PositiveThe Spectator (UK)Baer offers a fuller, fresher view of the dynasty that ruled an empire for 500 years and helped shape the West as much as the Hapsburgs or Romanovs ... Baer’s account of the rise, growth, stagnation and fall of the house of Osman over more than 600 years...is a major achievement He is a writer in full command of his subject and of a wide range of Turkish and western sources. His interpretations of these are intriguing ... Inevitably, compromises have to be made in telling this vast story in one volume and much detail must be suppressed. But at times I longed for the quirkiness of a writer such as Jason Goodwin...driven by a flow of entertaining anecdote. Baer does not allow himself this licence, but focuses on reinterpreting history and pushing back against centuries of prejudice. He brings women into the picture more than any other author I have read on the period; and he is sensitive to the shifts between religious tolerance and persecution ... It is a new view: the Ottomans for our time.
Toby Green
MixedThe Spectator (UK)... fascinating and occasionally frustrating ... a rich and insightful work, but occasionally also an unhappy mix. Above all, do not judge this long, dense book by its introduction. Had I not been reviewing it, I might not have read past the beginning, which is often confusing, both in its statements and in its timeline, and I wish that Green had worked some magic on his text and that his editors had cleaned up some of its many repetitions. But I am glad I persevered, for there is much fascination to be had beyond the opening pages ... What emerges is a radically different view of the region from the one that has been generally available.
William Dalrymple
RaveThe Spectator (UK)Dalrymple’s prodigious talents are on full display in the telling of this story: his ability to direct the big picture and give us convincing viewpoints from each of the very different players; to paint beautiful miniature portraits of the key figures; to describe landscapes in such detail that they seem familiar even though we may never have been there; and above all to make us care about things that happened 300 years ago. He is even-handed, too, for while he condemns the Company’s administration for bringing on the anarchy and misery that overwhelmed princely India, he recognises that some of the Company’s traders and administrators (his own relatives among them) acted on a personal level in the way one would have wished the Company to have done.
