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In this sequel to his highly acclaimed Bureaucratic Reform in the Ottoman Empire, Carter Findley shifts focus from the organizational aspects of administrative reform and development to the officials themselves. A study in social history and its cultural and economic ramifications, Findley's new book critically reassesses Ottoman accomplishments and failures in turning an archaic scribal corps into an effective civil service. Combining scrutiny of well-documented individuals with analyses of large groups of officials, Findley considers how much the development of civil officialdom ben.

From the author's preface: Sublime Porte--there must be few terms more redolent, even today, of the fascination that the Islamic Middle East has long exercised over Western imaginations. Yet there must also be few Western minds that now know what this term refers to, or why it has any claim to attention. One present-day Middle East expert admits to having long interpreted the expression as a reference to Istambul's splendid natural harbor. This individual is probably not unique and could perhaps claim to be relatively well informed. When the Sublime Porte still existed, Westerners who spent

The return toward centralization -- The Tanzimat -- The reign of Abdülhamid -- Imperial demise, national struggle -- The early republic -- Turkey's widening political spectrum -- Turkey and the world

In addition to my primary research specialty in Ottoman history, I prepared to teach the history of the Islamic Middle East from my first year in graduate school onward, and I did so throughout my academic career, including preparing graduate students to teach Ottoman and modern Middle Eastern history. My start in world history came later. Around the time I got tenure, my department decided, for comically bad reasons, to create a single world history course on the twentieth century. Having never witnessed creation ex nihilo in a department meeting before, I volunteered for the course. The department's reasons for creating the course were farcical, but I recognized it as a valuable intellectual property. In the existing state of the pedagogical literature, no one had paused to analyze the issues that made the twentieth century into more than the last chapter of a comprehensive world history book. A couple of years later, just as we finished teaching the course for the first time, an editor came along and asked if I had ever thought about writing a textbook. Yes, I had thought about it. Only I had assumed many years would pass before anyone would ask. Such were the origins of my coauthored Twentieth-Century World, having gone through seven editions from 1986 until 2010. It would be an understatement to say that radical revisions were required for each new edition, given not only the lengthening chronology but also the often radical revisions and improvements in the literature. If this presentation sounds more like a memoir than a research paper, the reason is that my dual lives in Middle Eastern and world history interacted in the pedagogical realm, raising issues that redirected my basic research and theoretical inquiries along the way.

"Drawing on the author's experience in writing The Turks in World History (2005) and Turkey, Islam, Nationalism, and Modernity: A History, 1789-2007 (2010), this essay examines critical problems and paradoxes in the history of the Turkish peoples. Clearly united by their languages but otherwise prodigiously diverse, the Turkish peoples' ability to project their identity enduringly across space and time seems paradoxical in itself. They were nomads of the Eurasian steppes in early centuries, and nomads the world over resist the rule of states. Yet nomads of the steppes created world empires. What explains this paradox? Out of it emerges the sacralization of state authority, the leitmotif of the Turks' political history from earliest times to the present. In modern times, the loss of sovereignty opens the widest gulf between the history of Central Asia's Turks and those of the Ottoman Empire. Astute choices that enabled the Ottomans to avoid repeating the mistakes of others also enabled them to project the Islamic tradition of state formation into modern times. The historians who founded the study of the modern Turkish experience envisioned a linear trajectory from Islam and empire to laicism and nation-state. Yet the persistence of Islam demands an interpretation that recognizes more than one approach to modernity, a culturally conservative approach as well as a radical secularizing one. The interpretation that best explains the last two centuries is that of two currents of change, alternately clashing and converging, to shape the transition from empire to nation-state. As new demands for pluralism arise in Turkey, will these two currents shape the history of the twenty-first century, or will they give way to a more finely divided politics of identities and interests from which fuller democratization may emerge? Ultimately, pluralism requires establishing that citizens can be equal and different at the same time." (author's abstract)

Central to late Ottoman history is a series of events that marks a milestone in the emergence of modern forms of political thought and revolutionary action in the Islamic world. The sequence opened with the rise of the Young Ottoman ideologues (1865) and the constitutional movement of the 1870s.It continued with the repression of these forces under Abdülhamid 11 (1876–1909). It culminated with the resurgence of opposition in the Young Turk movement of 1889 and later, and especially with the revolution of 1908. Studied so far mostly in political and intellectual terms, the sequence seems well understood. The emergence of the Young Ottomans—the pioneers of political ideology, in any modern sense, in the Middle East—appears to result from the introduction of Western ideas and from stresses created within the bureaucracy by the political hegemony of theTanzimatelite (ca. 1839–71). The repression under Abdülhamid follows from the turmoil of the late 1870s, the weaknesses of the constitution of 1876, and the craft of the new sultan in creating a palace-dominated police state. The emergence of the Young Turks shows that terror ultimately fostered, rather than killed, the opposition. Too, their eventual revolutionary success shows how much more effective than the Young Ottomans they were as political mobilizers.

"In this sequel to his highly acclaimed Bureaucratic Reform in the Ottoman Empire, Carter Findley shifts focus from the organizational aspects of administrative reform and development to the officials themselves. A study in social history and its cultural and economic ramifications, Findley's new book critically reassesses Ottoman accomplishments and failures in turning an archaic scribal corps into an effective civil service. - Combining scrutiny of well-documented individuals with analyses of large groups of officials, Findley considers how much the development of civil officialdom benefited Ottoman efforts to revitalize the state and protect its interests in an increasingly competitive world. Did reformers' initiatives in elite formation significantly broaden the social bases of officialdom and its capacity to represent Ottoman society? Did prospective officials profit from educational reform so as to achieve higher levels of qualification over the generations? How did cultural tensions of the reform era affect civil officials? To what extent did impersonal procedure and new ideas of professionalism supplant patronage and old scribal role concepts? How well did the state succeed in rewarding good service and protecting its officials against shifting economic conditions? The answers to such questions illuminate major issues of social integration and cultural change and clarify links between economic conditions and changing forms of political activism." (Publisher description, http://www.loc.gov/catdir/description/prin031/88017810.html, Zugriff am 15.05.2021)