Ariel Salzmann

Tocqueville in the Ottoman Empire: Rival Paths to the Modern State (Ottoman Empire and Its Heritage) Ariel Salzmann

Based on three years of archival research, this work adopts a comparative framework in its examination of one of the least understood and more paradoxical polities of modern European and Middle Eastern history: the Ottoman ancien regime. Despite a profoundly decentralized state apparatus, the Ottoman State managed to rule large areas of the Middle East and southeastern Europe during a turbulent century. Framing much of her argument within European debates about tax farming, the author argues that the success of the Ottoman ancien regime, like that of its French counterpart, is due to the successful articulation of a complex financial network revolving around central state elite investments and an Instanbul-based and supervised banking system. Embedded in the theoretical arguments about Ottoman economics is an empirical study of Diyarbakir.