by WILLIAM ARMSTRONG
Recently published by Cambridge University Press, “A History of the Ottoman Empire” by Douglas Howard, Professor of History at Calvin College in Michigan, is the first single-volume history of the Ottomans to appear in a number of years.
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There’s a popular view that there was a kind of Pax Ottomana. Indeed that’s often the case when people look back at any historical empire, seeing them as often oppressive but at least upholding the peace. But the book shows how the Ottoman territory was so often the site of upheaval, wars, rebellions, riots, disasters, epidemics and scandals.
I wanted to write about the sources of people’s pain and suffering. Of course at some level the Ottomans – like the Safavid Empire or the Mughal Empire or the Ming dynasty – did bring an overarching order to a large territory, with intrusive authority. But that always came at a cost. Empires always had their discontents and I wanted to bring that out. Our lives as human beings are full of difficulty, even for the victors, even for elites and even for servants of the state. I tried to write about that because for a contemporary reader it seems to me what’s interesting about the past.
You write at one point: “Violence or the threat of violence became almost routine as a means of negotiating political change … In such constant political turmoil, the Ottoman sultans often appeared to have little day-to-day political or military authority.” That cuts against the grain of some clichéd ideas about the Ottoman Empire and how it was a kind of pre-modern despotic system where everything was under the control of the sultan. You show how it was a lot more sophisticated.
It was an agrarian age empire. It’s easy for us to forget when we use terms like “absolutism” that in the age before modernity and modern methods of communication it was difficult for agrarian age states to control what was happening in provinces distant from the capital. Of course they could learn about it from reports, and there was ultimately the threat of force but their actual day to day ability to control events was limited by technology and travel.
When you read the decrees of the sultans they can be very direct and intimidating. They often contain threats of retaliation if orders aren’t carried out. But the correspondence between provinces and the center shows that there was quite a bit of negotiating room for local people to present their needs to the authorities and get them addressed.
The Ottoman Empire was famously diverse – religiously, linguistically and culturally – but something that the book gets across is the centrality of Islam to the practice, beliefs, and motivations of the authorities throughout Ottoman history. Was that something you set out to do from the start or did it come through as you were researching?
Often the role of religion is not clearly expressed in Ottoman histories. But I wanted to write about the Ottoman “worldview,” and that worldview was infused with an Islamic point of view. Writing about the Ottoman worldview is impossible to do without talking a lot about religion. You can’t understand the Ottomans without understanding that the dynasty was a Muslim dynasty and they looked at things from an Islamic point of view. At the same time, for centuries at least half the population of the empire was not Muslim; they were Christians and Jews and others. And even the Muslim community was not monolithic; there were Shia Muslims, Sunni Muslims – and many variations within both of those. So the dynasty was certainly Muslim but that didn’t mean it imposed uniformity on the population.
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