← New Books Network
New Books Network
James Grehan, "Empire of Manners: Ottoman Sociability and War-Making in the Long Eighteenth Century" (Stanford UP, 2025)
00:36:22
Loading summary
Transcript41 lines
- [00:01]
A
Some days call for working up a sweat, working on your passion and endless action. Ditch the glitch with Liquid IV's new energy multiplier Sugar free refreshing flavors like strawberry, kiwi and BlackBerry Lemonade. Scientifically formulated to support physical energy, hydration, focus, mood and social stamina. Liquid IV's new energy multiplier Sugar free Hydrating energy Tap the banner to learn.
- [00:30]
B
More Limu Emu and Doug Here we have the Limu Emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.
- [00:48]
A
Uh, Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us?
- [00:51]
B
Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Savings vary Underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates excludes Massachusetts. Upgrade your laundry routine with a durable and reliable Maytag Laundry pair at Lowes, like the new Maytag washer and dryer with performance enhanced stain fighting power designed to cut through serious dirt and grime. And what's great is this laundry pair is in stock and ready for delivery when you need it the most. Don't miss out. Shop Maytag in store or online today at Lowe's. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:36]
A
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. James Grahan about his book titled Empire of Ottoman Sociability and War Making in the Long Eighteenth Century, published by Stanford University Press in 2025. This book takes us into some really intricate aspects of history. I think looking at manners, dress, how people style their hair, etiquette, things that might seem like either sort of small personal choices that don't have a lot of additional symbolism, or even if we do think there's more sort of self expression involved, we may not link those things to how the state is going, how the economy is running, how military perception is changing in society. And yet, as this book helps us understand, maybe we should be linking some of those things more than we do. And I think with that background, we clearly have a lot to be discussing. So Jim, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [02:40]
B
Thanks for inviting me on.
- [02:41]
A
Could you please start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write the book? What questions are you asking in it? How did all of this develop?
- [02:50]
B
I'm a professor of history at Portland State University out in Oregon on the west coast of the US And I have spent my career writing about the social and cultural history of the Ottoman Empire. And so this particular book is an outgrowth of my long term research. And I have been trying to re examine what we think we understand about the culture of the Balkans in the Middle East. It's usually framed in terms of something called Islamic culture or Islamicate culture. And I've always been rather skeptical about this kind of language. And so my approach has been to dive in and take a very close look about, a very close look on Ottoman society and ask what actually do we see if we let Ottomans talk.
- [03:44]
A
To us, taking the sources at their word, as it were, or at least investigating what it is they actually said and did and thought, rather than just maybe what outside assumptions are. And I suppose it's because of your background in Ottoman studies that you've investigated these questions of kind of how manners relate to questions of empire and military, that you've looked at the ottomans in the 18th century to investigate these questions.
- [04:09]
B
Yes, I spent a good part of my career looking at what I call in this book the long 18th century. I think I spend most of my time generally looking at the 18th and 19th centuries. And this is an interesting time in Ottoman history. It is, I think, sometimes, particularly with the 18th century unfairly neglected, dismissed as a period of decline, decadence. And that approach has never really satisfied me. So this book is an attempt really to reinterpret that whole period and put it in a new light using manners, which is not exactly what I set out to do, but I'm always interested in taking a new look at this history and trying to build a new model for understanding it. And so this was a sort of roundabout way of getting at this much larger question.
- [05:06]
A
Speaking of roundabout ways of getting at questions, the obvious next place to go is sources, because of course, when we investigate things in the past, there is never just one source that tells us everything. So can you tell us a bit more about the kinds of sources that are available to figure out how manners can link to these larger sort of societal structures, I used a set of.
- [05:28]
B
Sources which are often associated with political history. I read widely in the chronicles of the period. And on top of that kind of source, I investigated biographical dictionaries, which are compilations put together by Ottoman literature literati. And you get in these different entries for individuals, most of whom are members of the religious establishment, but they're also literary figures, state officials and a few other eminent personalities. You wind up getting a lot of snapshots of everyday life as you do in the in the chronicles, you see scenes or reconstructed scenes, sometimes even imagine dialogue. And all these sources become windows to that lost social world that we're too easy to, too willing to smother in easy generalizations. And then on top of the biographical dictionaries and some memoirs and the chronicles, I use travel literature, both Ottoman and European. And one of the virtues of travel literature is that you find people passing from one place or region to another and they begin to note what they see, they can begin to show us how the manners, the fashions, the tastes of different parts of the empire were quite pronounced before modern times. And a certain homogenization has taken place in a lot of cultural life. If you step back into that, the social world of what I call the old regime, the scene is, I think, rather different and unexpected from what we're taught to imagine.
