HURI ISLAMOĞLU
Historians of different regions view world history in relation to how they situate their regions in that history. In a very broad sense, world history writing since the nineteenth century originated in the “West,” with European expansion into and colonization of non-European regions. Western world histories, with some notable exceptions, have told the story of European domination in the world – casting the histories of non-European regions in terms of categories that tended to universalize European (and later American) concerns and perceptions related to that domination. These concerns varied over time with the twists and turns in the European presence in the world, ranging from demonstrations of the essential cultural superiority of the West, to sentimental bemoaning of its decline, to regrets over the sins of European trade expansion in the subjugation of non-European regions, resulting in their underdevelopment and backwardness, and finally, when European domination has been challenged in the early twenty-first century, to attempts to relativize the success of the West, exploring the historical or environmental contingencies that may have accounted for it, and asking whether it could have happened – or will happen – elsewhere.
Engagements of historians of non-European lands with world history have generally taken the form of turning inwards to write or rewrite regional or national histories, responding or reacting to the presuppositions of European world historical writings about their society and history. On the other hand, regional or national histories written from a comparative point of reference, measuring the history of a given region against that of Europe, could be considered as much world history as European world histories had been – with their focus on European concerns, and with non-European regions serving as a contrastive backdrop to an essentially European story. All this, of course, suggests a fundamental question: Is world history possible? Is it perhaps time to set aside the hefty claim to “world history” and simply and more humbly talk about comparative history? (See Adas, this volume.) This chapter addresses the various engagements of historians in one part of the Islamicate world: in the former Ottoman territories encompassing the Arab Middle East, Anatolia, the Balkans and the Caucasus. In doing so, it explores the conceptual bottlenecks in imaginings of world history that have been ingrained in existing world historical thinking in relation to the history of Ottoman territories. It suggests that if historians could distance themselves from such habits of mind, it may perhaps be possible to write a genuine “world history.”
First, however, an explanatory word about the term “Islamicate.” This term was coined in the 1960s by the historian Marshall Hodgson.1 It represented a challenge to the existing, Orientalist world historical vision that condemned the history of Islamic lands to one of continued decline and stagnation following Arab cultural florescence from the ninth through the twelfth centuries CE. Hodgson objected to this erasure of the modern history of Islam, which amounted to a rejection of its universalistic, cosmopolitan reach. “Islamicate” referred to its distinctly universal dimension, to the world historical “venture of Islam” (as Hodgson titled his major work) that swept across Eurasia from Spain to North Africa, the eastern Mediterranean, Iran and Central Asia, merging the diverse societal, cultural, and religious legacies of these lands from medieval to modern times. Hodgson challenged scholars to rewrite world histories and to restore to the histories of Islamicate lands their place in world history, that is, to write the histories of these lands in terms other than those of their subordination to the West. Historians of the Ottoman lands have not, for the most part, taken up his challenge. In fact, most regional or national histories of the region ignored Hodgson’s work, taking Western histories (and their basic categories) as an underlying frame of reference.2 This chapter attempts again to nudge historians in the direction Hodgson suggested.
The position of Ottoman territories within Western world histories varied over time, shifting with changes in world conditions, just as historians within the Ottoman territories changed their views of their societies’ place in the world and in relation to the West. Of the many such shifts that could be described, this essay will focus first on four Western modes of interpretation: (1) the Orientalist/liberal perceptions of the nineteenth century, an approach that still lingers in perceptions of the formerly Ottoman territories; (2) the Braudelian moment; (3) the world-system perspectives of the 1970s; and (4) the antistatist new liberalism of the 1990s. Reactions or responses by historians working within these lands also varied, from nationalist histories rejecting the Ottoman past in favor of imagined ancient (pre-Islamic) national legacies, to secular, statist formulations embracing the Ottoman past. They also included conceptions of Ottoman territories as victims of European trade expansion, or as an idealized oasis of premodern societal harmony. Some, lastly, conceived the empire’s modern historical trajectory since the fifteenth century in a world-historical context of trade expansion and interstate competition, an approach that underscored convergences rather than divergences with the outside world, and between the East and the West. In relation to this latter understanding of the Ottoman Empire as part of a shared world history of modern transformation that has characterized all of Eurasia since the fifteenth century, the conclusion suggests some possibilities of writing truly world histories that will not be so overshadowed by Western concerns and perceptions.
In the Wake of Defeat and Humiliation: Tortuous Dialogues with Orientalist Visions
Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I, historical writing in the former Ottoman lands became a key part of the processes of nation-building and the creation of new social and political identities: national, secular, Western, and Islamic. The histories written during this period tell us as much about their authors’ personal commitments and the societies they inhabited as they do about their ostensible subject matter. Often historians’ commitments were rooted in a profound sense of pathos in the wake of military defeat, of European colonization, of societies torn apart as millions of people were compelled to leave their homes in the former imperial territories to pursue dreams of creating new societies, and of restoring dignities lost to defeat, humiliation, and colonization at the hands of Europeans. Indeed, historians and the postimperial elites they belonged to can be said to have lived with a sense of failure as late as the 1960s, with their scholarly work driven by the urgent need to rewrite history to establish a firm distance from that failure, one that came to be identified with Ottoman rule and/or Islam. Yet both the Ottomans and Islam were embraced under conditions of other defeats by the West, this time represented by Israel, and of global market developments heralding new ways of imagining Europe, the Ottomans and Islam.
