The nationalist sentiments that have pervaded most nineteenth- and twentieth-century history writing seriously have obstructed our assessment and appreciation of the Ottoman legacy. The biases come from many sides. West and central Europeans rightly feared Ottoman imperial expansion until the late seventeenth century. Remarkably, these old fears have persisted into the present day and arguably have been transformed into cultural prejudices, for example, now being directed against the full membership of an Ottoman successor state, Turkey, into the European Union. Moreover, nationalist histories have dismissed the place of the multi-ethnic, multi-religious political formation in historical evolution. Furthermore, as a model of economic change in an emerging European-dominated world economy, the Ottomans have had to bow to the manufacturing, exporting, highly productive Japanese success story. In the more than thirty countries that now exist in territories once occupied by the Ottoman Empire, the Ottoman past until recently has been largely ignored and/or considered in extremely negative terms. With some exceptions, this remains the situation today in the former Balkan provinces. Regarding a number of Arab states, by contrast, scholarly works on the Ottoman period recently have proliferated. In Israel, a comparatively strong Ottoman studies tradition dates back decades, often linked to Zionism and its justification. And finally, academic and public awareness of the Ottoman legacy in Turkey is growing and an active public debate over its meaning is taking place. Given the presence of the Ottoman Empire in many of these successor states for five to six centuries – an extraordinarily long period of time – the overall lack of public awareness and debate at first seems remarkable.
Let us begin with the paucity of the Ottoman linguistic legacy. At one time, there was a considerable penetration of Ottoman Turkish into the various languages; for example, Turkish words accounted for one-sixth of all Rumanian vocabulary during the pre-independence nineteenth century. Today, however, just a few words survive although, generally, somewhat more Turkish elements persist in other Balkan languages, including Greek, Serbo-Croatian, and Bulgarian. In the former Anatolian and Arab provinces, relatively little of the Ottoman language survives and it is vanishing quickly. Part of the explanation lies in the size and character of the Ottoman literary elite that was both small and mainly Muslim. Hence, when the successor states launched their literacy drives after gaining independence, they were working mainly with an illiterate populace and thus had few existing literary conventions to overcome. In the Balkan provinces, moreover, the Ottoman administrative elites fled with the success of the breakaway movements, leaving few living links to the Ottoman literary heritage. These features, however, only partially explain the absence of an Ottoman linguistic heritage. We also must consider that all of the post-Ottoman regimes launched linguistic purges, that were sustained efforts to eliminate Ottoman usages from the emerging national languages of the successor states. Hence Turkish governmental programs eliminated the Arabic and Persian words (more than 50 percent of the total) that had crept into Ottoman while the Syrian and Bulgarian states – otherwise so different – respectively erased Turkish words from Arabic and Bulgarian.
The linguistic purges derived from negative views that policy-makers in almost all of the successor states held of the Ottoman past, a function of their determination to fully expunge Ottoman elements from the national identities they were creating. That is, the hostility owes less to actual Ottoman policies in the past and more to the post-Ottoman history of these countries, specifically, their state building processes. In all of the successor states – from Serbia to Bulgaria to Turkey to Syria and Iraq – vilification of the Ottoman past accompanied state formation. For each people, the Ottomans served as the “other” – what they were not – and as the suppressor of long-cherished “national” values that had been submerged during the long Ottoman centuries. Thus, the Balkan, Arab, and Anatolian successor states for decades rejected the Ottoman legacy in their respective quests for identity in the post-Ottoman era. Here, it is important to consider that the imperial system being rejected died quite recently, just over seventy-five years ago. Hence, the process we are observing is very much in a state of flux.
