Hans-Lukas Kieser and Khatchig Mouradian (eds.), I.B. Tauris Handbook of the Late Ottoman Empire: History and Legacy (Bloomsbury, 2025).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you edit this book?
Hans-Lukas Kieser (HLK): Since the late twentieth century, Ottoman studies, particularly late Ottoman studies, have flourished introducing new perspectives and exploring hitherto little accessed archives in various languages. The end of the Ottoman Empire, especially the last decade marked by war and genocide, has long been shrouded in controversy and lacking serious, source-based, in-depth research. While this situation has improved, recent research has not been adequately compiled. Thus a feeling emerged that a comprehensive volume on late Ottoman topics and their legacy in the contemporary Middle East was needed. We accepted an invitation from Rory Gormley, a senior editor at IB Tauris, to prepare a handbook on the late Ottoman Empire. We defined its title, scope, contents, and authors.
Khatchig Mouradian (KM): The legacies of the Ottoman Empire continue to shape the modern Middle East and reverberate far beyond it. From the outset, we conceived the handbook as an exploration of the empire’s final century with an eye toward the century that followed—one still profoundly influenced by the afterlives of its institutions, ideas, and the disruptions it set in motion. This approach informs the volume as a whole and is addressed most directly in its final two sections.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
HLK: This handbook is about political history in the broadest sense—that is, all which concerns the polity of the late Ottoman state and society, how they functioned and malfunctioned, and their ultimate disruption. It also provides insights into the long aftermath in the post-Ottoman Middle East, which is still marked by the patterns, traumas, decisions, and unresolved questions of an Ottoman era officially ending in 1923 with the Treaty of Lausanne.
Divided into seven sections, the handbook surveys the new scholarship and its interdisciplinary dimensions. More seriously and in-depth than earlier general studies of the era and area, it highlights mass violence as a formative force in the region’s history. It draws on contributions from forty-five established and emerging academics, thirty-four chapters, and eight supplementary essays; a chronology of political events guides the reader from the late eighteenth century to the early twenty-first century. A general introduction, seven section introductions, and an afterword on the state of the field add coherence to this multiperspectival volume. Its first two sections cover the Ottoman Empire before the 1908 Young Turk Revolution. Section III addresses diachronic topics from Arab and Kurdish nationalism to missionaries and Zionism. Sections IV and V examine the post-1908 period, marked by the Young Turks’ rise (specifically the Committee of Union and Progress), the Great War, and mass violence. Section VI discusses the post-Great War treaty system and its lasting impact, while Section VII explores post-Ottoman realities entangled with the late Ottoman legacy.
KM: Even as the volume spans 760 pages and covers vast ground, we had to concentrate on certain themes while offering more concise treatments of others. These decisions were among the most difficult to make. They were shaped both by the focal points we set out to explore and by the challenges inherent in a project extending over five years and involving dozens of scholars. Some chapters we had initially planned were never completed due to personal circumstances faced by contributors; others evolved in new directions, focusing on different yet equally enriching dimensions. Throughout, we worked to navigate this mammoth project and give it coherence and shape, while encouraging the distinct voices and approaches of its authors through one in-person workshop at Columbia University’s Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) and two additional sessions held over Zoom.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
HLK: Overall, the authors of this handbook, including ourselves, concentrated most of their efforts on original, in-depth research of little-explored topics related to the late Ottoman Empire and its end. In contrast, this handbook is a collection that presents a synopsis of the state of the art. It compiles and synthesizes a broad range of new research from various perspectives, shedding new light on the history, aftermath, and ongoing impact of the late Ottoman imperial polity, which ended in extreme violence during and after the First World War.
KM: Hans-Lukas’s impressive body of work spans decades and encompasses multiple facets of late Ottoman history. When I joined this project, my first book had just been published and my second was under way. Our differing approaches, linguistic competencies, and scholarly reference points proved an asset to the endeavor. We were also building on an earlier collaboration: After the Ottomans, a volume we co-edited with Seyhan Bayraktar, was published by IB Tauris in 2023.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
HLK: The way the Ottoman world ended left deep traumata and unresolved political challenges in the Middle East.These are the root causes of most of today’s conflicts that keep the world on edge. We therefore hope that this handbook will serve not only as a useful manual for colleagues, university students, and academically interested people, but also as a reading or background reading for diplomats, politicians, and serious journalists, who need to understand the deeper logics and complexity of events in the Middle East. Fostering a deeper understanding may sound like a truism. However, an understanding of modern Middle Eastern history based on the contents of this handbook implies an uncomfortable confrontation with historical truths lacking in most high school and university textbooks of the last hundred years. This is certainly an impact we desire—fostering the readiness to confront problems with a long-term perspective and democratic mindset that forbids any individual or group supremacy.