Elites in the former Ottoman lands often resorted to Orientalist conceptions, articulated in a binary vision of world history, for explanations and solutions of the condition of their society. This was especially true of the Ottoman bureaucratic elites who, following the empire’s collapse, governed in the new Turkish republic that had been established in its Anatolian provinces. Historical writing of the 1920s and 1930s in Turkey thus largely assimilated Orientalist depictions of the Ottoman Empire, highlighting some Orientalist assertions while ignoring others. For the Orientalists, the Ottoman Empire as part of an Islamic civilization in decline since the twelfth century was characterized by economic backwardness, without the rule of law and ruled by despots. Islam, its law, its political theory recognizing the legitimacy of a de facto ruler, all were held responsible for the Ottoman deprivation, while Europe (in contrast) epitomized modern civilization – economic progress, the rule of law, participatory government, and rational and secular thinking.3 As such, Europeanization was the solution; it amounted to becoming civilized. This Orientalist perspective on world history haunted historical writing in the independent Turkish republic.4 History became an arena for venting all kinds of self-hatred and for the making of national, secular and Westernist identities often in conflict with each other. Universally, though, it meant a rejection of the Ottoman past.
This rejection of the Ottoman/Islamic past led these historians to other domains of world history, most importantly to that of Turkic lands and the peoples of Central Asia.5 M.F. Koprulu, for instance, a prominent member of the Ottoman elites, while dismissing the Islamic component, retold the story of the rise of the Ottoman Empire by tracing it to tribal movements out of Central Asia,6 and the subsequent “civilizing” of the tribes through exposure to the Byzantine institutional environment (Ersanli 1993; Koprulu 1988). In this way, Koprulu sought a reconciliation of the nationalist story (the Turkic) with the Western element (Byzantine); an encounter of the primitive with the “civilized” perhaps pointing to the future adoption of European institutions. On the other hand, for H. Inalcik, this “civilizing” dimension is sought not in Europe (via Byzantium) but in a non-European context – pre-Islamic Iran – through a focus on the uniqueness of Ottoman civilization as rooted in the institutions of Iranian statecraft.
Yet the overriding emphasis of Turkish republican elites on a critique of Islam and on secularism was paralleled by a tendency to overlook the liberal strand in that thinking. The latter idea refers to a critique of Oriental despotism and its detrimental effects on economic development and progress. Historians and elites of the Turkish republic did not engage with the antistatist dimensions of Orientalist discourse. This was particularly so in the wake of global economic depression in the 1930s, when statist economic policies prevailed in Turkey and widely throughout the world. In this context, Ottoman history was reconceived as part of a nationalistic and secularist discourse. Hence, for Inalcik (1992), secular law, propagated by the state, had enabled a more just distribution of resources – notably of land. This process was, however, interrupted by the introduction of Islamic law and its precept of individual landownership – which, according to Inalcik, partly caused the social unrest that led to the end of the secular golden age of the Ottomans, starting in the late sixteenth century.
By contrast, in the Arab lands which, unlike Turkey, were colonized by European powers, rejection of Ottoman history took a liberal turn. Consigning Ottoman rule to the wider domain of colonial history, Arab historians built a nationalist vision of the past by turning to an idealized Arab history, one inseparable from that of Islam. At the same time, in the 1930s an attempt was made to derive a “secular” civil code from Islamic law, wherein jurists drew a distinction between the moral and religious dimension of the law, on the one hand, and its legal dimension, on the other (Hill 1987).7 The anticolonialist approach prevailed in Arab history writing, and in the 1960s Israeli aggression sparked a widespread perception in Arab regions that colonial administrations had divided up a singular area, one united by Ottoman societal and administrative networks, into smaller units that then became the different nation-states.8 Increasingly the Ottoman past was dissociated from the region’s colonial past and became part of a more indigenous form of modern history.
A similar process, a repatriation of Ottoman history, took place in the Balkans following the Balkan wars of the 1990s. In this region Orientalist visions had not so much been rooted in a critique of Islam (given the local predominance of Christianity) but rather concentrated on the mosaic character of Balkan society – depicting it, that is, as an unruly society of disconnected communities held together only by the iron rule of an Oriental despot. Both nationalist and socialist histories later sought an interpretive cohesion of the different regions through recourse to pre-Ottoman Slavic pasts and to a universal history of socialism, respectively. Yet following the collapse of socialist regimes and the outbreak of ethnic and religious conflict alongside the rise of dictators, the earlier conception reappeared, depicting (in both the historical past and the violent present) a view of the Balkans as a mosaic-like society ruled by despots. In countering such images of fragmented societies, where violence reigns supreme unless countered by the iron hand of a ruler, recent historiography has turned to Ottoman history in search of historical connections among the different communities that make up these societies, to recover a broader societal identity (see, e.g., Todorova 2009; Blumi 2003).
Europe: Coveted Object of Desire, and of Alienation
Orientalist world historical visions cast the relationship between Europe and the Ottoman lands in contrasting images of prosperity and deprivation, law and tyranny, civilized and uncivilized. Such contrasts had not only been internalized by elites (including historians) but also by wider populations. This vision in time became part of a popular discourse, a societal auto-critique, a constant reminder that equality with Europe was unattainable unless and until society abandoned its essential (i.e. distinctive) cultural features and adopted European ones. From the 1960s onwards, world developments, including the Vietnam War, conditions of economic underdevelopment in postcolonial areas, including former Ottoman territories in Arab lands, Israeli aggression and invasion of Arab lands, and Israel’s identification with the West, all led to notions of the difference between the West and the rest as cast more in structural economic and political terms, and less in terms of culture. The divide between the East and the West thus came to be expressed more tangibly, in ways that either suggested the divide was permanent and insurmountable, or that (as in Latin America) one could find political possibilities for engaging with it.
