Science without Leisure: Practical Naturalism in Istanbul, 1660-1732

By Harun Küçük

Science in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Istanbul, Harun Küçük argues, was without leisure, a phenomenon spurred by the hyperinflation a century earlier when scientific texts all but disappeared from the college curriculum and inflation reduced the wages of professors to one-tenth of what they were in the sixteenth century. It was during this tumultuous period that philosophy and theory, the more leisurely aspects of naturalism—and the pursuit of “knowledge for knowledge’s sake”—vanished altogether from the city. But rather than put an end to science in Istanbul, this economic crisis was transformative, turning science into a practical matter, into something one learned through apprenticeship and provided as a service. In Science without Leisure, Küçük reveals how Ottoman science, when measured against familiar narratives of the Scientific Revolution, was remarkably far less scholastic and philosophical and far more cosmopolitan and practical. His book explains why as practical naturalists deployed natural knowledge to lucrative ends without regard for scientific theories, science in the Ottoman Empire over the long term ultimately became the domain of physicians, bureaucrats, and engineers rather than of scholars and philosophers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Release date: Dec 13, 2019
• ISBN: 9780822987109

Book preview

Science without Leisure

PRACTICAL NATURALISM IN ISTANBUL, 1660–1732

HARUN KÜÇÜK

UNIVERSITY of PITTSBURGH PRESS

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260

Copyright © 2020, University of Pittsburgh Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Printed on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress

ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-4580-2

ISBN 10: 0-8229-4580-0

Cover art: Qibla indicators, Kandilli MS 198, 36a–b.

Cover design: Alex Wolfe

ISBN-13: 978-0-8229-8710-9 (electronic)

In memory of Ayfer Küçük (1956–2016),

the kindest person I have ever known.

Residents of Istanbul buy clocks and other curious miscellany that come from the land of the Franks. And, as these things work and are of high quality, they take the commodities as an indication of the Franks’ mastery of the art of medicine and of the sciences. They believe that the Franks have seen and cured most of the diseases at their anatomical theaters and academies. And, they believe Franks have mastered medicine because of their endless experience with each and every ailment. Let us for a moment assume that this is the case. What are these highly trained physicians doing here in Istanbul in the first place? Why are they taking part in the sufferings of the people here, when they can make a good living at the hospitals back home?

—GEVREKZADE HAFIZ HASAN (D. 1801), CHOICEST TREATISE ON EYE SURGERY

Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means of subsistence and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case.

—FRIEDRICH ENGELS

Contents

Acknowledgments

Notes on Naming Conventions, Translation, and Transliteration

INTRODUCTION. After Science: Ottoman Practical Naturalism

CHAPTER 1. Istanbul and Her Sciences

CHAPTER 2. Istanbul’s Medreses in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries

CHAPTER 3. The Ottoman Scholastic Field and the Sciences

CHAPTER 4. The Calendar: Copernicus for Tax Collectors

CHAPTER 5. The Recipe: An Annotated Chronology of New Medicine in the Seventeenth Century

CHAPTER 6. Distinction: A Social Critique of Scientific Taste

CHAPTER 7. Like Ants on a Watermelon: Practical Naturalists Encounter Philosophy

CHAPTER 8. Maritime, Mercantile, Sacred: Empiricism and the Compass

CONCLUSION

APPENDIX 1. Extract from Tezkireci İbrahim, Secencelü’l-Eflak fi Gayeti’l-İdrak [Mirror of the Heavens at the Edge of Understanding] (1662)

APPENDIX 2. Extract from İbrahim Müteferrika, Füyuzat-ı Mıknatısiye [Magnetic Effluvia] (1732)

APPENDIX 3. Extract from İbrahim Müteferrika, Usülü’l-Hikem fi Nizamü’l-Ümem [Foundations of Government in Various Social Orders]

