A View from the Ottoman Margin (Models) (Essay‪)‬

A growing number of Ottomanist scholars have started to study commercial, cultural, and diplomatic encounters between Europe and the Ottoman world and have moved away from essentialist arguments that draw hard and fast boundaries between the civilizations. (1) Simultaneously, Ottomanist scholars are moving away from state-centric or purely provincial studies to ones that not only expose regional dynamics but also underline the interaction between state and local societies and economies. So the old paradigm of rise and decline that many historians incorporated to highlight the Oriental and absolutist character of the Ottoman state has been scrutinized and revised. (2) If the field of Ottoman studies was once divided between those who emphasized its Asian (nomadic) and Islamic roots and those who highlighted its Byzantine-Greek heritage (Lindner, Lowry, Kafadar), the newer generation of scholars tends to see the Ottoman state as a hybrid model that borrowed from the East and the West and carried the legacies of Byzantine as well as Islamic institutions (Persian, Turco-Mongol) and culture. (3) The formation of the Ottoman Empire took place in the former borderland of the Persian and Roman empires (Anatolia). With the conquest of Constantinople, the core of the empire moved to the center of the eastern Mediterranean and Balkan networks of trade; the empire included not only the lands once held by the Byzantine Empire but also vast parts of the Middle East and North Africa. Its northern Black Sea border incorporated lands controlled by the Golden Horde (Crimea) as a tribute-paying principality, much like Dubrovnik, Moldavia, and Wallachia. The Russian Empire can be seen to have followed a similar trajectory from its Russo-Mongol origins to an empire that expanded to the east as well as the west. Its development path diverged from Peter the Great's Westernization project and reforms. In the Tulip Age (1703-30) the Ottoman Empire, too, embarked on Westernizing reforms, although it did not push them with the same intensity as Russia until the 19th century. A further area of resemblance between the empires is their position in the geopolitical imagination: the question of Russia's position on the East/West continuum has been a subject of intense historiographical debate. (4)