Kent F. Schull is Associate Professor of Ottoman and Modern Middle East History at Binghamton University, SUNY. He is author of Prisons in the Late Ottoman Empire: Microcosms of Modernity and coeditor (with Christine Isom-Verhaaren) of Living in the Ottoman Realm: Empire and Identity, Thirteenth to Twentieth Centuries. M. Safa Saraçoğlu is Associate Professor of History at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania. Robert Zens is Associate Professor of History at LeMoyne College. Schull and Zens are coeditors of the Journal of Ottoman and Turkish Studies.
In all, this collection of essays, while not for the lay reader, is a welcome scholarly contribution to the study of law and legal affairs in the Ottoman Empire, with an emphasis on legal reforms, the politics of managing empire-citizen relationships, and institutional legal responses to challenges from Western powers. As such, this volume opens a new perspective for historians to develop and explore further. * Middle East Quarterly *