[This is a review published by the Arab Studies Journal Spring 2024 issue, which is now available for purchase. Click here to subscribe to Arab Studies Journal.]

Ozan Ozavci’s Dangerous Gifts is an ambitious treatment of great-power politics in the Ottoman provinces of Greater Syria and Egypt in the nineteenth century. In a meticulously constructed diplomatic narrative drawing on archives and scholarship in Arabic, English, French, German, Russian, and Turkish, Ozavci offers an “entangled history” of the Eastern Question, the European diplomatic and discursive anxieties resulting from the (real and perceived) weakness of the Ottoman Empire by the late eighteenth century.

This narrative takes place within the new legal and diplomatic framework established by the 1815 Congress of Vienna, in which the European great powers (Austria, Britain, France, Prussia, and Russia) sought to establish a lasting European peace through a commitment to mutual non-intervention following the violence of the Napoleonic wars. At the same time, the great powers were acutely aware of how Ottoman military and territorial vulnerability (laid bare following two disastrous Russo-Ottoman Wars in 1768–74 and 1787–91) threatened to destabilize the regional balance of power. These trends were put on a collision course as Napoleon’s brief occupation of Egypt from 1798 to 1801 set off a ripple effect (or tidal waves) of instability, civil wars, and regime change that would reveal the geographic and epistemological limits of European commitments to non-intervention over the next sixty years. As the book’s title (a critical rejoinder to Fouad Ajami’s The Foreigner’s Gift) implies, the unintended consequences of great-power intervention have roiled the region ever since. 

The book unfolds over thirteen detailed chapters, organized into three parts. Part 1 locates the origins of the Eastern Question and great-power interventionism in the late eighteenth century. Specifically, it charts a throughline from the French invasion of Egypt to a “tripartite civil war” between forces of the Ottoman sultan, Egypt’s Mamluk rulers (supported by Great Britain), and Ottoman-Albanian soldiers led by Mehmed Ali Pasha (supported by France) that ended with Mehmed Ali’s destruction of the Mamluks in 1811 (75). Part 2 examines how the Vienna order shaped the Eastern Question (and vice versa) after 1815. These chapters explore great-power involvement in the Greek war of independence (1821–32) (chapter 4), the Egyptian challenges to Ottoman sovereignty and survival in the 1830s (chapters 5–7), and the Druze-Maronite uprising against the Egyptian armies in Mount Lebanon in 1840 (chapter 8.)

The third and final section represents the original core of Ozavci’s study. It analyzes Eastern Question politics in the context of sectarian violence that rocked Greater Syria from 1840 to the 1860s. Chapter 9 offers a dizzying account of the origins of politicized sectarian identities in Mount Lebanon in the decades leading up to violent conflict between local Druze and Maronites in 1840. Ozavci’s frustrations with Ussama Makdisi’s Culture of Sectarianism (2000) are thinly veiled, as he strives to go “beyond both orientalism and its corrective rejection, beyond the likes of both [sic] Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami and Edward Said” to analyze European interventionism through attention to the complexity of events on the ground rather than as a modern discursive field (vii).

Chapter 10 follows the arc of sectarian violence as it collided with great-power intervention and the Ottoman Tanzimat reforms in the 1840s, while chapter 11 explores the impact of the Crimean War (1853–56) on Mount Lebanon, as Britain and France allied with the Ottomans to forestall Russian encroachment. Chapters 12 and 13 analyze the renewed outbreak of violence in Mount Lebanon in the 1860s and the European commission established to maintain peace and security in Syria with Ottoman consent, the “first international security institution” in the Middle East (319). Along the way, Ozavci draws attention to nineteenth-century European civilizing discourses and their Ottoman adaptations in the concept of medeniyetçilik, commercial and financial pressures on local Levantine and Ottoman imperial actors, and the growing presence of missionaries amid liberalizing reforms in Mount Lebanon. The result is a multilayered account of the Eastern Question in the long durée. In clear prose, it incorporates not only Ottoman perspectives, but also those of Russian statesmen and historians. Rarely has the province of Egypt or the role of Mehmed Ali been integrated so centrally into a study of Ottoman diplomacy, statecraft, and reform. It will be impossible for historians to write any of these histories in isolation going forward.

