I looked in the sidebar and couldn't find anything, best book on Ottoman Empire?

by Matthew212

My friend wants that as a gift and I wasn't sure which would be best. Any ideas or suggestions?

Zooasaurus

For the Ottoman Military i recommend "A Military History of the Ottomans: From Osman to Atatürk" and "Ottoman Wars, 1700-1870: An Empire Besieged"

LBo87

Did you take a look on our Books & Resources List? Granted, sometime it's hard to find exactly what you are looking for.

Ottoman history is tricky because it covers so much time. Anatolia during the early conquests of Osman is so very different than the 19th century Empire during, say, the Tanzimât reforms. The Empire had such a long history and (like any long-surviving polity) re-invented itself at times. (Although the contemporaries would rarely explicitly see it that way.) What I'm getting at is that there's hardly any commendable single volume history book on the entirety of the Ottoman Empire that is not already enormous.

Well, there's one I know of: Finkel, Caroline: Osman's Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire, 1300-1923. New York: Basic Books, 2006. -- But this one is also over 700 pages if I remember correctly.

Other things that you might be interested in, although they are not single volume history books of everything Ottoman:

  • Hanioğlu, M. Şükrü. A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. -- Taken from our book list, I haven't read that one.
  • Casale, Giancarlo. The Ottoman Age of Exploration. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. -- Kind of special of course, but have you ever wondered what the Ottomans did when the Europeans were discovering the Americas and venturing into the Indian Ocean for the first time? Then this book is for you. It's nicely written and quite concise.
  • İnalcık, Halil & Quataert, Donald (ed.) An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. -- There are two volumes with lots of leading contributors (Suraiya Faroqhi et al.), I have only read vol. 2 (1600-1914) and I can vouch for it but it's a very arduous read and I wouldn't recommend it if you're not explicitly interested in detailed social and economic history.