Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- 1. Nationalism and the ancien regime: politics of the Tanzimat -- 2. Primacy of international politics: diplomacy, and appropriation of the 'new knowledge' -- 3. A social portrait of the diplomatic service -- 4. The routine of the diplomatic service and its encounters abroad -- 5. The mentalities and dispositions of the diplomatic service: the great transformation -- 6. The European patterns and the Ottoman Foreign Office -- 7. Passages of the diplomatic service from the Empire to the Republic -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Index.

This book provides a general understanding of Ottoman diplomacy in relation to the modern international system. The origins of Ottoman diplomacy have been traced back to the Islamic tradition and Byzantine Inner Asian heritage. The Ottomans regarded diplomacy as an institution of the modern international system. They established resident ambassadors and the basic institutions and structure of diplomacy. The book concludes with a review of the legacy of Ottoman diplomacy.

The Ottoman Scramble for Africa is the first book to tell the story of the Ottoman Empire's expansionist efforts during the age of high imperialism. Following key representatives of the sultan on their travels across Europe, Africa, and Arabia at the close of the nineteenth century, it takes the reader from Istanbul to Berlin, from Benghazi to Lake Chad Basin to the Hijaz, and then back to Istanbul. It turns the spotlight on the Ottoman Empire's expansionist strategies in Africa and its increasingly vulnerable African and Arabian frontiers. Drawing on previously untapped Ottoman archival evidence, Mostafa Minawi examines how the Ottoman participation in the Conference of Berlin and involvement in an aggressive competition for colonial possessions in Africa were part of a self-reimagining of this once powerful global empire. In so doing, Minawi redefines the parameters of agency in late-nineteenth-century colonialism to include the Ottoman Empire and turns the typical framework of a European colonizer and a non-European colonized on its head. Most importantly, Minawi offers a radical revision of nineteenth-century Middle East history by providing a counternarrative to the "Sick Man of Europe" trope, challenging the idea that the Ottomans were passive observers of the great European powers' negotiations over solutions to the so-called Eastern Question.

This work reframes sixteenth-century history , incorporating the Ottoman empire more thoroughly into European, Asian and world history. It analyzes the Ottoman Empire’s expansion eastward in the contexts of claims to universal sovereignty, Levantine power politics, and the struggle for control of the oriental trade. Challenging the notion that the sixteenth-century Ottoman Empire was merely a reactive economic entity driven by the impulse to territorial conquest, Brummett portrays it as inheritor of Euro-Asian trading networks and participant in the contest for commercial hegemony from Genoa and Venice to the Indian Ocean. Brummett shows that the development of seapower was crucial to this endeavor, enabling the Ottomans to subordinate both Venice and the Mamluk kingdom to dependency relationships and providing the Ottoman ruling class access to commercial investment and wealth.

The Ottoman Empire maintained a complex and powerful bureaucratic system which enforced the Sultan's authority across the Empire's Middle-Eastern territories. This bureaucracy continued to gain in power and prestige, even as the empire itself began to crumble at the end of the nineteenth century. Through extensive new research in the Ottoman archives, Dogan Gurpinar assesses the intellectual, cultural and ideological foundations of the diplomatic service under Sultan Abdulhamid II. In doing so, Ottoman Imperial Diplomacy presents a new model for understanding the formation of the modern Turkish nation, arguing that these Hamidian reforms- undertaken with the support of the 'Young Ottomans' led by Namik Kemal- constituted the beginnings of modern Turkish nationalism. This book will be essential reading for historians of the Ottoman Empire and for those seeking to understand the history of Modern Turkey.

The effects of the French Revolution reached far beyond the confines of France itself. The Ottoman Empire, ancient ally and major trading partner of France, was not immune from the repercussions of the 'Age of Revolutions', especially since it was home to permanent French communities with a certain legal autonomy. French Revolutionaries in the Ottoman Empire examines, for the first time, the political and cultural impact of the French Revolution on Franco-Ottoman relations, as well as on the French communities of the Ottoman Empire. The modern interpretation of revolutionary ideological expansionism is strongly influenced by the famous propaganda decree of 19 November 1792 which promised 'fraternity and help to all peoples who wish to recover their liberty', as well as the well-studied efforts to export the Revolution into the territories conquered by the revolutionary armies and to the various Sister Republics. Against all expectations, however, French revolutionaries in the Ottoman Empire exhibited neither a 'crusading mentality' nor a heightened readiness to use force in order to achieve ideological goals. Instead, as this volume shows, in matters of diplomacy as well as in the administration of French expatriate communities, revolutionary policies were applied in an extremely circumspect fashion. The focus on the effects of the French regime change outside of France offers valuable new insights into the revolutionary process itself, which will revise common assumptions about French revolutionary diplomacy. In addition, Pascal Firges takes a close look at the establishment of the new political culture of the French Revolution within the transcultural context of the French expatriate communities of the Ottoman Empire, which serves as a thought-provoking point of comparison for the emergence and development of French revolutionary political culture.

During the nineteenth century—as violence, population dislocations, and rebellions unfolded in the borderlands between the Russian and Ottoman Empires—European and Russian diplomats debated the “Eastern Question,” or, “What should be done about the Ottoman Empire?” Russian-Ottoman Borderlands brings together an international group of scholars to show that the Eastern Question was not just one but many questions that varied tremendously from one historical actor and moment to the next. The Eastern Question (or, from the Ottoman perspective, the Western Question) became the predominant subject of international affairs until the end of the First World War. Its legacy continues to resonate in the Balkans, the Black Sea region, and the Caucasus today. The contributors address ethnicity, religion, popular attitudes, violence, dislocation and mass migration, economic rivalry, and great-power diplomacy. Through a variety of fresh approaches, they examine the consequences of the Eastern Question in the lives of those peoples it most affected, the millions living in the Russian and Ottoman Empires and the borderlands in between.