During World War II, a time of deep crisis in Europe that underscored the shift of world economic power to America, Fernand Braudel wrote a world history of the sixteenth-century Mediterranean – when that majestic sea was the center of a world economy. He found a geographic and economic unity of the Mediterranean region, in other words, precisely as the center of the world economy was shifting to the Atlantic. Braudel wanted to suggest that Europe should be united rather than divided, and his work (and the deeper idea of Mediterranean) became an inspiration for the later European Community.
Historians of the Ottoman Empire saw in Braudel’s conception the possibility of bringing Ottoman territories’ history back into Europe (where it had been) and thus into the mainstream of world history. Nineteenth-century European culturalist perspectives, by siting the Ottoman Empire within a separate, Islamic civilizational unit, had contributed to its isolation. Braudel, by contrast, viewed the Ottoman territories as part of a wider geographical/economic landscape of the Mediterranean world, as part of the global historical drama of the shifting of world trade routes to the Atlantic; a broader story, one beginning in the seventeenth century, and that accounted for the dramatic world-economic marginalization of both the Spanish Habsburgs and the Ottomans.
To this end, Braudel had formed a team of researchers at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales to study population and production trends in the western Mediterranean. Historians of the Ottoman Empire, most notably O.L. Barkan, sought to collaborate in this project, assembling in the 1950s a group of researchers at the University of Istanbul to publish hundreds of Ottoman tax registers from which population and production data for the Ottoman eastern Mediterranean regions could be gleaned. This was a glimpse of genuine world-historical work. (See Weinstein, this volume.) For the secular and Western-oriented historians of the early Turkish republic, it had the additional value of psychologically reestablishing ties with the empire’s European territories in the Balkans and in Crimea, the study of which had been neglected in favor of a nationalistic focus on Anatolia and its linkages to Central Asia.9 Braudel’s conception of world history as expressed in the sixteenth-century Mediterranean was the first step in the de-Orientalization of the Ottoman Empire and its territories – in relation to both nationalistic and Orientalist historical writings.
In the 1970s, a world-system perspective, following Braudel, also situated the Ottoman territories in the world historical context of European world trade. (See Chase-Dunn and Hall, this volume.) In doing so, it too challenged culturalist views of civilizational isolation, which (in either Orientalist or nationalist forms) had resulted in a fragmentation of the history of the empire and in erasures of the multiple connectivities (networks of trade, administration, educational and religious institutions, or societal relations) that made the empire a viable economic and social unit, as well as a political and cultural one.10
However, the world-system perspective – not unlike earlier liberal/Orientalist world histories – also set out to tell the story of European world domination. Granted, it did not portray that domination as part of Europe’s mission to civilize the non-European world. To the contrary, world-system scholars traced the roots of economic backwardness and poverty in postcolonial regions (including the former Ottoman territories) to European trade expansion and the incorporation of these regions into a European world economic system. The world-system perspective presented a vision of world history that rested on the emergence, starting in the sixteenth century, of a global division of labor between a European center and a non-European periphery. The former specialized in the production of manufactured goods, where high-cost wage labor prevailed, and strong states developed industrial production and trade. What sustained the European center was its trade with non-European regions. These latter areas specialized in the production of raw materials, and in them forms of coerced or serf-like cheap labor prevailed; as weak states, their practices enabled the incorporation process but had little initiative beyond that. In fact, this “peripheralization” characterized a process whereby the non-European regions or societies (and ultimately their histories) were placed at the mercy of world markets, responding to, and continually shaped by, the exigencies of European demand for primary goods, while also providing markets for European manufactured goods. Peripheral regions had practically no say in the determination of this division of labor, nor could they determine its effects on labor organization or production patterns. The history of the periphery was thus understood to be one of submission: of the processes and institutions, that is, that enabled its submission to the demands of European trade.
The Ottoman territories had thus been designated as part of the world periphery, their incorporation into the world system having begun in the late sixteenth century. During the 1970s and 1980s, a significant number of historians adopted this perspective to explore the history of peripheralization in the Ottoman Empire’s territories in Anatolia, and in its Arab lands in the eastern Mediterranean. Historians studied changing structures of trade, the ways European demand affected new patterns of organization of rural agricultural and industrial production, and most significantly, the organization of European trade in port cities, and the activities of non-Muslim Ottoman merchants there (see especially Kasaba 1988).
