Ottoman Archival Materials for the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries: The Archives of Istanbul

Abstract

It has been just fifteen years since my researches in the Başbakanlik Arşivi (Prime Minister's Archives) in Istanbul on Ottoman provincial administration and finance before the nineteenth century led me to attempt to describe what I saw in the archives for the benefit of other researchers. Since that time, a number of additional collections in that archive have been catalogued and made available, and my own subsequent research into the Ottoman reform movement in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have enabled me to examine these and other materials which I did not see or examine during my earlier research efforts in Istanbul. It is the purpose of this survey, then, to describe these more modern archival materials in Istanbul, particularly those in the Başbakanhk Arşivi which were not described in my earlier article, in the hope of encouraging all those interested in modern Ottoman and Middle Eastern history to make use of them in the course of their own research. In order to help the reader understand the nature of the bulk of materials in each collection, I am dividing them into four general categories: basic laws and regulations, administrative records and regulations, records of sultans and individual statesmen, and judicial records, although in fact the materials in each collection at least partly overlap in nature with those of the others.