Late Ottoman Society: The Intellectual Legacy

Elisabeth Özdalga

Mar 2013 · Routledge

About this ebook

When the Ottomans commenced their modernizing reforms in the 1830s, they still ruled over a vast empire. In addition to today's Turkey, including Anatolia and Thrace, their power reached over Mesopotamia, North Africa, the Levant, the Balkans, and the Caucasus. The Sultanate was at the apex of a truly multi-ethnic society. Modernization not only brought market principles to the economy and more complex administrative controls as part of state power, but also new educational institutions as well as new ideologies. Thus new ideologies developed and nationalism emerged, which became a political reality when the Empire reached its end. This book compares the different intellectual atmospheres between the pre-republican and the republican periods and identifies the roots of republican authoritarianism in the intellectual heritage of the earlier period.

About the author

Elisabeth Özdalga is Professor of Sociology at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara. Özdalga, who is also affiliated to Göteborg University in Sweden on a part-time basis, has also been the direct of The Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul. She is the editor of Sufism, Music and Society in Turkey and the Middle East (2001) and the author of The Veiling Issue (1998)