Marking Time on the Early Modern: Kings, Conquests, Commune, Continuum

The “early modern” in the Ottoman Empire lasts from the thirteenth century to the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Like all periodizations, this one is arbitrary. And despite the designation “early modern” I think the associations for this period have more to do with Ottoman pasts than with some notion of a “Western,” “Islamic,” or “world” modern. One of the problems with the historiography of the Ottoman early modern era is that it tends to project back phenomena and processes associated with the “modern” to see how far in time they apply. But that historiography does not necessarily enhance our understanding of the era or match Ottoman self-narratives. Within the empire, as in all cultural and political contexts, there were certain standard story modes for marking time (counting kings, invoking the heroes and heroines of epic and not so epic literature, measuring the scope and endurance of conquests, invoking religious genealogies, and tracing the histories and movement, or not, of peoples). The more I think about the “early modern” the less sense it makes. Much more sense is made by a term I heard from an Africanist colleague, who called this unbounded period the “eroding medieval.” That designation looks at continuities and does not rely on a presumed knowledge of what happens later. But if I have to put a limit on the early modern I choose the late nineteenth century: the period when the empire felt compelled to implement, and advertise, the expansion of female education. Female education, like systematic birth control in a later period, was surely an era shaping phenomenon.¹

If we think about how the Ottomans themselves narrated time we have a set of temporal categories: Quranic time, kingly time, conquest time, times of trauma and non-trauma, glory and humiliation, the poetic notion of the turning of the cosmos and of fate. These categories were enduring, inherited, and referential. For the sixteenth-century commander and cartographer, Matrakçı Nasuh, time was counted in the lives of heroes, each one of whom, including Alexander the Great and the Prophet himself, in time is swept away by death and his place taken by someone else.² For Mustafa Naima (1655–1716), moving into the eighteenth century, history is a set of layers of narration, the stories of other historians (like Peçevi) and his own. Time is counted in days and years, battles and conquests, the acts of sultans and pashas, and the actions of the asker-i İslam against the küffar.³ The historian is the witness and the reteller of tales. And that brings us to the question of “generation,” one of the most critical ways of marking time. Are the generations of protagonists, events, and institutions somehow distinctive for the “early modern”? Are they scripted differently in that era? And how has each generation (including our own) of historians scripted them into Ottomanist historiography?

Avner Wishnitzer’s study of time, for example, points out that there was no radical transformation in the late empire from counting time “alla Turka” to counting time “alla Franga.” It was a gradual transformation, even though the new temporal order of “clock time” was very noticeable.⁴ Beyond that, Wishnitzer suggests the idea of “time grids”: an organizing principle by which people understand and approach their days, years, eras, and histories.⁵ Wishnitzer’s time grids could be paired with Claire Norton’s comparative annotated chronicles to refine our notions of time. Norton addresses genre, looking at the writing, and rewriting of a single conquest in narratives written from 1601 to 1986.⁶ She notes the “fluidity that the terms tarih, hikaye, and gazavatname possessed for distinct Ottoman discourse communities,” (and for ourselves).⁷ If we use the idea of “plural” and “re-inscribed” pasts as a starting point, then era does not seem so important. Instead, the telling of history itself and its dialogic forms are foregrounded. Together, these two authors present a sense of the complexity of time and of story that provides a useful antidote to our...