Nelly Hanna, Empires in Friction, Egypt in the Sixteenth Century (Syracuse University Press, 2025).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Nelly Hanna (NH): I was led by my desire to place Egypt within the Ottoman Empire as it shifted from one empire (Mamluk) to another (Ottoman) in the sixteenth century. I was particularly interested in the sixteenth century, the “age of empires.”
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
NH: The book addresses the process of incorporation into an empire. It shows that conquest was a small part of this incorporation and that the process took a century to accomplish. Prior to the modern period, empires, whether the Ottoman Empire or other contemporary empires, faced a number of common challenges. For all of them, distance was a problem. It took time for orders to reach their destinations, for officials to reach the provinces that they were to govern. Likewise, it was difficult for the central authorities to ensure that their representatives who governed a distant province implemented orders.
The book moves from the broad, macro picture of contemporary empires to the micro picture of people who lived through periods of change—those who in some way experienced a shift to living in a new empire. Some of them benefitted from this shift and others lost in the process. Often there emerged hybrid characters, people who found a place in the process of incorporation, bringing in their own cultural luggage. Often, integration was accompanied by violence.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
NH: My interest in the economy touches most of my books in some way or another. At the same time, my perspective has been, and still is, to cover important economic developments through the experiences of people. This applies to my biography of a merchant, Ismail ab Taqiya, who I studied in the context of major commercial shifts. Empires in Friction follows the same perspective, but with an accent on a broader geographical region (the Ottoman capital and the Eastern Mediterranean). As highlighted above, my new book is a shift in that it asks how certain individuals lived through the process of incorporation.
With regard to Egypt, working on the sixteenth century has meant trying to draw a picture of the basic developments in the absence of contemporary sources. This century, especially from 1500 to 1580, is one of the least known in the history of Egypt between 1300 and 1800, because there are few chronicles; court records are few and thin for this period.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
NH: I hope that scholars and students will read this book- those interested firstly in empires in general, secondly in the Ottoman Empire, and thirdly in the sixteenth century. Among the scholarly community, this book challenges many dominant views on the sixteenth century. It should therefore arouse much discussion on the way we understand not only Egyptian history but also the Ottoman empire in the sixteenth century as a whole, usually seen as the most powerful in Ottoman history. Finally, it also challenges the nature of power in relation to empires in general in this century.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
NH: I am interested in “history from below” and am working on researching some marginal groups in eighteenth-century Cairo. My interest in the lives of ordinary people, in the way they can be part of important transformation is still the channel that I am interested in. This study is in its early stages and I am hoping to find out much more about entertainers and street performers with the aim of integrating them in the history of this period.
Excerpt from the book (from Chapter 1, Introduction, pages 3 to 4)
Empire as Seen from the Province
In this period that experienced many conquests in different parts of the world, in Asia and in America, the encounters that resulted are worthy of study from the point of view of the conquered as well as that of the conquerors. One of the focuses of the book is its view of the Ottoman Empire from the angle of a province rather than from the perspective of the capital. This approach is based on the assumption that the study of a province can shed new light on the nature of the empire as a whole, whether with regard to the Ottoman Empire or another early modern empire. Seeing the empire from the angle of the province—which is what the majority of the people living in the empire would see—shows a different perspective of the very idea of empire. This approach follows up on work that has been done on empires in general as well as on provinces of the Ottoman Empire, both from the angle of the center and that of the province….
The study of empire from the angle of the province can be helpful in redressing an imbalance. Empires, whether Ottoman or others, have been associated with their capital cities and generalizations are often made on the basis of conditions in these capitals. The capital of the empire was important because it was the place where rulers resided, where decisions were taken and orders issued, where the archives and the bureaucrats were located, and where revenues from the provinces flowed in. Yet, to focus the study of empire only on the capital restricts one’s view of its complexity and distorts one’s vision of the empire as a whole. Focusing only on capital cities does not provide sufficient distance to understand both the nature of its power or of its vulnerabilities. Nor does it sufficiently bring the great diversity in social composition or in religious, ethnic or linguistic makeup of most empires into the picture. Provinces did not necessarily experience the same important events, conditions or trends in the same way as they were felt in the capital. The broad appellations that were sometimes thought to be characteristic of an empire—terms like the “classical age,” the “age of absolutism” and so on—were often based on the experiences in the capital, perhaps even in the ruler’s court, rather than that of the empire as a whole. They may be relevant, but they are only a small part of the total picture.
Thus, in some ways, exploring “empire” from the angle of the province and the relationships between center and province can change our view on the empire. Power, for instance, is perceived in different ways in the capital than in the province, and its impact differs on each of them. Hence the present work is as much a study of a province as it is a study of empire. The conclusions reached about the province thus have a bearing on our understanding of empires. In other words, this is an attempt to theorize the concept of empire from the location of Ottoman Egypt.
These statements are particularly relevant for the early modern empire—the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—when the power of the ruler or the monarch was usually felt more strongly in the capital. Their impact was less in the distant or marginal regions of the empire. It was easier to control officials in the capital than it was in distant provinces; likewise, the central authorities could better control the economy in the capital or the central regions, where they set the prices of commodities or could control guilds, than they could elsewhere. It is therefore somewhat misleading to take such statements as a reflection of the empire as a whole. Broadening our scope gives a different picture of empire and of its power.