ABSTRACT
It is not accidental or arbitrary that the papers in this section are mainly concerned with the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century. This concentration reflects the survival in Istanbul (and to a lesser degree elsewhere) of a vast body of archival material generated by the activities of a highly centralized state. No comparable archive survives for any other pre-modern Middle Eastern state, and the archives of the Ottoman Empire itself for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are less informative, because the work of a less centralized administration. Not much of the potential of this archival source has as yet been realized. The contribution of European Orientalism has been fairly small, partly for the very straight-forward reason that it is only comparatively recently that most of the material has become accessible to scholars, and partly because Orientalism has tended to remain a philology in the classical tradition, that is to say one whose skills are best employed in dealing with a paucity of evidence. Much more has been done by historians in Turkey and the Balkans, but here again most of the effort is fairly recent.
