Ottoman Diplomacy: Conventional or Unconventional?, ed. A. Nuri Yurdusev (New York, 2004). Book Review

Ottoman Diplomacy explores some aspects of Ottoman diplomacy from the point of how it was formulated and conducted. This is a much-needed book, since the subject of Ottoman diplomacy in terms of the institutions, methods, and procedures employed by the Empire to carry out its policies or its conduct of external relations, has been neglected. Diplomacy has been defined as a system and art of communication’ between states aiming at negotiation. Based on the fact that the Ottoman diplomacy was nonreciprocal and the Empire did not establish permanent embassies in any European capital until 1793, it has been argued that there was no such thing as diplomacy. The book argues against the background of those assumptions which normally define diplomacy, the so-called ‘conventional’ assumptions of diplomacy – the reciprocal exchange of resident ambassadors, detailed rules of protocol and procedure, immunities and privileges for the diplomatists, a diplomatic corps, rules of ranking and precedence, professional training and recruitment– which view the institution of Ottoman diplomacy in dismissive terms. In their opinion, Ottoman diplomacy represents a ‘reversal’ – what is represented by the term ‘unconventional’  used by the author – of what has become the normal in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in diplomacy. Thus the inquiry, by focusing on some of those ‘unconventional’ notions of Ottoman diplomacy to which attention has been often drawn --  that the Ottoman Empire did not establish resident ambassadors abroad until 1793, it did not recognize the principle of the equality of sovereignties until the 18th century, the capitulations were unilateral rather than bilateral instruments, a body of professionally trained diplomatists did not seriously begin to emerge until the mid-nineteenth century and others help to clarify this problem of the nature of diplomacy and prove that the practice of Ottoman diplomacy was more complex than these divisions and that it combined both ‘conventional’ and ‘unconventional’ characteristics.