No More Center, No More Periphery: A New Ottoman Geography

The dominant way Ottoman historians have thought about the incredible geographic expanse of the empire is through a model of center and periphery.  Istanbul, the imperial capital, was the center of gravity that drew resources, people, cash, knowledge, and power to itself from all parts of the empire.  Borrowing from other imperial historiographies, this model for the Ottoman Empire has been variously described using analogies such as concentric circles and hubs and spokes.

This paper seeks both to understand how Ottoman historians have conceptualized the political geography of the empire and to then suggest some other perhaps more productive ways that we may understand the space of the empire.  It thus first gives a historiographical sketch of the various spatial models of empire currently on offer.  It then shows what these schematics have illuminated and what they have obscured.  They have made it possible for us to analyze something of the relationships between Istanbul and various imperial provinces.  At the same time though, understanding the empire as a center with many peripheries has meant that we only see provinces as they interact with the capital.

Thus, this paper ends by proposing some other ways that we may conceptualize the space of the Ottoman imperium.  A focus on connections within and across the empire that bypass Istanbul altogether helps us to see some of the complexities of the empire that ideas such as concentric circles or hubs and spokes fail to capture.  We see family and patronage networks extending from the Balkans to Syria, connections of commodity production and consumption that move from North Africa to the Arabian Peninsula, and charitable institutions that work across the empire through means quite distinct from the Ottoman imperial bureaucracy.  Where the centers and the peripheries lie thus no longer seems so clear.