E RHMC 602 0127

The Ottoman Empire Seen through the Lens of Postcolonial Studies:
A Recent Historiographical Turn

Özgür Türesay
In Revue d’histoire moderne & contemporaine Volume 60-2, Issue 2, 2013,
pages 127 to 145
Translated from the French by Cadenza Academic Translations
ISSN 0048-8003
ISBN 9782701181035
Available online at:

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How to cite this article:
Özgür Türesay, «The Ottoman Empire Seen through the Lens of Postcolonial Studies: A Recent Historiographical Turn», Revue
d’histoire moderne & contemporaine 2013/2 (No 60-2) , p. 127-145
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Reading
The Ottoman Empire

Seen through the Lens of Postcolonial Studies:
A Recent Historiographical Turn
Özgür Türesay
Abdülaziz Mecdi Efendi (Karesi): Do the parliamentary

system and equality reign supreme in England?
Kozmidi Efendi (Istanbul): I’m not referring to England
here. I am an Ottoman, was born an Ottoman, and was brought
up an Ottoman. Anything else simply doesn’t concern me.
Abdülaziz Mecdi Efendi (Karesi): The parliamentary
system in England is 225 years old. And there’s not a single
Indian member of Parliament.
Kozmidi Efendi (Istanbul): You don’t seem to understand
England very well. India is a colony.1
This dialogue, extracted from records made at the Ottoman Chamber of Deputies,

took place on July 3, 1909, during the debates on the tax bill that the non-Muslim
Ottomans had to pay in order to ensure their exemption from military service. At
the time, a number of Muslim deputies were opposed to the egalitarian arguments
and patriotic rhetoric of three non-Muslim deputies2 who were in favor of the
abolition of this “privilege” of exemption from military service in the name of the
principle of equality brought in by the recently reestablished constitutional regime.
This anecdote shows that certain Muslim deputies were ill at ease concerning
the principle of equality announced by the new parliamentary government that
succeeded Sultan Abdülhamid II’s autocratic regime (1876-1909) in 1908. Their
reaction clearly demonstrates an appraisal of the Ottoman Empire as a colonial
empire. Does this conversation then prove that the Ottoman Empire had become
a colonial empire by the beginning of the twentieth century?
1. Meclis-i Mebusan Zabit Ceridesi, Session 1, Year 1, June 20, 1325 (July 3, 1909) 5:170. [Trans-
lator’s note: All quotations from Turkish-language sources contained in this article have been back-
translated from the French-language version of the article.]
2. The Armenian deputy of Erzurum, Ohannes Varteks Efendi, the Armenian deputy of Sivas,
Nazaret Dagavaryan Efendi, and a Greek deputy from Istanbul, Kozmidi Efendi.
II REVUE D’HISTOIRE MODERNE & CONTEMPORAINE
Ottoman studies, which have been enlivened by an unparalleled spirit

of dynamism for more than two decades now, are constantly being enriched
by fresh analyses resulting from newly adopted or adapted points of view,
owing to the fact that they – sometimes – are based on sources hitherto
neglected by, or unknown to, historians. Since the end of the 1990s, the
attempts of a few eminent historians to include the history of the Ottoman
Empire within the domain of studies referred to as postcolonial have, thus,
produced a certain sort of scholarly literature. There is a recent historio-
graphical turn in which “Ottoman colonialism” and its discursive adjunct
“Ottoman orientalism” – aspects that emerged at the end of the nineteenth
century and were consolidated at the beginning of the twentieth – are placed
at the center of its thinking.
This historiographical turn, and the scholarly output resulting from it, has
unquestionably enriched our knowledge concerning the changeable nature of
the relationship between the imperial center and its periphery, as well as the
evolution of administrative practices and arguments used by the center to
increase the integration of the provinces. Inspired by the studies being carried
out in other imperial contexts, works by Selim Deringil, Ussama Makdisi,
Christoph Herzog, Raoul Motika, Thomas Kühn, and Isa Blumi have enlarged
the conceptual arsenal of historiography related to the Ottoman Empire. In
this article, I will briefly examine the hypotheses put forward in this body of
literature with a view to encouraging its critical interpretation.
Ottoman “Colonialism” and “Orientalism”
In spite of a number of nuances in terms of argument, “Ottoman colonialism”3


is defined in this literature by referring to its own concepts, all of which derive
explicitly or implicitly from studies concerning the history of colonialism –
”Ottoman orientalism,”4 “orientalism alla turca,”5 “the Ottoman civilizing
3. Selim Deringil, “‘They Live in a State of Nomadism and Savagery:’ the Late Ottoman Empire
and the Post-Colonial Debate,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 45, no. 2 (April 2003):
333-335, and 338, doi:10.1017/S001041750300015X . See also the articles by Isa Blumi included in a
book entitled Rethinking the Late Ottoman Empire. A Comparative Social and Political History of Albania
and Yemen 1878-1918 (Istanbul: ISIS Press, 2003), particularly the article entitled “Understanding the
Margins of Albanian History: Communities on the Edges of the Ottoman Empire,” 83-101.
4. Ussama Makdisi, “Ottoman Orientalism,” American Historical Review 107, no. 3 (June 2002):
768-796. We should note that the concept of orientalism has also been applied to republican Turkey:
Emmanuel Szurek, “Go West. Variations sur le cas Kémaliste,” in Après l’orientalisme. L’Orient créé par
l’Orient, ed. François Pouillon and Jean-Claude Vatin (Paris: IISMM-Karthala, 2011), 303-325. For
a summary in French of the argument concerning the differences involved in “Ottoman orientalism”,
see François Georgeon, “Le génie de l’ottomanisme. Essai sur la peinture orientaliste d’Osman Hamdi
(1842-1910),” Turcica 42 (2010): 165; Edhem Eldem, Un Ottoman en Orient. Osman Hamdi Bey en Irak,
1869-1870 (Arles, France: Actes Sud, 2010); Edhem Eldem, “Les Ottomans, un empire en porte-à-
faux,” in Pouillon and Vatin, Après l’orientalisme, 285-302, particularly pages 296-299.
5. Christoph Herzog and Raoul Motika, “Orientalism alla turca: Late 19 th /Early 20 th Century
Ottoman Voyages into the Muslim ‘Outback,’” Die Welt des Islams 40, no. 2 (July 2000): 139-195,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/1570642.
THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES III
mission,”6 “the Ottoman man’s burden,” 7 “modern Ottoman imperialism,”8