- [07:20]
A
This is always a really interesting type of history to look at, is kind of not just taking the stories we think we know and instead going, well, actually, hang on a second, what can we discover instead? So taking then one of the pieces of this history that you've put together, and we'll probably get to some others as well, but picking a place to start. If we're looking at the Ottoman Empire, well, really in any period, but certainly in this one, we might assume that we should be thinking of it in terms of constituent identity parts like the Greeks, the Arabs, the Christians. And you discuss in the book that those might to some extent be sort of useful to think about how people are kind of creating and enacting sort of quote unquote correct behaviour. But we also need to be thinking about the geographic spread of the Ottoman Empire, that it's really pretty big at this point. So that actually might be a better lens through which to look at what these sorts of normative expectations are. And that gender is a big piece too. So can you maybe help us understand why geographic and gender influences might be more relevant than just sort of lumping everyone together as Christian or Greek, regardless of those factors?
- [08:35]
B
Well, I would really put the stress on geography, and I think if we're looking at one of the main determinants of this kind of cultural difference, we're not going to find it in religious or ethnic identity. And of course, the ethnic terms that we use today often have a very different resonance if we step back into the pre 20th century world. So it really has to do with the. The smaller scale of life that we find if we. And we don't have to go very far back in time. Regional identities were much stronger they were much more visible. And the amount of traffic, not just commercial, but cultural, moving from one region to another, was worldwide much lower than it is today. The linkages between different regions, the very groundwork for creating a larger sense of identity that we often express today using religion or ethnicity, was for the most part, missing. And that's why we need to pay special attention to the different regional identities which, if we are looking at something like fashion, appear almost immediately. And contemporaries tell us they notice these shifts from one part of the empire to another. And so there are certain correspondences with, with religious identity because it carried so much political significance and was one of the hierarchies which determine status. But particularly in the countryside, once we leave the towns and the overwhelming majority of people, 80 to 90% of the population, are villagers, they're out in the countryside. It's a very different kind of cultural grammar. You know, once we are outside the more intensely ideological zones of the towns and regional fashions, styles and customs quickly assert themselves. Hmm.
- [10:37]
A
This is really interesting to think about, a rural, urban divide as well. What then was it like to be someone living in kind of anywhere in the Ottoman Empire at this point? Like, what was everyday fun like? Was it in fact fun?
- [10:52]
B
Well, I think one of the arguments that I'm making here is that by the 18th century, we have, not just in the Ottoman Empire, but I think worldwide, a kind of growing pressure coming from a maturing leisure culture. And this modern leisure culture, we'll start with the Ottoman case, really has its origins in the 16th and 17th century that the emergence of the coffee house as a new social institution, the diffusion of coffee drinking as a new habit. And then in the 16th century and then the 17th century, we have the worldwide diffusion of tobacco and smoking as a new bodily discipline is that by the 18th century, these habits have become very much part of people's lives, or they want them, they want to enjoy these habits. And after an initial period of resistance on the part of political and religious authorities, there was some opposition to coffee drinking, to tobacco smoking, when both of these habits first appeared. What we see in the 18th century is a kind of long rear guard action. There are occasional persecutions, mainly of smokers. But what we can see is that leisure culture has by this point really gained the upper hand and it is accelerating, as I say. And I don't think that this is an Ottoman story, I think it's actually a global story. And I think that what helped to orient a lot of my thinking about the Ottoman Empire is the way in which I was able to see global stories appearing inside the Ottoman narrative. And I think that this is going to be essential, actually, if you want to rewrite Ottoman history and make it more and generate a new framework for it. Certainly for a period like the 18th century, we're going to need world history as a kind of guide. And so what I'm narrating alongside this Ottoman story really is a kind of global triumph of leisure culture.
- [13:11]
A
Yeah, this is definitely not just happening in the Ottoman Empire. But of course, the state not banning things isn't necessarily the same as the state encouraging things. Did they go that far to let people be leisurely?
