Ali Yacıoğlu: "Partners of the Empire: The Crisis of the Ottoman Order in the Age of Revolutions"

Abstract

#10–2018 Book Reviewed Stanford UP, 2016. ISBN-13: 9780804796125 Among many texts that have been published recently which explore the long history of the Ottoman Empire, Stanford professor Ali Yaycıoğlu’s Partners of Empire stands out as an extraordinary work reevaluating upheavals in the Ottoman Empire in the Age of Revolution. This particular moment in Ottoman history drew the attention of the author due to the gap in the field; since the Age of Revolution is generally associated with the West, and particularly with the French and American Revolutions. In the interim, the 18th and 19th centuries are vital for full comprehension of the emergence of modernism and western values of democracy in the region that stretches from the Balkans, through Turkey, to the Arab world. In this regard, Yaycıoğlu draws the outline of his book as “to explain the transformation of Ottoman institutions, regional formations, and the global context as an integrated phenomenon” (x). Most significantly, Partners of Empire analyzes what the long-term effects of this long period of upheavals can tell us about contemporary Turkey and the Middle East’s turbulent political landscape and puts this transitional era of the Ottoman case into a global context. In the introduction, the author points out that there was a distinction between European and Ottoman experiences of revolution and rejects the older historiography of previous scholars that the narrative of failed Westernization attempts helps us to understand the evolution of the Ottoman Empire during the Age of Revolution (1760-1820). Instead, the author argues that there was not a major revolution such as the French Revolution in the empire, yet rather a number of reforms and transitions related to the globalized context of revolutions and modernization across the world which showed itself as “series of shakeups, political crises, popular insurrections and different attempts at settlements” (1). For the Ottoman case, the author prefers to use revolution in a contextual terminology which can be interpreted as “a diverse repertoire of reform agendas, institutional restructuring, political discourse, and shifting coalitions” throughout the book (1). The multiplicity of actors-individuals, house-holds, and collective actors with their own agendas, calculations and capacities with the agenda of changing the status quo, participated in the Ottoman transformation. The battle was not between the old and new, state and people, elites and the crowd, centre and periphery, or Muslim and non-Muslims as monolithic blocks. Rather, in many battles coalitions were formed between various groups and interests in a messy political landscape (x). The following chapters review 109