After the Ottomans?

Abstract

This chapter examines the transition from the “Ottoman Empire” into the “post-Ottoman” worlds that succeeded it. Rejecting the conventional narrative, in which “Westernization” caused the empire’s fragmentation and final collapse, it highlights instead the perpetuation of Ottoman institutions within the polities that emerged out of the sultanate. It argues that achieving this more nuanced periodization requires questioning the three normative oppositions that have structured the historiography of the late Ottoman Empire: between Ottoman and European, Empire and Nation, and Tradition and Modernity. It proposes three research objects (among other alternatives) to apprehend the layered temporalities at work in the post-Ottoman imperial transition: the emergence of citizenship in lieu of imperial subjecthood; biographies (including sociographies and intellectual histories) of actors having lived through that transition; and the transformation of property regimes. The chapter’s broader goal is to incite awareness of how context sensitive categories we use in history – such as Ottoman/Ottomanness – remain.