Osman's Dream: The History of the Ottoman Empire

Finkle's Osman's Dream fits an important need for English-speaking readers to understand the fundamental historical, cultural and social aspects of the modern Middle East. Today's problems and their solutions ultimately originate in the Ottoman Empire, a complicated but understandable multicultural political system that directly affected our European world for 600 years. The author has updated the scholarship of the subject by using a multitude of secondary (and some primary) sources, she has avoided describing the modern difficulties of the Ottomans, as European writers so often have, wondering " Why aren't they just like us?" She writes well, holds to a clear outline, and ends, as she begins, with the center of the Empire being not in Europe or the Balkans but in Anatolia, today modern Turkey. At the end she identifies several of Turkey's continuing problems, as with the whole of the Middle East, a lasting legacy of the Ottomans. The book can be enjoyed by the critical reader and should be a centerpiece of any upper division college class on the history of Turkey or the Modern Middle East.

Finkel's history of the Ottoman empire is certainly comprehensive in scope, encompassing the empire from its origins in the late middle-ages to the rise of Ataturk. Yet I begrudgingly give it four stars. While the scope and scale of the Ottoman empire is presented in detail, there was an ebb and flow to the relative strength of her writing, which was distracting. The first quarter of the history is remarkable - I assume this is Finkel's area of expertise, given the detail of the political, religious and social climate of Anatolia and the eastern Mediterranean in the 13th and 14th centuries. How Osman began to exploit the various divisions of competing ethnic groups, religions, and constantly shifting political loyalties is shown masterfully. With such a strong start, I was disappointed in her treatment of the founding and expansion of the empire in the 15th and 16th centuries. Recognizing that this is an *Ottoman* history, I had expected more detail and information on the conquest and occupation of the Balkans, the political competition between Hungary, Poland, Habsburg Austria and the mariatime powers of Venice and Genoa. These states were of course disucssed, but I had expected a deeper, more nuanced historical analysis of the complex econcomic and political competition between each of them. Thankfully Finkel again finds her footing as she writes about the 18th and 19th centuries - in fact, her discussion of the slow and painful implosion of the Ottoman empire was, to me at least, the best part of the book as she intertwines the various causes of its decline: increased econcomic competition from industrializing European nations, the influx of silver from the New World, new shipping routes to India and Asia, the adoption of "real politik" by European nation-states (and the reluctance to do so by the Ottomans), growing national movements within the Ottoman empire, and of course the overall reluctance by the Janissaries and ulaema to embrace change and moderinzation in any form. In writing, the amount of historical detail is almost overwhelming - repeatedly I had to remind myself what the larger point being made was given the sheer volume of information she shares. Clearly she is writing for an academic audience, something potential customers may want to keep in mind. In writing for an academic audience, I was disappointed at the relative lack of primary sources she used in her research and writing; many sources are translations or are cited in previously published works. All criticism aside, this is a densely detailed work, with a comprehensive view of the Ottoman empire, and a solid history of an important empire in world history.

Fascinating read with amazing details. My history fix!

I had no idea of the extensive study of the Ottoman Empire book covers. It’s 554 pages then pages filled in time lines and references.660! The printing is light in text making it difficult to read and the text itself is small. At times need a magnifyer. A book like this requires better maps that depict all the details towns cities countries mentioned as one reads the territory gathered. Where is Anatoli?

I feel like maybe I am not the audience for this book. I was looking for a general history of the Ottoman Empire before a trip to Türkiye this past June. Whil I certainly consider myself strongly interested in history, I am by no means an academic. This book reads like it's an academic tome, designed for Ph D level historians with a specialization in Ottoman history. There's an incredible level of detail, with every significant name getting some page time. But there doesn't seem to be any higher level analysis, or any attempts to make connections from one era to another, beyond those that are genealogical. With endless This Pasha and That Pasha, and this Köprülü and that Köprülü, my eyes started to glaze over. For someone with deep interest in the topic, maybe writing a thesis on a particular family or clan, this could be a useful resource. For someone interested in a general history of the Empire, skip it.

If you have any interest in the Ottoman empire this is a great place to start. It is a big book but it is easy and straight forward to read and follows all the rulers of the Ottoman empire in order to tell the history of the empire from its origins to its fall. It is a basic narrative, however, as it avoids details of the economics, culture, society and the specifics of military engagements. Although it does manage to discuss architecture quite often and which Sultan constructed which buildings, museums, Mosque's etc. This did not bother me too much as to go into that kind of detail could possibly have doubled the size of the already hefty book. It is mostly a story of the rise and fall of the Ottoman Empire and the overall big picture with a great bibliography and close attention paid to the chronology of the empire. So a great place to start and acquire an over all better understanding and knowledge of the Ottoman Empire and its major events and rulers compared to the next guy in the room.

I started into the book expecting a reasonably abbreviated summary of this period in our history (world history). What I found very quickly became an incredibly detailed and thorough history of the Ottomans for more than 600 years. Encompassing all of the significant cultural and political entities during that time, the book creates a vision of how the world from North Africa to Europe and South Asia reacted to the establishment of the political and religious functions that became the Ottoman Empire and eventually the caliphate. While the book ends with the final chapter of the Ottomans as the remnants became modern Turkey in the 1920s, what is left are the religious and political divisions that define even modern day conflicts in areas from Eastern Europe to North Africa and on through Iran into South Asia. For those wanting to gain a better understanding of how the current political and religious divisions throughout these areas developed and why many of the divisions appear to be characterized by an unreasonable intransigence, this book has to become part of your reference library.

I have been reading about the Empires of the world (British, Prussian, German and Russian) prior to World War I. I have also read about Mohammed and what he meant his vision to be (certainly not what it is!). But this book was filled with religious hatred, prejudice, killing and land-grabbing. Some of the characters were well meaning, but most of them just wanted to command their armies to take the land of others and kill anyone who got in their way. I suppose that in their way, the Ottomans were no different than other leaders of Empires: Henry the 8th got rid of all the Catholics; the Russians only wanted Orthodox Christians; the Germans didn't want Jews and the Prussians only wanted Catholics. You have to wonder what will happen in the future. If the past is any road map, people will fight until the end of time.