A History of Ottoman Political Thought Up to the Early Nineteenth Century

Introduction 17

in order to describe those centuries that were previously labeled as “decline”. It
was Rifaat Abou-El-Haj who first developed the notion of “early-modern cen-
tralization”, enumerating its characteristics as follows:

the separation of public affairs from the personal affairs of the ruler and

his family, the tendency to transform the zone frontier into a demarcated

linear border, a growing specialization of function in some branches of

the central administration, and finally, [the] rapid conversion of public

lands into semiprivate property.59

More recently, Tezcan has argued that “the early modern and modern periods
had two very significant sociopolitical developments in common—the expan-
sion of the political nation and the limitation of royal authority”.60 Darling,
on the other hand, identified modernity with the successful subordination of
all sources of authority to the power of kings, thereby placing the beginning
of this period back to what were traditionally considered to be the “classical”
years”.61
The usual criticism of the term “early-modern” is its Euro-centrism and
teleological character. On the one hand, as Hathaway has remarked, “the stan-
dard equation of Europeanization with modernization and modernization
with reform” makes the “(early) modernity” paradigm easy to fall into the trap
of Orientalism;62 among various responses to this critique, one could cite here
M. Şükrü Hanioğlu’s view of modernity as a reality of change, one to which
both the Ottoman Empire and the European states had to adapt, rather than a
Europe-driven procedure.63 To quote Linda Darling again,

The interrelations between European states ... can to some extent serve

as a model for relations between Europe and the Middle East in the early

modern period. For example, it is clear that European military and eco-

nomic expansion resulted in increased competition between [European]

59 Abou-El-Haj 2005, 54.
60 Tezcan 2010a, 232.
61 Darling 2008, 506. Jocelyne Dakhlia finds elements of a “modernism” in the “universal-
isme politique” and the “conception a-religieuse du bon gouvernement” seen in late
medieval Persian “mirrors for princes” (Dakhlia 2002).
62 Hathaway 1996, 30.
63 Hanioğlu 2008, 3. Cf. the remarks in Ortaylı 1995, 10ff. The discussions on an “Ottoman
Orientalism”, which arose together with modernity in the region and tended to see the
Arab lands as a quasi-colonial area, are of some relevance here; see the survey and assess-
ment in Kechriotis 2013.