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HAIM GERBER, State and Society in the Ottoman Empire (Farnham; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010) Variorum Collected Studies Series. 1 v. (various pagings) $ 139.95 Cloth
This book is a collection of Haim Gerber's articles (fifteen, written over three decades) on the Ottoman society, state and economy from the fifteenth to the early twentieth century. Its three parts are organized around the main themes investigated by Gerber: urban life in the central parts of the Empire, Ottoman reform and local relationships in late Ottoman Jerusalem, and ethnic and regional identities and their implications for the modern Middle East, especially in terms of the development of Arab nationalism. Underlying Gerber's discussion throughout the articles is his unrelenting criticism of the Orientalist view prevalent during the 1960s and 1970s. To attack this image of the Empire as the "rapacious, extortionist and corrupt creature it was made out to be in the secondary literature" (p. ix), Gerber draws on archival material from Israel/Palestine and Syria as well as Istanbul, Bursa and Edirne. While the linguistic richness of his English, French, Arabic and Ottoman Turkish sources indicate the breadth of his expertise, these studies also exemplify the work of a rare historian of the Ottoman Empire who goes beyond the archives to present a historical-sociological discussion of the topic.
This collection addresses different urban areas and some different themes but makes a case similar to that of Gerber's well received 1988 book, which showed economic and social relations in seventeenth-century Bursa were quite dynamic and state-citizen relations were benign. Part 1 on economic life opens with "The Waqf Institution in the Early Ottoman Empire" (1983), which disputes the then-prevalent idea that the vakif was designed to usurp state resources by turning them into family property. With evidence from the Edirne archives, Gerber shows that the vakifs were overwhelmingly endowed for the benefit of the public, rather than rich families. In the following article Gerber uses Ottoman court records to challenge the idea that Islamic "civil law ceased to have any practical meaning" (ch. 2:119) by showing the actual workings of Islamic partnership law. (He identifies at least 90 such cases). Likewise, the next article takes on the claim that Ottoman bureaucracy was never able to find a solution to (or...