- [13:26]
B
Well, the state is a bit conflicted. It can, in moments of ideological stress, try to shut down the coffee houses or enact bans on public smoking. This is activity that you would find in the towns. Really, the state is not going to have that much reach in the countryside when it comes to these kinds of questions. But there's a countervailing pressure which is what ultimately wins the day, and that is the state's need, desperate need, actually, for more revenue. And the Ottoman state is, by the 18th century, a mature fiscal state, and it's part of a family of global fiscal states which are all hunting for revenue and there's never enough of it. And this hunt is driven primarily by the mounting costs of warfare. And so this kind of violence in the background, the state led violence through war making is what helps to create more leeway for this very vibrant leisure culture, which is taking off of its own accord, but getting an extra boost from the fiscal requirements of the state.
- [14:38]
A
Okay, that's definitely worth making an explicit connection there. So thank you for understanding, helping us understand how those things go together. Thinking, then more about the manners side of the title. What did manners or etiquette mean at this point, and what was it consistent within the empire that kind of things always were polite in the same place? Or going back to your point about geography earlier, was it very different depending on where you were within the Ottoman world?
- [15:05]
B
Well, I think that everyone had manners. It's not that there are only some people with manners and others who lack them. So there were basic courtesies that one could find throughout the Empire. The most elaborate and complex code of manners belong to the urban elite. And it's part of a code of manners which very much predates the long 18th century. There are no big questions, no big criticisms of the prevailing code of manners in the long 18th century. And there is very much a sense of continuity. And I think that we might lump this kind of bodily code of deportment into what we can call the history of the long term. So what the 18th century, what the old regime, as I call it of the 18th century receives from earlier history, is a set of rules and customs which are largely taken for granted.
- [16:14]
A
Are there any particular examples that might illustrate this?
- [16:17]
B
Well, you know, so if you walk into, say, a literary salon in a town, there is a very elaborate set of manners that you would be expected to observe. Everything from greetings to the way in which you held your body, the way in which you would sit, the kinds of clothes that you would wear, the exchanges that you would have with other members of the elite, the kind of education and training that you were presumed to have, certainly if you are a member of the literary set, memory of the religious establishment, or perhaps a bureaucrat, one of the few literary literati. So we're looking at, if we think of this kind of manners as a kind of pyramid of bodily codes and regulations, then we're looking at the tip of the pyramid here in urban salons, as well as, of course, the palace and other high place social settings. It's the Smuckers Uncrustables podcast with your host, Uncrustables. Okay, today's guest is rough around the edges. Please welcome crust. Thanks for having me. Today's topic, he's round with soft pillowy bread. Hey. Filled with delicious PB and J. Are you talking about yourself? And you can take them anywhere. Why'd you invite. And we are out of time. Are you really cutting me off? Uncrustables are the best part of the sandwich. Sorry, crust.
- [18:01]
A
Yeah, but of course, it's not just the palaces, so that's helpful to understand. One thing you talk about in the book was it is a difference between polite manners and honorable manners. What's that distinction? And can you maybe give us some examples?
- [18:15]
B
Sure. Well, with polite manners, of course, we have an ideal of refinement and sophistication built around models of self restraint and very much linked to education and a religious sensibility. It has to do with the tempering of the soul and building a capacity for getting along with others. Now, when we come to honorable manners, as I call them, we see a competing code which is very much about status. And honorable manners are not necessarily going to yield to self restraint. They might actually require some kind of vehement reaction. It could be verbal, it could actually culminate in physical violence, and it usually has to do with the perceived injury to someone's status. So members of the elite, even though they would be expected to observe polite manners at the same time we're practicing or we're susceptible to what we can call these honorable manners, which would lead. Lead them to act in ways that could seem contradictory to the polite code, which is usually what people emphasize when they talk about manners.
- [19:41]
A
So maybe to make this more concrete, what would be a sort of situation where you'd end up with polite and honorable manners on opposite sides.
- [19:50]
B
So if someone's social status was being challenged, if someone's seniority, general social seniority, or seniority within a household was being challenged, they could lash out verbally or physically. And it might look surprising to us since even members of, say, the religious establishment were susceptible to these honorable manners. If there's, I have one episode in Damascus in which a chief judge beats his assistant for defying one of his orders. Now why would he do such a thing? He should have known better. And indeed he did know better under the polite code. But he was reacting to this infringement of his higher status, which cannot be tolerated. And so across the social elite or anywhere where there's a kind of social gradient in terms of hierarchy, those with higher status then would constantly be defending their position, and they might have to take measures, and I think society would largely agree with them, they might have to take measures to protect that status from those who would trample on it.
