User:Will Hanley/Selimgate

Selimgate is a 2020 debate in Ottoman history surrounding the book God's Shadow. Its author, Yale historian Alan Mikhail, argues for the centrality of the Ottoman empire to the world of the sixteenth century, and that the career of the sultan Selim I (r. 1512-1520) triggered global effects ranging from the Spanish exploration of the Americas to the spread of coffee consumption. Three prominent historians co-published a wide-ranging critique of Mikhail's argument, rhetoric, method, and professional positioning. Other historians rapidly published critiques of this critique, which were then answered by the trio in a critique of the critiques of the critique.

Publication and promotion of God's Shadow
God's Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World was published by Liveright (an imprint of the trade publisher W. W. Norton) on August 18, 2020. On the occasion of the book's release, Mikhail published pieces in the "Made by History" feature of the Washington Post and in Time. Laudatory reviews appeared in the New York Times (Ian Morris), the Spectator (Justin Marozzi), and the Times of London (Richard Spencer).

The first critical review by an Ottoman historian appeared in Literary Review on September 4, 2020. Caroline Finkel, author of the widely-read overview of Ottoman history Osman's Dream (2005), faulted Mikhail for overreach. Describing the book as "overblown," she questioned the ambition of his revisionist claims and the evidentiary basis for certain episodes he describes.

Kafadar/Fleischer/Subrahmanyam
On September 10, 2020, Harvard historian Cemal Kafadar, University of Chicago historian Cornell Fleischer, and UCLA historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam published a brief essay entitled "How to Write Fake Global History" in the online journal Chromos. The authors argue that Mikhail's book exemplifies an approach to global history characterized by outsized claims and minimal scholarly scrutiny. They include works by Romain Bertrand, Valerie Hansen, and Carol Delaney in this category.

The three authors take issue with Mikhail's "methods and arguments," accusing him of writing "great man," primordialist history. They assert that the book contains "errors" and "absurd speculation" concerning the extent of Ottoman presence in the Indian Ocean, the status of the Ottoman caliphate, European and Ottoman confessionalism, and the chronology of the diffusion of coffee consumption. They reject the connections that Mikhail makes between Ottoman events and contemporaneous events in Mexico.

The authors also criticize the Washington Post for declining to publish their critique of Mikhail. They raise questions about the politics of the book, stating that it is used by Turkish triumphalists, while also suggesting that Mikhail kowtowed to the requirements of US liberalism in criticizing Erdogan's neo-Ottomanism.

Subsequent developments
On September 13, 2020, Dartmouth historian of China Pamela Kyle Crossley published a discussion of the review on her own website. Crossley's piece is not concerned with Mikhail's book itself, of which she plainly states she "know[s] nothing". Instead, she analyses his critics and the general field of global history. She detects "faintly malicious envy" in Kafadar/Fleischer/Subrahmanyam of those who break into trade publishing. She summarizes (with some humor) the general lines of their critique of writing for a broad audience. Crossley focuses closely on the "doughty trio"'s discussion of Hansen's 'The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World—and Globalisation Began', detailing a series of elisions and misrepresentations. She suggests that their treatment of Hansen and Delaney is based on selective reading of reviews of their books, rather than the books themselves. One negative reviewer that the trio cites approvingly (Felipe Fernández-Armesto), Crossley writes, also wrote negatively of her own book What is Global History? (Polity, 2008). Crossley detects in their review elements of a pattern of dismissive treatment of the work of female global historians that she describes as "genteel misogyny."

On October 1, 2020, Efe Khayyat (literature scholar at Rutgers) and Ariel Salzmann (historian at Queen's) published a review of the review in the online journal boundary 2. They describe the Kafadar/Fleischer/Subrahmanyam review as an attempt to "defame and denigrate honest efforts to write Ottoman history and in doing so reinforce their own seemingly hegemonic and certainly outdated idea of what constitutes true history writing." They dismiss the trio's specific critiques of Mikhail as cherry-picking by placing them in the broader context of the book. They argue that Mikhail's focus on Selim, far from being "great man" history, is in fact a method that illuminates the broader story he seeks to tell. They point to the sophistication of his positioning of the Ottomans in a global context and the artfulness of his work. This they contrast with the moribund, controlling position of a trio of prominent critics "who seek to impose boundaries on the horizons of Ottoman scholarship to solidify their fading authority." Khayyat and Salzmann describe a set of professional, political, and intellectual structures in Ottoman history writing that they hope will be replaced by a more open, connected, imaginative scholarly community.

On October 2, 2020, Bilkent University historian Abdürrahim Özer began tweeting critical observations while reading of God's Shadow. A week later, the thread, in Turkish and English, ran to about 200 tweets. This stream was subsequently referenced by Kafadar, Fleischer, and Subrahmanyam.

On October 9, 2020, Kafadar, Fleischer, and Subrahmanyam published a rejoinder to their critics in the Turkish internet journal T24. They offer a renewed list of objections to details of Mikhail's text, then amplify those details to diagnose a general careless attitude. They attack his use of sources, including asserting that he did not use primary texts, that he succumbs to "the perils of a blind reliance on Wikipedia," and that he relies fatally on an unreliable text by Fatih Akçe. They repeat their charge that his version of global history is demeaning to scholarship and servile to popular (American) interests. They reject certain specific claims of Khayyat and Salzmann, but do not engage directly with their broader critique of the structures of the field. The piece closes with the implication that Mikhail's book is part of a Gulen-like push for influence.