An Ottoman Statesman in War and Peace: Ahmed Resmi Efendi, 1700-1783.

• Author: Murphey, Rhoads

Aksan's book investigates one of the neglected, "in-between" areas of Ottoman history. Ahmed Resmi Efendi (hereafter A.R.E.), whose career and literary output form the principal focus of her work, flourished in the period after the close of the Tulip period in 1730 but before the 1790s when Selim III began to implement a series of reform suggestions, many of which (as Aksan's study shows) had been in the air for some time. The long-standing neglect of this period in modern scholarship has served to create the (false) impression that little of importance was happening in the mid-eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire. Aksan's book serves as a much needed antidote both to that neglect and to the mistaken views which it encouraged.

The detailed part of Aksan's book covers the period 1750-80, which coincides with A.R.E.'s two European embassies of 1757-58 and 1763-64 (ch. 2, pp. 34-99) and his witnessing (as well as observations and criticisms of) Ottoman military performance during the war with Russia between 1768 and 1774 (ch. 3, pp. 100-169). Of the two subjects identified in the book's title (i.e., war and peace) A.R.E. was best qualified to comment on the latter. His professional experience was chiefly in the diplomatic arena, and the short work of roughly forty folios (or ninety-nine printed pages in the Istanbul printed edition of 1869 used by Aksan [see her summary of its contents on p. 110]) called the Hulasat'ul-i'tibar, in which he excoriates the Ottoman army command, was probably written after the fact (circa 1781) in part as an exercise in self-justification. In writing this work he sought to exonerate himself for (or deflect attention from) his own role in agreeing to the harsh terms of the Kucuk Kaynarca Treaty which brought a temporary end to the conflict in 1774 (on A.R.E.'s "interest" in the war as the negotiator of its end, see p. 166, n. 257). Although chapter three is already the book's longest chapter (69 pp.), a broadening of the focus here to allow for the inclusion of a broader spectrum of opinion (such as the views of experienced soldiers and participants in the campaign like Canikli Ali Papa, hereafter C.A.P.) would have enriched the discussion.

In chapter three Aksan relies mostly on the opinions of the two contemporary historians Enveri and Vasif (for her assessment of their works, see pp. 111-15) to balance A.R.E.'s views. However, since these historians were similar to A.R.E. in being both literati and members of the...