THE BALKANS IN OTTOMAN HISTORY: ISSUES AND CHALLENGES FOR STUDYING THE NINETEENTH CENTURY REFORMS

Abstract

Studies on the late Ottoman Empire focues on the evolution of the state from imperial forms of indirect rule to more centralized modern state structures starting with the Tanzimat reforms. The earlier studies attempted to understand this transformation in state stuructures and as a result were more state centered. In the last three decades, more society-centered viewpoints have emerged in which how different social actors and groups responded to the changing state structures. This shift in the focus of scholarship also influenced the way the Rumelian provinces of the Ottoman state was studied. This paper maps different viewpoints on studying the Balkans in late Ottoman Empire and analyzes the recent trends that focus on society-centered analysis of the region and the period. There are some major questions that necessitate attention in the study of the Balkans in the 19th and early 20th century: An important issue is related to the study of the Ottoman state. Shift from state-centered to society centered approaches calls for studying how different social actors and underrepresented groups survived and responded to the centralizing reeforms of the Ottoman state. Therefore, studying different religious and ethnic groups, women and labor became popular topics of historical studies. A second issue is more specific to the Balkans: 19th century was the time of nationalist movements and the foundation of nationstates in the region. The dominant view assumed that the nationalist movements were produced in the West and imitated in Eastern Europe by elite led revolutions. However, in the recent years this Western European understanding has been challenged by studies that focused on internal social, political, cultural and economic dynamics of nationalist movements in the Balkans and questioned the replication of the Western European model. A third issue concerns with historiography. Histories of the Balkan states that have long been written from a natinoalist perpective were isolated from its Ottoman context, that is the formation of the new nation-states and socio-economic and political transformations were seen to take place as a result of elite leadership isolated from the dynamics of the Ottoman empire. The recent scholarship contextualizes the nation-state formation processes in a dialogue with Ottoman history. By providing examples from the scholarship, the paper will discuss changes in scholarship on these three issues related to the history of the Balkans under late Ottoman rule.