In 1720, an Ottoman ambassador was sent to the court of the Child King Louis XV to observe Western civilization and report on what he saw and how it could be applied in the Ottoman Empire. Based on the accounts of this ambassador, East Encounters West studies the impact of the West on the Ottoman empire and the impact of this Ottoman embassy on the two societies. In France, the presence of the embassy yielded only a brief fashion of Turquerie, whereas in the Ottoman empire, it yielded the first official printing press, signalling an important step toward Western style. Gocek...

What are the causes of imperial decline? This work studies the Ottoman empire in the 18th and 19th centuries to argue that the Ottoman imperial decline resulted from a combination of Ottoman internal dynamics with external influences. Specifically, it contends that the split within the Ottoman social structure across ethno-religious lines interacted with the effects of war and commerce with the West to produce a bifurcated Ottoman bourgeoisie. This bourgeoisie, divided into disparate commercial and bureaucratic elements, was able to challenge the sultan but was ultimately unable to salvage...

A collection of essays which questions long-standing stereotypes about the traditional subordination of women in the Middle East. It offers an exploration of tradition, identity, and power in different parts of the Middle East.

While much of the international community regards the forced deportation of Armenian subjects of the Ottoman Empire in 1915, where approximately 800,000 to 1.5 million Armenians perished, as genocide, the Turkish state still officially denies it.

In Denial of Violence, Fatma Muge Gocek seeks to decipher the roots of this disavowal. To capture the negotiation of meaning that leads to denial, Gocek undertook a qualitative analysis of 315 memoirs published in Turkey from 1789 to 2009 in addition to numerous secondary sources, journals, and newspapers. She argues that denial is a...