The Ottoman Empire, 1300-1650: The Structure of Power (original) (raw)

2004, The Sixteenth century journal

Ottoman histories-better put: histories of the Ottoman state-have some right to be regarded in a pseudo-Braudelian sense as une historiographie du longue durée. Richard Knolles's massive folio, Generall Historie of the Turkes, came out in 1603, a scant half-century before the cutoff point of this latest offering on the subject by Colin Imber (by 'the Turkes' Knolles meant, of course, the Ottoman state, also long known as the Turkish Empire). More than two centuries later, a more relevant founding father for the field is found in the Austrian civil servant, dragoman and orientalist Joseph von Hammer, who published in ten cumbersome volumes a history of the Ottoman Empire from its origins to the conclusion the treaty of Küçük Kaynarja in 1774, a point in history which marks if not the end, then at least the beginning of the end of the Ottoman ancien régime.(1) Hammer's Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches, dedicated to the archpriest of conservative reaction, the Russian tsar Nicholas I, had its successors; at least in the German-speaking world of central European scholarship, there was the seven volume work by J. W. Zinkeisen in the mid-century, and five volumes from the Rumanian polyhistorian Nicolae Iorga fifty years later, both with near-identical titles.(2) But the best that English scholarship could offer at this time was a potted one-volume abridgement of Hammer put together by an Old Etonian High Court judge (and later Chief Justice in Ceylon), Sir Edward Creasy. Not unsurprisingly, the first edition appeared contemporaneously with the Crimean war, the second with the Russo-Turkish war.(3) It is worth pointing out that some very real British skills in Turkish studies in the Victorian era lay in the fields of literary criticism and lexicography: Sir James Redhouse's extensive Ottoman-English dictionary first appeared in 1891 and is still in print; E. J. W. Gibb's history of Turkish poetry-six volumes, all, except volume one, brought out posthumously by E. G. Browne-appeared between 1900 and 1909 (Gibb had died prematurely in 1901). Neither work has been in any real way superseded.