- [21:18]
A
There's a lot of violent words happening here, right? Trample, protect, defend. Was it inevitable that conflicts between polite and honorable manners would escalate to violence?
- [21:30]
B
No, not inevitable. I think that's one extreme along a whole spectrum of possible reactions. But you have to imagine a social world. Of course, we live with hierarchies today, so I think we ourselves have some sense of this kind of social order. But it was more pronounced and open and taken for granted. If we step back into the world of the old regime and around the world in the 18th century, people did not really think much of doctrines of equality or where they were, where this doctrine was taking off. It was still a rather eccentric idea. So I think part of the book's journey then, is rediscovering this world which is full of hierarchies, full of hierarchies, and everyone is monitoring their place. And I think what makes these reactions trickier in the context of the old regime in the long 18th century, is that we see a long term blurring of these hierarchies precisely because of the. The activities of the fiscal state, which is introducing more and more money to politics. And money is you might say the arch enemy of status. It acts as a kind of acid on prevailing hierarchies. And so one of my arguments, in fact, is that the long 18th century, with the activity of the fiscal state and all its war making, it is a period in which hierarchies are destabilized. And that has the effect then, of making some of these concerns about status more pronounced.
- [23:20]
A
Let's talk a little bit about these hierarchies being destabilized then. One of the actors you talk about in the book, or suppose categories of social engagement, is the sort of urban or even urbane warrior, which is a pretty new category, it sounds like, as we're in the long 18th century, so what is this category? And how do they become part of sort of polite society?
- [23:45]
B
So military officers, particularly from the Janissary Corps, are becoming urban notables around the Empire. And it's not actually. This is a process linked to the creation of what I call the Ottoman paramilitary complex. And so the Janissary Corps in particular, is becoming kind of a paramilitary corps across the 17th and 18th centuries. What is happening is that originally due to inflationary pressures, members of the Janissary Corps, officers in rank and file, were integrating themselves into the urban economy wherever their garrisons were stationed. And this was a way of supplementing their salaries or perhaps earning more. And so over the long term, what happens to Janissary officers and more generally military officers is that they become urban notables with their own investment portfolios. They become wealthy. And this is especially obvious by the 18th century. I think that's when they really begin to stand out. At the same time, the rank and file are integrating themselves into the marketplace. And we have many Janissaries becoming members of guilds. And coming the other way are civilians, quote, unquote, members of urban society, who gain access to the Janissary Corps and seek out this affiliation not because they necessarily want to serve under arms, but because it comes with all kinds of tax exemptions and access to political networks. So coming back then to the urbane warrior, the officers and becoming urban notables and gaining lots of wealth, increasingly style themselves as urban gentlemen. And it is a lifestyle which strongly appeals to them. And we see that, in fact, many Janissaries evolve in this direction. Even amongst the rank and file, they often prefer to become townsmen who don't necessarily get much military drilling. And many Janissaries aren't really proper soldiers. So it becomes what we call the Janissary Corps, becomes a much more complex organization in social terms.
- [26:26]
A
Hmm. That's really interesting to understand what did that mean for everyone around them? Like, was this exciting? Was it annoying? Like, what did it mean for these guys called Janissaries? But maybe not great at war making to be sort of roaming about town?
- [26:45]
B
Well, I think it becomes. It's not necessarily a problem, at least for those who can gain access to Janissary networks. There was always some friction between military units and urban society. But what we can see over the long term is a kind of integration. The Janissaries and other military units, including mercenaries, that the state is increasingly willing to hire and actually, actually having to hire to supplement its armed forces. They are also being stationed in many towns. And so it's not necessarily friction between soldiers and townspeople who are drawing closer anyway due to this two way traffic between the Janissary Corps and urban society. Much of the friction can come from struggles between different military units, different Janissary units, or between Janissary units and mercenaries. And then by the late 18th and early 19th centuries, what we see is that military recruitment has reached such a scale and acquired such a. A desperate reach that the size of the Ottoman army is growing by leaps and bounds. And the state is pulling lots of raw recruits, the overwhelming majority of whom come from the countryside. So they pour into the towns and their acculturation is rather difficult. And they bring with them lots of rural customs. They seek out a better life in the towns, and through military service, they hope to gain access to an urban lifestyle. I think that's part of the appeal. But their salaries remain meager and they become the heart of a kind of rowdy subculture. And so we have many of them become members of the Janissary Corps. Others are simply part of mercenary units. And in many towns, then what we have is a kind of rowdy paramilitary culture which is becoming more and more disruptive to urban life.