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

IT TOOK ME THREE BOOK PROJECTS to get to this one. As a trained Europeanist, I started out by trying to deploy my young-scholar-level knowledge of intellectual history and of the history of science to ask whether we could speak of an Enlightenment in the Ottoman Empire. Then I simply focused on eighteenth-century episodes that I thought I could passably analyze, which turned into a few short essays and book chapters. It was not until I turned to the seventeenth century that the general shape and trajectory of science in the Ottoman Empire began to gain some clarity. And only in the last few months of my academic leave in 2016–2017 did I feel a sense of pattern, however much of an illusion that sense may prove to be. That is, it took me about a decade to convince myself, and I made mistakes along the way. It felt like driving uncomfortably fast on a bumpy road. Many people helped me, accompanied me, and put up with me along the way.

First, I want to thank my advisor, Robert Westman, for his guidance and patience. My interest in the history of science all started with his article The Astronomer’s Role in the Sixteenth Century. I was lucky to work with him. He nursed the bad writer and the hasty thinker that I always have been. And, if it were not for him I would not have had either the will or the resources to see what to me seemed like a big project to completion. I would also like to thank Hasan Kayalı, whose generosity and openmindedness has made my years in San Diego both edifying and rewarding. The late John Marino, with whom I spent almost two years discussing early modern European history, awakened me to social and economic history and generally to how history is done. Luce Giard has been the patron saint of my work from the moment we met. I would not know nearly as much about Aristotelianism and the Jesuits without her. Finally, Frank Biess’s research seminar gave me the opportunity to think more seriously about education in modern Turkey. I would also like to thank Tom Gallant, Naomi Oreskes, Tal Golan, Cynthia Truant, and Steven Epstein. Finally, the late Şerif Mardin gave me my first education in social science and started me thinking about modernity in the Ottoman Empire.

Between 2012 and 2014, Lorraine Daston, Christine von Oertzen, Fernando Vidal, and David Sepkoski made it possible for me to keep working first as a predoctoral fellow and then as a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. I doubt I feel as nostalgic about any other year in my life as I do about 2013–2014 in Berlin. And attached to that sentiment are lasting friendships, especially with Florence Hsia, Judy Kaplan, Dora Vargha, João Rangel de Almeida and Elaine Leong.

I would not have made it to this third and final iteration of my book project without the support of my department members at Penn. Robert Aronowitz was not only kind and giving to me but also pragmatic in ways that have helped me on many occasions. John Tresch has been a most generous mentor since our paths intersected at the Max Planck. Heidi Voskuhl has been my go-to for commiseration. Susan Lindee and Beth Linker have given me the kind of perspective on my work that only leaders can give. Mehmet Darakçıoğlu, Joyce Darakçıoğlu, Etienne Benson, Tina Plokarz, Projit Mukharji, and Manjita Mukharji have brought light and air to many occasions scholastic and practical—they were good friends and essential life support to my whole family. I would also like to thank David Barnes, Meghan Crnic, Stephanie Dick, Sebastián Gil-Riaño, Ann Greene, Andy Johnson, and Ramah McKay for being great colleagues and conversation partners. Penn has been good to me outside of the department, too. Jamal Elias, Paul Cobb, Eve Troutt Powell, Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, David Ruderman, Peter Holquist, and Jim Ryan have helped me in scholarly and social ways. Oscar Aguirre-Mandujano, a new and dear colleague, has been a wonderful collaborator and friend.

I would like to thank Kasper Eskildsen, Evelyn Kim, and Stephen Larsen, erstwhile mentors and now friends, who have a lasting imprint on the way I think and work. Metin Kunt, Hakan Erdem, Hülya Canbakal, Akşin Somel, Halil Berktay, and Tülay Artan were first teachers and then colleagues at Sabancı University. I would also like to thank Ahmet Ademoğlu, Engin Akarlı, Mehmet Genç, Kahraman Şakul, Abdülhamid Kırmızı, Günhan Börekçi, Cem Behar and Ahmet Okumuş, Yalçın Armağan, and Mehmet Fatih Uslu for their collegiality and friendship at Şehir University.

