Shattering Empires

In this groundbreaking new book, Baki Tezcan calls for a wholesale reassessment of latter Ottoman history that challenges earlier assumptions of decline and degeneration following the increasing power of the Janissaries and the decreasing control of the court. Deeming this to be too simplistic, Tezcan reasons that the period following the short reign of Osman II marked the flowering of a ‘Second Ottoman Empire’. This new period in the Empire (from roughly 1580 to 1826) was marked culturally by an early modern sensibility; economically by a market-oriented economy; legally by a more unified legal system that exerted some authority of the ruling dynasty; monetarily by a more unified currency system; and politically by limited government brought about the interaction between novel legal developments and the ‘civilization’ and ‘proto-democratization’ whereby ‘a much larger segment of the imperial administration came to consist of men whose social origins were among the commoners… Thus more and more men whose backgrounds were in finance or trade came to occupy significant positions in the government of the empire, replacing those military slaves and civilizing the imperial polity.’ (p. 10)