ABSTRACT
The Ottoman state was a transcontinental empire with a political and commercial existence stretching from the Balkans and the Black Sea region through Anatolia, Syria, Mesopotamia and the Gulf to Egypt and most of the North African coast throughout the six centuries before World War I (Pamuk, 2014: 1–2). This extensive spatio-temporal coverage predisposed the Empire’s major actors to structure its institutional stock in a manner that ebbed and flowed among the theoretical consistency of Islam, the practical exigencies of its geostrategic and geocultural interlinkages and conjunctural pragmatic choices. Irrespective of this, and in parallel with the factional balkanisations in Republican Turkey, there has been a sharply bifurcated, instead of a systemically organised, approach to Ottoman institutionalism: either appraising it with regard to its Islamic institutional stock and civilisational achievements, in humanitarianism, multi-cultural cosmopolitanism, military triumphs and so on, or to denounce it for its religious pillars that are alleged to have constrained the embodiment of an innovative industrial and democratic mindset compared to its European contemporaries.
