Buch, Englisch, Band 24, 511 Seiten, Format (B × H): 160 mm x 239 mm, Gewicht: 916 g
Reihe: Collection Turcica
Buch, Englisch, Band 24, 511 Seiten, Format (B × H): 160 mm x 239 mm, Gewicht: 916 g
Reihe: Collection Turcica
ISBN: 978-90-429-3506-8
Verlag: PEETERS PUB
This book traces the transcultural and transnational dimension of the
internal genesis of the Ottoman Constitution, which was promulgated on
December 23, 1876. It shows that the constitutional process
incorporated, from domestic authorities to foreign Powers, a plurality
of formal and informal agents of different ethno-religious, cultural,
and ideological backgrounds and that its investigation goes beyond the
study of a national narrative.
Considering the issue of constitutional reforms from different angles
(foreign influence and pressure, the agency of domestic actors and
through discourse analysis of reform decrees), the book brings a
critical approach to the existing historiographical narratives, which
reduce Ottoman constitutional history to a simplistic process of
transplanting western legal artefacts and regimes without measuring the
selective control of dominant domestic groups over the process. Instead,
the book shows the evolution of a continuous set of negotiations of
various actors on the idea of constitution in the Ottoman Empire and
thus sheds light on the social construction of the idea of justice and
constitutional law. The draft constitutions studied throughout the book
are the textual embodiment of these negotiations and unveil the ways in
which concepts and issues such as legitimacy, the restriction of
political power, lawful government, liberty, equality, the rule of
people and the treatment of minorities reached the Ottoman context and
the ways in which they acquired new meanings or equivalents during their
adaptation to the imperial political culture.
