The Turkish past is not only Ottoman, and Ottoman history is not only Turkish. In other words, the title of this new Chair covers a vast, complex and even ambiguous field. We will, however, focus our attention on a more targeted context which, while reducing the scope of the subject, will enable us to integrate these two dimensions of the question into a particular historical reflection, that of the Ottoman Empire and republican Turkey vis-à-vis the West. This questioning will in turn be set within a chronology straddling the modern and contemporary periods, from the 18th century to the present day.
Modernity, modernization, Westernization, internal dynamics, external influences: this period of profound transformation is far too complex to lend itself to univocal readings that end up giving an overly simplistic vision, often made up of a combination of Western triumphalism and Ottoman defeatism.
At a time when history is falling prey to the most unhealthy political rhetoric, and when the history of the Ottoman Empire is being subjected to the Procrustean bed of Turkish-Islamic nationalism, it is all the more important to create a platform capable of disseminating historical knowledge in this particular field, and promoting research " en train de y faire ", in the felicitous words of the Collège de France. This is the mission that the International Chair of Turkish and Ottoman History has set itself for the next five years, during which the spectacular transformations of the last three centuries will be examined in their political, ideological, social, economic and cultural dimensions, in order to grasp the dynamics of change and continuity in one of the most turbulent regions of the globe.
The lecture will focus on the main themes of the period : integration with Europe at the turn of the 19th century, state reforms in the 1820s and 1830s, the " ottomanistes " dreams of the 1850s and 1860s, the crisis of 1876, the Hamidian autocracy, the Young Turk revolution, the debacle of the First World War.. The primary aim is to combine synthesis and detail, and to familiarize the public with the critical study of contemporary texts and documents, as well as with a diversified approach enabling different but converging aspects of an extremely varied reality to be cross-referenced. From funerary culture to financial institutions, from the anatomy of massacres to intellectual biographies, from the use of photography to the invention of orders and decorations, from the birth of Ottoman orientalism to the constitution of archaeological practice, many studies will be grafted onto this central narrative to reveal its richness and complexity.