Recent scholarship has taken great strides toward integrating the history of the late Ottoman Empire into world history. By moving beyond the view that the West was the prime agent for change in the East, historians have shed new light on indigenous efforts aimed at repositioning the state, reconceptualizing knowledge, and restructuring “society.”1 A comparative perspective has helped students of the period recognize that the late Ottoman Empire shared and took action against many of the same problems confronting its contemporaries, East and West. The assertion of Ottoman agency has been critical to finishing off the stereotype of the “sick man of Europe,” but the persistent legacies of modernization theory and nationalist historiography continue to obscure our view of the period.