... highly readable ... This book is impressively well-structured ... Baer’s fine book gives a panoramic and thought-provoking account of over half a millennium of Ottoman and—it now goes without saying—European history.

Inevitably in books like this, the narrative shoals for long, wonderful stretches on personal stories. Ottoman history provides no shortage of larger-than-life homicidal maniacs whose stories make for very colorful reading ... The prominence of all these personalities, so busy bustling about killing their fathers, their uncles, their younger brothers, and all their young brothers’ male children, represents a canny narrative choice; it keeps Baer’s book running along in an entirely enjoyable reading experience and gives readers a series of faces to put on all the social and economic eras that unfurl in the course of the story.

... oversimplification or airy generalisation is never advisable. Unfortunately Baer is not always free from oversimplifications himself. The book is marred by a predictable anti-western slant, with the enlightened Ottomans often compared favourably to the backward or intolerant European Christians ... Despite these lapses, Baer’s is a winning portrait of seven centuries of empire, teeming with life and colour, human interest and oddity, cruelty and oppression mixed with pleasure, benevolence and great artistic beauty.

Mr. Baer...organizes his material according to contemporary concerns such as minorities, women and sexual mores, thereby eking out surprisingly fresh insights from this hitherto well-plowed terrain. He doesn’t ignore chronology, but his structuring principle is to reset the conventional narrative ... Mr. Baer doesn’t stint on such glaring complications to his diversity-prioritizing approach. By book’s end, his narrative becomes a de facto illustration of the painful downsides of identity politics ... Eventually, religious and ethnic minorities helped persecute one another en masse as the empire fell behind in the late 19th century, beset with poverty, rebellions, weak sultans and recurrent lawlessness ... Until Moscow launched its pogrom-genocides, Turks and Armenians had lived together in relative harmony for many centuries in eastern Anatolia. But Mr. Baer doesn’t blame Moscow for the consequences—a surprising flaw in a history that is otherwise highly readable, original and thorough.

Baer’s enthusiasm for the empire as a cosmopolitan, European-oriented and tolerant state will surprise some readers. He is right to argue that the Ottomans were more tolerant than the Europeans, who expelled the Muslims from Spain and instituted the Inquisition to persecute the forcibly converted Jews. I would argue this is not a unique feature of Ottoman genius, but a tradition of Muslim statecraft ... We can agree that the Ottomans’ practiced tolerance, but see it as no more than realpolitik ... It’s unfortunate that a work based on painstaking and original research should contain mistakes that could have been easily caught by a friendly re-reader ... This reviewer found that the author’s focus on the use and abuse of people’s private parts is overused as a means of juicing up the narrative. We learn, for example, that antinomian dervishes practiced intimate body piercing. Did I need to know? On the other hand, there is a frank discussion of Ottoman sexuality that will enlighten many readers, without demonstrating, as Baer claims, a greater commonality with Europe. That is, in the end, my biggest caveat about Baer’s thesis. By humanizing the Ottomans, he makes them not more European, but simply more universal.

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.

In his latest book, Baer...expertly captures the undercurrents of Ottoman history that he says made the empire’s rule perilous at times ... There’s no study more masterful than Baer’s on the lengthy rule of the Ottoman Empire, from its founding in the 13th century to its collapse in 1924. Baer is especially skilled at presenting extensive information in an engaging and accessible way.

Baer’s elegantly written narrative is full of bloody state building—a new sultan was expected to murder his brothers to keep them from challenging him for the throne—along with intriguing, counterintuitive takes on Ottoman culture ... This immersive study makes the Ottomans seem less exotic but more fascinating.