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3 For a critique of the Ottoman dark ages myth, see Fikret Adanır, ‘Balkan historiography related to the Ottoman Empire since 1945’, in Kemal H. Karpat, ed., Ottoman past and today's Turkey, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2000, pp. 236–52; Maria Todorova, ‘The Ottoman legacy in the Balkans’, in Carl L. Brown, ed., Imperial legacy: the Ottoman imprint in the Balkans and the Middle East, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995, pp. 45–77.

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44 For a programmatic statement, see Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Between metropole and colony’, in Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, eds., Tensions of empire: colonial cultures in a bourgeois world, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997, pp. 1–56.

45 Emrence, ‘Three waves’.

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47 The rapid rise and the dramatic fall of the coastal city of Acre is a powerful testimony in this regard. See Thomas Philipp, ‘Acre; the first instance of changing times’, in Jens Hanssen, Thomas Philipp, and Stefan Weber, eds., The empire in the city: Arab provincial capitals in the late Ottoman Empire, Beirut: Orient Institute, 2002, pp. 77–92.

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69 Quataert, ‘Age of reforms’, pp. 888–933.

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