The Ottoman Empire was one of the mightiest empires in world history, ruling parts of Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa for more than six hundred years. At its height in the sixteenth century, it was more formidable militarily, better financed, more highly centralized, and more efficiently ruled than any rival power. For centuries, the sultans who governed it were the most powerful and prestigious “defenders of Islam.” At the same time, this Islamic empire accommodated religious diversity in a way Europe’s Christian powers would not.

Encompassing politics and war, economics and society, culture and religion, Dreams of Empire shows how across the centuries, the Ottoman state evolved from a ministate in the northwest corner of Anatolia (the Asian part of today’s Turkish republic) to a world empire sovereign over lands stretching from Hungary to Iraq and Algeria. Subsequently, it experienced centuries of adversity, then recovery, then finally–although both diminished in size and buffeted by separatist nationalism in the Balkans and European imperialism in Asia and North Africa–a remarkable surge of reformist dynamism to fight for its survival. This reformist dynamism enabled the Turkish people to survive near destruction in World War I and re-emerge in the independent Turkish Republic. In addition to examining the state’s central role in maintaining the empire, Carter Findley explores the prodigiously diverse communities residing in its sprawling lands, including nomadic tribes, settled agrarian communities, and religious groups of all sizes and types, including Muslims, Christians, and Jews. Charismatic Sufis, warriors for Islam, merchants in Cairo, compulsive travelers, a would-be Jewish messiah, revolutionaries, and pioneering women novelists all inhabit these pages.

Incorporating a wealth of scholarship, primary sources, maps, and plentiful illustrations in both color and black and white, Dreams of Empire masterfully depicts both great issues and human stories of women and men whose deeds and misdeeds helped shape the epic history of this long-lasting, cosmopolitan empire.