In A History of Ottoman Political Thought up to the Early Nineteenth Century, Marinos Sariyannis offers a survey of Ottoman political texts, examined in a book-length study for the first time. From the last glimpses of gazi ideology and the first instances of Persian political philosophy in the fifteenth century until the apologists of Western-style military reform in the early nineteenth century, the author studies a multitude of theories and views, focusing on an identification of ideological trends rather than a simple enumeration of texts and authors. At the same time, the book offers analytical summaries of texts otherwise difficult to find in English.

How the Ottomans refashioned and legitimated their rule through mystical imageries of authority The medieval theory of the caliphate, epitomized by the Abbasids (750–1258), was the construct of jurists who conceived it as a contractual leadership of the Muslim community in succession to the Prophet Muhammed’s political authority. In this book, Hüseyin Yılmaz traces how a new conception of the caliphate emerged under the Ottomans, who redefined the caliph as at once a ruler, a spiritual guide, and a lawmaker corresponding to the prophet’s three natures. Challenging conventional narratives that portray the Ottoman caliphate as a fading relic of medieval Islamic law, Yılmaz offers a novel interpretation of authority, sovereignty, and imperial ideology by examining how Ottoman political discourse led to the mystification of Muslim political ideals and redefined the caliphate. He illuminates how Ottoman Sufis reimagined the caliphate as a manifestation and extension of cosmic divine governance. The Ottoman Empire arose in Western Anatolia and the Balkans, where charismatic Sufi leaders were perceived to be God’s deputies on earth. Yılmaz traces how Ottoman rulers, in alliance with an increasingly powerful Sufi establishment, continuously refashioned and legitimated their rule through mystical imageries of authority, and how the caliphate itself reemerged as a moral paradigm that shaped early modern Muslim empires. A masterful work of scholarship, Caliphate Redefined is the first comprehensive study of premodern Ottoman political thought to offer an extensive analysis of a wealth of previously unstudied texts in Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish.

Using a wealth of contemporary Ottoman sources, this book recreates the social history of Istanbul, a huge, cosmopolitan metropolis and imperial capital of the Ottoman Empire. Seat of the Sultan and an opulent international emporium, Istanbul was also a city of violence shaken regularly by natural disasters and by the turmoil of sultanic politics and violent revolt. Its inhabitants, entertained by imperial festivities and cared for by the great pious foundations which touched every aspect of their lives, also amused themselves in the numerous pleasure gardens and the many public baths of the city. While the book is focused on Istanbul, it presents a broad picture of Ottoman society, how it was structured and how it developed and transformed across four centuries. As such, the book offers an exciting alternative to the more traditional histories of the Ottoman Empire.

Like many other states, the 19th century was a period of coming to grips with the growing domination of the world by the 'Great Powers' for the Ottoman Empire. Many Muslim Ottoman elites attributed European 'ascendance' to the new sciences that had developed in Europe, and a long and multi-dimensional debate on the nature, benefits, and potential dangers of science ensued. This analysis of this debate is not based on assumptions characteristic of studies on modernisation and Westernisation, arguing that for Muslim Ottomans the debate on science was in essence a debate on the representatives of science.

This book argues that the periodic ceremonial intrusion into the everyday lives of people across the Ottoman Empire, which the annual royal birthday and accession-day celebrations constituted, had multiple, far-reaching and largely unexplored consequences. On the one hand, it brought ordinary subjects into symbolic contact with the monarch and forged lasting vertical ties of loyalty to him, irrespective of language, location, creed or class. On the other hand, the rounds of royal celebration played a key role in the creation of new types of horizontal ties and ethnic group consciousness that crystallized into national movements and, after the empire's demise, national monarchies.

This book is dedicated to Metin Kunt, which primarily examines diverse cases of changes throughout Ottoman history. Both specialist and non-specialist readers will explore and understand the complexities concerning the longevity as well as the tenacity of the Ottoman Empire.

At the turn of the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire straddled three continents and encompassed extraordinary ethnic and cultural diversity among the millions of people living within its borders. This text provides a concise history of the late empire between 1789 and 1918, turbulent years marked by incredible social change.

Mediterranean states are often thought to have 'democratised' only in the post-war era, as authoritarian regimes were successively overthrown. On its eastern and southern shores, the process is still contested. Re-imagining Democracy looks back to an earlier era, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and argues it was this era when some modern version of 'democracy' in the region first began. By the 1860s, representative regimes had been established throughout southern Europe, and representation was also the subject of experiment and debate in Ottoman territories. Talk of democracy, its merits and limitations, accompanied much of this experimentation - though there was no agreement as to whether or how it could be given stable political form. Re-imagining Democracy assembles experts in the history of the Mediterranean, who have been exploring these themes collaboratively, to compare and contrast experiences in this region, so that they can be set alongside better-known debates and experiments in North Atlantic states. States in the region all experienced some form of subordination to northern 'great powers'. In this context, their inhabitants had to grapple with broader changes in ideas about state and society while struggling to achieve and maintain meaningful self-rule at the level of the polity, and self-respect at the level of culture. Innes and Philip highlight new research and ideas about a region whose experiences during the 'age of revolutions' are at best patchily known and understood, as well as to expand understanding of the complex and variegated history of democracy as an idea and set of practices.

How did the premodern Ottomans understand public office corruption? To answer this question, Defining Corruption in the Ottoman Empire explores how Ottoman jurists, statesmen, political commentators, and others characterized this notion and what specific transgressions they associated with it before the nineteenth century. The book is based on extensive research and a wide variety of sources, including jurisprudential texts, imperial orders and communications, chronicles, and travel and diplomatic accounts. It identifies articulations of self-interested abuses of power by official and communal actors in these sources and illustrates how they resonate in some ways with modern perspectives. These premodern formulations, however, are shown to have collectively constituted a conceptual space that was contentious and temporally unstable, and no single overarching term was able to encapsulate all the specific misdeeds frequently linked to modern depictions of corruption. The book's genre-specific discursive survey is complemented by discussions that highlight, in the Ottoman context, the shifty boundaries that separated legitimate and illegitimate forms of revenue extraction; that examine the state's efforts to monitor and punish abuses by government officials; and that explore the context-dependent and often contested moralities of many acts, such as gift giving as bribery, office selling, and favoritism. It also considers the ways in which "corrupt" state actors might have rationalized their offenses. Defining Corruption is a conceptually driven work that is both comparative and interdisciplinary, engaging seriously with non-Ottoman historiographies, including broader Middle Eastern, European, and Chinese, and multiple disciplines besides history, in particular anthropology and economics, to provide a comprehensive analysis of premodern Ottoman perceptions of administrative abuse.

Using Arabic and Ottoman Turkish sources drawn from three genres of legal text, this book is the first full-length study in decades to investigate the evolution of Ottoman land law from its “classical” articulation in the sixteenth century to its reformulation in the 1858 Land Code. The book demonstrates that well before the nineteenth century the tradition of Ottoman land tenure law had developed an indigenous form of property right that would remain intact in the Land Code. In addition, the rising consensus of the jurists that the sultan was the source of the land law paved the way for the wider legislative authority that the Ottoman state would increasingly assert in the Tanzimat period of reform. Demonstrating the profound and ongoing adaptation of a legal tradition that was at once both Ottoman and Islamic, it revises our understanding of the relationship between the modern Islamic world and its early modern past, and what kind of intervention was represented by reform in the 19th century.