The Almighty Akçe: The Economics of Scholarship and Science in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire

Is it possible for science to exist without theory? This basic question animates Harun Küçük’s new book, Science without Leisure. For Küçük, the answer is no, and the Ottoman Empire provides an instructive example of what happens when scientific practice exists in a vacuum of theory. Putting a new twist on some of the familiar narratives regarding science in the Ottoman Empire during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Küçük argues that many Ottoman subjects practiced the natural sciences but the missing ingredient was theory. This lack of theory in turn emerged because the scholars in the madrasa were being paid too little. They lacked the “leisure” afforded by affluence to devote themselves to theory and thus became ignorant, law-obsessed, and, ultimately, insignificant. In this moment of intellectual and economic decline, the earlier tradition of Islamic science was pushed aside by new “practical naturalists,” who came to dominate the social field of science. Yet, the practical naturalism of the Ottomans never came to resemble modern, or rather early modern, science in Europe because it lacked a connection to theory.