Above all, for historians of the Ottoman Empire, the world-system perspective provided an opening from their previous position of culturalist isolation, and it permitted their entry into the wider domain of world history. It also allowed different ways of thinking about “underdevelopment” and economic backwardness from which regions of the former empire suffered. Many prescriptions for modernization that had been introduced by the World Bank and other agencies blamed Islam and/or authoritarian political culture for contemporary economic and social ills. The world-system perspective provided relief from this brand of self-hatred that had been imposed on these societies: now Europe was to be blamed, not individuals in the formerly Ottoman lands, and not their culture either. As a result, Ottoman history began to make a new kind of sense in the context of the anti-imperialist struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. The writing and teaching of Ottoman history from this perspective gained considerable institutional traction, and came to be most prominently expressed in two major universities in Turkey: Middle Eastern Technical University (Ankara) and Bogazici University (Istanbul).11
The world-system perspective also contributed to the reinstating of Ottoman history in the writing of wider histories of the region. Studies of the incorporation of different regions – especially in Anatolia and the Arab eastern Mediterranean – found similarities in the institutional infrastructure throughout the empire that had been exposed to common pressures from European trade. This discovery encouraged historians to think in terms of commonalities among the histories of different regions. Historical research increasingly pointed to a totality of Ottoman history as being about a peripheral area; in doing so, at least from the perspective of Arab lands, the Ottoman era was no longer viewed as part of the region’s colonial history. Scholarly networks and organization of workshops, providing historians with opportunities to exchange insights and information, all contributed to a reconceptualization of the Ottoman Empire as a viable object of historical inquiry, and returned it to a place in world history – albeit a peripheral one.12
Yet conceptualizing Ottoman history in relation to the categories of the world-system, attempting to fit that history into the straitjacket of peripheralization or the status of the periphery, implied that historical inquiry had to sacrifice an attention to the specific internal dynamics of these regions to the broader dynamics of European trade and its assumed transformative effects. This emphasis meant a significant narrowing of the domain of historical inquiry, and a parochializing of the history of the Ottoman regions. They, along with other world peripheral regions in Africa and Asia, had thus been assigned a separate historical trajectory, one different from that of the West, or the center. The center had its own story, one to which the periphery could only be linked in a relationship of subordination. It also meant that these regions were always peripheral to world history, in the sense of never having any agency: their structures, societies, and economies were condemned lastingly to be subject to the transformative logic of European trade, condemned to a certain history, to a certain kind of world history.13
The world-system perspective primarily focused on the transformative effects of European trade on non-European societies – societies they assumed to have been stagnant before the advent of that trade. Thus, existing regional and interregional trade was understood to have been one of distributive channeling of surpluses – which were collected as taxes, and met only the basic requirements of both rural and urban populations, not allowing for any capital accumulation. The latter was assumed to have been a unique feature of European trade. In the case of the Ottoman territories, however, regional and interregional trading networks (both land-based and maritime) had been a key source of capital accumulation invested in urban as well as rural manufacturing, in state financing (most notably through tax-farming arrangements), and, crucially, in external trade – both European and non-European. One simply cannot talk about external trade – either European or non-European – without its linkages to the empire’s internal trade.14 Nor is it possible to assign a particular prominence to non-Muslim merchants in these interlocking trade activities. No doubt European states and trading interests, by pressuring the Ottoman government in the nineteenth century, sought such prominence, but this effort should not (and did not) mean that Ottoman Muslim merchants ceased to participate in trade.15 Interregional and regional trade flourished into the nineteenth century, sustaining important inland trading cities in Anatolia, Arab east Mediterranean areas, and the Balkans, with both Ottoman Muslim and non-Muslim merchants participating. Finally, the distinction between external and internal trade needs to be problematized even farther, considering that “European” trade had from the late eighteenth century onwards included areas that were part of the Ottoman Empire in the northern Black Sea, the Caucasus, and the Balkans. After these regions came under Russian or Austrian control, trade continued, largely maintaining the integrity of earlier exchange networks.
On the other hand, the effect of increased commercial demand on societal relations, or on the wider developmental trajectories of the Ottoman territories, was largely determined (or mediated through) political power relations centered on the state. The Ottoman state in the nineteenth century, in fact, was far from the weak state that world-system analysts assumed it to be. Such a depiction primarily focuses on the concessions European governments extracted in the form of reform edicts, including privileges for European trade representatives (non-Muslim Ottoman subjects). State practices responded not only to the demands of European traders and states, though, but also to merchants in internal trade, and to rural and urban producers. That the European trade did not result in the transformative trajectories – semi-servile rural labor, agricultural large estates, or deindustrialization – predicted by world-system analysis was largely due to state actions and initiatives that testify to an institutional innovativeness rather than a desperate accommodation to a growing mosaic of external demands.16 For instance, legislation on land and commercial transactions, which shaped the developmental trajectories of rural production relations and ownership, was attentive both to local political and economic tensions and to state interests in taxation and security. The resulting pattern did not favor large estates but rather smallholdings, with cultivators maintaining a tenacious hold on use-rights in various forms, including legally sanctioned, permanent tenancies. In other cases, by contrast, state inaction could be determining. For instance, the state bureaucracy – notwithstanding pressure from the British government – did not intervene in the activities of rural textile manufacturers, an approach that served to limit the import of European cloth.
What is at issue here is how historians assign agency to state actors and others in shaping the direction of societal transformations. Both the liberal/Orientalist perspective and the later world-system view assigned such agency, in the Ottoman case, to European actors – either states or merchants. They did so because they understood a modern transformation to have originated – for either historical or cultural reasons – in Europe, while the rest of the world sat on the receiving end of impulses from the West. In this sense, world histories written from these perspectives remained essentially European histories.
Global Capitalism, Contested Western Hegemony, and New World Historical Visions
In the 1990s, amid a burgeoning global market economy and the rapid emergence of China as a possible economic rival to the West, new world-historical writing appeared. These histories, published mostly in the United States, questioned the Eurocentric character of earlier accounts. Employing the terminology of the prevailing market discourse, A.G. Frank pointed to the competitive superiority of China as well as of Ottoman and Mughal regions in world trade and industrial production prior to the eighteenth century, at which point Europe gained a competitive edge and achieved world domination. Historical inquiry thereafter focused on the question of what accounted for this European, or more specifically British, “divergence.” (See Adas, this volume.) Recent explanations have highlighted environmental and economic features affecting factor endowments – most notably, coal and labor – in Britain and in the East.17 This is tantamount to a relativization of Western world domination, pointing first to other historical eras when different regions had the lead, then suggesting that the West may have had its moment, and that now the East may be gearing up for a renewed domination.
