Abstract
The Middle East, North Africa and Southeast Europe underwent profound changes during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, before the Ottoman Empire reinvented and rebuilt itself between 1840 and 1880. Contrary to earlier assumptions, this process did not consist of emulating a ‘Western’ model—but the willingness to learn from, adapt and expand promising models (if not to jump on the bandwagon of self-righteous progress and civilisation) is beyond doubt. The key group that actually did this were the metropolitan bureaucrats.
At the same time, the ensuing reinterpretion of established Islamic and imperial heritage presupposed a body of accepted knowledge, ushering in the question what kind of education these people could build on, what books they might turn to, or what might have been available to them for repurposing and reinventing.
While some private libraries did survive, most book collections of these people have been lost. Even without the actual books, however, it is possible to trace their education, main areas of interest and possible changes through probate inventories prepared in the wake of a book owner’s demise. Building on the analysis of several mid-eighteenth-century registers published in 2010, this contribution will examine a comparable number of registers from the late eighteenth and particularly the early nineteenth century, right before the mentioned changes.
