The Second Ottoman Empire
Political and Social Transformation in the Early Modern World

This book is a post-revisionist history of the late Ottoman Empire that makes a major contribution to Ottoman scholarship.

Baki Tezcan (Author)

9781107411449, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 25 October 2012

306 pages
22.7 x 15.2 x 1.6 cm, 0.45 kg

'The work is based on the conviction that integrating economic, military, and social issues, often studied in isolation, would form a viable alternative political narrative of the Ottoman Empire. And, as [Tezcan] skilfully demonstrates, it does … Tezcan's … analytically solid argumentation utilizing a wide range of unpublished and published archival, manuscript, and literary sources open[s] up fresh research venues for Ottomanists and [is] a welcome contribution to the field.' Side Emre, Sixteenth Century Journal

Although scholars have begun to revise the traditional view that the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries marked a decline in the fortunes of the Ottoman Empire, Baki Tezcan's book proposes a radical approach to this period. While he concurs that decline did take place in certain areas, he constructs a new framework by foregrounding the proto-democratization of the Ottoman polity in this era. Focusing on the background and the aftermath of the regicide of Osman II, he shows how the empire embarked on a period of seismic change in the political, economic, military, and social spheres. It is this period - from roughly 1580 to 1826 - that the author labels 'The Second Empire', and that he sees as no less than the transformation of the patrimonial, medieval, dynastic institution into a fledgling limited monarchy. The book is essentially a post-revisionist history of the early modern Ottoman Empire that will make a major contribution not only to Ottoman scholarship but also to comparable trends in world history.

Introduction: Ottoman political history in the Early Modern period
1. One market, one money, one law: the making of an imperial market society and a law that applies to all
2. The question of succession: bringing the dynasty under legal supervision
3. The court strikes back: the making of Ottoman absolutism
4. A new empire for a second Osman: Osman II in power (1618–22)
5. The absolutist dispensation overturned: a regicide
6. The second empire goes public: the age of the Janissaries
Conclusion: early modernity and the Ottoman decline.

Subject Areas: Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL], Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700 [HBLH], Middle Eastern history [HBJF1]