Osman's Dream: The History of the Ottoman Empire Kindle Edition

Caroline Finkel's book "Osman's Dream" is a useful book on the history of the Ottoman empire. It starts with the dream of the first sultan, Osman. He is said to have dreamt about a large tree growing from his navel. Its shade encompassed large parts of the world including distant mountains and mighty rivers. It was a clear sign of the wishes of the early sultans to build an empire. It would stretch across North Africa, including Egypt and also Persia as well as the Middle East.It should be rembered also, that Turkey was important in the attempts to stop Russian imperialism from Peter I and through the nineteenth century. During the Great Northern War (1700 - 1721) the Ottomans cooperated with Sweden, Poland and Ukraine against Moscow. Sweden's King Charles XII, Ivan Mazepa and Pylyp Orlyk were permitted to reside on Ottoman territory.Later Sweden, France and Turkey cooperated to stop Russian expansion. The first Turkish treaty with a Christian nation was with Sweden in 1739 when Sweden sought to reconquer territories lost during The Great Northern War. This events are covered in Mrs Finkel's book.Published in 2006 this book is still one of the best books on the Ottoman empire.Mr. Bertil Haggman, LL.M.author, Sweden

I picked this book up as a follow-on to a more extensive look into early Islamic history. Finkel's work covers 6 centuries in a single volume and does a commendable job of it. It is a Sultans, Queen Mothers, Veziers, Efendis, and Pashas version of history, with a few rebels thrown in, but it would be hard to cover six hundred years in about as many pages in any other way. There are places where it starts to stray toward the "Islam is a great religion that is misunderstood by the West" theme popular in contemporary academic circles, but that sentiment is largely held in check. It's not a fast read, but it is a worthwhile one.

I started into the book expecting a reasonably abbreviated summary of this period in our history (world history). What I found very quickly became an incredibly detailed and thorough history of the Ottomans for more than 600 years. Encompassing all of the significant cultural and political entities during that time, the book creates a vision of how the world from North Africa to Europe and South Asia reacted to the establishment of the political and religious functions that became the Ottoman Empire and eventually the caliphate. While the book ends with the final chapter of the Ottomans as the remnants became modern Turkey in the 1920s, what is left are the religious and political divisions that define even modern day conflicts in areas from Eastern Europe to North Africa and on through Iran into South Asia. For those wanting to gain a better understanding of how the current political and religious divisions throughout these areas developed and why many of the divisions appear to be characterized by an unreasonable intransigence, this book has to become part of your reference library.

Much of us Westerner's view of Turkey has come from Euro-centric accounts via the middle age chroniclers and early historians without access to the Turkish archives. And so,we are aware of Turkey's peripheral roles in the Crimean War and then the two World Wars in more modern historical tracts. However, Caroline Finkel is a historian who takes an insider's view of this most interesting, multifaceted and multi-layered empire on Europe's eastern boundary. She presents an enormous wealth of material that many western readers might find overwhelming in its detail.She points out many early trends but I am not sure of her rationale for the empire's expansion beyond its Anatolian beginnings when she discounts religion or jihadism.Like the many headed Hydra,the emerging Turkish Empire is featured in all its glory and weaknesses. While still adopting a 'kings and queens' approach to historical research, albeit with Turkish names,Finkel paints a very broad canvas, but we readers are left feeling a little overwhelmed in the detail of court intrigues. Apart from her account of Turkey's quite general resistance to modernization, one weakness is that there is little description of broader social trends in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries affecting Turkey. Nevertheless the broad sweep is there underneath well sourced detail and an easy to comprehend writing style.

I ordered this book, looking for a general history of the Ottoman Empire as a basis for further reading. Unfortunately, I found it an unuseful text, and ultimately a tedious read due to the excessive minutiae. The text provides overwhelming detail, including hundreds upon hundreds of names of characters who appear only in a paragraph never to be heard of again, without any real unifying themes or analytical framework being put forward to assist the reader in comprehending the detail. The narrative lacks coherence, and fails as a general text as it lacks any meaningful discussion of social or intellectual forces at work. The writing never caught my interest. I finally just put it down in frustration after about 200 pages, as again we were being told of border disputes with the Safavids, provincial unrest, an executed vizier, and a meddling mother of the sultan, etc. The details overwhelmed the narrative. I cannot comment on the quality of scholarship, but I can say that this is not a helpful book for someone, such as I am, looking for an introductory understanding of the sweep of Ottoman history. It would likely be more helpful for an advanced reader to establish narrative details, but I found it a disappointment.

An excellent book, but it is rather too detailed and some time drags on.

A capa está em ótimo estado mas como podem ver nas fotos as 3 bordasestão com manchas

One of the best books ever read

Excelente producto.