“colonial Ottomanism,”9 “borrowed colonialism,” and “the Ottoman colonial
project”10 for instance.
According to this literature, “Ottoman colonialism” emerged during the
second half of the nineteenth century. The Ottoman elite thus adopted the
ways of thinking of their enemies, the great imperialist nations, and began
to conceive of their boundaries as part of a colonial setting. In other words,
it is a worldview that appeared during the second half of the nineteenth cen-
tury among members of the central bureaucracy, who used it to formulate
a discourse of difference with regard to the inhabitants of the peripheral
provinces of the empire. It is a question of a new imperialist attitude along
European lines that consisted in maintaining an ever-increasing moral dis-
tance separating the imperial central elite from the population living in the
outlying provinces.11
This periphery was made up essentially of the Arab countries within the
Ottoman Empire.12 At the end of the day, a sort of “metropolitan arrogance”13
was becoming increasingly obvious and was expressed more and more in order
to legitimize the reforms introduced in the peripheral areas by the center. In
other words, in order to legitimize the centralist measures undertaken during
the age of reform, a discourse of difference was being created and deployed by
the central elite. The historians in question refer to this discourse of difference
as “Ottoman orientalism.” The latter establishes a hierarchy between the cen-
ter and the peripheral areas, with the center being associated with modernity
and civilization while the periphery is reduced to the survival or revival of a
tradition that ought to have been outmoded – expunged in fact – in order to
bring the Ottoman state into modernity. In consequence, this discourse was

necessarily accompanied by a rhetoric concerned with civilization and based
on the binary opposition of the civilized versus the savage (medenî/vahşî).
6. Herzog and Motika, “Orientalism alla turca,” 151; Christoph Herzog, “Nineteenth-Century
Baghdad through Ottoman Eyes,” in The Empire in the City: Arab Provincial Capitals in the Late Ottoman
Empire, ed. Jens Hanssen, Thomas Philipp, and Stefan Weber (Beirut: Ergon Verlag, 2002), 311-328;
Thomas Kühn, “Ordering Urban Space in Ottoman Yemen, 1872-1914,” in Hanssen, Philipp, and
Weber, The Empire in the City, 336; Deringil, “They Live in a State,” 311.
7. Makdisi, “Ottoman Orientalism,” 782.
8. Ussama Makdisi, “Rethinking Ottoman Imperialism: Modernity, Violence and the Cultural
Logic of Ottoman Reform,” in Hanssen, Philipp, and Weber, The Empire in the City, 30.
9. Thomas Kühn, “Shaping and Reshaping Colonial Ottomanism: Contesting Boundaries of
Difference and Integration in Ottoman Yemen.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the
Middle East 27, no. 2 (2007): 318.
10. Deringil, “They Live in a State,” 312-313, 315, 333, 335, 338-339.
11. Deringil, “They Live in a State,” 311-312 and 338.
12. I should also like to point out that the concept of “Ottoman colonialism” was recently used
in the context of intercommunity relations in İzmir: Vangelis Kechriotis, “Post-Colonial Criticism
and Muslim-Christian Relations in the (Very) Late Ottoman Empire: The Case of Smyrna/Izmir,”
in Ottoman Religious Communities, State and Colonialism in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century,
ed. Michalis N. Michael, Tassos Anastassiades, and Chantal Verdeil. (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag,
2013) (forthcoming).
13. Herzog, “Nineteenth-Century Baghdad,” 328.
IV REVUE D’HISTOIRE MODERNE & CONTEMPORAINE
Two types of criticism stemmed from this new imperialist attitude and its
discursive adjunct known as “Ottoman orientalism,” which established between
the center and the periphery a hierarchy unfavorable to the latter. Firstly, the
Ottoman traveler or administrator from an urban milieu frequently criticized
the Bedouins and their way of life. Secondly, criticism of a rhetorical nature
was leveled against the disordered state of the urban space in the peripheral
cities. We should emphasize that, to this end, accounts written by Ottomans,
who visited the Arab cities within the empire, such as Beirut, Damascus, and
Baghdad, abound with criticism for their narrow, dirty streets. We might add
that often these criticisms also concern the urban populations of these outlying
cities, whose ignorance is constantly in the line of fire.
Briefly summarized thus, a more historical approach should be adopted in
order to scrutinize the main arguments of this new historiographical literature.
This would allow for more reflection concerning both the conceptual limita-
tions of “Ottoman colonialism” and “Ottoman orientalism” and the notions
that are part and parcel of the same semantic field.
Historicity and the “Jeux d’échelles”
We should begin, first of all, by making a few remarks on these two types of
criticism on which the arguments used by the historians discussing Ottoman
colonialism are founded. Firstly, two interpretative problems can be discerned,
one deriving essentially from an oversight concerning the historicity of the
conceptual categories and the other from the “jeux d’échelles” effect on histori-
cal analysis.
The binary opposition between civilization (hazariyet) and tribal mentality

(bedeviyet) is of fundamental importance in Islamic political philosophy. During
the first quarter of the nineteenth century, when the concept of “civilization”
first appeared in Ottoman political thought with a Western connotation, the
word hazariyet, which might very well have been used to translate this concept
into something Ottoman, was not favored for this use owing to the fact that it
had a negative semantic connotation in which an idea of decline and luxury
was implied.14 Jean-François Bayart reminds us that the opposition between
“civilization” (medeniyet) and tribal mentality (bedeviyet) was one of the con-
stituent factors in the Pax Ottomanica, legitimizing imperial hegemony over
the Ottoman countries.15 The word for civilization in Ottoman – medeniyet
– comes from Medina, the name of the second-most holy city in Islam, which
14. Tuncer Baykara, “Bir kelime-ıstılah ve zihniyet olarak ‘medeniyet’ in Türkiye’ye girişi,” in
Osmanlılar’da Medeniyet Kavramı ve Ondokuzuncu Yüzyıla Dair Araştırmalar, ed. Tuncer Baykara
(İzmir: Akademi Kitabevi, 1999), 29-30. See also his other works in the same volume: “‘Civilisation’
ve Osmanlı devleti” and “Mustafa Reşid Paşa’nın medeniyet anlayışı,” 1-14 and 33-37 respectively.
15. Jean-François Bayart, “De l’Empire ottoman à la République de Turquie: la tentation coloniale”
(paper presented at the colloquium “L’Orientalisme désorienté? La Turquie contemporaine au miroir des
THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES V
simply means “city” in Arabic and is an Ottoman neologism apparently dating

from the first quarter of the nineteenth century. In other words, the etymology
of the term chosen for this new concept harks back to a quasi-ancestral senti-
ment concerning the “cultural difference between representatives of urban
civilisation and the desert nomad.”16
We should note, however, that scholars have been at pains to emphasize the
ambiguous character of a critique that vacillates between condemnation of the
nomad and his lack of civilization and admiration for his kindly, welcoming,
honorable, generous, courageous, and unspoiled nature, as well as his moral
integrity, as distinct from modern man whose morals are both disgusting
and corrupt. Is not the fact that Ottoman bureaucrats described part of the
population living in the peripheral regions as “nomadic” (bedevî) – ”savage”
in fact – sufficient to account for a colonial or colonialist rhetoric?
Even if it is true that the concept of “civilization” expressed by the word
medeniyet shows Western influence on Ottoman political thought,17 to construct
analyses of “Ottoman orientalism” based essentially on this Western influence
appears to be problematical. The word medeniyet appears in an official Ottoman
document of 1831, more precisely in the editorial of the first issue of the official
Ottoman journal, Takvîm-i vekayi (Chronicle of Events). The centralizing policies
promoted by the Ottoman state were described there as being “modernizing
measures” (ûsûl-i medeniyete teşebbüs) in accordance with a centralizing admin-
istrative approach.18 The term medeniyet appeared in Ottoman dictionaries
during the 1830s and 1840s, firstly in the sense of politeness, improvement,
moral development, and self-betterment, and rapidly acquiring the meaning of
“civilization” and becoming, from the 1860s on, an indispensable element in
centralist bureaucratic parlance. But to move from there to an interpretation,

