The Ottomans

Andrew Wheatcroft's The Ottomans attempts to be two books in one--but he succeeds in only one of his books and the second has little to offer. The author says in his introduction that as he set out to write about the history of the Ottomans and their empire he discovered that his "original image of the Ottomans simply did not bear up under the weight of the evidence" (xxviii). Thus, he claims, he found himself writing a book about the image of the Ottomans and how it developed and changed over four centuries. The failure of the image of the Ottomans to match the reality has, Wheatcroft argues, often been the source of the ambiguous relations between modern Turkey and the West. Thus he chose to examine the development of this image of the Ottomans that predominated in Europe by the end of the nineteenth century and has continued well into the twentieth. Wheatcroft claimed that he would attempt to "sift the texts" in which Western distortions of Turks are contained, "and to remove the grosser distortions, leaving (no doubt) subtle and invisible corruption but not so much as to negate the value of their testimony" (xxix-xx).

Yet Wheatcroft's book consists mainly of a brief history of the Ottomans, centered around various major episodes in their history, and only concludes with the discussion of Europe's development of the stereotypes of the "Terrible Turk." The historical chapters contain relatively little reflection on the nature of western perceptions of the Ottomans

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ntial confusions about Ottoman life, Wheatcroft resorts on numerous occasions to citing contemporary Western misunderstandings. In discussing the refusal of the janissaries to adopt Western weapons in the eighteenth century, for example, Wheatcroft notes that such a refusal seemed paradoxical to Western observers. But, he explains, "the changes which they opposed most consistently were those which clashed with their self-image [which] depended on the primacy of hand-to-hand conflict" (98). Because, by this time, the reader understands the nature of this elite corps and the importance of its traditions, Wheatcroft's explanations easily orient the reader toward the janissaries' view of their actions and away from the view of the puzzled European observer. This is excellent history-writing. But when Wheatcroft begins to discuss the Western image of the Ottomans the broad outlines that served him well in assembling an introductory history of the empire are not really appropriate. In the chapter on the emergence of modernization and reform in the nineteenth century Wheatcroft notes the failure of Westerners to understand that they and the Turks might mean entirely different things when using exactly the same words. The expectat

Category: History - T