In the former imperial lands, some nationalists continue to wax eloquent about the cultural destruction wrought by the Ottomans. This is ironic, for the heterogeneous variety of cultures, customs, and languages that presently exist in the successor states in fact is powerful testimony to the light hand of the Ottoman state on society. That is, the very fact that peoples who were speaking Bulgarian or Greek and professing Christianity at the moment of the Ottoman conquest still retained those languages and religion many centuries later following the departure of the Ottomans, speaks to Ottoman tolerance of linguistic and religious difference. Nonetheless, many writers, politicians, and intellectuals in areas of the Balkans, such as Bulgaria, Greece, and Serbia, resonate with a terrific hostility to the Ottomans, the “Turks.” For many Bulgarians, the “Turkish” yoke until today stands out as the darkest, most deplorable period in Bulgarian history. In most textbooks of Bulgarian history (as well as those in Greece), the Ottoman period, which is six centuries long, scarcely warrants a chapter of coverage, and then only in the bleakest terms. This seems amazing, the equivalent of writing the history of the United States without mentioning the British occupation of eastern North America.
For decades, historical writing in the Arab states similarly remained silent about or hostile to the Ottomans. In their efforts to create a sense of Arab community, nationalists decried the dead hand of the Ottomans. During the Ottoman period, 1516–1917, they said, Arab national rights had been extinguished. In their search for a foundation for the emerging new states, they ignored the Ottomans and went back to the Abbasid caliphate (750–1258) to find Arab history, or, sometimes, to find more secular roots, to the pharaohs or the kings of Babylon. There are some signs of positive change in places like Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt (and in pre-occupation Iraq as well). Scholars of and from these countries sometimes now are analyzing rather than vilifying the Ottoman period of the Arab lands and beginning to incorporate the Ottoman years into their own pasts. Many have moved away from overly simplistic dark characterizations of the Ottoman era and acknowledge its place in the Arab present. As a part of this discussion, there is a growing scholarly consensus that most Arab subjects neither consented to nor participated in the death of the Ottoman empire.
In Anatolia, Turkish nationalists building their new state aimed to foster a common sense of Turkish identity by connecting to the land of pre-Ottoman Anatolia. They created the Hittites as their national ancestors and sought to skip over the Ottoman period as irrelevant to modern Turkish identity, not unlike the use of the pharoahs and Babylonians in modern Egypt and Iraq. In Iran similarly, the last Pahlevi Shah had reached back to the ancient Achaemenids at Persepolis for legitimation. More, they argued that the Ottoman state was corrupt, decadent and weak and thus deserved replacement by the Turkish nation state. But counter-trends were present from the first years of the Republic, building over decades. Already in 1940, some mainstream Turkish academic works discussed the authentic significance of the Ottoman past for the Turkish present. In 1953, the Republic held a vast celebration commemorating the 500th anniversary of the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople and acclaiming Sultan Mehmet II as a national hero. In some provincial areas, locals began wearing Ottoman costumes in historical commemorations during the 1960s, making clear that the imperial past had no claim on present loyalties. Since the 1980s, rejection of the Ottoman past generally has given way to its use, although there is considerable debate over the nature and meaning of that past. By the 1990s, a best-selling Turkish author, Orhan Pamuk (and others), routinely used the Ottoman years as a backdrop for his books, demonstrating how popular Ottoman themes have become. There is today quite considerable popular and scholarly interest in the Ottoman era: Ottoman architectural monuments glisten again after restoration and Ottoman artifacts are widely sought items of display in the homes of the Turkish middle classes. They buy Ottoman books they cannot read, displaying them as well as Ottoman copper utensils, coins, stamps, clothing, and furniture. A huge market exists for these Ottoman antiques while television shows abound using Ottoman themes and settings. So too, in the world of cartoons there now are Ottoman sultans and heroes, often replacing the pre-Ottoman Turkic warriors of past decades.
And yet profound disagreement in Turkey exists over the meaning of these Ottoman events, antiques, and personages. Some nationalists portray the Ottoman state as a Turkish one, seeking to make this multinational empire into what it never was – a nation state. Some avowed secularists are beginning to look to the vastness of the empire as a model for Turkish military expansion, very much contrary to the decades-long direction of Turkish foreign policy. Others point to the Ottoman era as a model for the implementation and respect of Islamic values, part of an Islamist movement that has become politically powerful. These hold Sultan Abdülhamit II in high regard because of his pan-Islamic programs and stress his position as the caliph of Islam. On the one hand, this view distorts the past since it downplays Ottoman state efforts to hold onto the loyalty of all subjects, regardless of religion and ethnicity. And, on the other, the endorsement of Sultan Abdülhamit is complicated and risky because he presided over the massacre of Armenians in 1895.