Historians of the Ottoman Empire did not directly engage with these world-historical visions of the 1990s, except for a few historians schooled in world-system analysis who shifted their emphasis away from the process of peripheralization to the identification of multiple historical trajectories of different regions in competition, in keeping with a wider spirit of market liberalism (Kasaba 2009; Emrence 2008). More prominently, however, historical writing on the Ottoman past in the 1990s turned toward a broadly culturalist agenda under the general rubric of postmodernism, an offshoot of the free-trade infused global environment, and with an eye on widespread societal liberations in the wake of the dismantling of communist states in the Soviet bloc, and the retreat of welfare states in the West and developmentalist states in the Third World. Above all, postmodernist thinking resting on a rejection of the “modern” governmental state from the nineteenth century onward, and it turned back to the early modern era in search of forms of civil society which modern state practices were thought to have done away with. To historians of the former Ottoman territories, the emphasis on early modernity offered an opportunity for distancing the post-nineteenth-century history of a weakening empire, and its consequent Westernization via secular state formations. The modern state and its practices were thus blamed for all the aspects in Ottoman society which Orientalists (both in the nineteenth century and again in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, especially following the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States) claimed had been lacking in Ottoman society: the rule of law, legitimate state power, institutions responsive to changing conditions, and abilities to negotiate ethnic and religious differences. Moreover, as the modern state was similarly maligned in European historiography (also under the sway of this postmodern trend), it seemed Ottoman historiography finally had acquired an intellectual legitimacy in the eyes of dominant world historiography. Significant numbers of students – most notably Americans, but also students from these formerly Ottoman territories who went to study Ottoman history at US universities – have adopted this perspective.
For historians from the former Ottoman territories, this postmodern turn to early modernity to recover a civil society of multiple religious and ethnic communities, a society with a tolerance of diversity, a personalized state that negotiated with individuals and accommodated their needs, offered a number of possibilities. One, the almost idyllic imaginings of an early modern society, became a way of marshaling an intellectual defense against the onslaught of authoritarian and militaristic governments, variously nationalist, secular, and Westernist.18 Secondly, in the wake of eruptions of ethnic and religious conflict, especially in the former Yugoslavia, visions of an early modern Ottoman society that was a “mosaic” of diverse ethnic and religious communities provided new ways of imagining the past and perhaps hope for the future (Todorova 2009).
Thirdly, reimagining the early modern past and its social diversity also provided an inspiration for exploring new identities or ways of being in the increasingly transnational context of global capitalism. One such context was that of the European Union. Pluralistic conceptions of Ottoman early modernity resonated with searches for multiculturalist identities in the EU. At the same time, Islamic identity – as one that had been suppressed by modern states – has emerged as a cosmopolitan and transnational framework, one enabling networks of economic and societal cooperation.
From the perspective of situating Ottoman territories into the terrain of world history writing, the postmodern turn displays a certain involution, a rather self-satisfied withdrawal into remote and cozy utopias where the virtues of Ottoman history could be defended against Western (Orientalist) preconceptions, while, at the same time, rendering that history “precious” and incomparable in its cultural specificities – whether of its legal or state cultures. This culturalism, however, results in erasures of all the tensions and conflicts both within the Ottoman imperial entity and arising in its interactions in the wider world, in broader contexts of which the Ottoman Empire was an integral part. Put differently, it sacrifices history at the altar of a cultural early modern fantasy which is granted admission into a gallery of similar fantasies about European societies. Instead of a comparative early modern world history, one obtains a colorful display of cultural narratives – the Ottoman narrative serving as a welcome exotic addition. Moreover, the seeming challenge posed by the postmodern turn to Orientalism, is only seeming: unlike earlier contestations of Orientalist categories (e.g. world-systems analysis), which represented a challenge to the Orientalist methodology of culturalism, the postmodern turn is totally subsumed by that methodology.
One important focus of this new liberal trend in the writing of Ottoman history has been studies of Ottoman legal culture, its meditational and negotiative character. For instance, E. Akarli (2005) emphasizes that law, as it was practiced at local courts – and at the imperial high court as well – addressed the concerns of individuals and communities in different localities, accommodating customary practices and the laws of different religious communities and guilds. This approach allowed each their own ways of settling disputes, with judges intervening only when custom failed to resolve a dispute. Such practices, according to Akarli, contributed to harmonious relations in the society and were pivotal in building a consensus in support of the ruler’s power among society’s many diverse elements. Yet, on the other hand, this legal culture – pervasive and cohesive – was also steeped in Islam, and its transcendent quality vis-à-vis other religions. The modern bureaucratic state, with its secular, Westernist aspirations and nonnegotiable law that required no consensus for its authority, is then held responsible for disrupting this utopia’s seamless blending of pious law and political authority. We are thus presented with a view in which society has been wronged in history, a story told as “morality tale,”19 a tale of lost worlds projected into a world-historical context of passages to modernity. It is also a story that distances “modernity” from the actually existing modern society, through a total erasure of all the social tensions produced by challenges of commercial expansion and state demands. For instance, there is no sign of the perennial tension between judges at Islamic courts of law, also members of the religious establishment which controlled large resources (most importantly lands), and the state bureaucracy that wished to extract revenues from these lands. Such tensions crystallized both secular and religious claims, and one cannot simply expel the “secular” to a yonder domain of alien modernity, with its associated evils.
