François Georgeon’s latest book, Douze Essais sue l’Histoire de l’Empire Ottoman aux XIXe-XXe Siècles (Twelve essays on the history of the Ottoman Empire in the 19th and 20th centuries), brings together the renowned historian’s latest articles from the last two decades within a single volume. The article compilation is the third of its kind, following the earlier ones from 1995 and 2009, also published by Éditions Isis. Many of these articles might already be familiar to the interested reader, as they were published as contributions to edited volumes or thematic journal issues. It is nevertheless a great pleasure to have these beautifully written articles collected in a single book and read them once again as a whole.
In his humble preface, Georgeon notes that the reader might be surprised to see the diversity of the themes that are amassed under one roof. At the same time, he confesses that this assortment is a natural consequence of his almost fifty years of interest for the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey. One should also add his meticulous historian’s craft and tireless hard work, which translated into a dozen very well-researched and highly interesting articles. Despite the relative heterogeneity of the topics, such as painting, alcohol, temporality, and Ramadan, the chapters are very neatly divided among the three parts of the volume. The first part, “Un Empire et sa capitale” (An empire and its capital), opens with an article on “Ottoman plurality” as an antithesis of the nation-state system that would be the norm in the twentieth century. The following two chapters focus on Istanbul, the capital of the empire, in the long nineteenth century and exactly in 1900 (as an iconic date for city histories), as the epitome of ethnoreligious, linguistic, and sociocultural multiplicity of the Ottoman society.
Part 2, “Autour de la révolution jeune-turque” (Around the Young Turk Revolution), assembles four articles focusing on the period immediately before or after the Young Turk Revolution that were written between 2004 and 2017. Chapter 4 provides a general overview of the revolution situating it within a global picture and especially with reference to the aspects of liberty, “youth,” and Ottomanism (vs. Turkism). The following chapter is a close-up of the month of Ramadan (27 September–26 October) in 1908 at the Ottoman capital. As is well-known, François Georgeon is an expert of the social history of Ramadan in Istanbul and has fairly recently published a monograph on the subject (Le Mois le plus long. Ramadan à Istanbul de l’Empire ottoman à la Turquie contemporaine, 2017). The chapter specifically focuses on daily practices and routines of the month of fasting in Istanbul; international political developments as reflected in the life of city dwellers; economic life and consumption patterns; and the (critical) perception of relative liberty and permissiveness, such that it provides an analysis of continuity and change into the twentieth century.
Chapter 6 is a brief offshoot of Georgeon’s another well-known research article on humor in the Ottoman Empire, “Rire dans l’Empire ottoman” (1996), where the historian juxtaposes two different sources on comicality and laughter. The last chapter of the second part is the oldest article of the entire compilation (2004). “Un Tatar au Japon. Introduction au voyage d’Abdürrechid İbrahim en Asie (1908–1910)” is the extensive and informative introduction written together with Işık Tamdoğan for the French translation of Abdürreşid İbrahim’s book, Âlem-i İslâm ve Japonya’da İntişarı İslâmiyet.
The third and last part of the book, entitled “Mutation sociales et culturelles “(Social and cultural changes), brings together five articles on different aspects of social and cultural history of the late Ottoman Empire. Originally published as part of the edited volume, Les Ottomans et le temps (eds. Georgeon & Hitzel, 2012), Chapter 8 is an inspirational and pioneering research on Ottoman temporality, from the perspective of measuring, reforming, and accelerating time. Chapters 9 and 10 attest to Georgeon’s interest in visual sources for Ottoman historiography. “Le génie de l’ottomanisme. Essai sur la peinture orientaliste d’Osman Hamdi” analyzes the “orientalist” paintings of Osman Hamdi as reflections of his ambition to visualize and champion Ottoman civilization for Western audiences. Chapter 10, which has recently appeared in Clio. Femmes, genre, histoire as part of a special issue on “Genre et espace (post-)ottoman” (2018), provides a reflection of two caricatures, from 1911 and 1922 respectively, depicting an “emancipated” woman at the center with several male gazes surrounding her. Last two chapters of the volume reflect the historian’s most recent research interests, namely alcohol consumption and prohibition discussions from the Ottoman Empire to contemporary Turkey.
Chapter 11, largely based on Georgeon’s latest book, Au pays du raki. Le vin et l’alcool de l’Empire Ottoman à la Turquie d’Erdogan (2021), traces the ascent of rakı to the triumphant position of a “national drink” from the late Ottoman period onward. The article elaborates upon the changing facets of the culture of drinking in the Ottoman lands under the influence of religious and state-led restrictions, scientific and temperance discourses, and global economic and social trends. The volume closes with a chapter on Alcohol Prohibition Law of 1920 (Men-i Müskirat Kanunu), as Georgeon notes, “an episode often obscured within the history of the Turkish national movement” (p. 211).
Most of the research areas covered in the book reflect the fruitful discussions and collaborations that were developed at the seminar “État et société à la fin de l’Empire ottoman” that François Georgeon was directing, and at times coorganizing with colleagues, for several years at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Numerous acknowledgments and expressions of gratitude to colleagues and former students for source tips, references, and ideas also attest to a remarkable culture of collaboration and closeness that was built largely thanks to the efforts of François Georgeon within the larger community of researchers of the Ottoman Empire, Turkey, and South Eastern Europe at the Centre d’Études Turques, Ottomanes, Balkaniques et Centrasiatiques (previously Centre d’histoire du domaine turc).
As representative of the development of Turkology as a distinct research field with close ties to “Oriental studies” in continental Europe, specifically in Germany, Austria, and France in the second half of the twentieth century, Georgeon’s research focus more on the Turkish and Muslim aspects of the Ottoman Empire. Even though the multilingual and multiethnic realities of the Ottoman everyday life (with specific reference to “coexistence” and “sociability) is constantly stressed, both with regard to the use of sources (essentially in Turkish) and the angle of observation (from the view point of the center/the state/bureaucracy, political movements, intellectuals, and Turkish press), Ottoman non-Muslims usually remain in the background with minimal visibility and agency in these accounts. Furthermore, we might as well touch upon the methodological specificities of the “French school” of Turkology, which gives priority to “sources” and analyzing a document (or a phenomenon), instead of engaging with current theoretical debates (which might, in fact, determine the field in the Anglo-Saxon world). The reader would, no doubt, notice that all the twelve articles in the collection start with a brief introduction that summarizes the guiding questions of the research, but do not provide a more general theoretical discussion that resonates with the developments in social sciences. With regard to sources, it is clear that François Georgeon has never been a fan of the Prime Ministry’s Ottoman Archives. Instead, he has relied on his deep knowledge of sources of written and oral culture, especially through periodicals, journal, newspapers, compilations, and booklets. Compared to discontinuities, anonymities, and undeciphered chronological complexities in archival material, this kind of source material, essentially prepared and published for an audience, and thus potentially presenting a fuller (and more colorful) picture of the past, gives the historian a better hand to organize his material within a very lucid narrative and a highly reader-friendly structure.
As a final remark, it is worth noting that the book is dedicated to Bülent Tanör (1940–2002), whom Georgeon get to know and became friends with in the second half of the 1970s, while he was a researcher at the Institut Français d'Études Anatoliennes and both lived in Cihangir. Whether this is a manner of reminiscing his initial years in the field of Ottoman and Turkish studies or reflecting upon the fluctuations in the social and political history of Turkey is hard to tell, but I sincerely look forward to new publications of this eminent historian. François Georgeon’s calm and clear style of writing is without doubt a gift to all readers of history, but it is as well a great lesson and inspiration for all the students and researchers of the Ottoman past.
