The first part of this book explores the imperial model, defining empire as a “negotiated” enterprise where the basic configuration of relationships between imperial authorities and peripheries is constructed piece meal in a different fashion for each periphery, creating a patchwork pattern of relations with structural holes between peripheries. In that construction we see the architecture of empire emerge: a hub-and-spoke structure of state-periphery relations, where the direct and indirect vertical relations of imperial integration coexist with horizontal relations of segmentation. After I define empire, I argue that to preserve this structure, its dominance and durability, an empire needs to maintain legitimacy, diversity, and various resources through a stable relationship with intermediary elites. No matter how strong an empire is, it has to work with peripheries, local elites and frontier groups to maintain compliance, resources, tribute and military cooperation and ensure political coherence and stability.

In different chapters, I analyze the social organization and mechanisms of rule of the Ottoman Empire. For this, I carefully select historical and organizational moments of Ottoman tenure from its inception as a “brokered” frontier state in the early fourteenth century through the seventeenth century after which a large-scale remodeling of imperial relations occurred. In several chapters then, I undertake analytic and where possible, explicitly comparative studies of the emergence, the imperial institutionalization, the organization of diversity and its outcome in the form of a constructed toleration and, the response to dissent in the first four centuries of Ottoman rule.