Tezcan, Baki. the Second Ottoman Empire
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Book Reviews / Journal of Early Modern History 16 (2012) 431-453 451 Tezcan, Baki. The Second Ottoman Empire: Political and Social Transforma- tion in the Early Modern World [Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), $99, 284 pp., ISBN 978 05215 1 949 6. Baki Tezcan’s book is an ambitious work that proposes a bold new inter- pretation of the middle period of Ottoman history. Tezcan calls the period from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century the “Second Empire,” arguing that it represents a distinct incarnation of the Ottoman polity that was markedly different from both the patrimonial empire that reached its pinnacle under Suleyman the Magnificent and the centralized, modernizing state of the Tanzimat. The Second Empire’s key distinguish- ing feature was the institutionalized limitation of royal authority, which Tezcan compares with contemporary developments towards constitutional monarchy in Europe. At the center of the narrative is the regicide of Osman II; in the introduction Tezcan asks why this has been seen in traditional Ottoman historiography as the beginning of the empire’s decline, while the near-contemporary execution of Charles I is portrayed in English his- toriography as a birth-pang of modern liberty. Tezcan’s expertise lies in seventeenth-century Ottoman historiography, and the core of his book is a close and insightful reading of a range of Otto- man chronicles covering the reign and deposition of Osman II. Tezcan places this in a broader context that synthesizes recent scholarship on the Ottoman Empire, in order to build a new, positive narrative of the seven- teenth and eighteenth centuries to replace the discredited decline thesis. The reign of Osman II is used to highlight what the author claims was a struggle between constitutionalists and absolutists that was waged through- out the seventeenth century. The context for this struggle was the political empowerment of the Muslim merchant and artisan classes that resulted from the monetization of the Ottoman economy. The constitutionalists sought to limit the authority of the sultan using law; the absolutists hoped to concentrate power in the sultan’s court. Tezcan claims that this struggle was resolved after the 1703 deposition of Mustafa II, when a consensus was reached based on the acceptance of limits to the sultan’s power. With the exception of the events surrounding the Patrona Halil rebellion in 1730, this consensus held until Mahmud II abolished the Janissaries in 1826. Tezcan’s account thus turns the key tenets of the “Ottoman decline” narrative on their heads. The infiltration of commoners into the Janissary © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2012 DOI: 10.1163/15700658-12342334 452 Book Reviews / Journal of Early Modern History 16 (2012) 431-453 corps is no longer the corruption of an elite, professional army; rather, this process is described as the transformation of the Janissaries into a corpora- tion representing the interests of Muslims of monetary wealth. The increas- ing prominence of the ulema is due not to a growing obsession with obscurantist religious sciences, but rather reflects the rise of the rule of law and the consequent importance of legal scholarship. The Köprülü Grand Viziers do not represent a fleeting moment of imperial revitalization; rather, they were reactionaries who temporarily checked the progress of constitutionalism. The growing prominence of law is central to Tezcan’s thesis. As political transactions became increasingly “marketized,” so the law of the markets, i.e. shari‘a, expanded its jurisdiction into public law, displacing the assem- blage of feudal custom that constituted Ottoman kanun. The subjection of politics to a law which lay outside of the sultanate’s direct control both empowered the lawyers and gave the Muslim merchant classes a tool with which to challenge the sultan and the royal court. Tezcan’s case for a more expansive rule of law in the Second Empire is compelling, although it rests largely on the prominent role played by senior jurists in the events under study and on non-legal sources such as chronicles and advice literature. This argument would have been more compelling still if Tezcan had shown a constitutionalist agenda in Ottoman legal scholarship. It would be inter- esting for future scholars to test Tezcan’s thesis using Ottoman fiqh texts and also the documentary sources left by the empire’s various courts and legal institutions. The comparative frame of early modern European history is an impor- tant component of Tezcan’s project. Tezcan borrows extensively from the terminology of European historiography: some of his transferred terms are more useful than others. It is a stretch to talk about “democratization” and “free markets”: while the Ottoman economy may have been marketized, these emerging markets were not free. Tezcan’s deployment of the terms “absolutist” and “constitutionalist” is more successful. His use of these terms rests on proving that the conflicts he describes were more than just factional struggles for supremacy: that they were in fact ideological. Rely- ing on close readings of historiographical works, Tezcan convincingly demonstrates an emerging belief that the sultan’s authority was formally limited and a corresponding conception of legitimate rebellion. Beyond the issue of terminology, the comparative frame allows Tezcan tentatively to integrate the Ottoman Empire into the mainstream of Euro- pean history. This is not a defensive or apologetic attempt to prove that the .