in a nineteenth century Ottoman context, of the duality between civilization
versus tribal mentality (medeniyet/bedeviyet) or civilized versus nomadic or
savage (medenî/bedevî or vahşî), as a discourse of difference created between
the modern, the civilized, and the Western on one hand, and the traditional,
the savage, the Eastern, on the other, involves a huge intellectual reductionism.
We would do well to repeat Marc Aymes’s warning here: “Did you say ‘sav-
age?’ Let us learn to recognize the time-honored symbol of the pact made by
the Ottoman government before allowing ourselves to be carried away by the
approches postcoloniales” organized by the Institut d’études politiques, Rennes, France, January 28-29,
2010); text available at http://www.fasopo.org/cv/jf/encours/28012010.pdf (see in this case page 30).
16. Herzog and Motika, “Orientalism alla turca,” 192-193.
17. We should bear in mind the fact that the notion of “civilization” appeared in France at the
turn of the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries and that its consolidation only took place during the
1830s with the courses run by Guizot on “the history of civilization in France” (December 1828 to
May 1830) and then on “the history of civilization in Europe” (April-July 1830). On the meanders
of the history of the word “civilization,” see: Bertrand Binoche, “Civilisation: le mot, le scheme et
le maître-mot.” In Les équivoques de la civilisation, ed. Bertrand Binoche (Seyssel, France: Champ
Vallon, 2005), 9-30.
18. Ahmed Lûtfî Efendi, Vak’anüvîs Ahmed Lûtfî Efendi Tarihi (Istanbul: YKY, 1999), 2-3:651-654.
VI REVUE D’HISTOIRE MODERNE & CONTEMPORAINE
paratext of a stigmatizing colonialism.”19 We should also emphasize the fact

that, in his book, Thomas Kühn constantly historicizes the politics of difference
implemented by the Ottoman authorities. Thanks to this historicization he is
able to avoid the principal methodological error from which other historians
have been unable to escape. Kühn demonstrates that the discourse and poli-
tics of difference used by the center with regard to the periphery at the end of
the nineteenth century remain part of traditional imperial practice – in other
words, they were inspired by modes of thought and categorization concerned
with differentiation that predate the advent of modern colonialism.20
Next, we should take a look at the Europocentric stance adopted by Otto-
man travelers toward the peripheral provincial cities of the empire and the
criticism that resulted from it. This Europocentric stance is a historical fact.
It really did exist. The problem is that by provincializing imperial history, a
perspective that does undeniably have a part to play, these historians seem
to lose sight of the imperial dimension, giving rise to the regionalization of a
phenomenon that, in fact, clearly has an imperial character.21 An interpretation
of the criticism leveled by Ottoman travelers at “Arab” cities as constituting the
expression of an “Ottoman orientalism” or “orientalism alla turca” comes down
to believing and suggesting that other cities within the empire – those at the
center, and the capital in particular – were exempt from this type of criticism.
Indeed, these types of criticism share common ground in a modernist dis-
course in which the principles of modern Ottoman urbanism, contemporaneous
with the new European urbanism that emerged at the start of the nineteenth
century, are taken up.22 The same criticisms, formulated in exactly the same
terms, are made by numerous Ottoman writers toward Istanbul – the imperial
center and the center of the Ottoman world par excellence. Accounts written by

Ottoman travelers in Europe abound in comparisons made between Istanbul and
European cities, always giving rise to negative conclusions that are unfavorable
to the imperial capital.23 We might also add that all writings on “the problems”
19. Marc Aymes, “Un texte sans titre” (paper presented at the colloquium ““L’Orientalisme
désorienté? La Turquie contemporaine au miroir des approches postcoloniales” organized by the
Institut d’études politiques, Rennes, France, January 28-29, 2010), 11.
20. Thomas Kühn, Empire, Islam and Politics of Difference: Ottoman Rule in Yemen, 1849-1919
(Leiden, Netherlands: Brill).
21. On this subject, see similar remarks made by Hopkins on certain changes in the historiography
of the British Empire: Antony G. Hopkins, “Back to the Future: from National History to Imperial
History,” Past & Present 164, no. 1 (August 1999): 198 and 215-216, doi:10.1093/past/164.1.198.
22. On this subject, we might refer to the works of Stéphane Yerasimos, “Occidentalisation de
l’espace urbain: Istanbul 1839 – 1871. Les textes réglementaires comme sources d’histoire urbaine,”
in Les villes dans l’Empire ottoman: activités et sociétés, ed. Daniel Panzac (Paris: CNRS, 1991), 97-119;
Stéphane Yerasimos, “À propos des réformes urbaines des Tanzimat,” in Villes ottomanes à la fin de
l’empire, ed. Paul Dumont and François Georgeon (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1992), 17-32; Stéphane Yera-
simos, “La réglementation urbaine ottomane (XVI-XIXe siècle),” in Hommes et idées dans l’espace otto-
man, ed. Stéphane Yerasimos (Istanbul: Istanbul: ISIS Press, 1997), 217-288. See also Uğur Tanyeli,
“Transfer of Western Urban Planning Concepts and Techniques to Turkey,” in Transfer of Modern
Science and Technology to the Muslim World (Istanbul: IRCICA, 1992), 345-363.
23. Bâki Asiltürk, Osmanlı seyyahlarının gözüyle Avrupa (Istanbul: Kaknüs Yayınları, 2000).
THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES VII
of urbanism deriving from the urban spatial organization – which was not in
keeping with contemporary Western norms – of Ottoman cities in general and
the imperial capital in particular are necessarily pervaded by a strong rhetoric of
civilization. In other words, Ottoman authors writing at the time of the reforms
up until the era of the Young Turks – that is to say, from approximately the 1840s
up until the 1910s – made criticisms of urbanism always through the rhetoric
of civilization.24 In this respect, there is nothing to distinguish their opinions of
the peripheral cities of the empire from those related to their capital.
Moreover, historians who discern an “Ottoman orientalism” based essen-
tially on travel literature seem to disregard one of the elementary rules of the
historian’s skills, namely a critical reading of the source material. Travel lit-
erature is a literary genre like any other. From a methodological point of view,
any reading of travel literature that does not take into account its ideological
dimension and, above all, the narrative conventions of the genre, can lead to
overly hasty and erroneous conclusions. The “intrinsically volatile” 25 charac-
ter of travel literature, to borrow an apt expression coined by Sarga Moussa,
should put the historian who uses it on his or her guard.
Colonialism without Colonies
We should, moreover, clarify that we are referring here to “Ottoman colo-

nialism” in the absence of colonies. It is a matter, therefore, of colonialism
without colonies.26 A criticism of this theoretical extrapolation does not mean,
however, that the Ottoman Empire had no imperial ambitions; these were
crystallized at the Berlin Conference on Africa organized in 1884-1885. In
order to protect the imperial interests of their “Sublime State” in Africa, the