This culturalist perspective also prevails in characterizations of the state. For instance, Pamuk (2004) explains the longevity of the Ottoman state by referring to a culture of pragmatism, which enabled the state to accommodate societal conflicts. Hence, while subscribing to (or taking on faith) the nineteenth-century liberal/Orientalist presupposition that the conflict between state and commercial interests was the key difference between Ottoman and European environments, Pamuk argues that the flexibility of state practices meant commercial interests could prevail until the nineteenth century, when such flexibility finally reached its limits and more oppressive practices took over. A similar fetishization of accommodation and negotiation as key aspects of early modern society, as practices lost to modernity (this time in relation to empire), characterizes the work of Karen Barkey. (See Sinha, this volume.) Barkey (2008) accounts for the persistence of an Ottoman society of multiple and diverse religious and ethnic communities by framing the empire as a negotiated enterprise, one motivated by a culture of tolerance that waned once the empire confronted European attacks on its territories. Such attacks forced it onto the defensive, and tolerance came to an end. In the process, the empire (it is not clear here how Barkey differentiates empire from the state) falls afoul of commercial interests, conjoined with tax-farming processes, which realize their own form of indigenous modernity – as the empire drifts toward oppressive management practices, and ultimately extinction. True to the precepts of nineteenth-century liberalism, Barkey, like Pamuk, underscores the essentially conflicting interests of empire (state?) and merchants. Yet it still appears that the latter group, comprising both Muslims and non-Muslims, needed the empire’s negotiating environment to sustain itself.
Most significantly, as noted above, the postmodern turn represents a withdrawal from the wider history of a modern transformation that encompassed both European and non-European societies. Such a withdrawal is infused with a theoretical critique of the modern governmental state. Central to the crucial divide this approach posits between early modern and late modern, a divide meant to replace the earlier distinction between East and West, is the notion of negotiation. “Negotiation” is taken as the defining feature of early modern society, whereas the uncompromising modern state does not allow any negotiation of its practices. Hence, this notion is a fundamental principle used to explain virtually all kinds of state actions. It results in the definition of two ideal types (i.e., early modern states and late modern states), which are locked into their respective definitions. Yet taking this concept of negotiation as an object of inquiry, not as something assumed, would allow for evaluations of the different contexts in which negotiations take place, and for the careful tracing of shifts in these contexts, precisely as early modern states transformed into modern ones.20This approach, crucially, would allow history writing to move beyond ideal types, and would thereby make possible a more historicized vision of modernity, one that emerges in its complicated continuities and changes, from at least the fifteenth century. Instead, what is proposed is a horizontally integrated view of the early modern histories of Europe and non-European societies, which are portrayed with certain shared features, both contrasted with similarly defined late modern histories. It appears as if the postmodern turn took both European and non-European regions out of the bounds of historical inquiry; it developed an internalized moral mapping of a remote imagined past, alongside an ostensibly failing future, one full of strife, and with the laudably flexible cultures of legal, religious, and state tolerance long gone.
Can We Write World Histories That Are Genuinely “World Histories”?
I conclude this chapter by venturing that finally the time may have come to address world history writing in a new way: by giving full weight to the histories of different world regions and not subsuming these histories in a story of Western world domination. Our present history at least suggests that it is time to look beyond that domination.
A genuine rethinking of world history implies transcending the binaries of West and non-West, European center and non-European periphery, premodern and modern. It implies questioning the identification of modernity with the West, whereby institutions emerging from Western history represented universal attributes of modernity, merely imported or adopted or resisted by non-Westerners. Insofar as it exists as a discrete and recognizable entity, though, “modernity” is a universal historical process, one with a history not confined to that of the West. It refers to the continuous processes of exploring new institutional configurations to cope with the challenges of commercial expansion and state formation/interstate competition underway throughout Eurasia (and later the Americas and other continents) since the fifteenth century (Islamoğlu and Perdue 2009). The Ottoman Empire – as well as the Ming Empire in China, the Habsburgs in Spain, and others – emerged out of this world-historical context. They were all born into this world-historical environment: the survival of any depended on the ability of different actors (including states, merchants, artisans, and cultivators), to generate innovative institutions (financial instruments, land tenure systems, statecraft, weapon technologies, agricultural techniques). In all of these efforts can be traced a shared history of different regions, responding to the demands of a new world-historical context and, in doing so, relating to and linking with each other. (See Bright and Geyer, this volume.)
Decades ago, Marshall Hodgson remarked that without the rich cumulation of institutional innovations in the Afro-Eurasian oikoumene – including those in the Islamicate lands of the Ottoman, Mughal and Safavid empires – the Western transmutation would have been “unthinkable” (Hodgson 1993: part I). That transmutation, he said, was itself part of world-historical processes, representing mostly an acceleration of these processes in the late eighteenth century, in such a way as to result in Western world domination. This did not mean that other regions stopped being institutionally innovative (that, after all, was part of merely surviving in the modern world), but they did so at a different pace; nor did it mean that other societies did not have their high points or moments of domination; nor, by implication, does it mean they will not have their moments again.
For Hodgson, this concerted effort to respond to changing conditions through institutional innovation – to find new ways of ordering production, property rights, commercial transactions, and state administration – represented the “unity of history.” That view of unity, however, implied that different regions shaped and contributed to the core content of this history. Hence, it is important to ask, how did different societies meet the challenge of modern transformation, what institutional solutions did they produce? By whom and through what means? What, then, were the different trajectories of this common modern transformation in various societies? How did these trajectories interact with each other? When seen in a world-historical context of shared challenges faced by different regions, the answers should ignore the perennial issue that has previously distracted historians, that is, which area is “modern,” and which is not. All the regions throughout Eurasia have been involved in the historical processes of modern transformation, and these processes have been constitutive of social, political, and economic practices in the different regions. Various areas responded to the core challenges of modern history in different ways, thus partly accounting for their different historical trajectories. Such variations speak to the more general issue of locating human or societal agency in the making of specific, contingent historical trajectories. On the other hand, specific institutional responses were also simultaneously shaped through continuous interactions across regions. In this sense, we cannot speak of hermetically sealed universes of “regional” responses to “external” (world-historical) phenomena either, but rather need to suggest an assimilation of those phenomena into the very fabric of their specific institutional trajectories.
