This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1975.

There is no dearth of news, not always of the most cheerful sort, coming out of the broad geographic arc of the vast territory that once constituted the mighty Ottoman Empire. The Arab Spring continues to reshape regions, an economic crisis is tearing apart Greece, pirates off the Horn of Africa are terrorizing ships, and conflicts in the Caucasus and Balkans are simmering. In Echoes of Empire: An Accidental Historian's Journey through the Post-Ottoman World, James S. Kessler chronicles his travels through a dizzying array of cultures, religions, languages, and political systems found within many of the former Ottoman Empire's possessions in Africa, Asia, and Europe. Drawing upon his experience as a historian and educator, Kessler explores how the shared Ottoman past-and how that past is remembered-continues to play a role in the post-imperial present in the more than forty countries that constitute the post-Ottoman world.