| Abstract
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This dissertation aims to analyze the formation of the Ottoman Empire and to make a contribution to the scholarship by presenting a possible new perspective. The inspiration to choose this field as a dissertation subject stemmed not only from my personal interest in the problem, but also from the rather obvious observation that the academic discussion of the socio-political dynamics of the empire's formative period has been locked into hardened factions and false debates. Because of the limited temporal and spatial scope of the existing studies and because of the lack of a comparative approach, the issue has not been seen in its totality and has therefore not been resolved. A rather "closed" viewpoint has prevented Ottoman historians from benefiting from potentially very useful social-scientific, world-historical, and comparative tools that might provide them with new insights. In sum, the debate has been deadlocked to such an extent that it is an absolute must for researchers to now look beyond the conceptual, temporal, and spatial limits of the current historiography in order to produce any useful contribution. In order to move beyond the limits of the literature, I first adopt a world-centric approach which sees every single large-scale "success story" in history--such as a world-conquest, a world-empire, civilization, or universal religion--as the product of world history. By using the term "world history," I do not imply a compilation of isolated events, civilizations, or ideas; rather, following the footsteps of a number of world historians of the last forty or so years, I refer to the constants borrowings, exchanges, syntheses, and fusions between different cultures and modes of life as the essential motor of world-historical processes. Accordingly, I have tried to show that the formation of the Ottoman Empire as a large-scale "success story" can only be grasped in the context of world history as determined by webs of information, culture, trade, politics, diplomacy, war, and the like. Yet, in analyzing the issue, I have attempted to include not only the contemporary world history of the Ottomans, but also the long world history and its accumulation of knowledge that had existed before, without which the Ottoman venture would not have been feasible. Dealing with a certain historical problem, such as the formation of the Ottoman Empire, from a world history perspective necessarily extends the scale in space and time where we seek to find the explanation. Different scales provide different answers, insights and views, just like different maps with different scales provide different views. In other words, my spatial, temporal, and conceptual unit of analysis is much wider than the specific unit of observation, namely the Ottoman Empire. The working argument throughout this text is that the formation of the empire can be comprehensible in its totality only as a fusion of different time-spaces in a particular time and space. This Braudelien approach is necessarily comparative and world-historical. By focusing on various time-spaces and their clashes, recurring patterns of world history, intensifying interactions between different cultures, and by finally demonstrating the relevancy of all these to the formation of the Ottoman Empire, the issue becomes much more graspable. That is to say, if different times of different speeds such as long terms, cycles, and events, with their accompanying spaces, are taken into account, it is seen that they all contributed to the emergence of the empire with their respective qualities. Specifically, I have divided world history into the nomadic longue durée (composed of socio-political cycles), the sedentary-tributary longue durée (composed of socio-political cycles), and kairos as the right time for a specific action; each of these durations are accompanied by specific spaces, which I have discussed in three separate chapters. As it happened elsewhere many times, the nomadic mode of life of Greater Central Asia clashed with the sedentary civilization of the Near East in the 14 th and 15th centuries in a particular geography, that is, Anatolia and the Balkans. The fusion of these two essentially different sets of social structure, mentality, culture, and warfare in the time of events as kairos created the Ottoman Empire. In brief, this dissertation aims to be a comparative historical sociology of the formation of the empire, not its history.
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