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الدولة العثمانية والعالم المØيط بها
In Islamic law the world was made up of the House of Islam and the House of War with the Ottoman Sultan--the perceived successor to the Caliphs--supreme ruler of the Islamic world. However, Suraiya Faroqhi demonstrates that there was no iron curtain between the Ottoman and other worlds but rather a long-established network of diplomatic, financial, cultural and religious connections. These extended to the empires of Asia and the modern states of Europe. Faroqhi's book is based on a huge study of original and early modern sources, including diplomatic records, travel and geographical writing, as well as personal accounts.
432 pages, Hardcover
First published October 26, 2004
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About the author
Suraiya Faroqhi
58Ìýbooks44ÌýfollowersSuraiya Faroqhi was born in Berlin to a German mother and Indian father in 1941. She studied at Hamburg University and she came to Istanbul through a university exchange program when she was 21. At Istanbul University, she became a student of Ömer Lütfi Barkan. She completed her master's degree in Hamburg and between 1968-1970 she studied English Language Teaching at Indiana University-Bloomington. After her post-doctorate, she worked as English Lecturer at METU. She retired from METU in 1987 and from München Ludwig Maximillan Universität in 2005.
A turning point in her life came in 1962-63, when she took the opportunity to go to Istanbul University on a fellowship as an exchange student. Subsequently she became a student of Ömer Lüfti Barkan, one of the founding fathers of Ottoman history and an editor of Annales. When she first read Fernand Braudel at Barkan’s insistence, she “had the feeling that’s the sort of thing I wanted to do.� She wrote her doctoral thesis at Hamburg on a set of documents that a late 16th-century vizier submitted to his sultan discussing Ottoman politics at the time.[1]
She is regarded as one of the most important economic and social historians of the Ottoman Empire working today. Professor Faroqhi has written substantially on Ottoman urban history, arts and crafts, and on the hitherto underrepresented world of the ordinary people in the empire. She is well known for her distinctive approach to Ottoman everyday life and public culture. She has published numerous books and articles in the field of pre- modern Ottoman history.
A turning point in her life came in 1962-63, when she took the opportunity to go to Istanbul University on a fellowship as an exchange student. Subsequently she became a student of Ömer Lüfti Barkan, one of the founding fathers of Ottoman history and an editor of Annales. When she first read Fernand Braudel at Barkan’s insistence, she “had the feeling that’s the sort of thing I wanted to do.� She wrote her doctoral thesis at Hamburg on a set of documents that a late 16th-century vizier submitted to his sultan discussing Ottoman politics at the time.[1]
She is regarded as one of the most important economic and social historians of the Ottoman Empire working today. Professor Faroqhi has written substantially on Ottoman urban history, arts and crafts, and on the hitherto underrepresented world of the ordinary people in the empire. She is well known for her distinctive approach to Ottoman everyday life and public culture. She has published numerous books and articles in the field of pre- modern Ottoman history.
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November 15, 2016As its title suggests, this book is an account of the interactions of the Ottomans with their neighbours.
The reader might expect to find a classical study of state relations, but that is not the only purpose of the book. Certainly, the author devotes good many pages on the political developments and military encounters, which the Ottomans experienced throughout the period under scrutiny, and bases the book's chronological frame precisely on those developments and encounters. Nevertheless, more than half of the book focuses on topics that were - and to some extent still are - in vogue in the Ottoman studies, viz. the centralization / decentralization of the empire in XVI-XVII and its approach to its vassal principalities, the question of the ideological considerations, which animated (or did not) the Ottoman's attitudes to their neighbouring states - particularly Persia and Christian Europe, the permeability of transcivilizational borders, the fortune of the ordinary man (both Ottoman and non-Ottoman), his cultural transactions with the foreigners and the creation of their images in his eyes.
That said, the book definitely has much to tell to any reader, from the unaquainted one to the connoisseur. Surely, a book of such a scope cannot be flawless, and some lapses occur every now and then. I would have enjoyed to find out more about the Ottoman pressence in Africa or the relations with the Far East. Of course, one must consider the limitations that lay before the author such as the lack of historical sources and the current state of research.
On the other hand, I find unnessecary the excessive usage of do-emphasizer and restrictive/negative inversions, and the abundance of quotation marks; I also cannot see the point of giving dates both in Gregorian and Hijri calendar (it was distracting).
On the whole 'The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It' is a good book, and I would recommend it.
The reader might expect to find a classical study of state relations, but that is not the only purpose of the book. Certainly, the author devotes good many pages on the political developments and military encounters, which the Ottomans experienced throughout the period under scrutiny, and bases the book's chronological frame precisely on those developments and encounters. Nevertheless, more than half of the book focuses on topics that were - and to some extent still are - in vogue in the Ottoman studies, viz. the centralization / decentralization of the empire in XVI-XVII and its approach to its vassal principalities, the question of the ideological considerations, which animated (or did not) the Ottoman's attitudes to their neighbouring states - particularly Persia and Christian Europe, the permeability of transcivilizational borders, the fortune of the ordinary man (both Ottoman and non-Ottoman), his cultural transactions with the foreigners and the creation of their images in his eyes.
That said, the book definitely has much to tell to any reader, from the unaquainted one to the connoisseur. Surely, a book of such a scope cannot be flawless, and some lapses occur every now and then. I would have enjoyed to find out more about the Ottoman pressence in Africa or the relations with the Far East. Of course, one must consider the limitations that lay before the author such as the lack of historical sources and the current state of research.
On the other hand, I find unnessecary the excessive usage of do-emphasizer and restrictive/negative inversions, and the abundance of quotation marks; I also cannot see the point of giving dates both in Gregorian and Hijri calendar (it was distracting).
On the whole 'The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It' is a good book, and I would recommend it.
December 30, 2020
The book was written in overly scholarly manners in order to explain her hypothesis, which explains and cited sources that I found had little correlation with Ottoman Empire (it didn't make an exciting reading to be sure), yet at the same time, when she made bold conclusions on certain topics, she offered a little explanation or citations.
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