The state and bureaucracy: the Turkish case in historical perspective

Abstract

When viewed from a comparative perspective, the Ottoman-Turkish polity evinces a “strong state” in a third world context. The Ottoman Empire, the antecedent political formation of the present-day Turkish Republic, had been an “imperial regime,” and the system as crystallized during the initial institutionalization pattern (ca. 1300-1600) was a bureaucratic rather than a patrimonial polity.