Ottoman diplomats, who were great masters in the art of diplomacy, adopted
a very “legalistic” approach and, during the final decades of the nineteenth
century, they put forward arguments based on rights inherited from the past
and the notion of precedent. To this end, the concept of hinterland was con-
stantly used by the Ottomans.27
24. The case of the intergenerational intellectual Ebüzziya Tevfik (1849-1913) represents a good
example of this point. See my article: Özgür Türesay, “L’Istanbul du début du XXe siècle au prisme
eurocentrique. L’urbanisme et la civilisation selon Ebüzziya Tevfik (1849-1913),” Anthropology of the
Middle East 6, no. 1 (2011): 253.
25. Sarga Moussa, “Le récit de voyage, genre pluridisciplinaire. À propos des Voyages en Égypte
au XIXe siècle,” Sociétés & Représentations 21, no 1 (2006): 253. Also see the comments made by Tzvetan
Todorov concerning travel literature: Tzvetan Todorov, “Les Récits de voyages et le colonialisme,” Le
Débat 1, no. 18 (1982): 94-101.
26. For a critique of the theoretical construction of “colonialism without colonies,” and its
derivative “internal colonialism,” see Jürgen Osterhammel, “‘Colonialisme’ et ‘Empires coloniaux,’”
Labyrinthe 35 (2010): 61.
27. Selim Deringil, “Les Ottomans et le partage de l’Afrique, 1880-1900,” in Studies on Ottoman
Diplomatic History, ed. Selim Deringil and Sinan Kuneralp (Istanbul: ISIS, 1990), 5:121-133; Michel
Le Gall, “A New Ottoman Outlook on Africa: Note on the Turn of the Century Literature,” in Deringil
and Kuneralp, Studies on Ottoman Diplomatic History, 144.
VIII REVUE D’HISTOIRE MODERNE & CONTEMPORAINE
It is a matter, here, of the sort of imperial attitude described by Deringil

as “borrowed colonialism” that was “fated to remain an art of the possible.”28
Thence, colonialism without colonies. Others have interpreted the same
phenomenon as the defensive imperialism of a state lacking the military and
financial means to resist the advance of European imperialism, a contract-
ing empire feeling the need to struggle against expanding empires in order
to survive.29 The Ottoman Empire frequently found that it was necessary to
show an imperial attitude, even if, for want of resources, it was not actively
engaged in colonial practices. This might be compared with the numerous
preventative conquests made by Western colonial empires in the nineteenth
century30 in order to impede the claims of a rival Western state in a given ter-
ritory. As Michel Le Gall has emphasized, this attitude can often be seen in a
Pan-Islamist rhetoric that comes close to the argument put forward in “The
White Man’s Burden.”31
It therefore seems that it would be more correct to speak of imperial – rather
than imperialist – politics and attitudes leading to colonial situations in given
areas and at given times.32 Additionally, it has to be admitted that, as far as
determining these places and times is concerned, it has only been possible to
come up with a single example: that of the province of Yemen, particularly
during the Second Constitutional Monarchy – in other words after 1908. We
should dwell here on this particular case as it is unique. It was the only part of
the Ottoman Empire where a few resident bureaucrats imagined that it would
be preferable to confer a colonial status – but with one qualification: this was
only just before the Treaty of Da’an in 1911.33
Should we not also remember that Yemen represents a sizeable exception
in another respect? The province was annexed by the Ottoman Empire right

at the beginning of the imperialist era, in other words between 1871 and
1873. The Ottomans, in a sense, invaded this country, even if the historian
Ahmed Raşid, the author of a history of this annexation, has been at pains
to point out that the expedition was undertaken for preventative reasons in
order to protect Muslim territory from Christian colonialists. The Ottoman
28. Deringil, “They Live in a State,” 339.

29. Dina Rizk Khoury and Dane Keith Kennedy, “Comparing Empires: The Ottoman Domains
and the British Raj in the Long Nineteenth Century,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the
Middle East 27, no. 2 (2007): 233.
30. On the politics of preventative conquests, see Jane Burbank and Frederic Cooper, “‘Nouvelles’
colonies et ‘vieux’ empires,” Mil Neuf Cent. Revue d’Histoire Intellectuelle 27, no. 1 (2009): 14-15 and 35.
31. Le Gall, “A New Ottoman Outlook,” 139-140.
32. Jens Hanssen, Thomas Philipp, and Stefan Webber, “Towards a New Urban Paradigm,” in
Hanssen, Philipp, and Weber, The Empire in the City, 8.
33. Kühn, “Shaping and Reshaping,” 330. This concerns Abdülgani Seni (1871-1951), who
published a number of articles in defense of this idea in 1909-1910. See also Kühn, “Ordering Urban
Space,” 343. We should note here that Klaus Kreiser has described Abdülgani Seni as an “enlightened
imperialist:” Klaus Kreiser, “Abdülgani Seni – ein aufgeklärter Imperialist im Jemen (1909-1910),”
Jemen-Report. Mitteilungen der Deutsch-Jemenitischen Gesellschaft 20, no. 1 (1989): 11-15; and Klaus
Kreiser, “Abdülgani Seni (1871-1951) comme observateur de l’administration ottomane au Yémen,”
Revue d’Histoire Maghrebine 31-32 (1983): 315-319.
THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES IX
bureaucrats, however, had developed an argument similar to that used by the

European colonizers, which defined the local populations as “savage.” The
Ottoman governmental structure in Yemen began to be substantially different
from that of the rest of the empire from the end of the 1880s.
However, even in the case of Yemen, the similarities with European colonial-
ism end here. We might, like Jens Hanssen, ask whether it is possible to imagine
Indian notables occupying seats at Westminster.34 We might also ask whether
we can compare parliamentary representation under the Ottoman Empire with
the French colonial empire, where exceptional regimes were the norm in terms
of citizenship, in spite of the principles espoused by the French Revolution.35
A distinction between indigenous subjects and metropolitan citizens, as was
the case in France, with the exception of some regional exceptions that lasted
only a few years – which moreover involved nonproportional representation
for the indigenous population – was unthinkable in the context of the Ottoman
Empire. As for the Russian Empire, the question of political representation for
non-Russian populations did not involve the idea of proportional representation
either.36 Under the Ottoman Empire, the question of political representation
was not put forward in terms of ethnic or confessional communities, but was
made on an individual basis. All the subjects living under the Ottoman Empire
were Ottoman citizens and enjoyed the same political rights.
There is, therefore, nothing surprising in the fact that two Yemeni deputies
represented their territory, which had recently been conquered by the Otto-
mans, in the first Ottoman parliament (1877-1878). Moreover, there would
always be Yemeni deputies in the Ottoman parliaments during the Second
Constitutional Monarchy (1908-1918). The Ottoman administrators held a
more inclusive view of the “ottomanness” of the Yemeni population during
the 1870s and 1880s. It was only over time, and inspired by the example of

the Italian and British colonies in the vicinity of Yemen, that they were to
conclude that the province should be given a colonial status. Paradoxically,
even if Yemen was to be governed as a colony, according to the bureaucrats,
the Yemenis would continue to be Ottoman citizens in the full sense of the
word.37 From this single example, we are able to demonstrate the ontological
incompatibility that exists between the traditional Ottoman imperial modes
of thought and categorization and the political and legal categories along the
lines of which the colonial empires were founded.
34. Jens Hanssen, “Practices of Integration – Center-Periphery Relations in the Ottoman Empire,”
in Hanssen, Philipp, and Weber, The Empire in the City, 70.
35. For an overview of the subject, see Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, “Empire, droits et
citoyenneté constitutionnelle des empires,” Annales Histoire, Sciences Sociales 63, no. 3 (May-June,
2008): 533-560, and Emmanuelle Saada, “Citoyens et sujets de l’empire français. Les usages du droit
en situation coloniale,” Genèses 53 (December 2003): 4-24.
36. Juliette Cadiot, “Un Empire ‘un et indivisible’? La question de la représentation politique des
non Russes à la Douma après la révolution de 1905 (1905-1907),” Cahiers du monde russe 48, no. 2-3
(April-September, 2007): 221-242.
37. Kühn, “Shaping and Reshaping,” 316 and 318; Kühn, “Ordering Urban Space,” 343-345.
X REVUE D’HISTOIRE MODERNE & CONTEMPORAINE
In order to carry out this critical interpretation of literature concerning

