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129 7 The Challenge of Periodization New Patterns in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Historiography Hakan T. Karateke Ottoman historical consciousness and historiographical practices simultaneously underwent significant changes in the nineteenth century. This essay, conceived as the first in a series on new developments in Ottoman historiography during that century, concentrates on changes to Ottoman models of periodization for world history and aims to demonstrate that Ottoman historical consciousness entered a novel phase during the late nineteenth century. According to this new tripartite periodization model, world history was divided into “Ancient,” “Medieval,” and “New” periods , a departure from pre-nineteenth-century world histories, in which accounts of various dynasties had been given in roughly chronological fashion, with loose geographical groupings. The choice of a new model for periodizing world history was a manifestation of a changing worldview, an indication of where the Ottomans located themselves in the emerging world civilization of the nineteenth century. Although that project was spearheaded by contemporary western European ideals, members of the Ottoman elite no doubt considered themselves a part of it. Moreover, the idea of a world civilization that was shared by, and common to, all leading nations of the world facilitated the appropriation of non-Ottoman models in many spheres, including historical periodization. This essay investigates eight historians who published world histories or grappled with the topic of periodization in works written in the second half of the nineteenth century. Although their models seem largely similar, the small innovations introduced by each historian provide extraordinary insights into the nature of their concerns. Because the tripartite periodization model found resonance, was adopted with few alterations by later historians, and became the standard version taught in schools of the Turkish Republic, the variations that these historians proposed now seem all the more valuable historically. The model’s later modifications, moreover, dominated and shaped Turkish historical consciousness in the twentieth century. A number of reasons for such a development of a revised periodization model present themselves. One is the new source material that Ottoman historians began to appreciate and utilize in the nineteenth century. Sources doubtless have an effect on 130 | Hakan T. Karateke one’s conception of historical periodization, but accepting a particular periodization of world history is a larger intellectual commitment than a mere replication of a European model. I consider the Ottomans’ new periodization models to be a result of, and a vehicle for, a new notion of “universalism” in Ottoman historical consciousness. This new universalism was connected to the aforementioned idea of an emerging world civilization, and many Ottoman intellectuals regarded nineteenth-century modernization attempts as a step toward a common universal civilization project. The concept of westernization had not yet taken on negative connotations for non-Europeans, and hopes were high. Influenced by, and in negotiation with, the findings of the emerging professional discipline of history in Europe, the Ottomans felt the need for a “scientific ” periodization that covered the entire known history of the world.1 Before the nineteenth century, Ottoman world histories had utilized a structure relating the rise and fall of individual dynasties in chronological order, with some geographical grouping. The loss of prestige of the monarchy as a form of government, and of individual dynasties as legitimate sovereigns, during the nineteenth century must have made the move away from historiographical practices closely associated with them natural and easy, rendering the models traditionally preferred in Ottoman court historiography obsolete. The Ottoman intellectual mind also gradually dispensed with its faith in the linearity and singularity of Ottoman history, and the centrality of Ottoman achievement to world history became an assumption fewer historians accepted as easily as their predecessors. The tripartite division of world history and its later variations were adopted from European historiography. Several concepts of periodization based on Christian understandings of history and of the universe had been in use in Europe since the Middle Ages (e.g., the Four Kingdoms model or the Six Ages model). Christoph Cellarius’s (d. 1707) tripartite model, dating from the late seventeenth century, is generally considered to be the first “secular” periodization of world history.2 The Ottomans seem to have found it attractive only when it made its way into “scientific” nineteenth-century historiography. Oddly, the Ottoman mind had not been unfamiliar with tripartite taxonomies but classified many notions, including the histories of states, into three. Following the Ibn Khaldūnian scheme, for example, the historian Naʿīmā (d. 1716) viewed the rise, maturity, and decline of states as a reflection of...

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