The Turkish past is not only Ottoman, and Ottoman history is not only Turkish. In other words, the title of this Chair covers a vast, complex and even ambiguous field. This is why we have chosen a more focused context which, while reducing the scope of the subject, allows us to integrate these two dimensions of the question into a particular historical reflection, that of the Ottoman Empire and Republican Turkey in the face of the West. This questioning is in turn part of a chronology that straddles the modern and contemporary periods, from the end of the 18th century to the beginning of the 20th, i.e. the " long " 19th century.
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 five years of its existence.
The course focuses on the key moments of the period: integration with Europe at the turn of the 19th century, the state reforms of 1820 and 1830, the " ottomanistes " dreams of 1850 and 1860, the crisis of 1876, the autocracy of Sultan Abdülhamid II, the Young Turkish Revolution.. 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 brought together.