- [29:10]
A
All right, when we're talking about rowdiness, there are, of course, levels of rowdiness and disruption, some of which, you know, the state, for example, can kind of live with and maybe be annoyed by, but manage. You talk in the book, however, that this level of rowdiness perhaps goes beyond that and contributes to larger scale political crises.
- [29:30]
B
That's right. So there's a growing perception even in the capital, that many of these military units are threatening urban order. And they begin to state they are capable of staging their own brawls and gunfights in broad daylight, paralyzing even in the midst of the Capitol. They can paralyze entire neighborhoods for several days at a stretch. And beyond that, I think one of the fears is that they are a threat to public safety and they are a threat specifically to male honor through the harassment of women. And so we have what I call a crisis in patriarchy, which is actually part of the prehistory of what becomes the overthrow of the old regime and the creation of a modernizing political order. And I think one of the promises that the, that the modernizing political order of the early 19th century makes is that it will deliver order, it will cede everyone's safety. And this is a story not only in the Ottoman Empire, but I think in the other modernizing states that grew up within the Ottoman Commonwealth in Egypt and Tunisia.
- [30:48]
A
This is really interesting to see how something that might seem small, like swaggering quasi military guys around town, can be linked to these w. Is there anything further we want to discuss about kind of how these questions around behavior and manners and dress relates up to large scale political changes in reform?
- [31:09]
B
I think that there is, this is actually one of the themes that I touch on towards the end of the book. There is a notion that there was something quite radical about modernizing regimes that came into being in the early 19th century and that they began very large scale social experiments. And it's often pitted as a kind of contest between Islamic tradition and Westernization, the reforms representing the Westernization part of it. And I came out of my research rather skeptical about this kind of framework. And indeed, the, the modernizing regimes were very much committed to military and administrative reform and they followed European models. But beyond those technocratic concerns, they had no desire really to disrupt their own cultures and didn't really see their own cultures as a problem. And so I think what we call the modernizing reform of the Tanzimat in the Ottoman Empire. And so Mehmet Ali is doing something similar down in Egypt. These are actually very conservative projects. And for the rest of the 19th century, really most of Ottoman society retains its loyalty to the older codes of manners and fashion. And it's only amongst the reforming elite that you see the push to adopt, say, new dress and to acquire familiarity with European manners. And in the late 19th century, we have the rise of the modern middle class worldwide, really. And at that point there's a somewhat bigger push to, to gain fluency in European manners. But even then we're not looking at most of Ottoman society. And so I, I think it really helps to tell a story in which the old regime, many elements of the old regime survive modernizing reform intact across the 19th century. And I would say that's a global.
- [33:30]
A
Story, and definitely one that could span goodness knows how much future research just from that one piece alone. So I am tempted to ask what you might be working on now that this book is done. Anything related to what we've been discussing or totally new directions?
- [33:47]
B
Well, I so I there are two main strands to my research. One is very much an investigation of what you can think of as folk culture. And so I have been working on projects related to that theme for quite some time, and this book grew partly out of that research. So I took a piece of that research and it became an independent project almost of its own will. I was actually quite surprised the way it worked out. And the other theme that I'm increasingly working on has to do with the end of the old regime, or what I would call more accurately its reinvention. And so I'm looking at Ottoman history roughly from the mid 18th to the mid 19th century and trying to do a cultural history of this era of in which the old regime appears to end and then we have reforming regimes taking its place, but what is happening to cultural life? And that's, I think, what I'm increasingly getting interested in exploring.
- [35:02]
A
All right. Well, that certainly sounds very interesting. Best of luck with the various strands of your research. And of course, listeners can read more about the book we've been discussing. It's titled Empire of Ottoman Sociability and War Making in the Long Eighteenth Century, published by Stanford University Press in 2025. Jim, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [35:25]
B
Well, thank you.
- [35:25]
A
It's been a pleasure.