Osman's Dream: The History of the Ottoman Empire 1st Edition

by Caroline Finkel (Author)

64 ratings

ISBN-13: 978-0465023967

ISBN-10: 0465023967

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According to the Ottoman chronicles, the first sultan, Osman, had a dream in which a tree emerged fully formed from his navel "and its shade compassed the world"-symbolizing the vast empire he and his descendants were destined to forge. His vision was soon realized: At its height, the Ottoman realm extended from Hungary to the Persian Gulf, from North Africa to the Caucasus. The Ottoman Empire was one of the largest and most influential empires in world history. For centuries, Europe watched with fear as the Ottomans steadily advanced their rule across the Balkans. Yet travelers and merchants were irresistibly drawn toward Ottoman lands by their fascination with the Orient and the lure of profit. Although it survived for over six centuries, the history of the Ottoman Empire is too often colored by the memory of its bloody final throes. In this magisterial work Caroline Finkel lucidly recounts the epic story of the Ottoman Empire from its origins in the thirteenth century through its destruction on the battlefields of World War I.

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

What Finkel calls the "old" narrative of the Ottoman Empire is simple to relate: "it rose, declined, and fell." An exotic parade of salacious sultans, grand viziers and duplicitous eunuchs inhabit the sultry harems and domed palaces of Istanbul—at least in our imaginations. Finkel, a long-time resident of Turkey and Ottoman scholar, relates a "new" narrative of empire that properly accounts for the richness and complexity of the Ottoman state over nearly seven centuries. By presiding over their multiethnic empire for so long, and ushering it from medievalism to modernity, the Ottomans should be ranked alongside the Hapsburgs and the Romanovs, she argues. That they are overlooked is the fault of Western historians who have peered at their subjects through the lens of their own prejudices. Finkel's striking innovation is to turn a mirror on the Ottomans and examine how they saw themselves and their empire. While this approach yields a refreshingly original perspective, Finkel's quest to improve Westerners' understanding occasionally leads her into some questionable stretches (an implication, for instance, that Westerners think all Muslims are terrorists). Happily, these remain unintrusive and this history makes a riveting and enjoyable read for all audiences. 16 pages of photos; maps. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* To be blunt, historians have neglected the Ottoman Empire. Stifled by language barriers, problematic sources, and cultural blinders (and no doubt somewhat bewildered by the task of narrating an empire that lasted from 1299 to 1922 and extended from Sarajevo to San'a), American and European academics have been content to chew on small pieces of Ottoman history, limiting public conception of the empire to narrow notions of sultans, military maneuvers, and elaborate bathing facilities. With this superb book, Finkel boldly covers new ground in striving to show the Ottoman Empire from within, as the Ottomans themselves saw it--a perspective that, thanks to centuries of politically motivated selective perception, even modern Turks have had great difficulty ascertaining. Having spent 15 years living in Turkey, Finkel is uniquely positioned to overcome the practical hurdles to Ottoman research, but her real strength is in historiography: she has a keen ability to extract salient observations from her sources even as she renders their political motives transparent. The result is a panorama of the Ottoman Empire to rival the best portraits of the Romanovs and Habsburgs, and a must-have for history collections. Brendan Driscoll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product details

Hardcover: 704 pages
Publisher: Basic Books; 1st edition (February 7, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0465023967
ISBN-13: 978-0465023967
Product Dimensions: 6.2 x 1.8 x 9.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds
Average Customer Review: 64 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #321,310 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #173 in Middle Eastern History (Books)
- #296 in Asian History (Books)
- #175 in Turkey History (Books)

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Arthur Worster

A journey through the centuries of a key and little understood part of our history

March 11, 2015

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

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.

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Bertil Haggman

Valuable book on the Ottoman Empire

August 22, 2017

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Caroline Finkel's book "Osman's Dream" is a useful book on the history of the Ottoman empire. It starts with the dream of the first sultan, Osman. He is said to have dreamt about a large tree growing from his navel. Its shade encompassed large parts of the world including distant mountains and mighty rivers. It was a clear sign of the wishes of the early sultans to build an empire. It would stretch across North Africa, including Egypt and also Persia as well as the Middle East.

It should be rembered also, that Turkey was important in the attempts to stop Russian imperialism from Peter I and through the nineteenth century. During the Great Northern War (1700 - 1721) the Ottomans cooperated with Sweden, Poland and Ukraine against Moscow. Sweden's King Charles XII, Ivan Mazepa and Pylyp Orlyk were permitted to reside on Ottoman territory.

Later Sweden, France and Turkey cooperated to stop Russian expansion. The first Turkish treaty with a Christian nation was with Sweden in 1739 when Sweden sought to reconquer territories lost during The Great Northern War. This events are covered in Mrs Finkel's book.

Published in 2006 this book is still one of the best books on the Ottoman empire.

Mr. Bertil Haggman, LL.M.
author, Sweden

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Amazon Customer

Covers a Lot of Territory

April 11, 2018

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

I picked this book up as a follow-on to a more extensive look into early Islamic history. Finkel's work covers 6 centuries in a single volume and does a commendable job of it. It is a Sultans, Queen Mothers, Veziers, Efendis, and Pashas version of history, with a few rebels thrown in, but it would be hard to cover six hundred years in about as many pages in any other way. There are places where it starts to stray toward the "Islam is a great religion that is misunderstood by the West" theme popular in contemporary academic circles, but that sentiment is largely held in check. It's not a fast read, but it is a worthwhile one.

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Chris Martin

The Ottoman Dream...but what page was that?

February 26, 2013

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

Much of us Westerner's view of Turkey has come from Euro-centric accounts via the middle age chroniclers and early historians without access to the Turkish archives. And so,we are aware of Turkey's peripheral roles in the Crimean War and then the two World Wars in more modern historical tracts. However, Caroline Finkel is a historian who takes an insider's view of this most interesting, multifaceted and multi-layered empire on Europe's eastern boundary. She presents an enormous wealth of material that many western readers might find overwhelming in its detail.She points out many early trends but I am not sure of her rationale for the empire's expansion beyond its Anatolian beginnings when she discounts religion or jihadism.

Like the many headed Hydra,the emerging Turkish Empire is featured in all its glory and weaknesses. While still adopting a 'kings and queens' approach to historical research, albeit with Turkish names,Finkel paints a very broad canvas, but we readers are left feeling a little overwhelmed in the detail of court intrigues. Apart from her account of Turkey's quite general resistance to modernization, one weakness is that there is little description of broader social trends in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries affecting Turkey. Nevertheless the broad sweep is there underneath well sourced detail and an easy to comprehend writing style.

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