Diglossia has been the subject of attention of many linguists and philologists dealing with Arabic for many decades. The term itself was coined by W. Marçais (1930) and was brought to the attention of general linguists and ethnologists (socio-linguists in particular) by Ferguson in 1959. Diglossia is also a well-known phenomenon in Modern Greek, Swiss German, and Haitian Creole. Fishman (1967) and Valdman (1968) deal with it in terms of methodology and theory. Kaye (1970, 1972a) deals with it in the light of modern linguistic theory and is restricted (not entirely though) to a discussion of Arabic. The monograph under review is an attempt to survey the diglossia situation using Classical Arabic and colloquial Iraqi (almost entirely Baghdadi) data. Much of the work can already be found in Altoma (1957, 1966).

It has been just fifteen years since my researches in the Başbakanlik Arşivi (Prime Minister's Archives) in Istanbul on Ottoman provincial administration and finance before the nineteenth century led me to attempt to describe what I saw in the archives for the benefit of other researchers. Since that time, a number of additional collections in that archive have been catalogued and made available, and my own subsequent research into the Ottoman reform movement in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have enabled me to examine these and other materials which I did not see or examine during my earlier research efforts in Istanbul. It is the purpose of this survey, then, to describe these more modern archival materials in Istanbul, particularly those in the Başbakanhk Arşivi which were not described in my earlier article, in the hope of encouraging all those interested in modern Ottoman and Middle Eastern history to make use of them in the course of their own research. In order to help the reader understand the nature of the bulk of materials in each collection, I am dividing them into four general categories: basic laws and regulations, administrative records and regulations, records of sultans and individual statesmen, and judicial records, although in fact the materials in each collection at least partly overlap in nature with those of the others.

During the final century of its existence, the Ottoman state, seeking to adapt and survive in a European-dominated world, launched a series of far-ranging reform programs touching nearly every aspect of Ottoman life. The financial basis of these programs rested on a predominantly agricultural economy characterized by Ottoman and foreign observers alike as backward and impoverished, yet possessing vast potential.Generally, these observers also agreed that Turkey's function in the industrializing world was to supply agricultural produce and raw materials. The expansion of Turkish agricultural production would not only help satisfy increasing European demand but also, by raising Ottoman revenues, both ensure the continuation of the Ottoman Empire and provide the additional funds required by the modernization efforts.

No other people in the world, perhaps, have given more information in their poetry on their cultural and social life than have the Arabs over the centuries. Many years before the advent of Islam and long before they had any national political organization, the Arabs had developed a highly articulate poetic art, strict in its syntax and metrical schemes and fantastically rich in its vocabulary and observation of detail. The merciless desert, the harsh environment in which the Arabs lived, their ever shifting nomadic life, left almost no traces of their social structure and the cultural aspects of their life. It is only in their poetry – these monuments built of words – that we find such evidence, and it speaks more eloquently than cuneiform on marble statues ever could.

A survey of the contributions of political science to the understanding of the Middle East and of Middle East studies to the development of political science shows that one of the most fruitful areas of cross-fertilization is in elite studies.1 It might be interesting to speculate on the reasons behind this: Are politics and society in the Mideast especially elitist, or is it simply an accident of research that one scholar who stumbled on a mine of elite data inspired his students to pursue similar types of analysis?2 Whatever the reason may be, another characteristic of Mideast elite studies that stands out is their single- polity focus. If some of the elite studies of the Muslim East have developed a diachronic dimension, none has undertaken multinational comparison.

Le mot arabe sultân se rencontre plusieurs fois dans le Coran au sens de pouvoir.* A titre d'exemple, je vous cite quelques versets coraniques provenant de l'excellente traduction de M. Blachére: ‘Quiconque a tuée injustement, nous donnons à son proche, pouvoir [de la venger]’ (Coran, XVII, 35/33). ‘A l'exclusion de ceux des Errants qui te suivront, tu ne disposes d'aucun pouvoir sur mes serviteurs’ (Coran XV, 42). Et encore, au sens de puissance: ‘Je n'avais sur vous aucune puissance, sauf de vous appeler et que vous me répondiez’ (Coran, XIV, 26/22).