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Η Οθωμανική Αυτοκρατορία και ο κόσμος γύρω της
Για περισσότερο από πέντε αιώνες οι Οθωμανοί σουλτάνοι υπήρξαν οι σημαντικότεροι ηγεμόνες του μουσουλμανικού κόσμου. Κυριάρχησαν στη νοτιανατολική Ευρώπη, τη Μέση Ανατολή και τη βόρεια Αφρική και έθεσαν τους ιερούς τόπους του Ισλάμ υπό την προστασία τους. Οι σχέσεις του οθωμανικού κράτους με τους κοντινούς και μακρινούς του γείτονες, αλλά και οι επαφές ανάμεσα σε Οθωμανούς υπηκόους και ξένους, τόσο εντός όσο και εκτός της οθωμανικής επικράτειας, είναι τα ζητήματα που απασχολούν τη Σουράγια Φαρόκι στο «Η Οθωμανική Αυτοκρατορία και ο κόσμος γύρω της», μελέτη που επικεντρώνεται στους μέσους αιώνες της οθωμανικής κυριαρχίας, από τη δεκαετία του 1540 μέχρι τον ρωσο-οθωμανικό πόλεμο του 1768-74. (. . .)
416 pages, Paperback
First published October 26, 2004
14 people are currently reading
387 people want to read
About the author
Suraiya Faroqhi
61 books45 followersSuraiya Faroqhi was born in Berlin to a German mother and Indian father in 1941. She studied at Hamburg University and she came to Istanbul through a university exchange program when she was 21. At Istanbul University, she became a student of Ömer Lütfi Barkan. She completed her master's degree in Hamburg and between 1968-1970 she studied English Language Teaching at Indiana University-Bloomington. After her post-doctorate, she worked as English Lecturer at METU. She retired from METU in 1987 and from München Ludwig Maximillan Universität in 2005.
A turning point in her life came in 1962-63, when she took the opportunity to go to Istanbul University on a fellowship as an exchange student. Subsequently she became a student of Ömer Lüfti Barkan, one of the founding fathers of Ottoman history and an editor of Annales. When she first read Fernand Braudel at Barkan’s insistence, she “had the feeling that’s the sort of thing I wanted to do.” She wrote her doctoral thesis at Hamburg on a set of documents that a late 16th-century vizier submitted to his sultan discussing Ottoman politics at the time.[1]
She is regarded as one of the most important economic and social historians of the Ottoman Empire working today. Professor Faroqhi has written substantially on Ottoman urban history, arts and crafts, and on the hitherto underrepresented world of the ordinary people in the empire. She is well known for her distinctive approach to Ottoman everyday life and public culture. She has published numerous books and articles in the field of pre- modern Ottoman history.
A turning point in her life came in 1962-63, when she took the opportunity to go to Istanbul University on a fellowship as an exchange student. Subsequently she became a student of Ömer Lüfti Barkan, one of the founding fathers of Ottoman history and an editor of Annales. When she first read Fernand Braudel at Barkan’s insistence, she “had the feeling that’s the sort of thing I wanted to do.” She wrote her doctoral thesis at Hamburg on a set of documents that a late 16th-century vizier submitted to his sultan discussing Ottoman politics at the time.[1]
She is regarded as one of the most important economic and social historians of the Ottoman Empire working today. Professor Faroqhi has written substantially on Ottoman urban history, arts and crafts, and on the hitherto underrepresented world of the ordinary people in the empire. She is well known for her distinctive approach to Ottoman everyday life and public culture. She has published numerous books and articles in the field of pre- modern Ottoman history.
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November 15, 2016As its title suggests, this book is an account of the interactions of the Ottomans with their neighbours.
The reader might expect to find a classical study of state relations, but that is not the only purpose of the book. Certainly, the author devotes good many pages on the political developments and military encounters, which the Ottomans experienced throughout the period under scrutiny, and bases the book's chronological frame precisely on those developments and encounters. Nevertheless, more than half of the book focuses on topics that were - and to some extent still are - in vogue in the Ottoman studies, viz. the centralization / decentralization of the empire in XVI-XVII and its approach to its vassal principalities, the question of the ideological considerations, which animated (or did not) the Ottoman's attitudes to their neighbouring states - particularly Persia and Christian Europe, the permeability of transcivilizational borders, the fortune of the ordinary man (both Ottoman and non-Ottoman), his cultural transactions with the foreigners and the creation of their images in his eyes.
