Arming the Sultan: German Arms Trade and Personal Diplomacy in the Ottoman Empire before World War I by Naci Yorulmaz (review)

temporal experiences. Both the state and the urban middle strata are depicted as responding to the processes they are subjected to, but, at times, in divergent ways. Clock-time can be mechanical, but history of people experiencing time is not. Wishnitzer delightfully captures the most fleeting aspect of historiography , the human experience. He dissects personal accounts, self-imposed timetables, treatises, and petitions to show how a new valuation of time is embraced by individuals, whose “acute time awareness” (p. 87) became an important element of their vision of modernity. His keen eye on emotions, and interest in “how people felt time, instead of how they thought about time” (p. 8), accompanied by his stylistic narrative makes the book a great read. With the accounts of sunset-time sadness, the ferry-waiting wife at the window, the anxiety of running late, Wishnitzer brings in the creative forces of poetry and fiction, and strongly weaves a universe sufficiently chaotic that is irreducible neither to state-compelled reforms nor a world saturated with homogenous time. This is not to say that the book is without limitations. At times, the constitutive centrality of time wanes, especially when related modern notions and practices are discussed, given how interdependent they are. Or, enticed by the book’s thorough discussions on ferries in Istanbul, the reader expects more on the empire-wide temporal effects of technology (the tramways, railways , telegraph, and telephones). Still, Wishnitzer’s account of the dynamic construction of Ottoman temporal cultures is a major contribution to the historiography not only for giving the temporal experiences of late Ottoman society the centrality it deserves but also for taking the discussion about Ottoman modernities to a higher level. Melis Hafez Virginia Commonwealth University doi:10.2979/jottturstuass.3.1.14 Naci Yorulmaz. Arming the Sultan: German Arms Trade and Personal Diplomacy in the Ottoman Empire before World War I. London and New York: I.B. Tauris & Co., 2014. xviii + 349 pp. Cloth, $110. ISBN: 978-1780766331. Arming the Sultan is a detailed analysis of the process in which German arms manufacturers, particularly Krupp (for artillery) and Mauser (for rifles), 200 Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, Vol. 3.1 gradually monopolized the Ottoman arms market in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As Krupp guns had already entered and gained a reputation in the Ottoman army from the early 1870s, the book rightly pays more attention to the transactions made by Mauser, which actually achieved its first large-scale sale (500,000 rifles) to the Ottoman state in 1886–87 and began to hold a monopoly thereafter. In fact, the Ottoman army was the first to be largely equipped with Mauser rifles, which had not been adequately tested on the battlefield before entering the Ottoman market. German arms trade in the Ottoman Empire is not an entirely ignored subject matter. What makes Yorulmaz’s research more original and noteworthy than its predecessors is its multilateral treatment of the topic, making use of a wide array of archives that include not only Ottoman and German documents as its main basis of analysis, but also relevant British and American sources as supplementary material. Whereas the subtitle of the book implies that it covers a period from the late nineteenth century until World War I, the book’s main focus is actually on the Hamidian era (1876–1909); the Young Turk period receives only a cursory glance. The main argument of the book is that Ottoman purchases of German arms in this period were not determined by the rules of free market economy , price, or the technical analysis of the weapons, as Yorulmaz argues that German guns and rifles were not necessarily superior to French, British, American, and Austrian products. What influenced purchase decisions were the political dispositions of both governments and, more importantly, matrices of personal relations, which the author calls “personal diplomacy.” The effective execution of this personal diplomacy, which the author dubs “the German Style of War Business,” was what made Germany successful in the Ottoman arms market. In six chapters, Yorulmaz identifies four main individuals or groups of actors in this system of personal diplomacy...