Download PDF | Ethan L Menchinger - The First of the Modern Ottomans_ The Intellectual History of Ahmed Vasif-Cambridge University Press (2017).
356 Pages
The First of the Modern Ottomans The eighteenth century brought a period of tumultuous change to the Ottoman Empire. While the Empire sought modernization through military and administrative reform, it also lost much of its influence on the European stage through war and revolt. In this book, Ethan L. Menchinger sheds light on intellectual life, politics, and reform in the Empire through the study of one of its leading intellectuals and statesmen, Ahmed Vâsıf. Vâsıf’s life reveals new aspects of Ottoman letters – heated debates over moral renewal, war and peace, justice, and free will – but it also forces the reappraisal of Ottoman political reform, showing a vital response that was deeply enmeshed in Islamic philosophy, ethics, and statecraft. Tracing Vâsıf’s role through the turn of the nineteenth century, this book opens the debate on modernity and intellectualism for those students and researchers studying the Ottoman Empire, intellectual history, the Enlightenment, and Napoleonic Europe.
Ethan L. Menchinger is currently a lecturer at the University of Michigan. He was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien and Freie Universität, Berlin, and a visiting scholar at the University of Toronto.
“Situating the historian Vâsıf within the revolving core of Ottoman modernity, Ethan L. Menchinger gives us a thoroughly researched and often entertaining book that uncovers the links between the Ottoman worldview, literary culture, and international power politics. This is an engagingly written, sympathetic portrait of a man at once immensely gifted and deeply flawed – an impressive work of new scholarship.” Douglas A. Howard, Professor of History, Calvin College “Although there are a few good biographies of well-known Ottoman bureaucrats and intellectuals, intimate accounts of Ottoman individuals have not proliferated in modern scholarship. Ethan L. Menchinger’s The First of the Modern Ottoman is therefore a very welcome and wellexecuted contribution to this genre.
The book is an eloquently written reconstruction of the life of a relatively obscure bureaucrat, diplomat, and court historian whose life spanned one of the most eventful and transformative periods for Ottoman society: the end of the eighteenth and early years of the nineteenth centuries. It is the story of an ambitious but unconnected youth from Baghdad who developed himself into a member of the elite class of bureaucrats invested in resuscitating a failing empire. Menchinger bases his study on thousands of pages of personal writings by the historian – both published works and manuscripts from the Ottoman archives – and makes effective use of sources in a number of languages.
He thus admirably manages the difficult task of recreating the details of Vâsıf’s professional career: the offices he held, his duties, his diplomatic missions, even his day-to-day activities at various periods. However, the study is more than just a personal professional history of this bureaucrat; it successfully weaves the progress of his career into an account of a speedily changing political climate, a modernizing empire, and a rapidly transforming zeitgeist.
The work also evokes the human side of Vâsıf: his rather selfish, uncollegial character; his easy alienation of his peers; the philosophical questions in his mind; his outlook on life; and how he coped with the onset of modern times. The study as such is required reading for all who want to understand the intellectual history of the period.
Through depicting the inner workings of Ottoman bureaucracy in times of war and peace, as well as the intellectual preoccupations of its bureaucrats, Menchinger provides a good glimpse of a reforming empire through the lens of one of its functionaries, as steps toward an Ottoman modernity were being taken.” Hakan Karateke, Professor of Ottoman Turkish Culture, Language and Literature, University of Chicago
“This is the return of narrative history and the genre of biography with a vengeance, but a sweet vengeance at that. Based on painstaking research in scores of manuscripts and archival documents, it tells the story of the prolific and rather odious Ottoman chancery officer and court historian, Ahmed Vâsıf (d. 1806). We follow Vâsıf and watch him cook up justifications for Ottoman compromises and territorial losses and provide validations for reform initiatives from the assemblies of Baghdad, to the chancery offices of Kars and Van, to the royal court at Istanbul, to the army camps of Shamen, to the negotiation tables in Bucharest, to the opera houses of St. Petersburg, to the parks of Madrid, to exile in Lesbos, and to the residential neighborhood of Çamlica. In the process, Vâsıf arrives at a historiographical and philosophical outlook that reconstitutes the Ottoman polity from a divinely ordained exceptional and unilateral order to a reciprocal and necessarily bilateral state based on human will. In short, this is a coming of modern age story, which is a must read for Ottomanists and comparativists alike.” Dana Sajdi, Associate Professor of History, Boston College
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