That said, the book definitely has much to tell to any reader, from the unaquainted one to the connoisseur. Surely, a book of such a scope cannot be flawless, and some lapses occur every now and then. I would have enjoyed to find out more about the Ottoman pressence in Africa or the relations with the Far East. Of course, one must consider the limitations that lay before the author such as the lack of historical sources and the current state of research.
On the other hand, I find unnessecary the excessive usage of do-emphasizer and restrictive/negative inversions, and the abundance of quotation marks; I also cannot see the point of giving dates both in Gregorian and Hijri calendar (it was distracting).
On the whole 'The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It' is a good book, and I would recommend it.
The reader might expect to find a classical study of state relations, but that is not the only purpose of the book. Certainly, the author devotes good many pages on the political developments and military encounters, which the Ottomans experienced throughout the period under scrutiny, and bases the book's chronological frame precisely on those developments and encounters. Nevertheless, more than half of the book focuses on topics that were - and to some extent still are - in vogue in the Ottoman studies, viz. the centralization / decentralization of the empire in XVI-XVII and its approach to its vassal principalities, the question of the ideological considerations, which animated (or did not) the Ottoman's attitudes to their neighbouring states - particularly Persia and Christian Europe, the permeability of transcivilizational borders, the fortune of the ordinary man (both Ottoman and non-Ottoman), his cultural transactions with the foreigners and the creation of their images in his eyes.
That said, the book definitely has much to tell to any reader, from the unaquainted one to the connoisseur. Surely, a book of such a scope cannot be flawless, and some lapses occur every now and then. I would have enjoyed to find out more about the Ottoman pressence in Africa or the relations with the Far East. Of course, one must consider the limitations that lay before the author such as the lack of historical sources and the current state of research.
On the other hand, I find unnessecary the excessive usage of do-emphasizer and restrictive/negative inversions, and the abundance of quotation marks; I also cannot see the point of giving dates both in Gregorian and Hijri calendar (it was distracting).
On the whole 'The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It' is a good book, and I would recommend it.
September 29, 2025
#Binge Reviewing my previous Reads #World History and Civilizations # Empires, Trade, and Cultural Exchange
Suraiya Faroqhi’s *The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It* is at once a silver-tongued introduction and a deeply revisionist portrait of how a supposedly monolithic empire functioned within, and was shaped by, an interconnected early modern world. In a moment when Ottoman studies has moved far beyond the “decline narrative” and the trope of a cloistered Islamic state insulated from European and Asian currents, Faroqhi offers a book that manages to be both synthetic and intimate.
Her method—micro-historical in its anecdotes, macro-historical in its reach—consciously refuses the old binaries of East versus West, tradition versus modernity, and Islamic versus Christian civilisations. The book feels almost like a counterpoint to Halil İnalcık’s magisterial *The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age*, which mapped institutions, law, and administration with a positivist precision. Faroqhi, by contrast, deals in flux, permeability, and networks. She is less concerned with a fixed system than with the movements of goods, people, and ideas across borders, and with the reciprocal influence of the “world around” the Ottomans on their own internal dynamics.
This focus on entanglement shifts the narrative in subtle ways. For instance, where İnalcık and later Rhoads Murphey have emphasised the sultanic state as a fiscal-military machine that reached its “classical” perfection under Süleyman and began to fray thereafter, Faroqhi shows that Ottoman fortunes cannot be reduced to a curve of rise and decline. She tracks, instead, how changing Mediterranean and Indian Ocean trade routes, the inflow of New World silver, and the emergence of powerful European maritime states created both constraints and opportunities for Ottoman actors. Her chapters on merchants, pilgrims, and envoys are full of vignettes of Armenians in New Julfa, Jewish traders in Salonica, Arab scholars crisscrossing the empire, and European diplomats embedded in Istanbul.