KM: We also recognize that in the digital age, readers across the varied contexts Hans-Lukas described may engage selectively with chapters they find most relevant to their interests or those they believe best illuminate particular issues within the broader body of available scholarship. We envision many of these chapters finding their way into course syllabi, seminar discussions, and reading lists across multiple fields.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
HLK: There are now two projects. One is a longer article, which may become a monograph, about the partially overlapping historical paths that led both late Ottoman Turkey and Germany down the path of anti-democratic and genocidal politics. The other project is quite different and more extensive. It focuses on the Israel-Palestine conundrum, using a comprehensive approach of global and Middle Eastern history. Combining history, theology, and democracy studies, this project analyzes the impact of religious claims and narratives on politics, particularly their often—though not inevitably—conflicting relationship with the fundamentals of modern democracy. Ideally, deep-rooted faith and modern democracy building work together.
KM: I, too, am working on two projects: a monograph on Deir El-Zor, under contract with Cambridge University Press, and a book on midwifery in the late Ottoman Empire and the modern Middle East.
Excerpt (from the Editors’ Introduction)
The late Ottoman world is the immediate background to the modern Middle East that emerged after the First World War. Any serious discussion of contemporary Middle Eastern issues and conflicts, such as the Kurdish question and Israel-Palestine, must take this into account. There is therefore no need to insist on the importance of a handbook on this time and space.
The study of the late Ottoman Empire has witnessed a boom over the past three decades, commensurate with the flourishing of Ottoman studies in general. This phenomenon has gone hand in hand with the central role that the contemporary Middle East has played in post-Cold War global politics. At the same time, a resurgent nostalgia that, in the words of Selim Deringil, “glorifies and distorts” the empire’s history and legacies in the region has reverberated across cultural, religious and political arenas. And, while the phrase “late Ottoman” appears in the titles of dozens of recent monographs and countless articles, there is no volume that outlines, takes stock of, and reflects on the state, shape, and trajectory of late Ottoman studies. This alone evinces the need for the present work for both the field’s insiders and a broader readership. Working over the course of four years with a diverse team of fifty experts in the field, we have produced the current volume: the first ever handbook on late Ottoman history and its legacy.
Digital access to archives and increased ease of global scholarly communication in the age of the internet decisively facilitated the advances in the field—and the making of this volume. The digital age has also allowed transnational networks to function efficiently at little cost—a boon for disciplines where small groups of specialists work in different countries across continents. In our field, both the increased number of experts and new forms of collaboration have fostered much richer approaches compared to the earlier, very fragmentary scholarship on the late Ottoman era and the end of the empire. This introduction presents our vision and guiding principles for this tome, and maps out its constitutive elements and supporting content. We first discuss the resurgent relevance of late Ottoman themes and the importance of the late Ottoman legacy in contemporary geopolitical and cultural dynamics. We then explain our approach to the subject, pointing to distinctive features of the handbook and offering an overview of its structure and contents. Each section of this volume begins with a brief introduction where we delve deeper into some of the themes addressed here, and the afterword offers an in-depth overview of the field and situates the contributions to this volume within that frame.
We use the term “late Ottoman” in reference to the final period in the history of the Ottoman Empire, during which a profound internal and international precariousness emerged: This manifested itself in the military defeat against Russia, dominator of the Black Sea since 1774, and the short-lived French invasion of Egypt and Syria at the end of the eighteenth century. In this same period, Sultan Selim III attempted an internal “new order” (nizam-i cedid), resulting in two turbulent decades that ended with his assassination (1789–1808). Thus, the “late Ottoman Empire,” as we understand it in this handbook, extends from the late eighteenth century to the empire’s dissolution after the First World War at the Lausanne Conference. This overlaps with what international diplomacy called the Question d’Orient, the question of the future of the late Ottoman world. The aftermath of the latter is enduring, and its legacy is formative for Turkey and the contemporary Middle East—as this handbook makes clear especially in Sections VI and VII.
Defining the legacy of the late Ottoman period—and covering it meaningfully—is no less of a challenge. Echoes of the period under study pulsate across the modern Middle East and permeate large swaths of social and political life in dozens of states and communities. The last two sections of this volume identify and trace key areas in this space, and offer case studies that shed light on the century since the dissolution of the Empire, with particular focus on the Republic of Turkey and the Levant.
