Changing Perceptions of the Ottoman Empire: The Early Centuries

Abstract

This article surveys twentieth-century historical scholarship devoted to various aspects of the first four centuries of Ottoman history. It opens with the end-of-the-century ‘good news’ of an increasing number of studies accessible to wider audiences. The article then goes on to note that archivally based social and economic history writing quantitatively outperformed work on facets of Ottoman cultural history. Religious and legal studies, art history, and, to a lesser extent, Ottoman historiography flourished to a greater degree than literary history. The article closes with some reflections on major preoccupations of the twentieth-century study of the pre-modern Ottoman Empire, namely, Ottoman origins, the absence of the empire from comparative studies, and the question of decline.