Building upon an enormous historiography, Dangerous Gifts offers two primary interventions for the literature on the Eastern Question. The first is to integrate the (multiple and often dissenting) perspectives of Ottoman policymakers into the well-trodden territory of European interventions in Ottoman affairs. Ottoman sultans, diplomats, and military commanders debated whether and how to engage with the great powers during the negotiations that resulted in the mutual non-intervention pact at the Vienna Congress (111–12). Provincial governors in Egypt and unruly subjects in Mount Lebanon forged alliances that unsettled and recast allegiances among the great powers (for example, during the Battle of Navarino in 1827, the Battle of Nezib in 1839, and the Crimean War). It is hard to overstate the value of Ozavci’s contribution here.

While I read this book as a robust diplomatic history, Dangerous Gifts’ second intervention is to frame itself as a contribution to the field of security studies. The book grew out of a 2014–19 European Research Council project called “Securing Europe, Fighting Its Enemies,” which examined the formation of a European “security culture” in the period between the Napoleonic wars and World War I (viii). Dangerous Gifts frames the Eastern Question as a negotiation over the provision of security and the newly binding force of international law in the post-Vienna landscape. Starting in the 1810s, the great powers began to foster “an understanding of security as a public good that could be obtained most effectively through cooperation” within an “exclusive system, the Concert of Europe.” The concert would determine the international legal framework for peace at home, but also came to serve as a “quasi-legal platform” for destabilizing interventions abroad (8–9).

Twenty-first-century parallels to Ozavci’s treatment of the disastrous consequences of Western interventions in the tangled quests for security and humanitarianism will be evident to most readers. The book is admirably light on presentism. But the security studies frame may prove distracting for specialist readers in Ottoman and Middle Eastern Studies. Theoretical concepts from security studies are sometimes left undefined. Ozavci makes repeated reference to the Ottoman Empire’s “ontological security” and insecurity without elaboration or definition (12, 57, 187, 356, 359). The introduction to each of the book’s thirteen chapters invokes the concept of a “transimperial security culture” or “cultures of security,” but these terms are so capacious that they do little of the analytical or explanatory work that Ozavci wants them to do (see, in particular, pages 7–8). The detailed content of the individual chapters––full of powerful and lesser-known actors, negotiations, brinkmanship, and roads not taken––speak clearly enough for themselves, while the rote invocation of “transimperial security culture” in setting up and concluding each chapter serves to flatten more than it illuminates. But if the security studies apparatus––in the book’s title, chapter introductions, and promotional material––encourages scholars in political science, international relations, and the field of security studies to engage seriously with a carefully researched diplomatic history of the Eastern Question in which Ottoman, Arab, Russian, and Western European voices and interests are all taken seriously, then it will have served a useful purpose.

No one scholar can be expected to be an expert in all the material covered in this study. Yet the book contains historical (and bizarre typographical) errors that detract from its air of authority on Ottoman and Middle Eastern history. For example: ‘Ali ibn Ali Talib (48) instead of ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib, the fourth caliph of Islam; ‘Amr ibn al-Al (48) instead of ‘Amr ibn al-‘As, the Arab conqueror of Egypt in 641 AD; Sultan Selim II (76 and 231), instead of Selim I, the Ottoman sultan who conquered Egypt and Syria in 1516–17; Ali Bey Bulutkaptan (“Cloud-Captain,” 78–79, 98, and 232), instead of Bulutkapan (“Cloud-Catcher”); ‘muqata (e.g., 233, and dozens of times thereafter), with the ‘ayn symbol at the word’s beginning, instead of muqata‘a, referring to an Ottoman tax farm; and outdated claims that Egypt’s Mamluk rulers in the late eighteenth century were the same “slave soldiers” who had ruled Egypt prior to the Ottoman conquest in 1517 (78) and that “there had been almost no direct Ottoman political control [in Greater Syria] since Sultan Selim II [sic] had conquered the country in 1516” (231). Given that the integration of the Ottoman perspective is, in many ways, the book’s most novel contribution to the literature on the Eastern Question, it is unfortunate that none of Ozavci’s readers, reviewers, or editors at Oxford University Press had enough familiarity with Ottoman, Arabic, or Islamic history to correct these issues. Nonetheless, the book deserves a final word of praise. Ozavci is speaking to many audiences beyond Middle Eastern Studies, and I hope these audiences read his work with the attention it deserves.