Parameters of a Postcolonial Sociology of the Ottoman Empire (original) (raw)

Postcoloniality, the Ottoman Past, and the Middle East Present

International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2012

During the last decade, the postcolonial approach has become influential in the humanities and the social sciences. Tracing its own historical origin to interaction with Western European modernity, it focuses on contemporary power inequality, which it intends to eliminate by demonstrating the connection between power and knowledge. Hence, this approach not only puts the present in conversation with the past but also poses power inequality as the analytical lens through which to approach states and societies. In the last decades, a number of scholars working on the Middle East have adopted the postcolonial approach. In this review essay, I initially discuss its application in the study of the region and then contextualize eight recent works within that framework.

Post-Ottoman Studies: An are studies that never was

Building Bridges to Turkish, 2019

The Ottoman Empire lasted some six centuries (1299–1922) and disappeared a mere century ago. For much of this period, it was the suzerain force in the Eastern Mediterranean, Balkans, Anatolia, western Caucasus, North Africa, and Crimea. Through centuries of Ottoman rule its populations, societies, and landscapes were marked by common politics, institutions, concepts, cultural traits, circulation of goods and people, and social institutions. While it by no means brought homogeneity, such common historical experience socialised Ottoman populations and shaped societies in similar ways across a broad field of human activities. Nevertheless, no systematic programme for the exploration of Ottoman legacies has to date emerged. As a consequence, the geographical distribution, variation, and historical longevity of these legacies have yet to be fully explored and analysed. Moreover, in much scholarship, these legacies are outright ignored, assuming instead that the constituent parts were unmarked by centuries under Ottoman rule. It should go without saying that any polity that secedes from another is at its inception marked by that relationship and by institutionalised practices for handling such a relationship. Rather than the claim that post-Ottoman states are marked by Ottoman legacies having to be argued, the onus of proof should in the first place have been on those claiming that they are not. In the case of the Levant, such legacies are casually assumed to linger after 9–25 years of European mandate rule, but generally overlooked for four centuries of Ottoman rule.3 This is a typical case of Eurocentrism, whereby the primacy of European agency is the baseline assumption, while the importance of non-European agency is occluded (or at best has to be argued). In this chapter I explore successor states of the Ottoman Empire as an area studies principle that never was; namely post-Ottoman studies. The point is to propose this as a way to ask new questions, not immediately to provide answers. The claim in this chapter is that it is worthwhile making more comparisons between post-Ottoman polities, communities, and cultures across all fields of scholarship, and to study historical entanglements between them. The hypothesis, which is developed but largely left unanswered, is that there are important unexplored commonalities, in political, social and cultural terms, through much of post-Ottoman space. At the very least, it is worth considering avenues for studying these commonalities, as this may bring a better understanding of each individual polity and society (and phenomena within them), as well as insights into how imperial legacies linger in post-imperial space.

The Muslim World: Recent Scholarship on the Ottoman MIddle East

Study of the Ottoman empire has flourished in the past two decades. Reaching beyond the imperial centre, new work probes the problem of living in far-flung peripheries and what it meant to negotiate religious and ethnic differences in times of upheaval and change. With a remarkable array of languages and grasp of the complexity of early modern societies, young scholars are exploring not just the representation and practice of Ottoman sovereignty and the response of elites but also the experience of the frontier, and survival strategies of slaves, prisoners of wars, converts and captives.

Reorientating European Imperialism: How Ottomanism Went Global

Scholars have long studied Western imperialism through the prism of pre-World War I literature and journalism. Characterizing this literature as Orientalist has become pro-grammatic and predictable. The sometimes rigid analysis of this literature often misses, however, the contested dynamics within. This is especially the case with analyses of Ottoman contributions to the rise of a Western colonialist ethos – orientalism, imperialism , and racism – reflecting the political, structural, and economic changes that directly impacted the world. Essentially, colonial pretensions – servicing the ambitions of European imperialism at the expense of peoples in the 'Orient' – were articulated at a time when patriotic Ottomans, among others, were pushing back against colonialism. This article explores the possibility that such a response, usefully framed as Ottomanism, contributed regularly to the way peoples interacted in the larger context of a contentious exchange between rival imperialist projects. What is different here is that some articulations of Ottomanism were proactive rather than reactive. In turn, some of the Orientalism that has become synonymous with studies about the relationship between Europe, the Americas, and the peoples " East of the Urals " may have been a response to these Ottomanist gestures.

Historical Critique and Political Voice after the Ottoman Empire

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