Epilogue 2: The Limits of Knowledge Production as a Subversive Practice: The “Early Modern” in Ottoman Studies

Albert Hourani, arguably the founder of “modern” Middle East Studies, begins the most famous essay in the historiography of that field, “Ottoman Reform and the Politics of Notables,” with a cautionary sentence: “It is a commonplace that we cut up history into periods at our own peril: the artificial frontiers made for convenience may seem to be real, and a new generation of historians will have to remove them.”¹ First published in 1968, the essay quickly dismisses the Decline Paradigm and presents an alternative periodization that divides Ottoman history into four “phases” based on the types of documents available to historians. The dates and nature of the first two are not specified, while the third is sharply demarcated (1760–1860), and named (“The Beginnings of Modernization”). It was during this period, Hourani claims, that European diplomatic archives become especially well-stocked about the Ottoman Empire, reflecting the rupture of an encounter and simultaneously providing historians with a new vantage point.

I start with this anecdote to make three points that inform my reflections on the nineteen thoughtful interventions by the early modern Ottoman historians tapped for this special issue of the Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association. First, the colonial encounter is foundational to the intellectual and institutional developments of Middle East, Ottoman, and Islamic studies as fields of knowledge. Most scholarly works revolve around this gravity well, regardless of topic or approach. The seeming impossibility of escaping it has produced zones of invisibility, silences, and erasures with profound intellectual and political consequences. Thus, Hourani’s attempt to provide a periodization that replaces the Orientalist Decline Paradigm with a modernization one only reinforces the core assumption: the history of the Middle East and of the Ottoman Empire can only be narrated in relationship to the emergence of the modern.

Second, forces far more powerful than the guild of historians are invested in shaping the meanings of “modern.” As Michel-Rolph Trouillot was fond of pointing out, historians are but one of many producers of history, and they are never the first on the scene.² Hourani’s sources-based periodization unwittingly demonstrates Trouillot’s argument that the power of domination and exclusion in the production of history is a fluid relationship between, in his words, “the sociohistorical process and our knowledge of it.”³ The moments of “fact creation” (the writing of diplomatic reports), “fact assembly” (archives), “fact retrieval,” and “narration” are all infused with power relations connecting a wide range of actors including states and cultural institutions. Historians who take on the task of policing the temporal boundaries and attributes of the “modern,” do so at their own peril; for the political, moral, and ethical consequences extend well beyond the field of professional history writing. This is why the meanings of “modern” and how they may differ from those of “modernity” and “modernization” have been and continue to be elusive and hotly debated.

Third, the modern disciplines in the liberal arts (humanities, social sciences, and the sciences) and their enduring concerns developed through a centuries-long productive tension between enabling the “dark side” of the modern world and producing critical knowledge about it. The colonial encounters shaped core knowledge regimes and generated classificatory categories about the human, society, economy, nature, and race, among other things, that pervaded political cultures and social relations on a global scale. It is these encounters, not some autonomous, internal process of Western exceptionalism, that produced capitalism, modernity, the concepts of East and West, and territorial nationalism not only spatially, but also temporally through the hegemony of singular historical time that unfolds in stages.⁴ Hence, the familiar colonial paradox: the conceptual vocabulary of critical analysis is, itself, a product of the colonial encounter. How, then, can we, the “future generation of historians” imagined by Hourani, conceptualize periodization schemas not beholden to the teleology of the “modern” if, as Frederick Cooper put it, “…the tools of analysis we use emerged from the history we are trying to examine?”^5...