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

18 Introduction

states ... leading in most cases to a hardening of international boundar-

ies, greater governmental efforts to mobilize people and resources for the

state’s purposes, and a rising sense of national identity ... European rela-

tions with the east might well be examined in similar terms: not as the

colonization of passive victims, but as an economic and political com-

petition that led to changes on both sides and intensified the sense of

difference.64

On the other hand, the very term “early-modern” presupposes modernity, see-
ing this period as an antechamber for the nineteenth century. To quote Palmira
Brummett,

the whole notion of the early modern as an era that anticipates the ideas,

state formations, and hegemons of the nineteenth century suppresses a

set of very powerful continuities that tie the sixteenth, seventeenth, and

even eighteenth centuries to the long medieval era that preceded them.65

One might even say that post-1990 scholarship, while trying to oust “old-
fashioned” Marxist unilinear stage-theory from the door, introduced a similar
theory through the window.66 Moreover, as I will try to explain below, by elimi-
nating any concrete explanatory bases, Marx’s theory was thus turned upside-
down and made to stand on its head (once more), to make an ironic allusion to
his famous quotation on Hegelian philosophy.67
Indeed, it could be argued that the term “early-modern” is in fact a self-
explanatory theory that merely serves to compare meaningfully processes that
were common in various contemporaneous societies. It has become almost

64 Darling 1998, 245.
65 Brummett 2015, 9. One should not forget that these terms are “modern” in another sense
as well: they were coined in the period now termed “early-modern”, when the general
attitude among intellectuals was that they were living in an era radically differing from
the past. We could note here that the respective terms in French literature are, for
instance, histoire moderne for “early-modern history” and histoire contemporaine for
“modern history”.
66 On the genealogy of “early-modernism” with relation to the 1989–1990 political changes
cf. Hadjikyriacou – Lappa (unpublished).
67 “The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means prevents him
from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and con-
scious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again,
if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.” The quotation comes
from the afterword to the second German edition of the Capital (1873); see https://www
.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/p3.htm#method (accessed September 2015).