Download PDF | The Ottomans and the Balkans, A Discussion of Historiography, Brill Publishing (2002).
456 Pages
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
In the course of putting together this volume, we have accumulated quite a few debts. One of the most important is to Jeanne Adanir, without whose help during the editing process, this volume would stll be a sheaf of unedited paper. She also has translated the article by Klaus-Peter Matschke from the original German. On the Bochum end, Christian Mady’s help has been much appreciated, especially with the Hungarian material, and Kerstin Engelbrecht and Nicole Opatchi also have contributed a great deal. As for the Munich part of the operation, Bans Galsan patiently has dealt with abstruse library requests. Our thanks also go to Halil Inalak, Gudrun Kraemer, Klaus Kreiser and Christoph K. Neumann, who have provided many valuable suggestions with respect to content. Apart from the material aid given, all these people’s friendliness and good humor have been a source of joy and inspiration.
We are grateful to our contributors as well; some of them have waited patiently for many years. We also admire the energy of those who have produced articles at very short notice. All of our fellow workers have put up with our sometimes intrusive editing suggestions, and we can never thank them enough for their spirit of cooperation.
INTRODUCTION
SURAIYA FAROQHI AND Fikret ADANIR
In the present volume, the authors hope to contribute to the ongoing discussion of historiography concerning the Ottoman Empire, focusing on issues in one way or another relevant to the history of southeastern Europe. Such an enterprise must be viewed in the context of our discipline’s self-examination, which has been going on for more than twenty years, since Edward Said published his scathing critique of ‘orientalism’. Admittedly, Said’s book but marginally addressed itself to the work of Ottomanists; yet it did not fail to make an impact on many thoughtful representatives of our field.' In a different vein, our questioning also has been directed at the performance of national states in general, with those established in southeastern Europe, present-day Turkey included, as the center of attention.
This questioning has gained in urgency due to the conflicts of recent years. Given the political context, present-day rethinking of Ottoman history will often include a re-examination of sultanic policies vis-a-vis dissident provincials, with special emphasis on those political measures evaluated negatively in the past.? Conflicts encouraging such a re-evaluation of the performance of both multi-ethnic empires and national states include the Cyprus war of 1974, the Lebanon conflagration (1975-1990), repressive measures against the Muslim minority in Bulgaria culminating in the mass expulsion of 1989, serious military confrontations in eastern Anatolia, and especially the horrors of the war in former Yugoslavia, of which the Muslim Bosnians were among the principal victims. It is difficult to avoid asking oneself how these traumas might have been prevented. Some researchers will also wonder whether integration into a Muslim-based but secularized supranational state might not have opened up the road to a less confrontational future.
But apart from this background more or less specific to our discipline, there also exist trends in other fields of history which encourage historians working in very different specialties to re-examine the value of their work. To begin with, there is the public concern with memory. While memory coincides with the results of historical research in certain areas, it noticeably diverges from scholarly reconstruction in many others.* Searching investigations into the memory of witnesses have been going on for the past decades, undertaken by historians, journalists and above all, film makers.’ But at present this research is if anything intensifying, as the number of people who witnessed World War II and the Nazi mass murders dwindles every year. But by concerning themselves with the memories of eye witnesses, historians have had to confront the challenge that those most immediately involved often do not ‘recognize themselves’ in the historical reconstructions proposed by members of the discipline.
Debating the links and cleavages between history and memory, historians have been obliged to rethink their own procedures. For active fields producing considerable numbers of studies every year, we possess recent book-length summaries which map the state of the field, criticize certain aspects of it and point to the current desiderata.°
Within the limits set by our linguistic and other capabilities, the contributors to the present volume attempt something similar. In the body of our text, we will survey the work which has been done by scholars active in the Balkan ‘successor states’ of the Ottoman Empire, and also in republican Turkey. But before we get to this point, it seems necessary to discuss the links of twentieth-century historiography with the rich historical tradition of the Ottoman Empire itself. In this introduction, we will consequently examine the manner in which certain underlying themes of the great Ottoman chronicles, such as sultanic power, the Ottoman bureaucracy and warfare, have been treated in twentieth-century Ottomanist historiography.
