Locating the Ottomans in North America

Virginia Aksan
Thematic Conversations, MESA 1999*

The original statements Daniel Goffman, Resat Kasaba, and Robert Vitalis and I submitted to MESA are available at http://www.humanities.mcmaster.ca/~history/turk-news.htm.

Some sixty people joined us for a two hour open-ended conversation about the study of the Ottoman Empire in North America. What follows is a brief outline of our discussion.

In my own introduction, I outlined the origin of the conversation, what I saw as the deliberate lack of a fixed agenda and the multi-year commitment to the dialogue. I was asked why the choice of ‘Locating’ and tried to convey my sense of a lack of focus and set of definitions of what constituted the Ottoman empire, growing out of my work on comparative empires and military history. The other three principal participants were each given five or ten minutes to place themselves in the conversation, before we opened it to the floor for more generalized discussion.

My comments on the subject could be summed up as the problem of definitions (or lack thereof) of the Ottoman Empire as a unit of study. Resat Kasaba expressed concern about the continued resilience of stereotypic images of the empire in the public mind, using as an example a short piece in the New Yorker that chose to use Ottoman land tenure as a particu­larly boring and meaningless subject. He also bemoaned the inability or unwillingness of Ottomanists to confront (or write about) ethnic conflicts of past and present (especially of the nineteenth century). Dan Goffman chose the analogy of the mature empire and theories of decentralization and decline to discuss his concern about the diffusion of the field and its individuation (my word, not his). Robert Vitalis pointed to our ‘crisis’ mentality, advising the group to concentrate on the real problem which he viewed as the rush to fame and fortune, part of a ‘sociology of the professions.’ We should, he noted, stick to the passion of our pursuit and ignore the clamor for status and the jockeying for position. Of course, as one might expect, we paid little attention to his acute and spirited critique.

The floor was opened up to generalized discussion, wide-ranging and often candid. I jotted down the topics that came up, and reproduce it here, hoping that the discussion will help generate dialogue at Orlando next fall at MESA 2000 and elsewhere:

1) Identity of the problem: is there a crisis in the field? Is it unique to Ottoman studies? Opinion remained divided on this one: those trying to write narratives of the sweep of Ottoman history think there is a problem; those who are engaged in social or local histories do not.

2) The need for ‘outreach’/dialogue with European and other historians. Many of us alluded to this aspiration as a productive stimulus of research.

3) The influence of ethnic relations and political conflict on the development of the field. This issue is especially pertinent in North America. Many touched upon the subject; no one confronted it head on.

4) Also discussed was a problem that is both more universal, more threatening to the field, and more practical: that concerning the collapse of disciplines, the decline of Middle East Centers and ‘regionalism’ as an approach to the organization of knowledge.

5) Some did return to Robert Vitalis’ central point concerning the ‘sociology of the profession,’ that is, how the anxiety about position and status drives the research agenda.

6) Also asked was how to incorporate the Ottomans into a world history context. In this regard, we exhibited much puzzlement about the pedagogy and periodization of the Ottoman Empire, especially the middle periods.

7) The thorny question of the elision of Turk and Ottoman was raised. In what sense is the study of the Ottomans a ‘Turkish’ field? In what sense were the Ottomans ‘Turks?’

8) The problem of philology was also raised, as well as the necessity for language training (especially in the face of federal cutbacks), and the historical reality that most Ottoman study programs are in language-based area studies. Our few philological tools, training programs in Ottoman, and so forth, remain a problem. There was disagreement in this point; some insisted that the situation had improved.

9) An interesting discussion ensued over the lack of cultural studies of Islam in the Ottoman Empire. It is almost as if no intellectual culture existed in the empire. Has such a culture been ignored, or eclipsed by nationalist, secular historiography?

Discussion ended on a positive note, with several participants advocating the filling of the black holes, searching for more synthesis by taking ‘bold and daring risks.’ ‘Ottoman envy’ was the expression used by one outsider who admired the research currently underway in our field.

*Ed. Note: with this piece, the MESA Bulletin initiates a new series. Beginning with the Orlando meetings in 2000, we intend to publish summaries of all ‘MESA Conversations.’