During the long nineteenth century, faced with an increasingly powerful and arrogant West, the Ottoman Empire modernised itself with the objective of dealing with an increasingly precarious situation. The history of this modernity, strongly marked by Westernisation, must be freed from many of the political and ideological influences that have burdened it so far, including Euro-centric orientalism, Kemalist nationalism, Islamising Ottomanism. The study of a wide variety of sources – most of...

This book explores an event described by the Times as 'one of the greatest and most sensational political conspiracies of modern times'. On 21 July 1905, just after the Friday Prayer at the Yıldız Hamidiye Mosque in Istanbul, a car bomb exploded and left 26 dead with another 58 wounded. Sultan Abdülhamid II, the target of the attack, remained unscathed. The Ottoman police soon discovered that Armenian revolutionaries were behind the plot and several people were arrested and convic...

A scholarly study of the late Ottoman Empire's unique experiment of modernization that provides an alternative understanding of nineteenth-century world history.Modernity Alla Turca: Ottoman Military, Education, and Welfare, 1826–1923 focuses on the complex issue of modernity and change in the Ottoman Empire, a non-Western state facing European imperialism. It analyses three specific areas of transformation: the military, education, and welfare, which were...

At the turn of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire straddled three continents and encompassed extraordinary ethnic and cultural diversity among the estimated thirty million people living within its borders. It was perhaps the most cosmopolitan state in the world--and possibly the most volatile. A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire now gives scholars and general readers a concise history of the late empire between 1789 and 1918, turbulent years marked by incredible soc...

Partners of the Empire offers a radical rethinking of the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Over this unstable period, the Ottoman Empire faced political crises, institutional shakeups, and popular insurrections. It responded through various reform options and settlements. New institutional configurations emerged; constitutional texts were codified—and annulled. The empire became a political theater where different actors struggled, collaborated, and...

Losing Istanbul offers an intimate history of empire, following the rise and fall of a generation of Arab-Ottoman imperialists living in Istanbul. Mostafa Minawi shows how these men and women negotiated their loyalties and guarded their privileges through a microhistorical study of the changing social, political, and cultural currents between 1878 and the First World War. He narrates lives lived in these turbulent times—the joys and fears, triumphs and losses, pride and prejudices...

Between the 1890s and 1920s, cities in the vast region stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean were experiencing political, social, economic, and cultural changes that had been set in motion at least since the early nineteenth century. As the age of pre-colonial empires gave way to colonial and national states, there was a sense that a particular liberalism of culture and economy had been irretrievably lost to a more intolerant age.Avoiding such dichotomies as Eas...

This book is a comparative study of imperial organization and longevity that assesses Ottoman successes as well as failures against those of other empires with similar characteristics. Barkey examines the Ottoman Empire's social organization and mechanisms of rule at key moments of its history, emergence, imperial institutionalization, remodeling, and transition to nation-state, revealing how the empire managed these moments, adapted, and averted crises and what changes made it transform d...

A new, comprehensive history of the Ottoman Empire from its beginnings in 1300 to its dissolution in 1922 written by North America's leading expert in the field. The Ottoman Empire was one of the mightiest empires in world history, ruling parts of Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa for more than six hundred years. At its height in the sixteenth century, it was more formidable militarily, better financed, more highly centralized, and more efficiently ruled th...

The conflict between the Islamic groups and secularists taking place now in Egypt has its roots in the nineteenth century. This happened after the people became aware of their Egyptian identity as a result of their encounter with the West, represented in the French Campaign in Egypt (1798-1801) led by Napoleon Bonaparte, and the British Occupation of Egypt in 1882.----These encounters were the cultural shocks that awakened Egypt from a 300-year lethargy under the Ottoman Empire rule, and l...

Morocco is notable for its stable and durable monarchy, its close ties with the West, its vibrant cultural life and its centrality to regional politics. This book, by distinguished historian Susan Gilson Miller, offers a richly documented survey of modern Moroccan history. Arguing that pragmatism rather than ideology has shaped the monarchy's response to crisis, the book begins with the French invasion of Algeria in 1830 and Morocco's abortive efforts at reform, the duel with colonial powe...

It is an often ignored but fundamental fact that in the Ottoman world, as in most empires, there were 'first-class' and 'second class' subjects. Among the townspeople, peasants and nomads subject to the sultans, who might be Muslims or non-Muslims, adult Muslim males were first-class subjects and all others, including Muslim boys and women, were of the second class. As for the female members of the elite, while less privileged than the males, in some respects their life chances might be be...