The Edinburgh History of the Greeks, 1453 to 1768: The Ottoman Empire by Molly Greene, and: Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The Ottoman Experience, 1347–1600 by Nükhet Varlik, and: Writing the Ottomans: Turkish History in Early Modern England by Anders Ingram (review)

Much has been made recently of the spatial turn in historical scholarship, an avenue of inquiry that builds upon and dialogues with transnational, environmental, and disease history. The Ottoman Empire has not been immune to this historiographical development and, indeed, the spatial turn has opened up alternate horizons and points of entry into the exceedingly complex and fascinating history of the Ottoman imperial project and its reverberations within and upon classical "western" European history. Taking the Ottoman imperial capital of Istanbul as the epicenter of pulsating early-modern geopolitical shock waves, the three books under review here form, in their collectivity, a concurrent and concentric spatial synopsis of European-Ottoman history in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Adopting, as these books do to varying extents, a decidedly Ottoman-centric view of the early-modern world and moving outwards from Istanbul, this review will move from the center of the world (as Napoleon Bonaparte termed Istanbul) across continental Europe to London, England. It will, therefore, take in turn Molly Greene's superb and nuanced account of Greeks in the early-modern Ottoman Empire, Nükhet Varlık's ground-breaking analysis of disease flows to, from, and within Ottoman imperial space, and Anders Ingram's illuminating although somewhat conventional overview of the impact of the early-modern Ottoman perturbation on literary and print culture in England.

In the competition for the most entrenched and recalcitrant historiographical traditions in post-imperial studies, Greek nationalist scholarship and its bearing toward modern Greece's Ottoman past would have to be considered a front-runner. There can be few more daunting lines of historical inquiry than that of the Greeks under Ottoman rule—and this is exactly the roiling historiographical terrain that Molly Greene strides into confidently and with the courage of her convictions. Drawing upon a deep well of her own research and scholarship on the eastern Mediterranean and the Ottoman Empire, and incorporating, diplomatically and synthetically, a new wave of post-nationalist Greek scholarship on the Ottoman Empire, Greene has crafted here a balanced, expertly pitched, and foundational analysis of Hellenism in the early-modern period.

Throughout her book Greene meticulously and methodically moves through multiple analytical and spatial frames—zooming out to offer a birds-eye view of the Ottoman Empire, honing in on cities and Ottoman urbanism in the Balkans, and drilling down to the mahalle (community or neighborhood) level to offer insights on Christian communal organizations and associations. There are two main strengths of Greene'sbook (which is part of a ten-volume series on Greek history published by Edinburgh University Press). The first is her ability to speak, in the same book and at the same time, to scholars deeply embedded in the identity politics of Ottoman and post-Ottoman studies, graduate students looking for an original, well-sourced, rigorous, and content-based account of one of the most important groups in the Ottoman polity, and the general reader who is interested in knowing more about Greek and Ottoman history. The second strength of this book is Greene's expert weaving of Greek culture and society into the fabric of the Ottoman Empire in the early-modern period. Rather than adopt a traditional (i.e., nationalist) perspective that emphasizes difference and searches for historiographical blacks and whites or one that embraces fully an emergent counter narrative of unequivocal Ottoman tolerance towards minority groups, Greene systematically sets up and shoots...