Part ofa series on the |
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| History of the Ottoman Empire |
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| Timeline (Territorial evolution) |
Rise(1299–1453) |
Classical Age(1453–1566)
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Transformation(1566–1703)
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Old Regime(1703–1789)
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Decline and Modernization(1789–1908)
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Dissolution(1908–1922)
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| Historiography (Ghaza,Decline) |
Thehistoriography of the Ottoman Empire refers to thestudies, sources, critical methods and interpretations used by scholars to develop a history of theOttoman Dynasty's empire.
Scholars have long studied the Empire, looking at the causes for its formation (such as theGhaza thesis), its relations to theGreat Powers (such asSick man of Europe) and other empires (such asTransformation of the Ottoman Empire), and the kinds of people who becameimperialists oranti-imperialists (such as theYoung Turks), together with their mindsets. The history of the breakdown of the Empire (such asOttoman decline thesis) has attracted scholars of the histories of theMiddle East (such asPartition of the Ottoman Empire), andGreece (Rise of nationalism in the Ottoman Empire).
Ottoman history has been rewritten for political and cultural advantage and speculative theories rife with inconsistent research, ahistorical assumptions and embedded biases.[5] Partly because the archives are moderately new. TheOttoman Archives are a collection of historical sources related to the Ottoman Empire and a total of 39 nations whose territories one time or the other were part of this Empire, including 19 nations in theMiddle East, 11 in theEU andBalkans, three in theCaucasus, two inCentral Asia,Cyprus, as well asPalestine and theRepublic of Turkey.Ottoman Bank Archives and Research Centre operated in the former Head Office of theOttoman Bank.[6]
Osman's Dream is a mythological story relating to the life ofOsman I, founder of theOttoman Empire. The story describes a dream experienced by Osman while staying in the home of a religious figure,Sheikh Edebali, in which he sees a metaphorical vision predicting the growth and prosperity of an empire to be ruled by him and his descendants. However there are other thesis addresses the question of how the Ottomans were able to expand from a small principality on the frontier of theByzantine Empire into a centralized, intercontinental empire. According to the Ghaza thesis, the Ottomans accomplished this by attracting recruits to fight for them in the name ofIslamic holy war against thenon-believers. Such a warrior was known inTurkish as aghazi, and thus this thesis sees the early Ottoman state as a "Ghazi State," defined by an ideology of holy war. The Ghaza Thesis dominated early Ottoman historiography throughout much of the twentieth century before coming under increasing criticism beginning in the 1980s.[7] Historians now generally reject the Ghaza Thesis, and consequently the idea that Ottoman expansion was primarily fueled by holy war, but are conflicted with regard to what to replace it with.[8][9]
In seeking new identities and ideological foundations for their states, Arabs and Turks invoked ancient history: the Pharaohs, Kings of Babylon, and the Hittites of pre-Ottoman Anatolia. This could involve hostility and often vilification,[10] not so much regarding specific Ottoman policies but more about state building processes.[11] Doumani’s study of the Arab region of Ottoman Palestine notes: "most Arab nationalists view the entire Ottoman era as a period of oppressive Turkish rule which stifled Arab culture and socioeconomic development and paved the way for European colonial control and the Zionist takeover of Palestine."[12] The 19th- and early 20th-century literature written by Westerners bent on "discovering" the Holy Land—that is, reclaiming it from what they believed was a stagnant and declining Ottoman Empire—provided the intellectual foundation for this shared image.
Regarding the Ottoman Industrial Revolution, Edward Clark said, Ottoman responses to this European economic challenge are relatively unknown, and even the extensive and costly Ottoman industrial efforts of the 1840s seemingly have been dismissed as the casual, if not comical games of disinterested bureaucrats... What were the nature and magnitude of these Ottoman responses? What were Ottoman objectives? What main factors contributed to their failures? What if any achievements resulted?[13]
Many twentieth-century scholars argued that power of theOttoman Empire began waning after the death ofSuleiman the Magnificent in 1566, and without the acquisition of significant new wealth the empire went into decline, a concept known as theOttoman Decline Thesis. Since the late 1970s, however, historians increasingly came to question the idea of Ottoman decline, and now there is a consensus among academic historians that the Ottoman Empire did not decline.[14]
Scholars following in Wittek's footsteps have moved away from his strong formulation [...] It is probably safe to suggest that at the moment there is no agreed point of reference about which most scholars gather, and that a more eclectic approach, resting more on the sources than on scholarly tradition, holds the field.
The early Ottoman military activity described asghaza is now thought to have been a much more fluid undertaking, sometimes referring to actions that were nothing more than raids, sometimes meaning a deliberate holy war, but most often combining a mixture of these elements.
historians of the Ottoman Empire have rejected the narrative of decline in favor of one of crisis and adaptation;
Ottomanist historians have produced several works in the last decades, revising the traditional understanding of this period from various angles, some of which were not even considered as topics of historical inquiry in the mid-twentieth century. Thanks to these works, the conventional narrative of Ottoman history – that in the late sixteenth century the Ottoman Empire entered a prolonged period of decline marked by steadily increasing military decay and institutional corruption – has been discarded.;
Ottomanist historians have largely jettisoned the notion of a post-1600 'decline'
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