Certainly, the present authors would submit that twentieth-century historiography departs from its Ottoman predecessor in two major ways. On the one hand, the relationships of the Ottoman world to its neighbors have been viewed by modern historians in a new and different perspective. However, the transition from Ottoman to post-Ottoman was gradual. While Ottoman chronicles down to the early nineteenth century regarded relations with the outside world purely as a matter of campaigns and treaties, authors of the following period attempted to explain the reasons for certain major events taking place outside the Ottoman frontiers. Such developments included the French Revolution or, later, even the rise of socialism.’ Thus the foundations of a more broadly based history of the Ottoman Empire and its relations to various neighboring states were laid in the closing decades of the Ottoman period, even though more scholarly researches took place only during the later, republican epoch.
In the same vein, Byzantine history entered the consciousness of educated Ottomans in the late nineteenth century, when authors such as Ahmed Midhat, following European models, stigmatized the Byzantine Empire as the abode of ‘fanaticism, absurdity and immorality’. However, even Ahmed Midhat accepted that close parallels existed between Byzantium and the late Ottoman world, if only because both empires were embattled states under attack from all sides. In a lengthy article first published in 1931 and read by most Ottomanists of our generation, Fuat Kopriilii, the founding father of Ottoman cultural history, came to the conclusion that few immediate links between the two socio-political systems can ever have existed. After all, Byzantium was long past its prime when the Ottoman Turks appeared on the Anatolian scene.?
However, while students were for a long time encouraged to think that Képriilii’s article was the final word on the question, recent studies have shown that this is very far from being the case. Quite to the contrary, the Byzantine-Ottoman transition, and thus linkages between the two societies, have turned into a fruitful field of study, and the chapter by Klaus Peter Matschke in the present volume contains a comprehensive survey of recent research in this field.
Ottoman historians made frequent references to the embattled border areas, the serhad. Yet only in the twentieth century did historians working in Turkey begin to study the functioning of the Empire’s sixteenth-century northern, southern and eastern borders in any detail. And even then, this concern was less intensive than one might have expected.'° On the whole, border relations with the Habsburgs, and with the Russians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were left to the attentions of non-Turkish researchers.''! In the same way, Ottoman-French, Ottoman-English and Ottoman-Dutch relations became the province of European and North American scholars, often though not exclusively from the states immediately concerned. In the Habsburg instance, mainly Austrians and Hungarians were intrigued by the complexities of border relations in peace and war.'?
On the other hand, economic relations with Europe did become a major field of research in Turkey from the 1970s onwards.'? Scholarly interest focused on the Ottoman Empire’s incorporation into the early modern and, later, into the fully capitalist world economy. Many of the historians concerned worked within the Wallersteinian model and asked themselves how, and at what time, the Ottoman territories became part of a dependent ‘periphery’. At a later stage, the question of how Ottoman producers reacted to their ‘incorporation’, whether they simply went bankrupt or found means of adaptation, equally became a major issue.'*
Down to the present day, Turkish historians have followed the cues given by their Ottoman predecessors and have shown a strong predilection for the study of the Ottoman center. Yet a second novel aspect of present-day Ottomanist historiography, in which it differs strongly from its Ottoman antecedents, involves the history of individual regions within the Empire. On the whole, these had received short shrift from Ottoman chroniclers, whose lives and careers were so often oriented toward the imperial center.
In the present introduction, we will limit ourselves to a cursory glance at the relations between center and provinces, as this theme will dominate many contributions to our volume. Of course, the legitimation of regional studies among historians is inextricably linked with the nationalist movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, even if the more naive attempts at equating eighteenth-century tendencies toward decentralization with proto-nationalist movements now have been overcome. Just a few years ago, an important study has appeared which shows that centralization is not always equivalent to ‘modernity’.’’ In this perspective, local elites’ greater consciousness of the potentialities of ‘their’ respective regions can coexist with close and even intensifying ties to the Ottoman center. ‘This observation is especially applicable to the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire.
For the sake of completeness, this tension between integration and regional consciousness, which is not treated at any great length by our contributors, will briefly occupy us here.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق