The Second Ottoman Empire: Political and Social Transformation in the Early Modern World (review)

Before this book, many Ottoman historians bemoaned the persistence of a traditional view of the Empire as undergoing two centuries of decline, from the reign of Süleyman in the sixteenth century to the period of the Tanzimat reforms in the nineteenth century. Clearly, this claim could not possibly be true. The Empire not only survived until 1922, well beyond its period of supposed decline, but, as a generation of scholars has shown, it evinced a dynamism in the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries that affected everything from cultural and economic life to the nature of Ottoman governance. Beyond that point, however, dissenters could offer little more than negation—over and over again—of the idea that the Empire was in decline, preferring instead to use more nuanced, but ultimately unproductive, terms like negotiation, decentralization, and even anti-decline.

The singular achievement of Tezcan's The Second Ottoman Empire is to offer the first cogent and holistic model other than decline for understanding the entirety of the period from 1580 to 1826. This book thus represents an enormous contribution to the field of Ottoman history and stands to impact more general understandings of early modernity beyond the eastern Mediterranean.

Tezcan's thesis is that this period witnessed an expansion in the number and kind of imperial actors with a stake in the affairs of the Empire. Unlike the period before 1580—the first Ottoman Empire—the emergence of market relations and their legal instantiation through fiqh allowed provincial elites, members of large households, and former military men to enter the political arena through their economic connections and interests. This expanded political realm of contestation leveled the playing field of imperial politics, allowing rival interest groups—what Tezcan terms absolutists and constitutionalists—to debate, for the first time in Ottoman history, the nature of sultanic sovereignty and authority, dynastic succession, and the possibility of justifiable rebellion against imperial power. The constitutionalists would eventually win this contest, but not before a young Osman II was able to assemble a disparate group of military factions and provincial powerbrokers to bring him to the throne in 1618. The drama of this sultan's murder four years later—the only regicide in Ottoman history—is the real turning point in Tezcan's account and his clearest evidence for the Empire's new trajectory.

In this second Empire, the janissaries—the fabled Ottoman military establishment that had built the polity and long protected its sovereignty—became "an independent public corporation" (225). With the disbanding of the devşirme system of military recruitment, the janissary corps for the first time began to absorb "outsiders" of all kinds. This new "military" body eventually emerged primarily as a means to build or expand businesses, to create large farms, and generally to amass wealth. Its ballooning economic interests gave it an increasing role in the politics of the Empire, creating a substantial check on royal authority. Hence, the "auspicious event" (vaka-i hayriye) of 1826—the dismantling of the janissaries—should be read as an attempt by the centralizing state of the nineteenth century to stop this corporate body from increasing its economic influence and exerting too much political power in the governance of the Empire.

This book's sophisticated and important arguments emerge from a deep reading of Ottoman chronicler sources, an impressive range of archival materials, European traveler accounts, and secondary materials in, by my count, seven languages. One possible problem that Ottoman historians and others alike might have with this work is Tezcan's use of terms like proto-democratization (10), constitutionalism (48), free-market investment (23), nation (53) and, most jarringly, secular modernity (227). The novelty and weight of Tezcan's argument stands on its own without the perceived need for recourse to these conceptual frames, which can, at times, be distracting.

This book is one of the most important to be published in Ottoman history for at least a...