James Grehan's "Empire of Manners"

James Grehan is Professor of History at Portland State University. His previous book is Twilight of the Saints: Everyday Religion in Ottoman Syria and Palestine (2014).

Grehan applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Empire of Manners: Ottoman Sociability and War-Making in the Long Eighteenth Century, with the following results:

The Page 99 Test for Empire of Manners whisks readers to the literary scene in the Ottoman Empire during the ‘long eighteenth century’ (c. 1680-1830). Here they mingle with urban gentlemen—scholars, officials, and assorted literati—who flaunted their love of poetry, the main form of Ottoman literary expression, and wielded it as proof of their urbanity and sophistication. Most probably, these refined cultural tastes and their association with the polite and educated are exactly the image that will come to readers’ minds when they think of the word ‘manners’. But for this very reason, the Page 99 Test will only mislead them. If we look more widely at Ottoman society, other manners—not always so nice—immediately catch our eye. Beyond page 99, readers will see how questions of honor might drive even a polite gentleman to explosive displays of emotion or full-blown violence. Venturing into urban markets, coffeehouses, and neighborhoods, they will jostle their way through a vibrant and earthy street culture, which delighted in physical bravado and vulgar speech and humor. From page to page, lazy clichés about ‘Islamic culture’—so familiar to anyone who has ever picked up a book about the Middle East—will slowly dissolve in panoramic surveys of fashion, bodily comportment, and leisure culture across the length and breadth of the empire. The eighteenth century was a particularly interesting moment for Ottoman manners. It witnessed the slow blurring of social hierarchies; the expansion of polite society; the quickening of leisure culture; and the heyday of a bawdy paramilitary subculture. Curiously enough, it was the war-making of the state which was most responsible for generating these trends. To put it another way, manners and violence are fundamentally intertwined. For readers who are interested in learning more about etiquette and sociability in the premodern world, and keen on joining historical excursions across the Balkans and Middle East, Empire of Manners is an opportunity to consider this paradoxical relationship in colorful detail.

Learn more about Empire of Manners at the Stanford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Twilight of the Saints.

--Marshal Zeringue