“The questions that you ask in history come from a documentation,” Edhem Eldem notes in this continuation of his conversation with Enno Maessen, recorded on 7 July 2023. In the case of the Annales and other schools of European historiography, he notes, that documentation consisted of parish registers and other local sources which antiquarians had tilled for decades, if not centuries. But there are no parish registers in the Ottoman space. Edhem is tired of historians who fail to recognize the implications of that, who lack the curiosity (and the language and palaeographic skills) to engage with Ottoman sources and explore the questions that emerge from them. Instead they treat history as some kind of “knowledge transfer”, plugging “readymade” questions lifted from a very different European context into the Ottoman historical space. Can we even speak of an “Ottoman society”, Edhem wonders? Can we presume to study the history of a non-colonial Ottoman Empire? To render Ottoman history feasible, Edhem proposes that we “fraction” it into chunks. As a historian drawn more to documents than theory, Edhem believes we need to be open to seeing where the sources take us, rather than trying to perform a set of historical enquiries that provide Ottoman equivalents to those found in the west:

There will never be a bona fide demographic history of the Ottoman Empire done in the way that it has been done in Europe. Fine. Get a life! Accept that! The challenge is not to be able to have a check-list of what was done in the West, and try to do the same. Things can be done differently here, on the basis of curiosity, exposed to local documentation.

Edhem Eldem

Edhem also reflects on how history is taught at Boğaziçi University, three years after “occupation and conquest”, which constituted a “systematic attack on the production of knowledge as we know it”. He also volunteers some thoughts on the place humour has in history: both in the disciplinary discourse and as a subject for historical research in its own right.

Episode 36 (Part II) – A Historical Curiosity

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