Tocqueville In The Ottoman Empire Summary

The introduction of Tocqueville in the Ottoman Empire by Ariel Salzmann is an application of the concepts that Tocqueville has developed such as Ancien Régime to understand the semblance between pre revolutionary France and the Ottoman old regime . Tocqueville questions why did France cohere and the Ottoman Empire fall apart if their policies and institutional patterns were similar in character and close in timing ? Hence Tocqueville haunts the social scientific imagination of the Ottoman past as he uses comparison study to make sense of political change and the regimes in transition now that the Ottoman Studies have begun to overcome their isolated methodological frame of reference. To do so Salzmann promotes circulating analytical concepts as well as seeks to construct interpretations derived from current state of Ottoman historiography while reexamining the paradoxes that obliterate the past and remain as obstacles to understand modern political paths.

In my opinion the study which Salzmann presents focuses mainly on the fiscal governance and she could have included different functions of the old regime and the eruption of modernity . One feature which Tocqueville describes is the fiscal and administrative decentralization which remains one of the more interesting components of the old regime paradox and

She recognized that Tocqueville method of analysis could be contradictory and that his causality is elusive especially since the institutional features of the old regime that he identified are not unique to France