Karen Barkey is currently a Professor of Sociology and History at Columbia University. She is the author of Bandits and Bureaucrats: The Ottoman Route to State Centralization, winner of the Social Science History Award in 1995 and co-editor of After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-Building: The Soviet Union, and the Russian, Habsburg and Ottoman Empires with Mark von Hagen. She has been awarded fellowships from the United States Institute of Peace, Social Science Research Council - MacArthur and National Humanities Center.

• Part I: 1. Introduction; 2. Emergence: brokerage across networks; 3. Becoming an empire: imperial institutions and control; 4. Maintaining empire: an expression of tolerance; 5. The social organization of dissent; Part II. The Transformation of the Eighteenth Century: 6. An eventful eighteenth century: empowering the political; 7. A networking society: commercialization, tax-farming, and social relations; 8. On the road out of empire: Ottomans struggle from empire to nation-state.

'… a book that is notable for influencing the present trend in Ottoman studies through its aims at reconsidering the roots of the Ottoman state-building process … exhibits a new step in [Barkey's] research on the very nature of the Ottoman Empire …' Nora Lafi, Comparativ