Pervasive turmoil in the contemporary Middle East—notably in regions that had remained Ottoman until the end of the Empire (such as Anatolia, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine)—has invited a thorough interrogation of the Middle East’s Ottoman past. Key drivers of the boom in the study of late Ottoman history—scholarly curiosity, the search for new paths forward and for solutions to intractable conflicts after the end of the Cold War—are all strongly correlated with the field’s verve, and are reflected in this handbook. A broader and far more diverse scholarly landscape has fostered new perspectives foregrounding gender, subaltern voices, the environment, and rethinking violence and its sequelae.
The late Ottoman era had long remained under-researched because post-Ottoman societies, especially their state elites, had sweepingly negative associations with it and with Ottoman rule in general. The Kemalists, the heirs of the Ottoman Empire, sought to maintain maximal distance between the “new Turkey” and its Ottoman predecessors. As such, the critical reappraisal of the late Ottoman era during the last three decades has produced a well-justified scholarly reevaluation on the one hand, and an ideological exploitation of the era by a new, post-Kemalist politics of “neo-Ottomanism” in Ankara on the other.
At the turn of the twenty-first century, scholarship on the late Ottoman Empire still suffered from significant lacunae. Very few historians at Western universities were able to read Ottoman-Turkish and the other languages of the Ottoman world; crucial sources were not yet accessible, while other archives were just opening up. While unfettered access to sources and freedom of research remain unattained, fundamental progress has been made. The most striking research gap concerned the last Ottoman decade (early 1910s to early 1920s) characterized by the Young Turk party-state, the Ottoman Great War, and genocide. This observation leads to Turkey- specific reasons for our field’s dynamic. After the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne, which liquidated the Ottoman Empire, the latter’s cataclysmic collapse cascaded through the rest of the twentieth century. By negotiating a compromise between mandatory powers—France in Syria Britain in Palestine and Iraq—and an ultranationalist new government in Ankara, the diplomatic settlement in Lausanne in 1923 brought Turkey back into the Western orbit in both political and civilizational terms. However, it sacrificed democracy as well as self-determination for the other peoples of the former Ottoman space. Thus, important issues remained unaddressed and unresolved. Appeasing Ankara and pulling it away from the rising Soviet Union was a primary goal of the ageing national empires of Britain and France at Lausanne’s negotiating table. The United States followed a similar course of action a few years later.
The restarting point at Lausanne in 1923 therefore induced a massive condoning of, if not identification with, Turkish-nationalist tenets and taboos, and the renouncement of robust, independent scholarship on the end of the Ottoman Empire. More broadly, the Lausanne Conference perpetuated a framing of history convenient to the major dealmakers. For decades, crucial topics—including religious war, demographic engineering, genocide, and seminal anti-democratic choices—remained behind an enduring veil of silence or sanitizing euphemisms. Western authors followed the narrative of Kemalist modernization, although generally not without some resigned lament for what had gone fatally wrong or was lost with the “death of the Ottoman world.” […]
The end of the Cold War contributed to breaking this silence and fueling new explorations of history, admittedly in ambivalent ways. On the one hand, we see nostalgia for the Ottoman Empire and the sultanate-caliphate, especially among practicing Sunni Muslims in Turkey who had, for decades, felt the disdain of, and sometimes outright hostility from, Kemalist elites. On the other hand, we witness the struggle of those heavily disfranchised by the Lausanne Conference, stripped not only of political agency, but also of their homes, belongings, and habitats after having lost to genocide a major part of their community members. […]
There are many highly relevant historical themes and figures that scholarship had manifestly not done justice to by the end of the twentieth century. Ottoman studies now started to integrate a much broader spectrum of suppressed or sidelined voices, languages, and experiences. In-depth research, reckoning with history, and the expectation of new-old horizons—a promising “homecoming to the future”—went hand in hand. Those most clearly let down at the Lausanne Conference knew that they needed to come to terms with a past that for them had never been past during the entire twentieth century. Their persisting desire and efforts for historical rectification and justice at long last found more fertile scholarly ground at various universities. However, the pain of loss and unrealized (national) homes and hopes at the end of the Ottoman Empire remains a common denominator of all groups who drove the new research dynamic. Nostalgia involved in the early twenty-first century’s “late Ottoman boom” thus ranges from the lasting pain of lost homes to imperial-caliphal nostalgia; from the longing for Ottoman conviviality and cosmopolitism, to the urge to revisit missed opportunities and going “back forward” to squandered democratic coexistence.