Epilogue 1: Early Modern Ottomans

The phrase “early modern” caught on among Anglophone historians of Britain and Europe in the 1970s. It resolved a tension between two accounts of when the modern era began: in the sixteenth century, with the Reformation and the “rise of capitalism,” or, as it was then becoming increasingly common to argue, with the industrial revolution—the latter account all too easily entailing the relegation of all that came before to the realm of the “pre-industrial” or (still worse) the “traditional.” The French had already developed a way of making the distinction: the first watershed marked the birth of “histoire moderne”; whereas the Revolution inaugurated “histoire contemporaine.” Anglo-phones by this means acquired a similar tool. The phrase allowed the sixteenth century and after to be “modern,” but a different kind of modern. Though a vision of modernity (with detachable components) remained implicit, by and large the effect was to free the “early modern” period to be modern in its own way. The phrase was attractive to non-Marxists, because it offered an alternative to “feudalism to capitalism” schemas: it opened the way to a characterization of the economic structures and practices of the era in fresh terms. The period thus demarcated was understood to have been characterized by change and crisis—the much debated “general crisis of the seventeenth century.” This in turn was commonly argued to have been at least in part a political crisis, associated with the rise of new kinds of state keen to develop new forms of relationship with society, and also with struggles for pre-eminence between these states—not least those that were developing world-traversing “seaborne empires.” In some tension with these emphases, interest in structural-function-alist anthropology encouraged constructions of “early modern society” as a broadly static system, a meaning-drenched hierarchy, which could be thrown into disorder but tended to reassemble itself back into something like its equilibrium state. In parallel, Malthusian demography encouraged the modelling of population and the environment as a homeostatic system: crisis-prone but constantly reverting to equilibrium.

It is clear from the think-pieces assembled here that, by the time Ottoman-ists embraced the “early modern” in the 1990s and still more during the early twenty-first century, the phrase had acquired somewhat different baggage for Europeanists, and therefore offered different opportunities, and posed different problems. This was partly because of broader changes in historiographical fashion, and partly because understandings of the period were inflected by increasingly upbeat, future-oriented accounts of the eighteenth century, in which interest boomed around this time. As historians responded to sloganizing about “globalization” with their own accounts of and approaches to the “global,” more attention was directed to the many more and less benign forms of European outreach and contact, and to Europeans’ importation and consumption of new exotic commodities, also, to new forms of learning and the impact of “print culture,” and to changing forms of sociability. Analysis of the logic of social roles gave way to stories about “self-fashioning.” While developments in the forms of states were still imagined as having created tensions with subject populations, these were subsumed into a longer narrative about the rise of powerful “fiscal-military” states, which succeeded only inasmuch as they forged effective relationships with their societies. Ottomanists wondering how far to try to locate themselves within this narrative have approached that question with needs and hopes that also distinguish them from the first generation of Europeanist adopters. Contributors to the current discussion repeatedly identify two main drivers: the desire to escape from a narrative of Ottoman history which posits “decline” from the battle of Lepanto onwards, and the desire to enter into more equal comparative or transnational conversations with Europeanists—which have become more possible as Europeanists for their part have become keener to stage such conversations.

This contrast (no doubt over-schematized) between two episodes of adoption reminds us that the meaning of phrases such as “early modern” is always changeable and context-dependent. By my reckoning, a small majority of contributors to this discussion see merit in using...