiance from the sultan to "the abstract idea of the
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