Guns for the Sultan: Military Power and the Weapons Industry in the Ottoman Empire

Gabor Agoston’s book contributes to an emerging strand of military history, which examines organised violence as a challenge to early modern states. His is the first to examine the weapons technology and armaments industries of the Ottoman Empire, the only Islamic empire that threatened Europe on its own territory in the age of the Gunpowder Revolution. Based on extensive research in the Turkish archives, the book affords new insights regarding the early success and subsequent failure of an Islamic empire against European adversaries. It demonstrates Ottoman flexibility and the existence of an early modern arms market and information exchange across the cultural divide, as well as Ottoman self-sufficiency in weapons production, well into the eighteenth century. Challenging Eurocentric scholarship, the book disputes the notion of Islamic conservatism and the Ottomans’ supposed technological inferiority. This is a discerning analysis which successfully contends traditional perceptions of Ottoman and Islamic history.