Marc David Baer, The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars, and Caliphs
Marc David Baer, The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars, and Caliphs, New York: Basic Books, 2021, xv-543 p.
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1Marc Baer’s new survey of Ottoman history, The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars, and Caliphs asks its readers to imagine a Europe of which the Ottomans were an integral part. Such a reconceptualization, Baer argues, can help us arrive at a more sophisticated understanding of European history, not only as it relates to hallmarks such as the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Reformation, and the Age of Discovery, but also to forms of political and social domination. By foregrounding his analyses conceptually, Baer is able to bring a whole host of characters typically relegated to the margins of Ottoman history, including women, non-Muslims, converts, and slaves, to the center of his narrative. The result is the most significant synthesis of the empire’s history to date.
2The book’s narrative arc, which develops chronologically over twenty-two chapters, generally follows the history of the Ottoman dynasty, which ruled the empire from the end of the thirteenth century until the Young Turk revolution in 1908. Baer defies the essentialization that plagues earlier generations of Ottomanist scholarship by instead emphasizing the fluidity and contingency of categories such as confession, ethnicity, and gender. The book accordingly employs gender and religion to bring – as much as is possible in a single monograph – a multi-confessional, multilingual, and geographically diverse empire into a single frame. Neither were fixed categories and in fact – as evidenced by the ways in which they changed over time – central facets in how the empire was organized and legitimized. The fluid and hierarchical aspects of Ottoman imperialism therefore come to the fore in the book’s first chapters. The gazis and sultans are there and they are in charge; their rule however is not a given, something they established in large part because they had forged relations with Christians and used converts and slaves to build out the dynasty’s household and fashion an imperial administration.
3Islam, in this telling, serves as a tool of integration in the early years of Ottoman rule, used more to integrate than to exclude. Converts and mystics, who had latitude to adapt the religion to local needs, forged connections that linked together communities and institutions together as part of a nascent imperial society. Such an Islam however proved combustible for the House of Osman as it provided the disaffected with a political language for mobilizing groups into organized opposition that could transcend confessional boundaries. This precipitated a need on the part of imperial authorities, as Baer explores in later chapters, to define religion in stricter terms and make boundaries between communities less porous; Islam needed to exclude at least as much as it included. Baer follows these threads throughout the book, most expertly in the chapters on the early modern empire. Here, he weaves in thematic chapters that accentuate the book’s chronological arc by layering in thoughtful (if at times somewhat unsettling) discussions on gender and sexuality into his analysis. Changing gender roles, much like the changing role of religion, reflected an imperial society becoming increasingly stratified and hierarchical. As the state’s response to the challenge posed by the Jewish mystic Sabbatai Zevi (the subject of chapter fifteen) demonstrates, these hierarchies were seminal to the configuration of imperial society. More often than not, this placed firm limits on what non-Muslims or women could accomplish in the public sphere. Yet it could also place them in advantageous positions as go-between or brokers behind the scenes, as Baer’s discussion of Jewish ladies-in-waiting at the imperial harem shows.
4This embrace of cultural history supports Baer’s efforts to realize the book’s stated goal of reframing European history such that it can include the Ottomans. Here, he profits from the maturation of the field of Ottoman history over the last two decades, something in which his own impressive body of scholarship has played no small role. A number of factors, including the critique of Orientalism, the opening of the Ottoman archives, and the cultural turn in the discipline of history, ushered in new research agendas that grappled with questions of decline, gender, and the fate of the empire’s non-Muslims. Taken as a whole, this new body of scholarship moves the field away from positivist frameworks that privilege Eurocentric developmentalism and ethnonational narratives and instead towards ones better attuned to the dynamic aspects of imperial history. Baer ably synthesizes much of this new scholarship to develop his own framework, organized primarily around the intersection of gender and religion, to offer critical new perspectives on the ruling elite and the types of coercion they employed to enforce their rule. This framework consequently makes it possible to bring debates, often had in isolation from one another, together.
5As generative as the book’s aim and its pursuit of it are in this area, they are something of a mixed bag elsewhere. Efforts to connect the Ottoman experience to European history are sometimes useful and have the potential to do the kind of work the author seems to intend. Drawing parallels between the Ottoman slave trade in Crimea and that of the British in the Atlantic (p. 127), for example, does make powerful commentary on European state-building in the early modern period. More often, however, examples do little to advance the book’s narrative, its arguments, or the goal of reframing European history. Pointing out that the devşirme system (the youth levy used to conscript janissaries) would qualify as an act of genocide (p. 47), for example, needlessly distracts from an otherwise interesting discussion on how an Ottoman politics of difference resolved administrative issues that had plagued Turkic states. Similar such references, for instance, to secularism and the Peace of Westphalia (p. 72), disrupt the book’s narrative and conceptual flow.
6The conceptual flow is also disrupted somewhat when the book’s focus shifts to the modern period. Here, the centrality of religion and gender begins to disappear and gives way to something else. Very interesting notes on the activities of various sufi orders and a short chapter on Orientalism aside, the structure and organization of these final few chapters are much more conventional: reform (Tanzimat) provokes reaction (Abdülhamid), reaction precipitates opposition (the Young Turks), the oppositionists take control and destroy the state. The throughline connecting these chapters is the development of an increasingly authoritarian and exclusionary political culture, which culminated with the Armenian Genocide, a focus of chapter twenty-one. In the book’s penultimate chapter, Baer follows the story of a survivor to narrate the events of the genocide, a contingent event explained in part by the context established in the preceding chapters.
7The discussion on the genocide, like the book as a whole, represents a welcome departure from what long constituted the mainstream of Ottoman history. While acknowledging that authors writing books such as this must make difficult choices about what to include or what path to take, one wonders what the chapters on the long nineteenth century might have looked like had Baer continued employing the critical lens (foregrounding religion and gender) he used so effectively in his analysis of the early modern period. The discussion on the Greek rebellion (1821-1830) starts down that path, only to quickly abandon it. How, for example, would the subsequent discussion on the Tanzimat reforms have changed had Baer examined the implications of the Greek rebellion for our understanding of non-Muslim subjectivity as carefully as he did the story of Sabbatai Zevi? The claim that the sultan granted Christian subjects equality in 1839 to stamp out nationalist movements (p. 347), a dated oversimplification of how the Tanzimat reconfigured intercommunal relations and transformed non-Muslim subjectivity, feels out of place in a book this critical. What shape does the modern period take in Baer’s analysis if non-Muslims’ roles in configuring nineteenth-century Ottoman society are described as carefully as they are for the early modern period? Answers to these questions would have added to the context Baer excavates to explain the intolerant political culture that developed in the nineteenth century and later led to the genocide.
8Still, The Ottomans is an overwhelming success. The book provides an introduction to the history of the empire that is both accessible and thought-provoking. While it cannot include everything, it does an excellent job of challenging readers to take a panoramic view of the empire’s history and see it from both the center and the margins. Moreover, the book does an admirable job of bringing together a number of debates that have raged across the field for decades, finding their points of intersection, and distilling them into a single narrative. While the book cannot answer (or even ask) every question, it offers a template for doing so. It is, for these reasons, the most important overview of the Ottoman Empire to date.
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Richard Antaramian, « Marc David Baer, The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars, and Caliphs », Études arméniennes contemporaines, 14 | 2022, 221-225.
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Richard Antaramian, « Marc David Baer, The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars, and Caliphs », Études arméniennes contemporaines [En ligne], 14 | 2022, mis en ligne le 16 janvier 2023, consulté le 13 juin 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/eac/3074 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/eac.3074
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