Introduction 19
axiomatic now, as has been mentioned, that similar forms of political orga-
nization and of intellectual developments were common in societies as dif-
ferent as France, England, and the Ottoman Empire in the period commonly
designated as “early-modern”, i.e. (in European terms) from the Renaissance up
to the late eighteenth century. Moreover, the “early modernity” concept helps
Ottomanists engage in a fruitful conversation with specialists of European his-
tory, and thus it has become somewhat fashionable to include this notion in
any study of post-sixteenth-century Ottoman history; this follows earlier fash-
ions such as the emphasis placed on “negotiation”, “fluidity”, and “pragmatism”.68
However, a full explanation of why similar procedures of state-making did
(or did not) happen over a wide geographical and cultural range during the peri-
od in question is still lacking. Current definitions of modernity do not offer any
hints as to why and how this development occurs: all focus mainly on political
aspects69 and thus make it difficult to interpret “modern” developments in non-
Western societies through reasons other than the influence of the West. But if
“modernity” can be interpreted as the gradual expansion of the Western capi-
talist world into other economies and societies, “early modernity” cannot. In
other words, if we wish to speak of “early-modern” developments in the Middle
East before the nineteenth century, i.e. in a period when Western European
political influence was insignificant, we have to explain them in terms of
socio-economic developments. These changes may be attributed either to local
developments in the economic sphere and socio-economic relations or to their
integration into an increasingly global (and, arguably, already Europe-driven)
economy. In this respect, the most comprehensive approaches to the notion of
“early modernity” in an Ottoman context are those that go beyond the “politi-
cal level”. Dror Ze’evi spoke of an “institutional” and an “epistemological” facet
of modernity, the latter encompassing changes in religion, cosmology, and cul-
ture in general (and here one may remember the recent German contributions
to the idea of an autochthonous eighteenth-century “Islamic enlightenment”,
or the even more recent emphasis on “confessionalization”);70 as for Tezcan,
68 See the criticism of “Ottoman pragmatism” in Dağlı 2013 and of “fluidity” in Hadjikyriacou-
Lappa (unpublished). For a review of post-World War II approaches to Ottoman “mod-
ernization” see Emrence 2007.
69 Even thus, definitions are controversial: Shmuel N. Eisenstadt speaks of “a conception
of the future characterized by a number of possibilities realizable through autonomous
human agency” (Eisenstadt 2000, 3) and Karen Barkey, similarly, of “the constitution of
a political arena increasingly defined by a struggle over the definition of the political”
(Barkey 2008, 206).
70 Ze’evi 2004, 76. On the debate concerning the “Islamic Enlightenment” (islamische
Aufklärung) see Schulze 1996; Hagen – Seidenstricker 1998; Radtke 2000. On “confes-
sionalization” in the Ottoman Empire see Krstić 2011; Terzioğlu 2012; Terzioğlu 2013. For