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    The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Editors of The Journal of Interdisciplinary History

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    berkant şahin
    This document is a review of the book "An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire 1300-1914" edited by Halil Inalcik and Donald Quataert. The review provides high-level information about the book in 3 sentences: 1) The book contains a lifetime of scholarship from four distinguished Ottoman historians covering the economic and social history of the Ottoman Empire from 1300 to 1914. 2) It aims to provide an overview of transformations in administration, material conditions, and the main regions of the empire, but struggles with limitations of sources and changing historical paradigms. 3) While an important contribution, the review argues that comparisons to Europe could be more nuanced and contradictions between authors' approaches

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    The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Editors of The Journal of Interdisciplinary History

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    berkant şahin
    11 views3 pages
    This document is a review of the book "An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire 1300-1914" edited by Halil Inalcik and Donald Quataert. The review provides high-level information about the book in 3 sentences: 1) The book contains a lifetime of scholarship from four distinguished Ottoman historians covering the economic and social history of the Ottoman Empire from 1300 to 1914. 2) It aims to provide an overview of transformations in administration, material conditions, and the main regions of the empire, but struggles with limitations of sources and changing historical paradigms. 3) While an important contribution, the review argues that comparisons to Europe could be more nuanced and contradictions between authors' approaches

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    205225

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    This document is a review of the book "An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire 1300-1914" edited by Halil Inalcik and Donald Quataert. The review provides high-level information about the book in 3 sentences: 1) The book contains a lifetime of scholarship from four distinguished Ottoman historians covering the economic and social history of the Ottoman Empire from 1300 to 1914. 2) It aims to provide an overview of transformations in administration, material conditions, and the main regions of the empire, but struggles with limitations of sources and changing historical paradigms. 3) While an important contribution, the review argues that comparisons to Europe could be more nuanced and contradictions between authors' approaches

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    11 views3 pages

    The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Editors of The Journal of Interdisciplinary History

    Uploaded by

    berkant şahin
    This document is a review of the book "An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire 1300-1914" edited by Halil Inalcik and Donald Quataert. The review provides high-level information about the book in 3 sentences: 1) The book contains a lifetime of scholarship from four distinguished Ottoman historians covering the economic and social history of the Ottoman Empire from 1300 to 1914. 2) It aims to provide an overview of transformations in administration, material conditions, and the main regions of the empire, but struggles with limitations of sources and changing historical paradigms. 3) While an important contribution, the review argues that comparisons to Europe could be more nuanced and contradictions between authors' approaches

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    of 3

    the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the editors of The Journal of

    Interdisciplinary History

    An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire 1300-1914 by Halil Inalcik; Donald
    Quataert
    Review by: Roger Owen
    The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Autumn, 1996), pp. 371-372
    Published by: The MIT Press
    Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/205225 .
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    REVIEWS | 371

    "Islam as a historically transcendent object of inquiry" (9)-a habit for


    which Chamberlain gently chides the field-he successfully situates his
    study of the transmission of knowledge in the hurly-burly of social
    competition of the place and period.
    Mary C. Wilson
    University of Massachusetts, Amherst

    An Economicand Social History of the Ottoman Empire 1300-1914. Edited


    by Halil Inalcik with Donald Quataert (New York, Cambridge Uni-
    versity Press, 1995) 1026 pp. $120.00

