Jonathan Parry, Promised Lands: The British and the Ottoman Middle East. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022, 480 pages.

Abstract

erence to “coexistence” and “sociability) is constantly stressed, both with regard to the use of sources (essentially in Turkish) and the angle of observation (from the view point of the center/the state/bureaucracy, political movements, intellectuals, and Turkish press), Ottoman non-Muslims usually remain in the background with minimal visibility and agency in these accounts. Furthermore, we might as well touch upon the methodological specificities of the “French school” of Turkology, which gives priority to “sources” and analyzing a document (or a phenomenon), instead of engaging with current theoretical debates (which might, in fact, determine the field in the Anglo-Saxon world). The reader would, no doubt, notice that all the twelve articles in the collection start with a brief introduction that summarizes the guiding questions of the research, but do not provide a more general theoretical discussion that resonates with the developments in social sciences. With regard to sources, it is clear that François Georgeon has never been a fan of the Prime Ministry’s Ottoman Archives. Instead, he has relied on his deep knowledge of sources of written and oral culture, especially through periodicals, journal, newspapers, compilations, and booklets. Compared to discontinuities, anonymities, and undeciphered chronological complexities in archival material, this kind of source material, essentially prepared and published for an audience, and thus potentially presenting a fuller (and more colorful) picture of the past, gives the historian a better hand to organize his material within a very lucid narrative and a highly reader-friendly structure. As a final remark, it is worth noting that the book is dedicated to Bülent Tanör (1940–2002), whom Georgeon get to know and became friends with in the second half of the 1970s, while he was a researcher at the Institut Français d'Études Anatoliennes and both lived in Cihangir. Whether this is a manner of reminiscing his initial years in the field of Ottoman and Turkish studies or reflecting upon the fluctuations in the social and political history of Turkey is hard to tell, but I sincerely look forward to new publications of this eminent historian. François Georgeon’s calm and clear style of writing is without doubt a gift to all readers of history, but it is as well a great lesson and inspiration for all the students and researchers of the Ottoman past.