These characters echo, in microcosm, the world described by Cemal Kafadar in *Between Two Worlds*, where the very identity of the early Ottoman polity emerges as a hybrid frontier culture, shaped by Byzantine, Turkic, Persian, and Arab influences. In Faroqhi’s hands, that hybridity never disappears; it simply takes new forms in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Equally striking is Faroqhi’s treatment of culture and daily life. Caroline Finkel’s *Osman’s Dream* tells a dramatic story of imperial rise, a sweeping narrative of sultans, campaigns, and crises; its appeal is epic. Faroqhi writes in a different register. She is interested in artisans in Bursa, pilgrims to Mecca, Sufi orders in Anatolia, women litigants in Sharia courts, and the mundane traffic of commodities like cloth, coffee, or books.
This attention to ordinary actors recalls her earlier social histories—especially *Subjects of the Sultan*—and complements the institutional focus of other historians. By juxtaposing state policy with local practice, she exposes a pattern of negotiation rather than unilateral imposition. The Ottoman “center” appears less as a commanding fortress and more as a node in a web of power that was constantly being rewoven. This is a picture that resonates with Baki Tezcan’s *The Second Ottoman Empire*, which reinterprets the supposedly decadent seventeenth century as an age of political participation and constitutional experimentation. Faroqhi does not go as far as Tezcan in positing a proto-parliamentary moment, but she similarly undermines the old stereotype of a sclerotic, despotic state by showing its responsiveness to global shifts and internal pressures.
Another area where *The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It* stands out is its treatment of knowledge circulation. Faroqhi devotes considerable attention to the ways in which European observers collected and disseminated information about the empire, and how Ottomans in turn absorbed and refracted ideas from abroad. This is a theme that Daniel Goffman also pursued in *The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe*, but Faroqhi’s canvas is broader. She examines not only diplomacy and espionage but also pilgrimage, translation, and commerce as conduits of knowledge. Her narrative of the hajj routes, for instance, reveals a vast infrastructure of movement and hospitality that tied the empire to the wider Islamic world and, indirectly, to European interests in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. By placing such networks at the heart of her story, she redefines what counts as “foreign relations”: not just treaties and wars but overlapping circuits of faith, family, and finance.
Faroqhi also brings a characteristically nuanced touch to the question of religious diversity. Whereas much older scholarship either romanticised the millet system as tolerant or condemned it as rigidly hierarchical, Faroqhi shows it as a set of evolving arrangements shaped by bargaining, coercion, and pragmatism. Her attention to Armenian and Greek merchant networks, Jewish communities in the Balkans, and the role of Christian artisans in Ottoman cities highlights an empire that was not merely multi-confessional but also economically and culturally interdependent. Here again the book can be read alongside Heath Lowry’s work on the early Ottomans and the recent studies on Balkan provincial life: all suggest that the Ottoman order was as much about shared practices as about imperial ideology.
The comparative dimension becomes especially vivid when Faroqhi deals with the Ottomans’ position vis-à-vis other empires. Instead of the tired East–West confrontation, she shows an empire engaged in parallel struggles with Safavid Iran, Habsburg Austria, and later Russia, while also interacting with Mughal India and North Africa. This broader, almost world-historical framing invites the reader to rethink early modernity itself. In this sense, *The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It* is an ideal companion to Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s connected histories of the Indian Ocean and to Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper’s *Empires in World History*, which similarly decenters Europe by placing empires in comparative dialogue. Faroqhi’s Ottomans are not peripheral; they are active participants in a multipolar world of shifting hegemonies.
Stylistically, Faroqhi’s prose is patient and deliberate. She avoids the grandiloquence of Gibbon-style declinism and the breathless sweep of popular histories. The result is a book that rewards slow reading and cross-referencing. It can feel dense, but that density is generative: every page invites you to see the empire less as a finished edifice and more as a process of continual negotiation across vast distances. This is perhaps why her work resonates so strongly with contemporary scholarship on global history, which emphasises circulation, translation, and co-production rather than unilateral diffusion.
What also emerges from reading Faroqhi alongside the likes of İnalcık, Finkel, Kafadar, Tezcan, and Goffman is a sense of the field’s transformation. Where once the “Ottoman decline” story dominated, we now have a rich mosaic of perspectives: legal and institutional (İnalcık), narrative and epic (Finkel), frontier and hybridity (Kafadar), participatory politics (Tezcan), and entanglement with Europe (Goffman). Faroqhi’s distinctive contribution lies in her insistence on the permeability of the empire’s boundaries and on the agency of its diverse subjects. She is not writing a biography of sultans or an anatomy of a state machine but an account of an evolving world in which the Ottomans were both shapers and shaped.
