EUME
2014/ 2015

Ethan Menchinger

Last of the Ancients, First of the Moderns: the Ottoman Historian Ahmed Vasif (ca. 1730—1806)

Ethan L. Menchinger has a PhD in Near Eastern Studies from the University of Michigan (2014), where his research interests included early modern Ottoman intellectual history, Middle East literatures and historical writing, and translation. He also holds a BA in History and Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Toronto and an MA from the University of Michigan and has received fellowships from the US State Department, the Rackham School of Graduate Studies, and the American Research Institute in Turkey. He has published articles on Ottoman political and intellectual thought as well as translations, including his book A Summary of Admonitions: a Chronicle of the 1768-1774 Russian-Ottoman War (Isis, 2011). 
 

Last of the Ancients, First of the Moderns: The Ottoman Historian Ahmed Vasif (ca. 1730-1806)

As a EUME Fellow Ethan will follow up his doctoral research in “Last of the Ancients, First of the Moderns,” a project in intellectual biography that focuses on the transitional Ottoman statesman and historian Ahmed Vâsıf Efendi (ca. 1730-1806) and his milieu at the dawn of the modern period. Under Mustafa III, Abdülhamid I, and Selim III, the Ottoman Empire began its first attempts at European-style administrative and military modernization. These efforts are well-attested and are invariably depicted as a watershed in the empire's development. Yet less understood is the surrounding intellectual climate. The last quarter of the eighteenth century was particularly traumatic for the empire and the political life of the period suggests that elites underwent a moral and intellectual crisis, struggling, as challenges forced new worldviews upon them, to answer pressing questions: Why did this happen? How could this happen? What must be done?

“Last of the Ancients, First of the Moderns” is a project in intellectual history that will clarify this juncture in the empire through the study of a leading figure, the statesman and historian Vâsıf (ca. 1730-1806), and his circle. It explores the moral and intellectual reaction of Ottoman elites to the challenges posed by European ascendancy and the empire's eroding power, helping to both contextualize and historicize the early Ottoman experience of modernity. Vâsıf and his milieu not only shed light on completely new aspects of Ottoman letters—heated debates over moral renewal, justice, and human agency—but they also demonstrate a vital intellectual response that was deeply enmeshed in currents of Islamic philosophy, ethics, and statecraft.