If we consider west European hostility towards contemporary Turkey, we can see yet another legacy of the Ottoman past. Mistrust, dislike, and fear of modern-day Turks abounds in countries like Germany, notably symbolized by the European Union’s initial rejection of Turkey’s application for admission in 1998. Certainly the economic reasons for the rejection were important: namely, the consequences of a massive influx of Turks into Europe and of Turkish industrial competition. And there are other issues promoting rejection, generally, modern Turkey’s poor human rights record and, specifically in the case of Greece, its disputes with Turkey over Aegean oil and Cyprus. But history also plays a role, if often unacknowledged, in stimulating west European fears of Turkey. Old memories of Ottoman military successes against the European states are at work. Here, western Europeans falsely treat Turkey as the only Ottoman successor state, rather than one among many. In part this posture derives from several factors: the origins of the Ottoman Empire in Anatolia and the Turkish migrations into that area; and from the fact that, in the end, Anatolia remained the most populous area left in the empire, with ethnic Turks as the largest single group.
Ottoman administrative borders that had existed were ignored more or less in the state-making decisions that occurred after World War I in the Anatolian and Arab provinces. In the Balkans, however, present-day political frontiers follow old Ottoman provincial administrative boundaries. But few administrative practices or structures transferred from the Ottoman to the post-Ottoman states in the Balkans. The main reason seems to be because, following independence, almost all of the Muslim administrative classes fled or were expelled. By contrast, former Ottoman elites directed affairs or exerted considerable influence in many Arab states, for example, Iraq, Jordan, Egypt, and Syria. The case of Iraq is an arresting example; there, a small group of former Ottoman military officers and administrators thoroughly dominated state and society until the revolution of 1958. Elsewhere, for example in Syria and Egypt, distinguished families from the eighteenth century and before continue to be prominent. In Turkey, former Ottoman generals served as presidents of the Republic until 1950 while comparatively large numbers of Ottoman civil and military personnel staffed the Turkish bureaucracy. Overall, Turkey inherited more Ottoman personnel than any other successor state.
Sometimes present-day patterns falsely are attributed to an Ottoman legacy. For example, some scholars argue that the general Turkish and Arab prevalence of large bureaucracies and of the dominion of public over private economic direction owes something to an Ottoman legacy. Since, however, these patterns persist elsewhere in the world, they likely are due to other factors. Others, for example, point to Ottoman influences to explain the allegedly patient and cautious style of Arab politics that balances one force against another in an effort to neutralize them all, leaving the enemy time and scope for self-destruction. While Ottoman diplomacy surely possessed these features, so did that of Machiavelli’s Florence and Ming China. On the other hand, there may be some connection between the Ottoman and modern Turkish administrative traditions of a very strong central state.
The Ottoman legacy in landholding is held to be a key to understanding the present in many areas. Landholding in twentieth-century Iraq evolved in a peculiar way – thanks to the interaction of capitalism, colonialism, and Ottoman land legislation. There, tribal chiefs manipulated the Land Law of 1858, became great estate holders, and held sway until the 1958 revolution finally broke their power. In most other Arab and Anatolian areas, the relatively free peasantry and absence of a landed nobility is said to be a key carryover from Ottoman times. In some cases, the statement seems to be valid: small plots do predominate in modern Turkey. And yet, perhaps the point has been overemphasized. Many families now holding political and economic power in the Anatolian and Arab areas have done so for several centuries. For example, in northeastern Turkey during the 1960s, the local elites almost always were descended from families which had been prominent in the empire. In the Balkan lands, by contrast, economic patterns from the Ottoman era were obliterated: the independence regimes often embarked on land distribution programs that reversed the landholding patterns of the Ottoman era. And then, the Communist regimes completed the destruction of the former Ottoman economic and political elites.
