Introduction

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As an introduction to a program covering a long period - the famous "long ^nineteenth century" - and a subject that is, to say the least, complex, it seems useful to devote the first lecture to some fundamental questions concerning the discipline of history in general and, more specifically, the field of Turkish and Ottoman history. Returning first to some of the issues raised in my opening lecture, I began by recalling the extent to which the field was vitiated by the grip of the political and the ideological, particularly in a Turkey I described as "cliomanic" and "cliopathic".

However, I turned my attention more to problems inherent to the discipline and arising from questions of method and context, starting with terminology - particularly the risk of amalgamation, whatever the period, between "Turkish" and "Ottoman" - and by the de facto monopoly that Turkey has arrogated to itself over Ottoman history, encouraged in this by the systematic rejection by other successor states - Balkan and Arab - of the Ottoman heritage, deemed incompatible with their own "national" narrative. By rejecting a certain Ottoman past, these historical traditions effectively create a historiographical "black hole", an anhistorical parenthesis that further reduces our still incomplete knowledge of this Empire, not to mention tacitly encouraging Turkish nationalist historiography to perfect its hold on the subject.

Of course, we also had to consider the impact of Orientalism, which is still very present in the discipline, not least because of the survival of certain Eurocentric reflexes from previous centuries. Not without irony, the desire to correct these historiographical drifts is not without risk, since it can lead to an anti-orientalism that sometimes becomes just as reductive and simplistic as its target. One of the major challenges facing the discipline is to restore the right to speak to the East - including the Ottoman Empire - which Orientalism had for so long defined as the object rather than the subject of history. However, this restitution cannot and must not be made at the cost of historical rigor, by borrowing intellectual shortcuts which, obviously for the "right cause", simply invert the arguments of Orientalist scholarship. It is a betrayal of Edward Said's originality and genius to reduce the meaning and impact of his Orientalism (1978) to a kind of Third World revanchism designed to restore a balance and justice distorted by Orientalism. Naturally, the crudest examples of this tendency are easily unmasked, but the same cannot be said of a certain intellectual production of Anglo-Saxon origin whose subtlety and sophistication guarantee success, and which often manages to create the illusion of a genuine historiographical riposte. However, it often appears that these works are based on a rhetoric that flatters certain ideological and moral sensibilities and, above all, on the conscious choice of partial and biased documentation that goes along with the desired conclusions.

This last remark brings me to the problem of documentation, or rather the document, the use of which in Ottoman history remains extremely imperfect and problematic. In the "Turkish" camp, documentary fetishism dominates, sacralizing the document on condition that it emanates from the State and, above all, ignoring any critical reading, reducing the historian's work to an exercise in paleography. The problem, however, is more general and also affects the more enlightened circles of the profession. The inaccessibility of certain collections, the under-exploitation of those that are accessible, the tendency to "cherry-pick" to the detriment of serial and systematic treatment, the linguistic and palaeographic challenges arising from the cultural diversity of the Empire... These are all problems facing the discipline and justifying the emphasis placed throughout the lecture on questions of method based on specific cases.

Finally, for a lecture whose main guideline remains chronological, it is worth remembering that one of the major challenges facing historians working on this period is not to get caught up in a teleology likely to obscure the internal dynamics of local modernities, which are either ignored or blamed on a highly dubious Western influence. While the title of this lecture clearly focuses on interaction with the West, it is important to remember that the transformations of this period cannot and must not be reduced to such a simplistic, univocal logic. As I reminded you at the end of my opening lecture, the historian's aim is not so much to answer questions as to ask the right ones, in order to reveal the complexity and ambiguities of the historical narrative.