Was there such a thing as an 'Ottoman world ' ? The Ottoman empire as a political entity comprised most of the present Middle East, north Africa and south-eastern Europe. For over 500 years, it encompassed a wide range of communities with differing religious, linguistic and cultural traditions, most of which lived under Ottoman rule as a result of military conquest.Traditional study of the Ottoman empire has focused on the dynasty in Istanbul, its military undertakings and its centralised administration: the nature of its huge and diverse state has not been seriously addressed until recently and is not covered in standard textbooks. The Ottoman World inverts this approach, looking not from Istanbul outwards, but from the provinces inwards, and examining Ottoman social and cultural worlds from the bottom up. How did major cities such as Cairo or Damascus adjust to Ottoman rule - or did it adjust to them? What produced the consensus that held the empire together, particularly in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? To what degree did subject peoples see themselves as part of a political whole? How far did the state impinge upon the lives of ordinary people in the provinces?Thirty-Five of the world's leading specialists examine these and many other questions in this ambitious and important volume, making readily available the exciting new research which has been undertaken in recent years.