Ottoman Imperial Diplomacy: A Political, Social and Cultural History.

• Author: Delgado, Jibreel
• Position: Book review

Ottoman Imperial Diplomacy: A Political, Social and Cultural History

By Dogan Gurpinar

London and New York: I.B.Tauris, 2014, 350 pages, $99, ISBN 9781780761121.

Dogan Gurpinar's most recent contribution to Late Ottoman History places the formation of modern Turkish nationalism not in any externally imposed ideology diametrically opposed to all that the Ottoman identity stood for, but rather he finds it emanating from the reformist trends within the Ottoman diplomatic service. Gurpinar situates his study within the new paradigm generated by the work of a generation of historians, "beginning with the avant-guarde study by Rifa'at Abou-El-Haj... such as Linda Darling, Ariel Salzmann, Butrus Abu-Manneh, and Beshara Doumani" (p. 3). Starting in the 1990s, this paradigm identified the early modern period of the Ottoman Empire as a time of dynamism and complexity, challenging earlier historians who gave a reductionist description of the period as one of total decline and degeneration. Continuing along these lines, the current work under review along with Gurpinar's other recent publication, Ottoman/Turkish Visions of the Nation, 1860-1950, trace the continuities between the early modern period and the late 19th to early 20th century.

The book is divided into seven chapters with an introduction and conclusion. The first three chapters--"Nationalism and the ancient regime: politics of the Tanzimat," "Primacy of international politics: diplomacy and appropriation of the 'new knowledge,'" and "A social portrait of the diplomatic service"--examine the institution of the Ottoman diplomatic service in the shadow of the Tanzimat era of the mid-1800s, providing insight into the social status of those involved in international diplomacy and their consideration of the skill of international relations as another of the many types of "new knowledge" that Ottoman reformers were looking to attain. Throughout the following two chapters --"The routine of the diplomatic service and its encounters abroad," and "The mentalities and dispositions of the diplomatic service: the great transformation"--the author traces intellectual developments from the Tanzimat generation to the generation of the Young Ottomans in the First Constitutional Era, the Hamidian reforms, to the time of the Young Turks and Unionists of the Second Constitutional Era and the rise of the Turkish Republic. He does so, all through the lens of the bureaucrats of the Ottoman Foreign Ministry. In the...