Historiography of the Ottoman Empire

The research, sources, critical approaches, and interpretations utilized by scholars to build a history of the Ottoman Dynasty's Empire are referred to as Ottoman historiography. The article on the Ottoman Empire focuses on historians and their views; specific regions, historical dates, and occurrences are addressed on the page on the Ottoman Empire. Scholars have long studied the Ottoman Empire, examining the factors that led to its formation, its relationships with Great Powers and other empires, such as the Transformation of the Ottoman Empire, and the types of people who became imperialists or anti-imperialists well as their mindsets. In addition, scholars of the Middle East and Greece have been drawn to the history of the Empire's demise.

Western perceptions on Ottoman antiquity. Ottoman history has been redrafted for political and cultural motives, with speculative hypotheses filled with inconsistencies in research, ahistorical assumptions, and ingrained biases, partly because the archives are relatively new. The Ottoman Records are a collection of historical sources from the Ottoman Empire and 39 countries, including 19 in the Middle East, 11 in the European Union and the Balkans, three in the Caucasus, two in Central Asia, Cyprus, Palestine, and the Republic of Turkey. The Ottoman Bank Archives and Research Centre was housed in the former Ottoman Bank Head Office. According to Edward Clark, Ottoman reactions to this European economic challenge are mostly obscure. Even the extensive and costly Ottoman industrial endeavours of the 1840s appear to have been dismissed as the frivolous, if not ludicrous, games of indifferent bureaucrats.

Osman's Dream is a mythical tale based on the life of Osman I, the Ottoman Empire's founder. Osman has a dream in which he gets a figurative vision predicting the rise and prosperity of an empire to be ruled by him and his successors while staying at the home of a religious figure, Sheikh Edebali. On the other hand, other theses look at how the Ottomans grew from a minor principality on the Byzantine Empire's border to a centralized, transcontinental empire. According to the Ghaza thesis, the Ottomans achieved this by enlisting recruits to fight for them in the name of the Islamic holy war against non-believers. In Turkish, such a warrior was known as a ghazi, and this thesis views the early Ottoman Empire as a "Ghazi State," defined by a holy war ethic. Throughout much of the twentieth century, the Ghaza Thesis dominated early Ottoman history before increased scrutiny in the 1980s. Historians now widely reject the Ghaza Thesis, and hence the claim that Ottoman expansion was primarily propelled by holy war, although they disagree about what should be replaced with it.

In search of a new identity and foundation for their states, Arabs and Turks were equally hostile, desiring to return to the Pharaohs, Kings of Babylon, and Hittites of pre-Ottoman Anatolia. This criticism and often vilification is directed more at Ottoman state-building processes than at real Ottoman policies. Most Arab nationalists view the entire Ottoman era as a period of oppressive Turkish rule that stifled Arab culture and socioeconomic development and paved the way for European colonial control and the Zionist takeover of Palestine, according to Doumani's study of the Arab region of Ottoman Palestine. The intellectual foundation for this shared picture may be found in considerable literature published during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Westerners intent on "discovering," thereby reclaiming, the Holy Land from what they saw as a stagnating and dying Ottoman Empire.

The Ottoman Decline Thesis asserted that the Ottoman Empire's authority began to wane with the death of Suleiman the Magnificent in 1566. Without the acquisition of large fresh money, the Empire would fall into decline. However, from the late 1970s, historians have progressively questioned the idea of Ottoman decline, and academic historians now agree that the Ottoman Empire did not fall.