ABSTRACT
Was there such a thing as an ‘Ottoman world’? Among the numerous and varied answers there must be to this question, three stand out for the purposes of this book. The first and most essential is the obvious territorial definition. The Ottoman empire as a political entity comprised most of the present Middle East (with the principal exception of Iran), North Africa and South-Eastern Europe. For over 500 years, until its disintegration during the First World War, it encompassed a diverse range of ethnic, religious and linguistic communities with varying political and cultural backgrounds. Further questions on the nature of the ‘Ottoman world’ now follow. For instance, Ottoman authority might have been established largely by military conquest, but how was it maintained for so long over such distances and so many disparate societies? How did provincial regions relate to the imperial centre and what role was played in this by local elites? How did the inhabitants of major cities such as Cairo or Damascus adjust to Ottoman rule, or did it adjust to them? What produced the consensus which supported the empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? To what degree did subject peoples see themselves as part of a larger political and economic whole? What did it mean in practice, for ordinary people, to be part of an ‘Ottoman world’?
