Ottoman Early Modern

Abstract

Ottoman Early Modern Ali Yaycıoğlu (bio) Keywords Early Modern, Ottoman Empire, Periodization It would not be wrong to suggest that we have been undergoing a “global turn” in Ottoman studies for some time. Historians increasingly tend to situate the Ottoman experience in a world historical context in a comparative and connected fashion. Rather than an isolated imperial trajectory of Ottoman history, which could only be explained through internal realities and meanings, some Ottomanists increasingly tend to link the Ottoman experience with certain large-scale (e.g., global, Afro-Eurasian, European, Mediterranean, Indian Ocean) movements, transformations, and events. The “early modern” seems to be the key notion facilitating the Ottoman “global turn.” It helps scholars of the Ottoman world to “synchronize” Ottoman realities with structural changes in other parts of the world, particularly Europe, from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, during which we see increasing (and asymmetrical) interactions at a global scale. However, both the “global” and “early modern” turns come with certain limits and costs, which we should take into consideration and problematize. “Early modern” was first coined by British and North American historians in the 1960s and 70s. These historians intended to shift the focus from national historical narratives, history of elites and high-culture to large scale and longue durée structural transformations in societies, economic and political orders, cultural life, technological developments, and environment roughly between 1450 and 1800.1 This is the long period prior to the “modern” (“middle or late modern?”) or contemporary era (or simply “our” or contemporary time) roughly nineteenth and twentieth centuries, during which there were unprecedented radical shifts in human experience and as well as in human-nature [End Page 70] relations. We are currently living in a time shaped by these radical changes in technology, knowledge, economic and political institutions, and human-nature relations, art and meaning of history. The term “early modern” implies that these radical changes in “our time”—the time of the “Great Acceleration”— were not to be understood within a separate chronological rubric, in its own rights. But they rather are to be situated in a greater transformation, which started much earlier. Therefore, we have to see modernity not within the radicality of the last two centuries but within a larger “time zone” so that we can appreciate deeper structural transformations. In many ways, the “early modern” challenged the centrality of “current time” and situates “us” (the moderns or, at the moment, post-moderns) in a deeper, larger, and longer context. To this end, several historians sharing this global early modern agenda participated in different projects which can resonate in different parts of the world in this era: Trajectories of state-building as a territorial organization with effective mechanisms to radically change demographic, political, institutional, and cultural landscapes; new forms of imperial and colonial expansions, different knowledge projects developed with these expansions, and different forms of resistance to imperial or colonial consolidations; formation of industrious developments and science cultures which were more and more in interaction with each other; increasing global connections which fostered mobility of people, commodities, styles, and ideas; new awareness about space and time—an awareness about the connectedness of the world in a common time; emergence of new meanings concerning nature, life and death coming with different forms of “disenchantments.” In many ways, “early modern” provides us with a ground for such questions, which are beyond the scopes of national, continental, and civilizational boundaries. As Ottoman history is becoming an accepted and appreciated field in history departments and journals, especially in Anglo-American academia, Ottoman historians have come to engage in dialogues with their colleagues of different fields over such comparative and connected questions. In Europe, several Ottoman historians became part of massive early modern Europe or early modern world projects financed by the European Union. In the early twenty-first century, the global early modern became a sort of a “common program” for historians for a dialogue within a universal knowledge project across a larger time zone of several centuries of which we can also be a part. The global early modern, therefore, connects spatial and temporal experiences of different people to the experiences of others, as...