Investigating how a number of modern empires transform over the
long 19th century (1789-1914) as a consequence of their struggle
for ascendancy in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East,
Foundations of Modernity: Human Agency and the Imperial State moves
the study of the modern empire towards a comparative,
trans-regional analysis of events along the Ottoman frontiers:
Western Balkans, the Persian Gulf and Yemen. This
inter-disciplinary approach of studying events at different ends of
the Ottoman Empire challenges previous emphasis on Europe as the
only source of change and highlights the progression of modern
imperial states.
The book introduces an entirely new analytical approach to the
study of modern state power and the social consequences to the
interaction between long-ignored "historical agents" like pirates,
smugglers, refugees, and the rural poor. In this respect, the roots
of the most fundamental institutions and bureaucratic practices
associated with the modern state prove to be the by-products of
certain kinds of productive exchange long categorized in negative
terms in post-colonial and mainstream scholarship. Such a challenge
to conventional methods of historical and social scientific
analysis is reinforced by the novel use of the work of Louis
Althusser, Talal Asad, William Connolly and Frederick Cooper, whose
challenges to scholarly conventions will prove helpful in changing
how we understand the origins of our modern world and thus talk
about Modernity. This book offers a methodological and
historiographic intervention meant to challenge conventional
studies of the modern era.
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