Minorities, Intermediaries and Middlemen in the Ottoman Empire
Nicola Melis, editorThis is a series of essays from leading experts, very interesting
pages 1..349 are missing along with the cover and other details
The Ottoman Empire, like the other Islamic empires of the early modern age (the Ṣafavid, and the Moghul), was a mosaic of social groups governed by a Muslim elite, dominating the army and the administration, heterogeneous conglomerates of lands and peoples. They administered large non-Muslim populations which, in many areas, outnumbered Muslims. There were numerous populations with different confessional, linguistic, cultural, social, and economic backgrounds. The most striking feature of the Ottoman Empire as a social entity was its diversity. The Muslim population itself was heterogeneous.
In premodern times, individual, family, and group identities were fluid because “identity [. . .] was more than just a sum total of its parts; it was a dynamic process”. The primarily marks of early modern identity were religion, “nation”, and language (although linguistic boundaries were not yet well defined). Various identity labels usually co-existed, and historically certain labels disappeared, others remained, while new ones emerged.