Subjects of the sultan: culture and daily life in the Ottoman empire. By Suraiya Faroqhi. London: I. B. Tauris, 2000. Pp. x+358. ISBN 1-86064-289-6. £35.00.

The Ottoman empire and early modern Europe. By Daniel Goffman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xvi+273. ISBN 0-5214-59087. £15.99.

A shared world: Christians and Muslims in the early modern Mediterranean. By Molly Greene. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Pp. xiv+228. ISBN 0-619-00898-1. $29.50.

Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab world: the roots of sectarianism. By Bruce Masters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xiv+222. ISBN 0-521-803330. £48.00.

Consumption studies and the history of the Ottoman empire, 1560–1922: an introduction. Edited by Donald Quataert. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000. Pp. vii+358. ISBN 0-7914-4431-7. $25.50.

The Ottoman empire, 1700–1922. Second edition. By Donald Quataert. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xxii+212. ISBN 0-521-839106. £40.00.

Since Edward Said first launched his devastating critique of western scholarship on the Islamic world, it has been almost impossible to think of Orientalism as anything other than a euphemism for the systematic distortion of an exotic Other. That imaginings of a fanciful ‘Orient’ are now recognized as providing acute expositions of western pathologies, of references to deep-seated desires and anxieties so disturbing that they only reveal themselves in alterities, goes some way towards explaining the sheer bulk of interdisciplinary publications that have been directly inspired by Said's Orientalism.1 As reflexive phenomena, however, such publications have even less to say about the real ‘Orient’. Rather, the historical reconstruction of Orientalism's ostensible subject has been left to a separate and less conspicuous stream of scholarship that is characterized by painstaking archival research.