Europe, Islam and Pax Ottomana, 1453–1774

Abstract

Historical diplomatic relations between European powers and the Ottoman Empire (1299-1923) are usually regarded as the most enduring and equal of Europe’s relations with the non-European world. Though the Ottoman Empire was historically and geopolitically embedded in the ‘diplomatic system of Europe’ through warfare, trade and bilateral agreements (Mansel 2010: 15), it was never regarded as part of Europe and did not know its place in the hierarchy of European powers until it was formally admitted as the ‘sick man of Europe’ in 1856 (Adanir 2005). In the narrative of the English School on the expansion of international society, the Ottoman Empire was the first Islamic entity to be admitted to international society in 1856 (Bull and Watson 1984b). The ‘inclusion’ of the Ottoman Empire was followed by Japan and China in the late nineteenth century, as non-Christian and nonEuropean civilizations gave the expanding European international society its multicultural and ‘universal’ character (Naff 1984; Zhang 1991; Yurdusev 2003; Suzuki 2005). However, the idea that the West was keenly engaged in establishing relations with other civilizations has usually been presented from the perspectives of European powers. As Paul Keal (2000: 64) rightly points out, the inclusion of non-Christian and non-European states is ‘a vital but often neglected part of the story of international society’. While ‘high imperialism’ of the late nineteenth century integrated differentcultures, civilizations and religions into a hierarchical international society, this process was arguably the consequence of an unprecedented expansion of European imperialism and domination to the other parts of the globe in the nineteenth century. One intellectual legacy of this process is that it produced a Eurocentric model of the world that put the dominant West at the centre and thereby tacitly relegated the rest of the world to subordinate positions (Hobson 2004). As the editors of this volume argue in the Introduction, an immanent critique of Eurocentrism is necessary not only to understand the parallel historical experiences of non-European societies in other regions of the world, but also to explain the existence of a plural international order.