Recent Currents in the Study of Ottoman-Egyptian Historiography, with Remarks about the Role of the History of Natural Philosophy and Science

Abstract

The historiography of Ottoman Egypt is a largely uncharted field. This article traces the development and current state of the field and offers new directions for research. Since the fifties the field has been developed by scholars who have been interested in the corpus of texts which can be used as a source for the writing of political, economic and cultural histories of Ottoman Egypt. However, historians of Islamic science, who have focused on medieval technical texts have ignored this corpus. I propose that this corpus is a rich source for writing the cultural history of science in the early modern Islamic world. It sheds light on how natural phenomena and new European science and technologies were conceived by a great intellectual culture. Methodologically this allows not only for a cultural history ofscience but also for an all-encompassing approach that combines economic, political, cultural and natural histories into a mélange that represents the everyday practices of the intellectual culture of Ottoman Egypt.