A Social History of Ottoman Istanbul (review)

This study offers a true cornucopia of everyday life in Ottoman Istanbul, 1453–1922, where masses of fascinating details bring readers to the streets and byways, and sometimes into the homes, of this legendary imperial city. In its six thematically-organized chapters, readers will find abundant antidotes to the often-dry and dull military or political history that still dominates Ottoman history writing. Among the vivid vignettes I especially enjoyed were those about city neighborhoods maintaining discipline and public order through the use of mobilized popular pressure against potential transgressors. The sections on public baths, while somewhat familiar, remain welcome, especially the part on “seaside hamams,” a combination of outdoor swimming and the confines of a hamam located on salt water. Also attractive were the chapters on welfare and on the various forms of public amusement. The section on death, however, favored presentations of its instruments such as plague and famine and offered surprisingly little about actual funerary and burial practices. Worse, the authors’ decision to devote a separate chapter to the 19^th century following the six thematic chapters produced confusion and undermines the richly topical structure of the work. By focusing on the 19^th century as a topical issue, the authors break the chronological continuity they so carefully sought to construct in the thematic parts.

While there is much to be admired in this ambitious book, readers likely will be overwhelmed by the amount of details bubbling out from every page. Moreover, I was troubled at many turns in my reading. The authors begin with a disappointing mini-political history of the Ottoman Empire that is unanalytic and arbitrary in its use of details. In this chapter, a pattern emerges that holds throughout the book. Namely, when offered the choice of using recently published secondary works or published primary sources, the authors selected the latter course. While this approach offers a certain freshness, it sacrifices the opportunity to build on the prodigious scholarship generated by Ottomanists over the past several decades. And, by ignoring the analytical work of their immediate predecessors, they promote the tendency, too characteristic of social history, to become mired in details.

Most subversive to the project of the book is the authors’ willy-nilly presentation of details from whatever century to illustrate trends for the entire Ottoman period. Thus, in a single page, examples of experiences from various Ottoman centuries are jumbled together to portray Ottoman social history, ignoring the crucial issue of change over time. For example, a 1623 case of corruption is followed ten lines further by a 1540s example (114). Or, in discussing sexual violence, the authors present samples from 1576 and 1809 within a few lines of each other, (256). leaving it to the reader to determine the prevalence and significance of such brutal behavior. This is ahistorical writing. The apparently arbitrary and uncritical plucking of facts from one century or another to illustrate a theme, such as popular violence, makes impossible any determination of change over time. Readers are left to their own devices. The approach resembles a form of orientalism that meshes all too well with the failure to contextualize and historicize arguments.

On a different note, the authors confusingly refer to Turks on one page and Ottomans on the next, when it is clear these are the same. The reference to Turks is especially troublesome in the reports of Ottoman military victories where the authors repeat the hyperbolic contemporary European accounts. “The Turks poured into [Constantinople]… their hands bloodstained with murder” (10). The authors’ purpose in uncritically reiterating such accounts is not clear to this author. But readers attracted to the book as an introductory survey will come away with five hundred year old impressions of savage and cruel Turks that other scholars have been working to contextualize. To characterize the military and bureaucratic personnel of the state, and its subject/citizens, as Turks truly misrepresents the nature of Ottoman state and society.