Historically, states representing various configurations of political power relations have been central to the exercise of societal agency (as have communities of merchants, artisans, and cultivators). As such they have played a key role in these modern transformations. Most importantly, state power referred to an ability to order societal realities, that is, initiating and defining particular institutional solutions in response to changing conditions. In the Ottoman context, as in other territorial empires, this work focused on securing social peace to ensure (among other things) commerce, production, and resource collection.
Statecraft or rulings drawing on Islamic law as well as Roman law, even ancient Sassanid traditions of statecraft, had been the chief means for crafting such institutional solutions. However, these solutions also created further terrains for deliberations among and contestations by multiple actors in this world region. In the nineteenth-century Ottoman empire, for instance, rulings about landed property and the rules of commercial transactions were subject to continuous debate among different actors, including state administrators, commercial interests and tax-farmers who had ownership claims, cultivators who had use-rights, and urban producers and pastoralists. Property rulings as well as rules of commercial transaction bore the traces of such struggles, often accounting for differences in various places and times, often related to shifting power relations among the different actors. Yet one may nevertheless speak of an underlying unity of the institutional environment: of the state (its sovereign status) represented through a set of general principles to address what were fundamentally the moral concerns of the government.21 These concerns – which in Ottoman parlance were expressed through a language of “justice” – were shared throughout Eurasia. They aimed to achieve a balance between freedom (representing the ever-expanding commercial environment) and power, or the responsibility of the state to mediate the adverse affects of freedom on the larger community.22
The political character of the state and its statecraft or law ultimately contributed to the particular developmental trajectories of this world region and thus ultimately to the shaping of a wider world-historical context, as each state in turn interacted with others. This could take the shape of war and peace, of assimilating institutions, of understandings of government and its role. One could speak – in the spirit of Joseph Fletcher – of the ways steppe empires linked the Chinese and Ottoman state formations, transmitting techniques of government between East Roman (Byzantine), Iranian, Chinese, and Turkic traditions.23 To Europeans, Ottoman statecraft appeared as the visible face of this body of knowledge, and it was assimilated into the Renaissance ideal of governance. Machiavelli’s Prince approximated an idealized image of the Ottoman ruler, possibly more than the glorious Medici. Later, as centralizing European states looked to Frederick the Great’s “well-ordered police state” or Rechtsstaat and the subjecting of governments themselves to the rule of law, the Ottoman Empire and the Mughal state, as well as the Chinese Middle Kingdom, became contrasting metaphors for despotism, mirrors for a critique of the absolutist practices of European rulers (Islamoğlu and Perdue 2009). Finally, one could refer to state actions affecting worldwide trade flows, movements of people, and production levels worldwide.
Western world-historical writing, however, has long denied the centrality of states or political power relations to the process of modern transformation, instead focusing extensively – almost exclusively – on commercial relations (Frank, Pomeranz) or by denying state effectiveness to non-European regions, Islamicate areas in particular. By doing so they have distanced the latter histories from a shared history of modernity. The world-system perspective, for instance, assimilated Orientalist visions to identify the Ottoman state with the figure of an oriental despot who ruled over but did not govern the multiple and diverse communities of traders, people of different religious faiths, fraternities of artisans, religious sects, trading communities, villages, cities – all coexisting but quite unrelated to each other. The despot’s rule was not rooted in societal relations, supposedly, but on coercive relations of taxation. In the nineteenth century this perception justified European interventions in Ottoman governance, including the introduction of European-inspired reform packages and legislation that aimed to establish “modern institutions.”24 Ottoman statesmen of the nineteenth century understood the intent of these proposals: they saw the introduction of the French civil code, for example, as an impingement on their right to govern, that is, to generate their own institutional responses to political and economic conditions. For them, such intrusions were tantamount to denial of the political identity or the sovereign existence of the empire (Mardin 1946). In response, Ottoman jurists drafted the Land Code, including new definitions of landed property rights, and a Civil Code containing new rules for commercial transactions. Both legislative changes drew on the categories of Islamic fiqh as well as a rich legacy of customary practices.
Above all, the rethinking of world history as one that is not bifurcated into domains of domination and subordination, East and West, center and periphery, allows for human or societal agency in different world regions, whereby multiple actors are continually engaged in crafting institutionally innovative responses to changing conditions. They do so in a common world-historical context of continuous interactions across regions through trade, war, and exchange of ideas. Specific institutional responses were shaped through such interactions. What accounted for the persistence of different non-European formations – for instance, Chinese and Ottoman – were the abilities of states as well as other actors to initiate institutional solutions in specific relation to particular patterns of societal relations within individual regions and worldwide. As such, their survival cannot be explained through recourse to any overly specific cultural features, such as their particular abilities to accommodate and tolerate.
In this context, one could refer to changes in the relative positioning of different regions, with changes in the power relations among them or within a given world region. Similarly, one could talk about varied forms of production system, property rights, or the unintended results of societal power relations worldwide. Hence, world history should no longer be imagined as a yet-to-be-realized liberal utopia of the nineteenth century (or its late twentieth-century analogue), as part of a liberal/Orientalist vision. Nor is it one of dependent but irreconcilable separations, as world-system analysts assumed it to be. If histories of non-European regions are not overdetermined by histories of their subjugation to the West, it makes it possible to imagine positioning them in a new kind of world history, according them a compatible space to that of Europe, judging them not simply by outcomes, but evaluating them in relation to the world-historical processes they were part of and to which they responded – or failed to respond.