In the end, *The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It* is less about a discrete polity than about a way of seeing. It invites readers to abandon static categories—center versus periphery, Islam versus Christendom, tradition versus modernity—and to think instead in terms of flows, negotiations, and shared spaces. In this respect it echoes the best of recent global history but remains grounded in the specific textures of Ottoman life.
Reading it after Finkel’s *Osman’s Dream* gives one a sense of moving from a panoramic film to a documentary rich with archival footage; reading it after İnalcık shows how far the discipline has come from institutional schematics to human stories; reading it with Kafadar reveals continuities of hybridity stretching from the empire’s origins to its later centuries.
It is precisely in this interplay—between state and society, between local and global, between old and new historiographies—that Faroqhi’s book earns its place as a modern classic of Ottoman studies.
Read this and encourage others to read it too.
Suraiya Faroqhi’s *The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It* is at once a silver-tongued introduction and a deeply revisionist portrait of how a supposedly monolithic empire functioned within, and was shaped by, an interconnected early modern world. In a moment when Ottoman studies has moved far beyond the “decline narrative” and the trope of a cloistered Islamic state insulated from European and Asian currents, Faroqhi offers a book that manages to be both synthetic and intimate.
Her method—micro-historical in its anecdotes, macro-historical in its reach—consciously refuses the old binaries of East versus West, tradition versus modernity, and Islamic versus Christian civilisations. The book feels almost like a counterpoint to Halil İnalcık’s magisterial *The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age*, which mapped institutions, law, and administration with a positivist precision. Faroqhi, by contrast, deals in flux, permeability, and networks. She is less concerned with a fixed system than with the movements of goods, people, and ideas across borders, and with the reciprocal influence of the “world around” the Ottomans on their own internal dynamics.
This focus on entanglement shifts the narrative in subtle ways. For instance, where İnalcık and later Rhoads Murphey have emphasised the sultanic state as a fiscal-military machine that reached its “classical” perfection under Süleyman and began to fray thereafter, Faroqhi shows that Ottoman fortunes cannot be reduced to a curve of rise and decline. She tracks, instead, how changing Mediterranean and Indian Ocean trade routes, the inflow of New World silver, and the emergence of powerful European maritime states created both constraints and opportunities for Ottoman actors. Her chapters on merchants, pilgrims, and envoys are full of vignettes of Armenians in New Julfa, Jewish traders in Salonica, Arab scholars crisscrossing the empire, and European diplomats embedded in Istanbul.
These characters echo, in microcosm, the world described by Cemal Kafadar in *Between Two Worlds*, where the very identity of the early Ottoman polity emerges as a hybrid frontier culture, shaped by Byzantine, Turkic, Persian, and Arab influences. In Faroqhi’s hands, that hybridity never disappears; it simply takes new forms in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Equally striking is Faroqhi’s treatment of culture and daily life. Caroline Finkel’s *Osman’s Dream* tells a dramatic story of imperial rise, a sweeping narrative of sultans, campaigns, and crises; its appeal is epic. Faroqhi writes in a different register. She is interested in artisans in Bursa, pilgrims to Mecca, Sufi orders in Anatolia, women litigants in Sharia courts, and the mundane traffic of commodities like cloth, coffee, or books.
This attention to ordinary actors recalls her earlier social histories—especially *Subjects of the Sultan*—and complements the institutional focus of other historians. By juxtaposing state policy with local practice, she exposes a pattern of negotiation rather than unilateral imposition. The Ottoman “center” appears less as a commanding fortress and more as a node in a web of power that was constantly being rewoven. This is a picture that resonates with Baki Tezcan’s *The Second Ottoman Empire*, which reinterprets the supposedly decadent seventeenth century as an age of political participation and constitutional experimentation. Faroqhi does not go as far as Tezcan in positing a proto-parliamentary moment, but she similarly undermines the old stereotype of a sclerotic, despotic state by showing its responsiveness to global shifts and internal pressures.