The Ottoman legacy, however, clearly stands out when we look at a number of population distribution patterns. Migrations imposed by the Ottoman imperial system compelled the movement of peoples within the empire, with effects down to the present. Turks on the island of Cyprus are descended from Anatolian settlers arriving during the sixteenth century while the Circassians in Jordan came in the nineteenth century. Serbs and Croats left their earlier homelands and fled northward to escape invaders or migrated later when they sided with the Habsburgs. Everywhere these demographic legacies remain, although the post-cold war migrations are diluting their importance.
Ottoman policy failures resonate down into our own time. First, Ottoman inability to keep Great Britain out of the Persian Gulf during the later nineteenth century led to the formation of a British client state in Kuwait, from what had been part of the Ottoman province of Basra in the Iraqi lands. Saddam Hussein’s invasion and the Gulf War of the early 1990s to reclaim Kuwait thus is traceable, in part, to this Ottoman political failure. Similarly, the Ottomans tried but failed to prevent Jewish immigration into Palestine, giving Zionism a demographic toehold there, an event that still resonates today. Also, as is well known, the chronic Turkish–Greek hostilities directly stem from the breakaway of the Greek subject peoples, while Armenians and Turks still bitterly clash over the events of 1915.
In modern Turkey, Syria, pre-occupation Iraq, Lebanon and other Arab states, popular attitudes and official policies sometimes are tinged with a Turkish sense of imperial superiority and an Arab sense of being colonized. In Turkey, for example, the word “arap” has quite negative connotations. The past repeatedly comes to haunt the present. In the Balkans, intervention by the Turkish state during the Bosnian crisis sometimes was criticized and opposed as a latter-day version of Ottoman imperialism. Here, again, we see the common but nonetheless incorrect tendency to see Turkey as the only successor state of the Ottomans.
In sum, the Ottoman legacy, both in the lands the empire once occupied and beyond, is mixed. For some, it remains an object variously of opposition, derision, scorn, and even hatred while others along this spectrum view the Ottoman past as irrelevant for their own present. Admirers of the Ottoman legacy, however, are divided. They disagree over whether the Ottoman entity they seek to emulate is a secular, nationalist, or Islamist state and society. In these pages, I have argued that the Ottoman legacy is of a political and social system offering non-national, multi-religious and multi-ethnic forms of organization for a world increasingly divided by nationality, religious belief and ethnicity.
Entries marked with a * designate recommended readings for new students of the subject.
*Abou-El-Haj, Rifaat. “The social uses of the past: recent Arab historiography of Ottoman rule,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, May 1982, 185–201.
Anscombe, Frederick F. The creation of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Qatar (New York, 1997).
*Brown, Leon Carl, ed. Imperial legacy: The Ottoman imprint on the Balkans and the Middle East (New York, 1996).
*Kayalı, Hasan. Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism and nationalism in the Ottoman Empire, 1908–1918 (Berkeley, 1997).
Kiel, Machiel. Art and society of Bulgaria in the Turkish period (Aassen/Maastricht, 1985).
Meeker, Michael. A nation of empire. The Ottoman legacy of Turkish modernity (Berkeley, 2002).
*Schacht, Joseph and C. E. Bosworth, eds. The legacy of Islam, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1979).
Sells, Michael A. The bridge betrayed: Religion and genocide in Bosnia (Berkeley, 1996).
Todorova, Maria. Imagining the Balkans (Oxford, 1997).
Several suggestions on the history of the post-Ottoman
Middle East and Balkans
*Beinin, Joel. Workers and peasants in the modern Middle East (Cambridge, 2001).
*Cleveland, William. A history of the modern Middle East (Boulder, CO, 1999).
*Esposito, John. The Islamic threat: myth or reality, 3rd edn (Oxford, 1999).
*Goldberg, Ellis, ed. The social history of labor in the Middle East (Boulder, CO, 1996).
*Hourani, Albert, Philip S. Khoury and Mary C. Wilson, eds. The modern Middle East (Berkeley, 1993).
*Khater, Akram Fouad. Sources in the history of the modern Middle East (Boston, 2004).
Neuburger, Mary. The Orient within. Muslim minorities and the negotiation of nationhood in modern Bulgaria (Ithaca, 2004).
*Smith, Charles D. Palestine and the Arab–Israeli conflict, 5th edn (Boston and New York, 2004).