Notes
1 This work of Hodgson’s from the 1960s has been republished more recently in Rethinking World History (Hodgson 1993), parts I and II.
2 For instance, Hodgson’s magnum opus, The Venture of Islam (1974), was initially translated into Turkish in the early 1980s by a small Islamist publishing house and was largely ignored. From 2002, after an Islamic political party came to power, its intellectuals turned to world historians favored by their secularist counterparts – including world histories by I. Wallerstein and A.G. Frank. Hodgson’s interest in transcending the usual binaries of East and West, religious and secular, did not resonate in the post-2002 Turkish political context. Similarly, P. Gran’s work on multiple paths of historical development, also critical of the East/West divide, resonated with Egyptian historians such as Nelly Hannah but not with Turkish historians. Finally, it was primarily due to a labor of love by Edmund Burke that Hodgson’s work came back to the attention of Western world historians in the 1990s; it thereafter contributed largely to the rapidly consolidating field of “world history” in the United States.
3 In this relation it is important to keep in mind Talal Asad’s (2003) distinction between the secular and secularism – the latter referring to a modern self-definition or ideology, while the former describes a societal/historical phenomenon.
4 Identification of Europe with a civilizing project to which to aspire has been a central theme in discussions of Turkey’s European Union membership, especially by the secular intelligentsia in the 1990s and early 2000s.
5 This reflected the influence of émigré intellectuals, who came to the Ottoman Empire both in the wake of Russian colonization of the Caucasus and Central Asia and following the Bolshevik takeover, on Turkish understandings of a Turkic world history. Most notable was Zeki Velidi Togan, a leader of the basmachi movement in Central Asia, who wrote a major world history, The General History of the Turks.
6 He was partaking of another favorite theme in Orientalist discourse: the tribe as a representation of primitive society that would be civilized by Europeans (Asad 1973).
7 For an excellent discussion of this distinction in the civil code drafted by al-Sanhuri see Johanssen (1999).
8 This perspective is epitomized in the work of A. Hourani, for instance Hourani (1968).
9 The de-Orientalization of the empire – by claiming its uniqueness and by linking it to the history of Mediterranean Europe – no doubt had a salience for historians such as Barkan and Inalcik, who traced their origins to the Balkan provinces and Crimea, respectively.
10 Two articles in particular introduced the world-system perspective to the study of the Ottoman territories: Islamoğlu and Keyder (1977); Wallerstein et al. (1987).
11 A number of world-system historians received their PhDs at the State University of New York-Binghamton, where Immanuel Wallerstein launched the world-system project in the mid-1970s.
12 In this respect R. Owen’s efforts were crucial. His scholarly output and his textbooks (The Middle East in the World Economy, see Owen 1993) as well as numerous workshops he organized (with Talal Asad and Sami Zubaida) contributed to an integration of Arab lands into the Ottoman imperial unit.
13 Conforming to this vision of dependent but separate histories, in the 1970s there was a proliferation of comparative Third World histories. See Amin (1990).
14 For instance, Damascene Greek Orthodox merchants who had been active in the Hawran wheat trade in northern Syria invested in overseas trade with the Philippines. For this example I am grateful to William Gervase Clarence-Smith, who is currently working on a book on these global linkages.
15 See Hannah (2011) for the internal coffee trade that linked to European trade.
16 For the accommodationist perspective, see Pamuk (2004).
17 Similarly, K. Pomeranz pointed to the compatibility of developmental trajectories in China and Britain with respect to trade, population and production trends, and industrial innovation until the Industrial Revolution, when the trajectories of the East and the West began to diverge (Burke and Pomeranz 2009: Introduction). For Pomeranz (2000), greater availability of coal in England, as compared with the Yangzi Delta in China, played a crucial role.
18 In the Turkish historiography, recent critiques of the nineteenth-century Ottoman state have been extended to that of the Turkish secular, Westernist state in the 1980s. The military coup d’état in Turkey in 1980, however, while emphasizing the secular, nationalist, Westernist premises of the state, also was instrumental in laying the groundwork for a global market economy by removing all the obstacles or resistance to global flows of capital, e.g., cutting trade union power as well as silencing civil society institutions, including universities and professional associations. Postcolonial historians have approximated the practices of the nineteenth-century Ottoman state to those of colonial European states (Deringil 1999). For the practices of the colonial modern state in Egypt, see Mitchell (1988).
19 Appropriately the title of a book by Leslie Pierce, Morality Tales (2003), whose work represents one of the best examples of this genre of history writing.
20 I am grateful to Baber Johansen for his analytical distinction between negotiation as an explanatory category and as an object of inquiry.
21 For instance, in the sixteenth-century formulation of the principle of state ownership in land (Inalcik 1992).
22 In this regard, see the extensive literature on the “social question” in Europe in the early nineteenth century.
23 I thank James Millward for his eloquent comment on this point, presented at the workshop on Shared Histories of Modernity: State Transformations in the Chinese and Ottoman Contexts, Seventeenth through Nineteenth Centuries, at the Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, New York University, April 1999.
24 In fact, a perception of a liberal governmental state (a ghost of Bentham perhaps?) appears to loom large behind Smithian free-tradist formulations (Bevir and Trentman 2004).
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