Although the book often focuses on potentates, its distillation is political history in the broadest sense, which incorporates cultural and literary information and insightful case studies, of individuals, carpets, or a notion like ‘Ottoman fusion’. In a concise and readable style, Fortna traces the long history of the Ottoman Empire from its rise to power in the thirteenth century as one of many nomadic emirates in Asia Minor to its status as the most enduring Islamic empire in history.

The fledgling Ottoman principality was shaped by the opposing influences of Byzantine and Mongol rule. As it expanded across the Balkans and Anatolia during the fourteenth century, it inherited traits and territory from both. The Ottomans absorbed a third, caliphal imperial heritage by conquering the Arabic Levant and Egypt in the sixteenth century. Whereas internally divided Europe expanded globally, the Ottomans disregarded the new horizons which opened up beyond the Old World. They excelled at integrating the diverse traditions, territories, and peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean into their central rule, granting Christian and Jewish communities some non-territorial autonomy. For many religious groups, particularly Jews, this was an improvement on the situation in premodern Europe.

 Fortna does not present this history with nostalgia or romanticisation. Unlike the ‘neo-Ottomanism’ embraced by members of Turkey’s ruling party in the early twenty-first century, his account resists both sentimental idealisation and exotic fascination, favouring instead a critical scholarly curiosity.

The self-confidence of the Muslim imperial power demanded a reinterpretation of the Ottomans’ beginnings, which took place in their relations with indigenous Christians. Osman, the founder of the Ottoman dynasty, purportedly referred to this conviviality: ‘They are our neighbours,’ he said of the Christians, ‘we came into this country as homeless people, and they received us well. Therefore, it is fitting that we, too, respect them.’ Yet as Fortna notes, by the late fifteenth century the Ottoman historian Aşıkpaşazade had retrospectively cast this posture as a victor’s shrewd policy: ‘First, you must deceive the enemy with feigned friendliness, then eliminate them.’

Power concentration, subordination, and violence – rather than trust and consensus – formed the core of the imperial fabric. At the height of its power, the palace sanctioned multiple fratricides to ensure uncontested patrilinear dynastic succession. The sultan considered his concubines slaves, as he did his government officials and bureaucratic workforce. The presence of powerful women and the refinement of education in the palace did not change the system’s misogyny, evident in what has been described as ‘a misogynistic streak in Ottoman [contemporary] history-writing’, as Fortna relates. Slavery beyond the palace was widespread until the early twentieth century, sustained by war, raids, piracy, the African slave trade, and the enslavement of enslaved people’s children.

Fortna highlights a recurring dynamic: centralised rule and supreme rulers, and an aversion to self-determining regions, groups, and individuals – a mindset that construes any form of equality as a threat to one’s own dominance, even though history demonstrates the connection between prosperity and freedom.

This book gives the crisis-ridden, late Ottoman sphere its due place, from its military-focused reform efforts in the nineteenth century to the making of the post-Ottoman order after 1918. Moves towards equality, democracy, and regionalisation during the final century of the Ottoman Empire clashed with the prevailing logic of centralisation. This course of centralisation was ultimately pursued by the ultranationalist imperial élites who formed the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), the dominant Young Turk party, many of whose leaders were from the Balkans. The lost Balkan Wars of 1912-13, which produced approximately four hundred thousand (not four million, as Fortna claims) Muslim refugees, radicalised the CUP.

While there were some hopeful departures from the norm – most notably the constitutional movement and the 1908 Young Turk Revolution – the late Ottoman Empire ultimately became a dictatorial CUP party-state. Amid extreme violence and the genocide of indigenous Christians during World War I, it collapsed in 1918. The CUP cadres formed the backbone of the new government in Ankara, renouncing the empire but not their claim to exclusive central rule over Asia Minor. In the wars that followed, they emerged victorious against the Armenians, Alevi Kurds, Greeks, and minor French units. Recognised by the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, they established the Republic of Turkey under Kemal Atatürk, a former CUP general.

Since the end of the twentieth century, most research has focused on the disastrous end of the Ottoman Empire, which has long been shrouded in uncertainty and distorted by denial. However, understanding this period is crucial for understanding the ongoing crises in today’s Middle East and Turkey, not least because it included significant Western failures, Fortna underlines. As the term ‘Eastern Question’ suggests, ‘what mattered to the powers was not so much what happened in the “East”, but rather how it affected Europe’, as Fortna aptly puts it. The fate of the Armenians, Kurds, and other groups whose rights were disregarded by the Lausanne Treaty was of no concern for Western politicians.

Many diplomats believed that the Lausanne Treaty had definitively settled the Eastern Question – not least through the forcible ‘unmixing’ of peoples. This was radically executed by the CUP and its successors, and it was amended by an agreement on ‘population exchange’ in Lausanne. But this diplomacy overlooked the price that was ultimately paid, as Fortna rightly states: Ankara developed a ‘staunchly mono-national’ vision of the state and ‘the German right became downright obsessed with Mustafa Kemal’. Relying on recent scholarship, he makes clear that Kemal and the concept of a ‘pure’ Turkish nation ‘loomed large in the Nazi imagination’, and the so-called New Turkey and its leader received adulatory coverage in the foreign press.

Following the Lausanne Treaty, many in the West considered political Islam a force of the past. Ankara abolished the caliphate and Sharia law, introducing the Swiss Civil Code, which became the backbone of Kemalist secularism. This was an important step forward, especially for urban women. Yet the Kemalist state was a repressive dictatorship that did not rest on a country-wide consensus or a democratic process. After 1945, Western powers demanded a transition into a more democratic, multi-party system as the price of entry into the Western alliance. Turkey’s unresolved problems predating 1923 as well as political Islam re-emerged, slowly but surely.

Contemporary Turkey has moved only ‘haltingly towards democracy’. Its progress has been thwarted by chaos, coups, corruption, and periodic regression into centralist authoritarianism. Important progress in education and industry has failed to realise its full potential for prosperity. Since the 1950s, millions of people from Turkey have migrated abroad, either as refugees or to join the workforce. The current brain drain is due to R.T. Erdogan’s costly autocratisation. By reviving what Fortna refers to as the ‘imperial ghosts’ of the sultanate-caliphate, his ambitious rule has established links with the Ottoman past and shaken the vulnerable foundations of the secular republic.