The Late Modern Origins of Early Modern Governance

The conceptual tools associated with the historiography of early modernity have received scant attention.¹ The lexicon for the study of this period currently includes concepts such as fluidity, ambiguity, adaptability, permeability, malleability, flexibility, accommodation, elasticity, pragmatism, exchange, or encounter. I will here discuss the context within which this trend emerged, and then shift attention to a recently popular term used to describe imperial rule: governance.

The idea of early modernity as an explanatory, analytical or heuristic tool—different those purposes as they may be—gained traction in Ottomanist historiography sometime in the 1990s. The timing was not by chance. Firstly, as more than one contributor to this volume has pointed out, this was the result of the historiographical quest to offer a valid alternative to the orientalist decline paradigm. Early modernity implied that the Ottoman Empire was not inherently different from its European counterparts and experienced similar or identical historical processes. One of the pioneers of early modernity in the Ottoman context, Rifa‘at Abou-El-Haj, insisted on a social history agenda— interestingly, something that was gradually abandoned by later proponents of the approach. The early modern perspective opened new vistas for comparative studies, something that radically changed the field. However, the development of this perspective proved unable to account for historical questions at the explanatory level—unless one assumes that the Ottoman Empire failed to transition from early modernity to modernity proper, thereby adopting a developmentalist stage-theory approach of national state building.

This brings us to the second reason why the concept of early modernity appeared in the 1990s: That modernization theory had by then reached its explanatory capacity. The quest for a teleological path to the modern nation-state had restricted historians for too long. Scholars no longer accept long-standing binaries such as institutionalized/informal practices, centralization/decentralization, consolidated/fluid identities, or market/moral economy. Rather, the current consensus understands these processes as coexisting in non-mutually exclusive ways. This lack of consistency with modernization theory and its foundational assumptions did not preclude the development of modern structures. On a different level, the waning of area studies was another associated development, giving room for global, connected or entangled history.²

Equally important is the political/ideological context of this conjuncture. The end of the Cold War heralded the victory of liberal democracy and its values. The notion of multiculturalism rose in prominence both as ideology and policy in order to provide answers to questions of cultural and religious diversity or integration in the face of waves of migrants and refugees in the western world. Influenced by this intellectual climate, which concurrently included a temporary (if superficial) receding of nationalist ideology and historiography, historians turned to multiethnic and multireligious empires for answers and inspiration. The Ottoman Empire was a particularly fertile ground to elaborate on and document what an early modern multicultural polity looked like and how it administered and managed its populations.

Despite the value and usefulness (if not necessity) of abandoning the rigid categories of modernization theory, there are various problems with the way early modernity has been conceptualized. I will limit my comments here to the lexicon of early modernity that I have referred to in my introductory paragraph. To name one implication that has escaped attention, the ease with which such concepts are employed renders early modernity a reflection of the current condition of late modernity. In other words, the language of the present globalized condition is projected back to a romanticized primordial pre-modern past. Such a linear periodization means that the flexibility and fluidity of early and late modernity were interrupted by a modern “digression,” which temporarily consolidated the human condition. Thus, it reifies modernity itself as the central and defining element of the preceding and subsequent era. The sense conveyed by most studies celebrating the multi-ethnic and multi-religious nature of Ottoman rule is that of a paradise lost, a cosmopolitan milieu that twentieth-century nationalist modernity may have obliterated, but is coming back with a vengeance.