“Ottoman colonialism,” we should also consider the imperial nature of the
Ottoman Empire during the age of reform. During the nineteenth century the
Ottoman administrative system claimed to be centralized. In other words, it
was no longer a question of applying the principle of the “differentiating type
of government characteristical of empires.”38 The nineteenth was the century
of administrative centralization as far as the Ottoman Empire was concerned.
It was as part of this process that a redefinition of the relations between the
central government and the provinces took place, particularly those which
were “peripheral.” We might note, along with Hanssen that
[w]hereas British rule was marked by extra geographical, cultural administrative
distance between ruler and ruled, by contrast, the Ottoman system of provincial rule […]
had a long and diverse tradition of interaction at all levels of society between the imperial
center and the provincial peripheries.39
For his part, Deringil apparently also returns to the same point when
he emphasizes the fact that populations from the peripheral provinces had
very superior powers of negotiation in relation to the Ottoman center if we
compare them with the peoples colonized by Great Britain and France.40 We
might also continue to reflect on the essential point differentiating “Ottoman
colonialism” from French or British colonialism through another semantic
pair, namely, “ruled” and “rulers.”
The Periphery and the Center : “Ruled” and “Rulers?”
I will use these two terms ruled and rulers to refer directly to European colonial-
ism since an understanding of the colonial phenomenon is impossible without

this ontological distinction.
First of all, in the case of the Ottomans, we should emphasize that the
majority of the population from the peripheral provinces – the “ruled” that
are our focus here – were of the same religion and the same confession as the
officials from the central bureaucracy or the “rulers.” This fact is of monu-
mental importance.41 This is to say that, unlike British or French colonialism,
“Ottoman colonialism” cannot constitute the expression of religious superiority
in comparison with the populations of the peripheral provinces.42
38. Concerning “the principle of the differentiating type of government,” see the comments made
by Pieter M. Judson, “L’Autriche-Hongrie était-elle un empire?” Annales Histoire, Sciences Sociales 63,
no. 3 (May-June 2008): 577-578 and 589.
39. Hanssen, “Practices of Integration,” 57. [Translator’s note: Quotation back-translated from
the French-language version of this article.]
40. Deringil, “They Live in a State,” 340.
41. The importance of the existence or nonexistence of historical and cultural connections between
“rulers” and “ruled” in the context of imperial domination is aptly emphasized in a comparative study
by Michael Adas: Michael Adas, “Imperialism and Colonialism in Comparative Perspectives,” The
International History Review 202 (1998): 382 and 386.
42. Of course, the Hamidian policy concerning the Sunnification of “heretical” populations can, to
a certain extent, be understood as a policy of internal colonization. See Selim Deringil, The Well-Protected
THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES XI
Since we are speaking here of “Ottoman colonialism,” we should examine

the criteria distinguishing “ruled” from “rulers.” As it is not a question here
of a difference in religious affiliation, a political line of demarcation ought
to exist. These populations, since they were “ruled,” ought not to have been
represented in the Ottoman parliaments during the first two periods of consti-
tutional monarchy (1877-1878 and 1908-1918), as was the case concerning the
peoples colonized by the British or French. Yet, the fact remains that they were
very well represented in the Ottoman parliaments. This is unsurprising, since
they were Ottoman citizens in their own right and enjoyed the same liberties
and political rights as their compatriots in Istanbul. Indeed, do not both the
nature of Ottoman administrative reform during the nineteenth century and its
underlying political philosophy require this “equality?” The Ottoman parlia-
ment was, after all, nothing other than the culmination of a process involving
the incorporation of the provinces.43 This representation was not, moreover,
limited to the imperial level. The provincial councils political structures that
allow the historian to take the origins of representative government under the
Ottoman Empire back to the first half of the nineteenth century – to the start
of the 1840s in fact.44
It is, therefore, not religious affiliation, confessional antagonism, or
political and legal discrimination that distinguishes the populations of these
peripheral provinces from those of the center. A third hypothesis presup-
poses ethnic differences. In fact, the very same historians who developed the
concept of “Ottoman colonialism” are given to pointing out that the central
bureaucracy was not really limited to officials of “Turkish” extraction.45 In
other words, the process of development, articulation, institutionalization, and
expression concerning the cultural differences between the imperial center

and the peripheral provinces was not the prerogative of the Ottoman “Turks.”
The “Ottoman orientalism,” or “orientalism alla turca,” defined by Ussama
Makdisi, Christoph Herzog, and Raoul Motika is representative of a language
and an attitude shared by bureaucrats from the central administration, what-
ever their ethnolinguistic origins.46 We should add that ethnolinguistic origin
Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876-1909 (London: I. B. Tauris,
1998), 68-92. That said, the policy of Sunnification only served to legitimize the Hamidian political
power internally and was not intended to provide the Ottoman Empire with the means of conquering
and colonizing outside the country. Moreover, the overwhelming majority of the population in the Arab
countries under the Ottoman Empire was Sunni, as was the imperial ruling elite.
43. Hanssen, “Practices of Integration,” 70.
44. Roderic H. Davison, “The Advent of the Principle of Representation in the Government of
the Ottoman Empire,” in Essays in Ottoman and Turkish History 1774 – 1923, ed. Roderic H. Davison
(London: Saqi Books, 1990), 96-111; and Stanford Shaw, “The Central Legislative Councils in the
Nineteenth Century Reform Movement before 1876,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 1
(1970): 51-84.
45. This does not mean, however, that Ottomanism – the ideology and egalitarian discourse that
characterized the age of reforms – was based on a completely egalitarian logic of inclusion. As Deringil
emphasizes, the “professional peregrination” of an Ottoman bureaucrat had limitations, since thirty-four
out of the thirty-nine last Ottoman grand viziers were Turks. See Deringil, “They Live in a State,” 338.
46. Herzog, “Nineteenth-Century Baghdad,” 312 and Makdisi, “Ottoman Orientalism,” 790.
XII REVUE D’HISTOIRE MODERNE & CONTEMPORAINE
is also not a pertinent category for the analysis of Ottoman society, in which
multilingualism was far from being a marginal phenomenon.
We can see that this “Ottoman colonialism,” “Ottoman orientalism,” or
“orientalism alla turca” and the distant and disdainful attitude accompanying,
justifying, and legitimizing it cannot be consistent with religious, political,
and legal, or indeed ethnolinguistic, differentiation. It is more a matter of a
demarcation line being drawn between the imperial center and its provincial
periphery. We should, therefore, take a critical look at the mechanisms of
exclusion deployed by the center against the provinces. It is, thus, neces-
sary to consider – as Marc Aymes has done in a recent article – the notion of
exteriority inherent in the conceptual creation that is “the province,” namely,
“the province as an ‘outsider,’ outside the civilized city, in particular in the
image of the countryside or the desert . . . in short, Istanbul and the Ottoman
desert.”47 Even if his reflections are principally relevant to an era other than
the nineteenth century and another geographical context, we should also cite
Alain Corbin in order to show the sense of exclusion contained in the concept
of province: “The semantic province, connected with the centralization of
the descriptions and reality of power, is founded on exclusion. For this reason
part of it is immediately linked to derision.”48 Let us recapitulate: a province,
then, comes down to exteriority, exclusion, and derision.
A Sociological Interpretation : From Ethnic Lens to Social Class
In addition, a discussion of the problem in sociological terms would appear

