The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It - Course Information

~ INTRODUCTION ~ 11
Throughout the present study we will have occasion to dwell on the structural
similarities between early modern European states and the Ottoman Empire. Certainly
it is true that the sultans never recognized a privileged nobility, an estate
that formed the backbone of almost all European polities even in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. Yet the Ottoman ‘great households’ that we can
observe ‘through a glass darkly’ in the sixteenth century, and which went from
strength to strength in the course of the seventeenth, can be viewed as an aristocracy
even if their members lacked the legal guarantees that members of
European nobilities possessed at least on parchment or paper. 38 All this is not to
deny that the Ottoman state possessed certain special features that we do not find
in Christian Europe and vice versa. But in the period to be covered here, that is,
down to the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the differences were perhaps
not as important as they often have been made out to be.
According to the – doubtless limited – lights of the present author, the activities
of the Ottoman elites between about 1540/946–7 and 1774/1187–8 should be
placed in a world of states and empires that, for lack of a better term, we may call
‘early modern’. In this context technological and organizational constraints made
for quite a few structural similarities. I think that one can make a case that serious
divergence only began in the second half of the eighteenth century: with the
political and military reforms of Maria Theresa and Joseph II in the Habsburg
lands, the early industrial revolution in Great Britain, the incipient liberalization
of trade in France and, above all, the far-reaching reorganization of Russian governmental
and military structure. 39
~ An impossible balance between ‘east’ and ‘west’?
This study attempts to see the Ottomans as a state and society with both eastern
and western neighbours, whose elite maintained more or less extensive relations
with both sides. In recent decades, a number of studies have shown that the Ottomans
of the sixteenth century maintained a strong presence in the Indian Ocean
and the Persian Gulf. In the sixteenth-century Hijaz, there was a degree of rivalry
between the Ottomans and the Mughul emperors of India. 40 And even when the
Ottoman navy withdrew from the Indian Ocean after top priority had been given
to conquests closer to home, Basra continued as an Ottoman port of major significance.
From the late seventeenth century onwards, the better-off inhabitants of
Istanbul and Cairo became avid consumers of Indian fabrics, and the importation
of spices, drugs and cottons formed a mainstay of Cairo’s commercial activity. 41
Further south, there was an Ottoman province of Habeş (Ethiopia) on the eastern
coast of Africa, even though control of the hinterland often must have been aleatory.
42 Viewed from another angle, political conflict between Iran and the
Ottoman Empire did not prevent Ottoman courtly society from modelling itself
on Iranian patterns, with the palace of Timur’s grandson H. usayn Bayk. ara the