Karen Barkey. Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative ...

200 Book Reviews
NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY
Karen Barkey. Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative
Perspective. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008, xv+342
pages.
For a long time, the paradigm of decline was paramount in debates on the
seventeenth and eighteenth century Ottoman Empire. However, in the
past few decades, students of Ottoman history have discarded the decline
paradigm in favor of alternative approaches. One such approach challenges
the notion of decline by emphasizing the empire’s longevity and replacing
a narrative of failure with one emphasizing the empire’s successful survival
over time. 1 Karen Barkey’s important study belongs to this latter category.
Barkey draws on a large body of secondary literature on the Ottoman
Empire in order to analyze the entire history of the Ottoman state. The
first part of the book comprising Chapters One to Five traces the emergence
and development of the empire until the eighteenth century. Here,
she mainly analyzes the structural features of the Ottoman political formation
that contributed to its dominance and longevity. To explain the organizational
logic of the empire, she uses the metaphor of a hub-and-spoke.
In her formulation, the imperial center served as a hub in that Ottoman
central authorities, especially after the mid-fifteenth century, managed to
vertically integrate local power-holders, corporate groups, and even some
of its dissenters into the political system. The process of vertical integration,
as Barkey underlines, indicates the flexibility of the Ottoman political
structure and the limits of imperial power. In Chapter Three, for instance,
she shows how, depending on the period of conquest and on negotiations
between central and local actors, center-province relations varied. While
central authorities handed over a certain degree of autonomy and authority
to local power-holders in order to rule over a vast territory, they kept these
power-holders separate from each other, like the spokes of a wheel, in order
to prevent them from forming a threat to the state together. Thus, “the empire
prospered as a solar system, with planets circling the central sun, pulled
in and held by the center’s gravitational force” (p. 294). This political structure,
Barkey argues, enabled the articulation of three conditions necessary
for the domination and longevity of an empire: a supra-national legitimating
ideology, appropriate mechanisms of rule over cultural diversity, and
modes of appropriation of political and economic resources.
The second part of the book deals with the question of how the Ottoman
solar system weakened and flew apart in the eighteenth and nine-
1 See, for instance, Şevket Pamuk, “Institutional Change and the Longevity of the Ottoman Empire,
1500–1800,”Journal of Interdisciplinary History 35, no. 2 (2004): 225-247.

teenth centuries. Here, Barkey emphasizes two processes which had their
roots in the empire’s long eighteenth century (1695-1808): Life-time taxfarming
and international trade. On the one hand, granting life tenure to
tax-farming local notables reduced the capacity of the Ottoman central
state to appropriate economic resources necessary for military and other
reforms in the nineteenth century. International trade, on the other hand,
radically changed the dynamics of diversity in the empire. In response
to competition and insecurity fueled by international trade, non-Muslim
Ottomans chose to organize along ethnic and religious lines. Likewise,
Muslims who did not perform well economically began to interpret their
plight in religious terms. These developments led to inter-ethnic and religious
tensions and, worse yet, violence, both of which were encouraged
rather than contained by the Ottoman state. Eventually the Ottoman solar
system “flew apart leaving a diminished sun” (p. 294).
In this study, political agency belongs primarily to the elite sectors of
Ottoman society, with state elites in the center as the major, and sometimes
only, creative political actors. Although Barkey does not provide sufficient
historical evidence to back up her claim concerning the horizontal
segmentation of local elites, she frames the emergence, development, and
then weakening of the Ottoman solar system as a negotiation process
between the state and the local elites. In the nineteenth century, however,
this negotiated enterprise gave way to a unilateral reform project:
“Ottomans therefore in their new understanding of reform and centralization,
embarked in the direction of nonempire, suspending negotiated
forms of rule and the diversity of bargaining between state and society”
(p. 265). Yet, recent studies on the nineteenth-century Ottoman reforms
that explore the social and political bases of the reforms in the provinces
contradict her latter argument. 2 As Barkey overlooks this scholarship and
interprets the reforms of the long nineteenth century as a top-down and
forced centralization, nationalism/the nation-state appears as the only viable
political project in the transition of the empire to a different political
formation. But the facts that decentralist political organizations, such as
the Liberty and Entente Party, found considerable support from Muslim
and non-Muslim Ottoman subjects until the end of the empire and that
Turks and Arabs sought possibilities for political cooperation even after
World War I strongly suggest that this was not the case. 3
2 See, for instance, Dina Rizk Khoury, State and Provincial Society in the Ottoman Empire, Mosul, 1540–
1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), and Jens Hanssen, Fin de siècle Beirut: The Making
of an Ottoman Provincial Capital (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
3 Hasan Kayalı, Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire, 1908-
1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
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NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY

202 Book Reviews
NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY
The way in which Barkey discusses the impact of international trade
on Ottoman polity and society also deserves attention in two respects.
First, although domestic trade vastly exceeded international trade in
the last two centuries of the empire, she ignores this important internal
dynamic and partly reproduces a Eurocentric view of the Ottoman
economy that puts primary importance on the connections between the
European powers and the Ottomans. Secondly, her narrative concerning
international trade tends to see Ottoman subjects, both Muslim and
non-Muslim, as members of homogenous and hermetic communities.
In Chapter Eight, for instance, it seems as if all Christians were successful
merchants or guild members who adapted to and benefited from international
trade, whereas the Muslim masses “were either unemployed
or employed at the lowest rank with the lowest salaries” (p. 285). Here
Barkey seems to be resurrecting the idea that there existed an “ethnic
division of labor” in the empire, a notion that has been convincingly
challenged by Ottoman labor historians. 4 Moreover, her analysis fails
to take notice of the many business and labor organizations established
collectively by Ottomans and foreigners coming from different ethnic
and religious backgrounds. Therefore, cosmopolitan historical alternatives
in the Ottoman past are left hidden from view.
In the context of current inter-ethnic, religious, and racial atrocities
around the world, the questions that Barkey’s comprehensive framework
addresses—that is, the longevity of the Ottoman Empire and how it
managed diversity—remain present and pressing. It is equally important,
however, not to see the longevity, flexibility, and diversity of the
empire as mere outcomes of inter-elite negotiations, but to recognize
the political challenges and demands raised by non-elite actors. Such an
approach would help to uncover the various forms of social inequalities
that Ottomans from different social classes suffered, as well as the political
projects they pursued; therefore, it would provide a more dynamic
and less deterministic analysis of the Ottoman Empire, especially of its
last century.
Can Nacar
Koç University
4 See, for instance, Cengiz Kırlı, “A Profile of the Labor Force in Early Nineteenth-Century Istanbul,”
International Labor and Working Class History, no. 60 (2001): 125-140, and Mustafa Erdem Kabadayı,
“Working in a Fez Factory in Istanbul in the Late Nineteenth Century: Division of Labour and Networks
of Migration Formed along Ethno-Religious Lines,” International Review of Social History 54, no. S17
(2009): 69-90.