Approaching Ottoman History: An Approach to the Sources.

• Author: Zarinebaf-Shahr, Fariba
• Position: Brief Reviews of Books

Approaching Ottoman History: An Approach to the Sources. By SURAIYA FAROQHI. Cambridge: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1999. Pp. x + 221. $59.95 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

A leading historian of the Ottoman empire wrote the present book, intended for graduate students as well as young scholars about to launch their careers as members of an increasingly visible field of history and humanities. It is thus a guidebook for those who are not familiar with the intricacies and frustrations of conducting research in the Turkish archives as part of their doctoral dissertations. It is also a critical review of the state of the field, offering some suggestions for future inquiry.

The author, a prolific historian, studied, taught, and conducted research for many years in Turkey, and she highlights the contributions of Turkish historians as well as her Western colleagues with a critical assessment appropriate for a scholar of her stature. But one shortcoming of the book is its lack of attention to the place of Ottoman studies within the larger field of Islamic and Middle Eastern studies. Instead Faroghi devotes more time to discussing the integration of Ottoman history into European history. As she appropriately notes, the field has attracted more attention as a result of a dialogue between Barkan, the Turkish historian, and Braudel, the French annaliste. Social and economic history thus has claimed pride of place in Ottoman studies since the '50s. And the role of Turkish historians like Barkan and Inalcik in the development of this kind of historiography is undeniable. However, from time to time, certain trends have set in as a result of the immaturity of the field, the lack of suffici ent research, and certain residues of Eurocentric bias among Western scholars. The rise-and-decline paradigm, for example, or the modernization paradigm, nationalist historiography in Turkey as well as the Balkan countries, the Asiatic mode of production, and the world-system theory are some of the more recent ideological and theoretical impediments blocking objective historical research. Faroghi does acknowledge the contributions of economic history, anthropology, and sociology to the field of Ottoman studies and she emphasizes the intellectual advantages of comparative studies and familiarity with the literature in European, Indian, and Asian histories. She concludes her remarks by highlighting the importance of studying the eighteenth...