In 1517, the Ottoman Sultan Selim "the Grim" conquered Egypt and brought his empire for the first time in history into direct contact with the trading world of the Indian Ocean. During the decades that followed, the Ottomans became progressively more engaged in the affairs of this vast and previously unfamiliar region, eventually to the point of launching a systematic ideological, military and commercial challenge to the Portuguese Empire, their main rival for control of the lucrative trade routes of maritime Asia. The Ottoman Age of Exploration is the first comprehensive historical account of this century-long struggle for global dominance, a struggle that raged from the shores of the Mediterranean to the Straits of Malacca, and from the interior of Africa to the steppes of Central Asia. Based on extensive research in the archives of Turkey and Portugal, as well as materials written on three continents and in a half dozen languages, it presents an unprecedented picture of the global reach of the Ottoman state during the sixteenth century. It does so through a dramatic recounting of the lives of sultans and viziers, spies, corsairs, soldiers-of-fortune, and women from the imperial harem. Challenging traditional narratives of Western dominance, it argues that the Ottomans were not only active participants in the Age of Exploration, but ultimately bested the Portuguese in the game of global politics by using sea power, dynastic prestige, and commercial savoir faire to create their own imperial dominion throughout the Indian Ocean.

In the early modern world, the Safavid, Ottoman, and Mughal empires sprawled across a vast swath of the earth, stretching from the Himalayas to the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea. The diverse and overlapping literate communities that flourished in these three empires left a lasting legacy on the political, religious, and cultural landscape of the Near East and India. This volume is a comprehensive sourcebook of newly translated texts that shed light on the intertwined histories and cultures of these communities, presenting a wide range of source material spanning literature, philosophy, religion, politics, mysticism, and visual art in thematically organized chapters. Scholarly essays by leading researchers provide historical context for closer analyses of a lesser-known era and a framework for further research and debate. The volume aims to provide a new model for the study and teaching of the region’s early modern history that stands in contrast to the prevailing trend of examining this interconnected past in isolation.

For many years, Ottomanist historians have been accustomed to study the Ottoman Empire and/or its constituent regions as entities insulated from the outside world, except when it came to 'campaigns and conquests' on the one hand, and 'incorporation into the European-dominated world economy' on the other. However, now many scholars have come to accept that the Ottoman Empire was one of the - not very numerous - long-lived 'world empires' that have emerged in history. This comparative social history compares the Ottoman to another of the great world empires, that of the Mughals in the Indian subcontinent, exploring source criticism, diversities in the linguistic and religious fields as political problems, and the fates of ordinary subjects including merchants, artisans, women and slaves.

The main objective of this book is to dispel some of the conventionally-held views surrounding trade between Europe and Asia in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. For instance, through a comparative and comprehensive study of merchant communities, markets and commodities, the individual authors demonstrate that Asian merchants were in no way inferior to Europeans in terms of their commercial operations and business acumen. The book as a whole attempts to view trade between Europe and Asia in its totality and emphasizes similarities rather than differences in the two regions.