to be as relevant as a discussion involving the significant division between the
center and the periphery. Asking the question in ethnic or national terms leads

not only to a methodological error, but also involves a political danger, namely,
that of undermining – or eradicating – the importance of the strategies of social
differentiation during the period under study. In other words, there is a risk
of not understanding the true character of the integration and participation
of the elite within each community in terms of the discourse and imperial
practices utilized by the center. In fact, by using this type of approach, it is
possible to neglect the discursive domination endured by the more popular
layers of the Ottoman population.49 In fact, there are two separate conflicts in
common action here: first, the sociological division of “the center versus the
periphery” crystallized in the antagonism between Ottoman bureaucrats from
47. Marc Aymes, “Provincialiser l’empire. Chypre et la Méditerranée ottomane au XIXe siècle,”
Annales Histoire, Sciences Sociales 62, no. 6 (November-December 2007): 1317.
48. Alain Corbin, “Paris-Province,” in Les lieux de mémoire, vol. 3, Les France. 1. Conflits et part-
ages, ed. Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 778.
49. This danger is aptly emphasized in a recent article by Edip Gölbaşi: “19. yüzyıl Osmanlı
emperyal siyaseti ve Osmanlı tarih yazımında kolonyal perspektifler,” Tarih ve Toplum Yeni Yaklaşımlar 13
(2011): 203.
THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES XIII
the imperial center and the peripheral provincial populations and, second, the
sociocultural hostility between the Ottoman nobility and the more popular
levels of society. This reifying viewpoint concerning the provincial and/or
peripheral populations, at once all-encompassing and reductive, is not, in fact,
that of the colonizer, but rather that of the Ottoman nobleman.
In other words, this is a new form of expression for the historical sentiment
of sociocultural and political superiority held by the imperial elite. An identity
connected with Istanbul also counts for something. We are undoubtedly being
faced with exoticism50 here, but it is a “social” one. I believe that the concept
of “social exoticism” is more appropriate than concepts such as “social arro-
gance” or, indeed, “social contempt” to express the idea put forward below.
Indeed, the word exoticism, even when the qualifier social is omitted, refers
etymologically to another essential idea intrinsic to the habitus51 of the Ottoman
bureaucrats, one that has been misinterpreted by historians, who discern in it
an “Ottoman orientalism: the notion of exteriority inherent in the conceptual
creation represented by the “province.” In order to explain how this “exoti-
cism” is also “social,” we must adopt a more theoretical perspective, bearing
in mind a fundamental aspect of the Ottoman organization and sociopolitical
order, that of the dual division running through society.
In fact, the Ottoman sociopolitical order depended on two demarcation
lines that divided the population of the empire. The first involved the line
dividing the Muslim from the non-Muslim community. It is a question here
of denominational categorization serving a legal and administrative purpose,
a discriminatory line regarding non-Muslim Ottomans and one that was
abolished – at least officially – at the time of the centralizing reforms. The
second line of demarcation, which is sociopolitical, separated the askerî (lit-

erally “military men”), that is to say, the servants of the Ottoman state, who
paid no taxes and comprised about one or two percent of the population, from
the reaya (literally “the flock”) or tax-paying Ottoman subjects, that is to say
contributors, comprising the overwhelming majority of the population within
the Ottoman Empire.52 The askerî class included men of the sword (seyfiye),
scribes (kalemiye), and men of learning (ilmiye) as well as their wives and
50. For a historical critique concerning the concept of “exoticism,” see: Anaïs Fléchet, “L’exotisme
comme objet d’histoire,” Hypothèses 1 (2007): 15-26. We should note here that the word exoticism implies
the idea of a certain type of fascination for a foreign culture, a phenomenon that cannot be discerned
in the arrogant attitude of the Ottoman bureaucrats.
51. Regarding the definition of the term habitus, I have been inspired by Pierre Bourdieu. In
order to emphasize its historicity, I will cite Bourdieu’s definition of habitus as a “matrix of perceptions,
appreciations, and actions, the outcome of the individual and social history of an agent, conditioning
his practices.” See his work: Pierre Bourdieu, Les Règles de l’art. Genèse et structure du champ littéraire,
(Paris: Seuil, 1992), 251-253; and Pierre Bourdieu, “Quelques propriétés des champs,” in Questions
de sociologie, (Paris: Minuit, 1984), 113-120 (especially 119-120).
52. On this division in Ottoman society, see Halil Sahillioğlu, “Askerî,” Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı
İslâm Ansiklopedisi, (Istanbul, Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı, 1991), 3:488-489; Halil İnalcik, The Ottoman
Empire. The Classical Age 1300-1600, 3rd ed. (London: Phoenix Press, 2003), 67-69, and especially
Gilles Veinstein, “Asker et re‘aya: aperçu sur les ordres dans la société ottomane,” in Le Concept de
XIV REVUE D’HISTOIRE MODERNE & CONTEMPORAINE
children. It was for this group that the appellation Ottoman was reserved up
until the second half of the nineteenth century. Up until this time, only those
who served the Sublime Ottoman State were “Ottomans.”
Even if the theoretical impenetrability of the two groups does not always
seem to have been respected in reality,53 this line of social, political, and legal
demarcation – the very essence of the Ottoman sociopolitical order – remained
entirely functional in the nineteenth century despite the centralizing and
egalitarian reforms in progress from the 1830s onwards.54 Historians have
demonstrated clearly that the first line of demarcation, that is, the line existing
between Muslims and non-Muslims, persisted – outliving the Ottoman Empire
in fact – in spite of the fact that legal equality had been proclaimed between
all the subjects of the empire from the middle of the nineteenth century. So
what is there, then, to prevent us from thinking that the same phenomenon of
survival did not occur in the case of the two social classes mentioned above,
namely the servants of the state and the subjects liable for taxation? There are,
in fact, a number of indications to show that, on the contrary, the sociopoliti-
cal origin of the members of the imperial Ottoman elite in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries was a determining factor both in terms of their identity
and the formation of their world view.55 In other words, the members of the
imperial Ottoman elite did indeed perceive the world that surrounded them
through the lens of their social class.
There are, thus, two elements that seem to have created the boundaries
of this Ottoman “Orient” portrayed by the bureaucrats: sociopolitical and
sociocultural consciousness, or the Ottoman versus the popular masses, and
an urban identity connected specifically with Istanbul.
Another point of criticism concerning certain works cited in this article

