CURRENTS IN THE STUDY OF OTTOMAN-EGYPTIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY 303 Journal of Semitic Studies XLIX/2 Autumn 2004 © The University of Manchester 2004. All rights reserved RECENT CURRENTS IN THE STUDY OF OTTOMAN-EGYPTIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY, WITH REMARKS ABOUT THE ROLE OF THE HISTORY OF NATURAL PHILOSOPHY AND SCIENCE AVNER BEN-ZAKEN HARVARD SOCIETY OF FELLOWS Abstract The historiography of Ottoman Egypt is a largely uncharted field. This article traces the development and current state of the field and offers new directions for research. Since the fifties the field has been developed by scholars who have been interested in the corpus of texts which can be used as a source for the writing of political, economic and cultural histories of Ottoman Egypt. However, historians of Islamic science, who have focused on medieval technical texts have ignored this corpus. I propose that this corpus is a rich source for writing the cultural history of science in the early modern Islamic world. It sheds light on how natural phenomena and new European science and technologies were conceived by a great intellectual cul- ture. Methodologically this allows not only for a cultural history of science but also for an all-encompassing approach that combines economic, political, cultural and natural histories into a mélange that represents the everyday practices of the intellectual culture of Otto- man Egypt. The purpose of this paper is to assess the current state of secondary studies of Ottoman Egyptian history and to propose areas and direc- tions of research that might prove useful in the future. I argue that the field is relatively undeveloped, not only because of the late resur- facing of sources, but also because of certain ideological, theoretical, and professional constraints — namely, the ‘decline paradigm’ and its reaction, the ‘nationalist paradigm’, as they combined with notions of modernization and politics. Deductively and teleologically, histo- rians have been drawing from these approaches and producing not so much histories of Ottoman Egypt as histories of its tension with Eu- rope. Moreover, these historians confined their endeavors to prob-