Tocqueville in the Ottoman Empire

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 tha