The Early Modern Ottomans

Virginia H. Aksan is Associate Professor of History at McMaster University, Ontario. Her publications include An Ottoman Statesman in War and Peace: Ahmed Resmi Efendi, 1700–1783 (1995) and Ottomans and Europeans: Contacts and Conflicts (2004). Daniel Goffman is Professor and Chair of History at DePaul University and author of Britons in the Ottoman Empire; Izmir and the Levantine World (1998), and The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe (2002).

• Situating the early modern Ottoman world Virginia Aksan and Daniel Goffman; Part I. Mapping the Ottoman World: 1. Imagining the early modern Ottoman space from world history to Piri Reis Palmira Brummett; Part II. Limits to Empire: 2. Negotiating with the Renaissance state: the Ottoman Empire and the new diplomacy Daniel Goffman; 3. Information, ideology, and limits of imperial policy: Ottoman strategy in the context of Ottoman-Habsburg rivalry Gábor Ágoston; 4. The Ottomans in the Mediterranean Molly Greene; 5. Military reform and its limits in a shrinking Ottoman world, 1800–40 Virginia Aksan; Part III. Evocations of Sovereignty: 6. Genre and myth in the Ottoman 'Advice for Kings' literature Douglas A. Howard; 7. The politics of early modern Ottoman historiography Baki Tezcan; Part IV. Boundaries of Belonging: 8. Inside the Ottoman courthouse: territorial law at the intersection of state and religion Najwa Al-Qattan; 9. The material world: ideologies and ordinary things Leslie Peirce; 10. Urban voices from beyond: identity, status and social strategies in Ottoman Muslim funerary epitaphs of Istanbul (1700–1850) Edhem Eldem; 11. Who is a true Muslim? Exclusion and inclusion among polemicists of reform in nineteenth-century Baghdad Dina Rizk Khoury; Part V. Aesthetics of Empire: 12. Public spaces and the garden culture of Istanbul in the eighteenth century Shirine Hamadeh; Bibliography.

'… Aksan and Goffman's collection is an excellent example of what Ottoman history can be when the skilful close reading of texts traditionally valued by Ottomanists is seen as a means, rather than as an end, to research. … The volume is thus both a valuable contribution to Ottoman studies - furthering research on well-established topics such as diplomacy, urban planning, or military reform - and an effective discussion of historical space and time broadly conceived.' Journal of Islamic Studies