A groundbreaking reinterpretation of the middle years of the Ottoman Empire, from the conquest of Byzantium in 1453 to the establishment of the Tanzimat in 1839. This period saw the evolution of the Empire from the height of its powers to - as the traditional view has it - an empire in decline, unable to modernise in the face of globalisation and European ascendancy. The contributors challenge this view, demonstrating how the Ottomans came to be modern on their own terms. They explore the Ottomans as politicians and diplomats, military reformers, artists and historians. They also map out and redefine the material worlds which they inhabited - the courthouse, the cemetery, the Turkish garden. This book, which represents a turning-point in the intellectual history of the Ottoman Empire, promises to become a key text for students, scholars and anyone interested in the Ottoman world.

Situating the early modern Ottoman world Virginia Aksan and Daniel Goffman; Part I. Mapping the Ottoman World: 1. Imagining the early modern Ottoman space from world history to Piri Reis Palmira Brummett; Part II. Limits to Empire: 2. Negotiating with the Renaissance state: the Ottoman Empire and the new diplomacy Daniel Goffman; 3. Information, ideology, and limits of imperial policy: Ottoman strategy in the context of Ottoman-Habsburg rivalry Gábor Ágoston; 4. The Ottomans in the Mediterranean Molly Greene; 5. Military reform and its limits in a shrinking Ottoman world, 1800¿40 Virginia Aksan; Part III. Evocations of Sovereignty: 6. Genre and myth in the Ottoman 'Advice for Kings' literature Douglas A. Howard; 7. The politics of early modern Ottoman historiography Baki Tezcan; Part IV. Boundaries of Belonging: 8. Inside the Ottoman courthouse: territorial law at the intersection of state and religion Najwa Al-Qattan; 9. The material world: ideologies and ordinary things Leslie Peirce; 10. Urban voices from beyond: identity, status and social strategies in Ottoman Muslim funerary epitaphs of Istanbul (1700¿1850) Edhem Eldem; 11. Who is a true Muslim? Exclusion and inclusion among polemicists of reform in nineteenth-century Baghdad Dina Rizk Khoury; Part V. Aesthetics of Empire: 12. Public spaces and the garden culture of Istanbul in the eighteenth century Shirine Hamadeh; Bibliography.