In the native historiographies of many regions of former Ottoman rule, particularly the Balkans and the Arab world, the Ottomans are very much criticized and the negative aspects of their rule are indeed played up. This could reach absurd proportions in its more nationalistic manifestations, as in one Bulgarian textbook from 1987, which declared that Bulgarians in the early modern period, "were born, grew up, reached maturity, and died in slavery." (Marina Liakova, "Das Bild des Osmanisches Reiches und der Türken (1396-1878) in ausgewählten bulgarischen Schulbüchern für Geschichte," International Schulbüchforschung 23 (2001), 248). Negative portrayals of the Ottomans in the Balkans and Arab world have been heavily influenced by nationalist concerns, as the newly established states, and the scholars who supported them and were supported by them, sought to build legitimacy and a national identity counter to the Ottomans. It's only in recent years that the vehemently anti-Ottoman image presented in secondary education in these countries is being moderated. In Turkey, some of the same pressures were present: nationalists writing in the aftermath of the War of Independence sought to legitimize the new republic by repudiating the Ottoman past and emphasizing the negative impact of the Ottomans on the modernization of Turkey. As the hardcore nationalists lost their monopolistic grip on public discourse in the '40s and '50s, voices wishing to identify the Ottoman past with modern Turkey became more influential and more positive narratives emerged.

In western historiography, judgements of Ottoman rule in the early modern period have frequently been informed by comparison with Europe. Probably the most common of which is the notion of religious tolerance: the Ottomans permitted certain religious minorities, particularly Christians and Jews, to live normal lives in the empire in exchange for the payment of a tax (the jizya, which is frequently characterized as being either "light" or "heavy" without any evidence - in fact it seems to have varied significantly according to place and time) and certain social restrictions, the level of enforcement of which also varied significantly. This is then contrasted to Western Europe, where Muslims were generally not permitted to live and Jews were restricted in where and how they could live, and above all to the case of Spain, which famously persecuted and expelled its religious minorities. While Ottoman attitudes toward Christian and Jewish religious minorities certainly didn't align with modern notions of religious pluralism, it was noticeably more tolerant than most states of Europe. It is difficult to criticize Ottoman treatment of minorities too harshly when, right across the Mediterranean, one finds a Christian society (Spain) which persecuted its Jewish and Muslim minorities so severely that they largely ceased to exist. I would agree that this sometimes leads to a romanticization of Ottoman tolerance and a tendency to downplay its limits, or to an ahistorical dichotomy between a "tolerant east" and "intolerant west."

More interesting, I think, is the question of how to characterize Ottoman rule and the nature of its relation to its subjects in comparison with the European empires. What strikes me as the most significant difference between the nature of Ottoman rule in the Balkans and Arab world, and British and French colonial empires, is that the latter entailed a stark distinction between center and periphery, while the Ottoman case did not. The fact that British and French empires were built overseas was not insignificant: there was a clear status distinction between the mainland and the colonial empire. The exception that proves the rule here is Russia. Russia ruled over a colonial empire in Asia just as the French and British did, but because it was an overland empire, it carried with it certain ambiguities. It was not clear where the Russian "core" ended and the colonial realm began, and this ambiguity even spawned the notion of "Eurasianism," or the idea that Russia's empire should be understood as a single unit with its own distinct cultural identity. With some exceptions, for the European oceanic empires this ambiguity did not exist. The purpose of the empire was to enrich the metropole. European empires were designed, deliberately, to bring wealth to the center, and particularly in the nineteenth century European (and American, and Japanese) empires actively sought to reshape the world economy for their own benefit, importing raw materials from their colonies and other non-industrialized regions of the world to fuel manufacturing industries, a concept famously characterized by Immanuel Wallerstein as "the Modern World-System." This distinction between a core and a periphery is, I think, what fundamentally separates the Ottoman case from that of European empires. The Ottoman empire was not a "Turkish empire" which prioritized the needs of the Turkish people or the geographic region of Anatolia above those of the Balkans and the Arab lands. In the early modern period, the Ottomans divided their society into the askerî, or military/administrative class of elites, and the re'âyâ, or subject class. Although the Askerî was mostly Muslim, this was not a religious division (nor an ethnic one, as the elite classes were of diverse origin). All peasants, Muslim or Christian, were re'âyâ, and Ottoman legitimacy was built upon an ideology which emphasized the need to provide them with justice. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, confronted with European concepts of citizenship, Ottoman administrators continued to conceptualize their empire as a single unit, and sought to propagate an inclusive "Ottoman" identity which brought all the peoples of the empire together, whatever their religion or ethnicity, as equal citizens. The degree to which they actually succeeded in doing so is highly debated, and clearly Ottoman rule was not always harmonious in fact. But insofar as the nationalist narratives emerging from Balkan and Arab countries have sought to place the blame for current problems on Ottoman rule, it is not justified to argue, in a general way, that these problems emerged from a consistent and deliberate mistreatment of the places over which they ruled in favor of a Turkish "core." The Ottomans in the early modern period ruled over the Balkans in essentially the same way that they ruled over Anatolia. In the nineteenth century, they didn't try to reshape the economies of Syria or Bulgaria to benefit Turkey. Ottoman rule, whatever its positive and negative aspects, didn't have a fundamentally different character between all of these regions. One can still identify negative aspects of Ottoman rule, of course, but the idea that Bulgarians "were born, grew up, reached maturity, and died in slavery" (the implication being that life for Turkish peasants was significantly better) is flatly wrong. Ottoman rule in the early modern period didn't consist of a "Turkish nation" conquering and ruling over a colonial population of Bulgarians, Arabs, Greeks, etc. but of a multiethnic Muslim elite, linked together only by loyalty to the dynasty, ruling over a large population of all religions and ethnicities.

That doesn't mean, of course, that Ottoman history isn't full of examples of mistreatment of minorities, the most striking being the genocides carried out during World War I. As I mentioned above, romanticization of Ottoman rule should be avoided just as much as demonization. My point here is that there were fundamental differences between the Ottoman empire and European colonial empires in terms of how they conceptualized and organized relations between center and periphery which make direct comparison of their historical impact on their subject populations more difficult than it first appears. Among early modern Ottomanists, when we talk about "the core lands of the Ottoman empire," what we are referring to are the Balkans and western Anatolia, the regions under the most direct administration, being divided into land-revenue grants for the empire's cavalry forces. There was no identifiable center and periphery around which a colonial economic relationship could be organized.