The main reference source for questions of Islamic philosophy, science, and technology amongst Western engaged readers and academics in general and legal researchers in particular.

A History of Ottoman Libraries tells the story of the development and the organization of Ottoman libraries from the fourteenth through the twentieth century. In the first part, the book surveys the phases through which the Ottoman libraries evolved from a few shelves of books to sizable, endowed collections housed in free-standing library buildings. Ottoman libraries were mainly established as charitable foundations, that is by endowing the books and steady income for the maintenance of the collection and the library building. The second part of the book focuses on the organization, the personnel, and the day-to-day functioning of Ottoman libraries. This first complete history of Ottoman libraries was written based on hitherto untapped archival sources.

Traces the simultaneous crafting of political power, the codification of a historical record, and the unfolding of cultural change

Elias John Wilkinson Gibb (1857-1901) was a Scottish Orientalist who was born and educated in Glasgow. After studying Arabic and Persian, he developed an interest in Turkish language and literature, especially poetry, and in 1882 he published Ottoman Poems Translated into English Verse in the Original Forms. This was a forerunner to the six-volume classic presented here, A History of Ottoman Poetry, published in London between 1900 and 1909. Gibb died in London of scarlet fever at the age of 44, and only the first volume of his masterpiece appeared before his death. His family entrusted to his friend Edward Granville Browne (1862-1926), a distinguished Orientalist in his own right who had made a special study of Babism, the task of posthumously publishing the five remaining volumes. Browne characterized the work as "one of the most important, if not the most important, critical studies of any Muhammadan literature produced in Europe during the last half-century." The first volume contains a long and compelling introduction by Gibb on the entire subject, in which he argues that Ottoman poetry often rose and fell in tandem with Ottoman power. Gibb divides Ottoman poetry into two great schools, the Old or Asiatic (circa 1300-1859), which generally was characterized by its deference to Persian influences; and the New or European (from 1859 onward), which was influenced by French and other Western poetry. According to Gibb, the Old or Asiatic School went through a four periods: a formative period (1300-1450); a period (1450-1600) in which works were modeled after the Persian poet Jami; a period (1600-1700) dominated by the influences of Persian poets Urfi Shirazi and Saʼib Tabrizi; and a period of uncertainty that lasted until 1859. The European school that followed was inaugurated by Ibrahim Sinasi (1826-71), who in 1859 produced a small but momentous collection of French poetry translated into Turkish verse. The influence of the collection was far-reaching and eventually changed the course of Ottoman poetry. Gibb is known for his masterful translations that brilliantly render into English both the meaning and the form of Ottoman, Persian, and Arabic poetry. For almost a century after his death, a family trust financed the Gibb Memorial Series of editions and translations into English of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish texts.

The eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire used to be a multi-ethnic region where Armenians, Kurds, Syriacs, Turks, and Arabs lived together in the same villages and cities. The disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and rise of the nation state violently altered this situation. Nationalist elites intervened in heterogeneous populations they identified as objects of knowledge, management, and change. These often violent processes of state formation destroyed historical regions and emptied multicultural cities, clearing the way for modern nation states. The Making of Modern Turkey highlights how the Young Turk regime, from 1913 to 1950, subjected Eastern Turkey to various forms of nationalist population policies aimed at ethnically homogenizing the region and incorporating it in the Turkish nation state. It examines how the regime utilized technologies of social engineering, such as physical destruction, deportation, spatial planning, forced assimilation, and memory politics, to increase ethnic and cultural homogeneity within the nation state. Drawing on secret files and unexamined records, Ugur Ümit Üngör demonstrates that concerns of state security, ethnocultural identity, and national purity were behind these policies. The eastern provinces, the heartland of Armenian and Kurdish life, became an epicenter of Young Turk population policies and the theatre of unprecedented levels of mass violence.

This book is a new history of the Ottoman Empire's Tanzimat reforms in the provinces of Edirne and Ankara. It studies variation across the two provinces and the crucial role of local intermediaries such as notables, tribal leaders and merchants who at times undermined the power of the state but in other times worked hand-in-hand with state officials to build roads, improve infrastructure and provide security.

This illustrated textbook covers the full history of the Ottoman Empire, from its genesis to its dissolution.