This book explores intellectual life, politics and reform in the eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire by studying statesman and historian Ahmed Vâsıf.

Ethan L. Menchinger is currently a lecturer at the University of Michigan. He was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien and Freie Universität, Berlin, and a visiting scholar at the University of Toronto.

List of illustrations; Acknowledgements; Note on the text; Dramatis personae; Chronology; List of abbreviations; Introduction; 1. Out of the east: early life (c.1735-68); 2. At war (1768-74); 3. Years of faction and reform (1774-87); 4. 'Honorable exile': in Spain (1787-8); 5. At war (1788-92); 6. Vâs¿f and the new order (1792-1800); 7. The height of fame (1800-6); 8. Epilogue: Vâs¿f as ancient and modern; Appendix: on the authorship of the Final Word to Refute the Rabble; Glossary; Bibliography; Index.