Turkish historian Halil İnalcık was commemorated in London on 3 November Wednesday evening with the attendance of many distinguished speakers from academia and literature World.
Amognst the speakers, were Dr Fatih Bayram from Medeniyet University, Dr Christine Woodhead from Durham University, Dr Micheal Talbot from Greenwhich University. Taking place at the Yunus Institute London, the event lasted for an approx. One and half hours. Commemorating Halil İnalcık, many of his Works on Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic was referred to.
Who is Halil İnalcık?
Halil İnalcık (26 May 1916 – 25 July 2016) was a Turkish historian of the Ottoman Empire. His highly influential research centred on social and economic approaches to the empire. His academic career started at Ankara University, where he completed his PhD and worked between 1940 and 1972. Between 1972 and 1986 he taught Ottoman history at the University of Chicago. From 1994 on he taught at Bilkent University, where he founded the history department. He was a founding member of Eurasian Academy.
İnalcık’s work was centred upon a social and economic analysis of the Ottoman Empire. He aimed at both countering what he saw as the hostile, biased narrative presented by western sources at the onset of his work and what he saw as an exaggerated, romanticised and nationalistic historiography in Turkey itself. He exemplified the biased western narrative he tried to dispel as Franz Babinger’s depiction of Mehmed the Conqueror as a bloodthirsty, sadistic personality. He criticised generalising approaches to Ottoman history as such approaches, he argued, lacked social or economic insight due to a lack of research. He was the first historian to study Ottoman judicial records in depth to deduce elements of the socio-economic factors in the Ottoman society. When he first started his research in the 1940s, such documents were believed to be useless due in part to the recent change of alphabet and were being stored in unfavourable conditions or altogether destroyed.
İnalcık corrected a number of wrong convictions about Ottoman and Turkish history. One such instance was his discovery that the proposition that the Ottoman dynasty belonged to the Kayı tribe was fabricated in the 15th century.[7] According to Immanuel Wallerstein, İnalcık shaped the discipline of historical research with his unique methodology and led to many students in his school of thought approaching issues from a number of socio-economic and cultural perspectives.