concerns chronological ordering. Unlike the works of Thomas Kühn, in which
the chronological evolution of the outlook and perception held by the Otto-
man bureaucrats posted to Yemen and the colonial-type discourse deriving
from them are emphasized, the articles written by Ussama Makdisi are based
on an ahistorical line of argument. By drawing his anecdotal references from
the Second Constitutional Monarchy and even beyond – for he quotes from
Halide Edib’s memoirs, which date from 1926, to illustrate his ideas – Makdisi
is putting forward a Turkish nationalist vision that harks back to the middle
of the nineteenth century in order to explain the historical context in which
“Ottoman orientalism” and “modern Ottoman imperialism” apparently
classe dans l’analyse des sociétés méditerranéennes, XVIe -XXe siècles, ed. André Nouschi (Nice: Centre
de la Méditerranée moderne et contemporaine, 1978), 15-19.
53. Veinstein, “Asker et re‘aya,” 17.
54. Bernard Lewis is not of this opinion, and wrote in 1960 that, from the seventeenth century,
“the askerî status had lost its real meaning.” See his article “‘Askerî,” in Encyclopédie de l’Islam, new ed.
(Leiden: Brill, 1960), 1:733-734.
55. On this subject, see A. Teyfur Erdoğdu, “Osmanlılığın evrimi hakkında bir deneme: bir grup
(üst düzey yönetici) kimliğinden millet yaratma projesine,” Doğu Batı 45 (2008): 19-46 (especially 45-46).
THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES XV
originated.56 Indeed, we should note here that this nationalist vision was only
consolidated on the eve of the First World War and not before then.57
In addition, if we adopt a wider chronological perspective that embraces
the Tanzimat period, the reign of Abdülhamid II, and the Young Turk era
(c. 1830-1918), it appears that the examples taken from the latter period should
be used with much more caution. As François Georgeon points out, Sultan
Abdülhamid II paid particular attention to the Arab provinces and the Arab
element increased in the central administration during this period.58 As a
result, his reign was associated in the minds of the Young Turks with the Arab
element. The Young Turk revolution was, moreover, very poorly received in
the Arab provinces.59 Associated as it was with the ancien régime, the image
of the Arab provinces under the Second Constitutional Monarchy was a par-
ticularly negative one. We should, therefore, take this temporary factor into
consideration during the use and interpretation of narrative sources concern-
ing the Arab provinces that date to just after the restoration of the Ottoman
Constitution in July 1908.
I do not deny the existence of a reifying view of the imperial center toward
the periphery, and of the Ottoman nobleman toward his compatriots of modest
social origin. However, as I have previously emphasized, this view did in fact
exist. It is, nevertheless, important to clarify what interpretation we should
give to it. The nuances are important, indeed, even decisive. Basing his ideas
on an analysis of several volumes from Malumat, a very influential popular
journal at the time, François Georgeon examines this view in one of his articles:
The Ottoman elite had, to a certain extent, internalized the perception held by Europe,
to the point where they projected onto their own territories a view that was, by definition, that
of the external colonizer concerning the colonized. Similarly, we might say that the Arabs

56. Makdisi, “Rethinking Ottoman Imperialism,” 45-46.
57. There has, to date, been only one critique of Makdisi’s first article entitled “Ottoman Oriental-
ism,” namely, Mehmet Akif Kayapınar’s article “Ussama Makdisi ve ‘Osmanlı oryantalizmi,’” Dîvân
20 (2006): 311-317. The author points out that Makdisi’s approach is erroneous owing to his method,
which is characterized by a “fixation of temporality.” According to Mehmet Akif Kayapınar, pursuing
his reflections inside the mind-set of the political structure that is the nation-state, Makdisi conceives of
the Ottoman past in terms of political realities occurring prior to the First World War. Thus, according
to Makdisi, the natural boundaries of the Ottoman Empire correspond to the territories occupied by
modern Turkey. In consequence, everything remaining outside Turkey is seen as constituting external
possessions. Similarly, the Turks are perceived as being the essential founding element of the Ottoman
Empire, while the other peoples living under the empire are considered to be populations conquered
by the Turks. We are, therefore, only at one step removed from the “Ottoman yoke” favored in Balkan
nationalist historiography. The observations made by Mehmet Akif Kayapınar are relevant in this
respect. He might also have pointed out that this entirely anachronistic view and type of reconstitution
of the Ottoman past are directly reminiscent of the views held by Turkish nationalists from the Young
Turk movement up until today. He might have demonstrated more readily that Makdisi’s approach
ultimately stems from a type of nationalism – Arab as it happens – that is ambiguous and paradoxical,
as is every nationalist understanding of the imperial Ottoman past.
58. François Georgeon, Abdülhamid II, le sultan calife (Paris: Fayard, 2003), 183-186.
59. Elie Kedourie, “The Impact of the Young Turk Revolution on the Arabic-Speaking Provinces
of the Ottoman Empire,” in Arabic Political Memoirs and Other Studies, ed. Elie Kedourie (London:
Frank Cass, 1974), 124-161.
XVI REVUE D’HISTOIRE MODERNE & CONTEMPORAINE
served as an “orientalist” outlet for the citizens of Istanbul, in the same way that colonial
territories fostered the dreams of “elsewhere” espoused by the French or English in 1900.
That said, François Georgeon is at pains to point out that this image was
primarily concerned with demonstrating the modernization undertaken by
the sultan:
The exoticism indulged in by Malumat did not stem . . . from the idea of the eternal,
unchanging Orient, implied by European orientalism. Far from it, it invited among readers
an awareness of the changes being undertaken by the central powers.60
In his book, Thomas Kühn makes similar observations regarding the views
held by the Ottoman bureaucrats in Yemen.61
This is where the fundamental difference lies between imperial practices
that derived from the arrogant superiority felt by Ottoman noblemen toward
the lower echelons of the population within their empire and colonialist prac-
tices that stemmed from the contempt felt by colonists toward the colonized.
The former aimed to eradicate gradually the cultural difference between two
sociopolitical groups belonging to the same political community, whereas the
latter tended consistently and systematically to replicate the same difference, so
as to be able to perpetuate the distinction between the metropolitan center
and the colony. In other words, the one intended to work toward integration
while the other was dedicated to perpetuating exclusion.
In concluding I would like to make one last criticism, this time of a general
and fundamental nature and with a bearing on the very essence of this body
of literature. This criticism concerns the use of the term colonialism, which is
too loose, used as it is to designate all the phenomena noted above. In other
words, I believe that it is inappropriate to refer to the new relationship that the
imperial Ottoman center began to foster with its peripheral provinces from

the middle of the nineteenth century as a type of colonialism. It seems to me
that these historians, who are undoubtedly contributing to the enrichment of
the historiography on the Ottoman empire of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries by focusing on the centralizing administrative measures and the
rhetoric connected with civilization during this period, have lost sight of the
fundamental elements of modern colonialism, a historical phenomenon asserted
during the second half of the nineteenth century.
European colonization during this period was certainly not new. It started
as part of a process already begun in the fifteenth century with the Age of
Discovery. However, after three centuries of colonial experience, the great age
of imperialist expansion was to begin round about 1870.
It is difficult to understand this new phenomenon without taking into
consideration all its fundamental aspects. Although I am aware of the fact
60. François Georgeon, “Exotisme et modernité: l’image des provinces arabes dans un magazine
ottoman vers 1900,” Osmanlı Araştırmaları 22 (2003): 216.
61. Kühn, “Empire, Islam,” 93-94.
THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES XVII
that “colonial circumstances unfolded in very different ways,”62 it is possible

