16 Introduction
Before proceeding to a fuller examination of the concepts of “modernity”
and “early modernity”, a note on periodization is not unnecessary; if there
was such a radical transformation of the political institution par excellence,
i.e. the state, it should be pivotal in our views of the course of Ottoman his-
tory. Periodization has been a debated issue in Ottoman history ever since
Halil İnalcık’s conceptualization of a “classical age” from c. 1300 to the end
of the sixteenth century, followed by a long decline, was challenged in the
the early 1990s by a group of scholars that included Suraiya Faroqhi (see
also below, chapter IV).55 In 1996, Jane Hathaway suggested that the period
from 1453 to the conquest of Egypt in 1517 could be considered a transition to
“a predominantly Muslim polity”, and she also saw a process of decentraliza-
tion that stretched from the late sixteenth century to Mahmud II’s reign in
the early nineteenth.56 Half a decade later, Linda T. Darling proposed replac-
ing the classical age/decline/reform paradigm with another set of three peri-
ods, namely expansion (1300–1550, with 1453 dividing it into pre-imperial and
imperial phases), consolidation (1550–1718, with another two sub-periods sep-
arated by the late sixteenth-century socio-economic crisis), and transforma-
tion (1718–1923, i.e. beginning with the “Tulip period”, with the first sub-period
ending in 1839 when “resistance to transformation” ceased to hold the upper
hand). Darling thus attempted to bring Ottoman chronology closer to that of
both the West and other empires within the region, since the “consolidation
period” corresponds roughly to the “gunpowder empires” concept and the
“transformation” to the Enlightenment and colonialist modernity.57 Recently,
Rhoads Murphey has written of a “high imperial age” between 1480 and 1820,
a period “when Ottoman traditions of sovereignty were formulated, elaborated
and implemented as expressions of a unified and cohesive system of rule and
political control”.58 As for Baki Tezcan, his concept of a “Second Empire” from
ca. 1580 to 1826 is not so far from Hathaway’s “decentralization”, although in a
much more “Istanbul-centric” vein.
The very concept of “early-modern”, used so much in recent scholarship,
is not without its problems. Traditionally, Ottoman society was labeled “pre-
modern” for the period before the Tanzimat reforms. In the last few decades,
however, a “grey zone” of “early modernity” has been increasingly introduced
55 On İnalcık’s views see, among others, İnalcık 1972; İnalcık 1980. The literature against the
“decline paradigm” is now large enough; some seminal titles are Kafadar 1993; Darling
1996; Barkey 1994; Faroqhi 1994; Quataert 2003.
56 Hathaway 1996.
57 Darling 2002.
58 Murphey 2008, 4–5. Elsewhere (ibid., 4) he speaks of the period 1450–1850 as “a single
continuum” in terms of “the normal modus operandi of the state governing apparatus”.