    This great encyclopedia of a book contains a summary of the life-time


    scholarship of four of the most distinguished historians of the Ottoman
    Empire: Inalcik-the doyen of Ottoman studies-who deals with the
    period I300-I6oo, Suraiya Faroqhi (159o-1699), Bruce McGowan
    (1699-i812), and Quataert (1812-1914). In addition, there is a very
    useful appendix called "Money in the Ottoman Empire, 1326-i914,"
    by Sevket Pamuk.
    The book's stated task is to provide an overview of the economic
    and social history of the territories governed by a world empire that
    expanded, changed, and contracted during four centuries. This aim
    requires each author to try to do justice to transformationsin the pattern
    of central administration in Istanbul, as well as in the material conditions
    to be found in the empire's three main component parts: the Balkans,
    Anatolia, and the Arab provinces. The authors provide a great deal of
    new information, as well as a summary of much of their own earlier
    work, to be found in such publications as Inalcik's The OttomanEmpire:
    The ClassicalAge, 1300-1600 (London, 1973) and Quataert's edited Manu-
    facturingin the Ottoman Empireand Turkey, 1500-1 950 (Albany, 1994).
    Their task proves difficult for a number of basic reasons. First, the
    Ottoman archives, upon which all rely, provide patchy coverage, at best,
    in highlighting such subjects of official interest as taxation, while largely
    ignoring (at least until the nineteenth century) the equally important
    question of production. Second, when dealing with such a heavily
    centralized system as the Ottoman, it is necessary to sketch the admin-
    istrative and political background before treating the economic and
    social aspects-a constraint that takes a lot of time and encourages all
    four authors to view the structure of economy and society in primarily
    statist terms.
    Even more important is the question of how to give shape to this
    vast enterprise at a time when the field itself is in the midst of a
    paradigmatic shift from the old idea of an empire and society in decline
    from the late sixteenth century to one that lays greater stress on the
    state's ability to reorganize itself as a way of adapting to changing
    circumstances. Some of the authors prove to be more revisionist than
    others, but all continue to rely on some of the basic features of the old

    This content downloaded from 169.229.32.137 on Thu, 8 May 2014 20:53:06 PM


    All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
    372 j ROGER OWEN

    paradigm, such as the role of crises in promoting change and the basic
    distinction between "reformers"who wanted to modernize government
    and society and conservative social forces that stood in their way.
    This situation, in turn, produces a new challenge-how to replace
    the old notion of Ottoman retreat before an advancing Europe with an
    understanding in which the relationship between the two and, just as
    important, the comparisons and contrasts between the two, are more
    carefully nuanced. On the evidence presented in this book, the work
    has only just begun. Comparisons are made, but they are still conducted
    largely on the assumption that there was just one Europe with a relatively
    unproblematic historical trajectory.
    It would be unrealistic to suppose that a general uniformity of
    approach could have been imposed on four such experienced scholars.
    However, the tendency to downplay the implicit contradictions be-
    tween them will only confuse student readers. It would have been more
    fruitful to bring such contradictions out into the open rather than
    treating them as subjects for discussion and debate in random and
    haphazard fashion.
    One last criticism refers to the problems still surrounding the analy-
    sis of the late sixteenth-century crisis, which continues to loom large as
    the major turning point in Ottoman history. Inalcik, Faroqhi, and
    Pamuk all stress different causal factors-inflation, depreciation of the
    currency, wars, rural overpopulation, and so on-without suggesting
    any way to resolve the matter eventually. What is needed-as in the
    similar case of sixteenth-century European economic and social his-
    tory-is a much better sense of the realities of rural agricultural life,
    based on a model that transcends the present emphasis (represented by
    a long line of thinkers from Thomas Malthus to Emmanuel Le Roy
    Ladurie) on immobilism punctuated by crisis.
    Roger Owen
    Harvard University

    The Making of Early Medieval India. By Brajadulal Chattopadhyaya


    (Delhi, Oxford University Press, I994) 270 pp. $24.00

    This work of original scholarship will be read with interest by anyone


    concerned, in the author's words, with "the selection of variables which
    would purport to separate one historical phase from another" (2). The
    analysis of the historical experience of the Indian subcontinent has
    undergone enormous changes in the past fifty years, and Chattopad-
    hyaya's opening chapter is an erudite and searching examination of
    modern Indian historiography relating to his field of specialization. His
    justification of his designation of that field as "earlymedieval India" leads
    into many of the most debated issues in the writing and teaching of
    Indian history.
    When.the history of India began to be written in the nineteenth
    century by Westerners as well as by Indians, it was generally divided

    This content downloaded from 169.229.32.137 on Thu, 8 May 2014 20:53:06 PM


    All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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