to group these fundamental elements into four categories by combining con-
temporary arguments made in favor of colonialism and the real motivations
underlying modern colonization. And what better way to do this is there than
to turn to an entry in an encyclopedia? Firstly, the racist element linked to
the scientific theories concerning races and the adaptation of social Darwin-
ism to European expansion, whence the civilizing mission of the white man;
secondly, the missionary factor; thirdly, the economic motives conditioned
primarily by the Great Depression of 1873-1896 in Europe, which caused a
return to protectionism, whence the need to find considerable outlets to accom-
modate the human and industrial surplus as well as the surplus of capital in
the metropolitan centers; and, lastly, the colonial “parties” belonging to each
country, the various organizations established by soldiers, geographers, and
other stakeholders who encouraged their governments to follow them for
reasons of national prestige.63 Without the coexistence of these factors, it is
not modern colonialism.
Of the four constituent elements of modern colonialism, it is only in the
discourse concerning the Ottoman civilizing mission, without any racist or
racial coloring, that we can see a certain influence from European colonialism
affecting the world view held by the Ottoman bureaucrats from the imperial
center. It is difficult, not to say ridiculous, to think of the existence of a modern
colonialism without its underlying dynamics, above all if we are to rely purely
on the existence of a discourse drawn from a few narrative sources.
If orientalist discourse – and perhaps it might be preferable to speak
rather of orientalist representations – had any influence on the Ottoman elite
whatsoever, notably through the argument related to civilization, the view

that enlightened bureaucrats had of certain parts of their country was mark-
edly different from the orientalist view espoused by the colonizer toward the
colonized.64 For a correct interpretation of the otherness established between
the “modernizing center” and the “traditional province,” we must first of
all abandon the ethnic perspective. It is probably more pertinent to think in
terms of social exoticism rather than of metropolitan contempt in order to
62. Jean-François Bayart, “De l’Empire ottoman,” 5; and Burbank, and Cooper “‘Nouvelles’
colonies,” 26, 29-30 and 32. For a good theoretical summary of modern and imperialist colonialism,
we might refer to Osterhammel, “‘Colonialisme’ et ‘Empires,’” 57-67.
63. Jean Bruhat, “Colonialisme et anticolonialisme,” in Encyclopaedia Universalis (Paris: Ency-
clopedia Universalis, 1993), 6:116-120. On the fundamental aspects of colonial imperialism, see also
Hannah Arendt’s views: L’impérialisme, trans. Martine Leiris, (Paris: Fayard, 1982). For a recent and
comprehensive work, we might refer to Henri Wesseling, Les Empires coloniaux européens 1815-1919,
trans. Patrick Grilli, (Paris: Gallimard, 2009).
64. We should note here the timely caution of two historians concerning the risks inherent in the
comparative method adopted in recent studies connected with “empires:” “Difference – specificity
not freakishness – must come before similarity. The crucial point is that the Ottoman Empire was not
like any other empire. This, of course, let us stress, does not mean it is beyond comparison.” See: Alan
Mikhail and Christine M. Philliou, “The Ottoman Empire and the Imperial Turn,” Comparative Studies
in Society and History 54, no. 4 (2012): 743, doi: 10.1017/S0010417512000394.
XVIII REVUE D’HISTOIRE MODERNE & CONTEMPORAINE
be able to interpret this antagonism as being at least also a conflict between

the members of two social classes, the askerî and the reaya in the case under
analysis.65 Is this not really a matter of the reproduction of a social grammar
and the readjustment of a process of creating social otherness? Finally, why
should we not deepen our reflections on the notion of exteriority inherent in
the conceptual creation that is the “province” and on the possible changes
to these representations among reforming bureaucrats in the context of the
Ottoman Empire’s gradual increase in administrative centralization during
the nineteenth century?
Özgür T üresay
Department of Political Science,
Galatasaray University
Çirağan Cad. No. 36 34357,
Ortaköy-Istanbul, Turkey
turesayozgur@gmail.com
65. For this interpretation concerning a number of argumentative tensions mentioned here within
the imperial Ottoman context, we might take inspiration, all things being relative, from the brilliant
analysis conducted by Susan Thorne on class language in England in the early industrial era: Susan
Thorne, “‘The Conversion of Englishmen and the Conversion of the World Inseparable.’ Missionary
Imperialism and the Language of Class in Early Industrial Britain,” in Tensions of Empire. Colonial
Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley, CA: University
of California Press, 1997), 238-262.
THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES XIX
Abstract/ Résumé
Özgür Türesay
The Ottoman Empire through the prism of postcolonial studies.
Reflections on a recent historiographical turn
In recent years, Ottoman studies have been developed and enriched through new questions as
a result of newly adopted perspectives. Since the end of the 1990s, the attempt of some prominent
historians to integrate the history of the Ottoman Empire into the field of post-colonial studies
thus produced a certain scholarly literature. There is a recent historiographical turn claiming that
“Ottoman colonialism” and its discursive corollary, “Ottoman orientalism”, appeared in the last
decades of the nineteenth century and were consolidated at the beginning of the twentieth. It is
a worldview that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century among the members of
central bureaucracy who established a discourse of difference toward people living in the outlying
provinces of the empire. This article presents and underlines the hypotheses of this literature in
order to suggest a critical reading of it.
K eywords : Ottoman, colonialism, orientalism, 19th century, postcolonial studies,
imperialism n
Özgür Türesay
L’Empire ottoman sous le prisme des études postcoloniales.
À propos d’un tournant historiographique récent
Les études ottomanes s’enrichissent ces dernières années de questionnements inédits issus de nou-
velles perspectives adoptées. Depuis la fi n des années 1990, la tentative de quelques éminents historiens
d’intégrer l’histoire de l’Empire ottoman au domaine des études dites postcoloniales a ainsi produit une
certaine littérature scientifique. Il s’agit d’une tournure historiographique récente qui met au centre de
sa réflexion le « colonialisme ottoman » et son corollaire discursif l’« orientalisme ottoman » qui seraient
apparus dans les dernières décennies du XIXe et auraient été consolidés au début du XXe siècle. Il
s’agit d’une vision du monde apparue dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle chez les membres de la
bureaucratie centrale qui mettent en place un discours de différence à l’égard des peuples habitant dans
les provinces périphériques de l’empire. Cet article présente brièvement les hypothèses de cette littérature

pour en proposer une lecture critique.
Mots - clés : Ottoman, colonialisme, orientalisme, XIXe siècle, études postcoloniales,
impérialisme n

E RHMC 602 0127

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The Ottoman Empire Seen through the Lens of Postcolonial Studies:

A Recent Historiographical Turn

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The Ottoman Empire

Abdülaziz Mecdi Efendi (Karesi): Do the parliamentary

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Ottoman studies, which have been enlivened by an unparalleled spirit

Ottoman “Colonialism” and “Orientalism”

In spite of a number of nuances in terms of argument, “Ottoman colonialism”3

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mission,”6 “the Ottoman man’s burden,” 7 “modern Ottoman imperialism,”8

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Historicity and the “Jeux d’échelles”

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simply means “city” in Arabic and is an Ottoman neologism apparently dating

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paratext of a stigmatizing colonialism.”19 We should also emphasize the fact

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Colonialism without Colonies

We should, moreover, clarify that we are referring here to “Ottoman colo-

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It is a matter, here, of the sort of imperial attitude described by Deringil

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28. Deringil, “They Live in a State,” 339.

bureaucrats, however, had developed an argument similar to that used by the

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In order to carry out this critical interpretation of literature concerning

The Periphery and the Center : “Ruled” and “Rulers?”

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Since we are speaking here of “Ottoman colonialism,” we should examine

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A Sociological Interpretation : From Ethnic Lens to Social Class

In addition, a discussion of the problem in sociological terms would appear

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that “colonial circumstances unfolded in very different ways,”62 it is possible

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be able to interpret this antagonism as being at least also a conflict between

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