Another area where *The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It* stands out is its treatment of knowledge circulation. Faroqhi devotes considerable attention to the ways in which European observers collected and disseminated information about the empire, and how Ottomans in turn absorbed and refracted ideas from abroad. This is a theme that Daniel Goffman also pursued in *The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe*, but Faroqhi’s canvas is broader. She examines not only diplomacy and espionage but also pilgrimage, translation, and commerce as conduits of knowledge. Her narrative of the hajj routes, for instance, reveals a vast infrastructure of movement and hospitality that tied the empire to the wider Islamic world and, indirectly, to European interests in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. By placing such networks at the heart of her story, she redefines what counts as “foreign relations”: not just treaties and wars but overlapping circuits of faith, family, and finance.
Faroqhi also brings a characteristically nuanced touch to the question of religious diversity. Whereas much older scholarship either romanticised the millet system as tolerant or condemned it as rigidly hierarchical, Faroqhi shows it as a set of evolving arrangements shaped by bargaining, coercion, and pragmatism. Her attention to Armenian and Greek merchant networks, Jewish communities in the Balkans, and the role of Christian artisans in Ottoman cities highlights an empire that was not merely multi-confessional but also economically and culturally interdependent. Here again the book can be read alongside Heath Lowry’s work on the early Ottomans and the recent studies on Balkan provincial life: all suggest that the Ottoman order was as much about shared practices as about imperial ideology.
The comparative dimension becomes especially vivid when Faroqhi deals with the Ottomans’ position vis-à-vis other empires. Instead of the tired East–West confrontation, she shows an empire engaged in parallel struggles with Safavid Iran, Habsburg Austria, and later Russia, while also interacting with Mughal India and North Africa. This broader, almost world-historical framing invites the reader to rethink early modernity itself. In this sense, *The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It* is an ideal companion to Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s connected histories of the Indian Ocean and to Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper’s *Empires in World History*, which similarly decenters Europe by placing empires in comparative dialogue. Faroqhi’s Ottomans are not peripheral; they are active participants in a multipolar world of shifting hegemonies.
Stylistically, Faroqhi’s prose is patient and deliberate. She avoids the grandiloquence of Gibbon-style declinism and the breathless sweep of popular histories. The result is a book that rewards slow reading and cross-referencing. It can feel dense, but that density is generative: every page invites you to see the empire less as a finished edifice and more as a process of continual negotiation across vast distances. This is perhaps why her work resonates so strongly with contemporary scholarship on global history, which emphasises circulation, translation, and co-production rather than unilateral diffusion.
What also emerges from reading Faroqhi alongside the likes of İnalcık, Finkel, Kafadar, Tezcan, and Goffman is a sense of the field’s transformation. Where once the “Ottoman decline” story dominated, we now have a rich mosaic of perspectives: legal and institutional (İnalcık), narrative and epic (Finkel), frontier and hybridity (Kafadar), participatory politics (Tezcan), and entanglement with Europe (Goffman). Faroqhi’s distinctive contribution lies in her insistence on the permeability of the empire’s boundaries and on the agency of its diverse subjects. She is not writing a biography of sultans or an anatomy of a state machine but an account of an evolving world in which the Ottomans were both shapers and shaped.
In the end, *The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It* is less about a discrete polity than about a way of seeing. It invites readers to abandon static categories—center versus periphery, Islam versus Christendom, tradition versus modernity—and to think instead in terms of flows, negotiations, and shared spaces. In this respect it echoes the best of recent global history but remains grounded in the specific textures of Ottoman life.
Reading it after Finkel’s *Osman’s Dream* gives one a sense of moving from a panoramic film to a documentary rich with archival footage; reading it after İnalcık shows how far the discipline has come from institutional schematics to human stories; reading it with Kafadar reveals continuities of hybridity stretching from the empire’s origins to its later centuries.
It is precisely in this interplay—between state and society, between local and global, between old and new historiographies—that Faroqhi’s book earns its place as a modern classic of Ottoman studies.
Read this and encourage others to read it too.
December 30, 2020
The book was written in overly scholarly manners in order to explain her hypothesis, which explains and cited sources that I found had little correlation with Ottoman Empire (it didn't make an exciting reading to be sure), yet at the same time, when she made bold conclusions on certain topics, she offered a little explanation or citations.
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July 18, 2019كتاب
July 10, 2019
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