ABSTRACT
Turkish historians concerned the Ottoman Empire and interested in European and American historiography have all acted on the assumption that a broad knowledge of early modern European history can serve as a source of assumptions to be tested and paradigms to be played out in the Ottoman context. The Ottoman Empire did not possess a land-holding nobility even the ayan of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries never boasted a local power base comparable to French or English aristocracy. Emphasis on persistent archaisms is justified as a corrective against naive assumptions concerning a clearly identifiable take-off' into modernity, but the approach involves intellectual difficulties of its own. Muslim Ottomans also dominated late-fifteenth-century commerce of the Black Sea and were active in caravan trade linking the various Anatolian regions to one another and to the capital. The traditional-modern dichotomy now has come under critical scrutiny, not only in Ottoman history but, to name but one example, in Chinese history as well.
