Imperial Legacy
The Ottoman Imprint on the Balkans and the Middle East

Edited by L. Carl Brown. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. 337 pp. $49.50.


Reviewed by Daniel Pipes

Middle East Quarterly
June 1996

http://www.meforum.org/1113/imperial-legacy

"In the Valhalla of past empires, the Ottomans should rank high. In actual fact few major political systems have been so consistently ignored or misrepresented." Imperial Legacy represents an attempt to right this wrong by assessing the Ottoman legacy many decades after its passing in those lands where the padishah once ruled; the editor dubs it "a collection of briefs for the court of history."

The results can hardly be gainsaid. In chapters on one arena after another -- state boundaries, administration, diplomacy, the Arabic and Turkish languages, economics, military matters, Islam, and education -- the authors show the wide, sometimes pervasive, impact of Ottoman institutions and practices. This hardly comes as a surprise, given that the empire lasted over six hundred years, but the point does emphatically need making, and a luminary cast (Halil Inalcïk, Charles Issawi, Geoffrey Lewis, Bernard Lewis, André Raymond, Dankwart Rustow) effectively does so.

Brown, professor emeritus at Princeton University, has emerged in the last decade as the Middle East's historian with the widest vision. His International Politics and the Middle East: Old Rules, Dangerous Game (Princeton University Press, 1984) is a path-breaking effort to find patterns in diplomacy over the past two centuries; and a multi-authored volume (co-edited with Cyril E. Black), Modernization in the Middle East: The Ottoman Empire and Its Afro-Asian Successors (Darwin Press, 1993) ambitiously seeks to interpret the whole of modern Middle Eastern history.

Related Topics:  Daniel Pipes  |  June 1996 MEQ receive the latest by email: subscribe to the free mef mailing list To receive the full, printed version of the Middle East Quarterly, please see details about an affordable subscription. This text may be reposted or forwarded so long as it is presented as an integral whole with complete information provided about its author, date, place of publication, and original URL.