I was lucky to have intellectually nourishing peers, best of friends to me, who also had the time and the eagerness to talk about matters immaterial to our empirical work. My conversations with Alper Yalçınkaya, Çağrı İdiman, Elly Truitt, Claire Griffin, and Eric Hounshell have been an education unto their own. Elçin Arabacı, Sinan Ciddi, Benny Cohen, Tuba Demirci, Vefa Erginbaş, Berk Esen, Ricardo Fagoaga, Burcu Gürgan, Doğan Gürpınar, Emre Hatipoğlu, Zeynep Kutluata, Brian Lindseth, Nazan Maksudyan, Eric Martin, Kate McDonald, Arvid Nelsen, Uğur Peçe, Liz Petrick, Emily Sablosky, Matthew Shindell, Cristina Trecha, Ekin Tuşalp Atiyas, and Zeynep Yelçe gave me friendship and camaraderie when I needed it most.

Too many people tried very hard to help me get better at this than I was. Over the years, I have shared parts and stages of this project in many venues, written and spoken, and I have received valuable feedback from many colleagues, including Tuna Artun, Babak Ashrafi, Ömer Aygün, Tawrin Baker, Peter Barker, Ahmet Bilaloğlu, Jacques Bouchard, Ömerül Faruk Bölükbaşı, Sonja Brentjes, Nikolaos Chrissidis, Harold Cook, Matt Crawford, Kathleen Crowther, Mehdin Çiftçi, James Delbourgo, Edhem Eldem, Khaled El-Rouayheb, Marwa Elshakry, Nahyan Fancy, Walter Feldman, Paula Findlen, Sietske Fransen, Yulia Frumer, Kostas Gavroglu, Cathy Gere, Chris Gratien, Molly Greene, Emrah Safa Gürkan, Gottfried Hagen, Shirine Hamadeh, Darin Hayton, Kit Heintzman, Phillip Honenberger, Hadi Jorati, Çiğdem Kafesçioğlu, Lambros Kamperidis, Seyfi Kenan, Tzvi Langermann, Eugenia Lean, Steven Livesey, Kerry Magruder, Maria Mavroudi, Matt Melvin-Koushki, Robert Morrison, Carla Nappi, Lisa O’Sullivan, Ovidiu Olar, Pietro Omodeo, Manolis Patiniotis, Miltos Pechlivanos, Konrad Petrovszky, Leslie Pierce, Andrei Pippidi, Nikolas Pissis, Gianna Pomata, Maria Portuondo, Valentina Pugliano, Ahmed Ragab, Kapil Raj, Alisha Rankin, Justin Rivest, Lissa Roberts, Marinos Sariyannis, Kostas Sarris, Dagmar Schäfer, Yavuz Sezer, Nir Shafir, JB Shank, Miri Shefer-Mossensohn, Kavita Sivaramakrishnan, Pamela Smith, Emma Spary, Dimitris Stamatopoulos, Tunç Şen, Cengiz Şişman, Şehnaz Tahir, Assaf Tamari, Mary Terrall, Paul Theerman, Charlie Thorpe, Hasan Umut, Matteo Valleriani, Nükhet Varlık, Madalina Veres, Rienk Vermij, Simon Werrett, Veli Yashin, Ali Yaycıoğlu, and Duygu Yıldırım. I can only hope I did not disappoint them.

Being a reserved writer, I have shared some parts of this book with only a few people. Yves Gingras, Susan Lindee, Beth Linker, Skúli Sigurðsson, Baki Tezcan, John Tresch, Elly Truitt, and Gülay Yılmaz kindly provided written feedback on various chapters. Versions of chapters 3, 4, and 7 received welcome feedback at the Early Modern Science Working Group at the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, Ilm wa Amal Workshop at Stanford University, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, respectively. Projit Mukharji and members of the Other Reasons graduate seminar read and discussed the production copy in spring 2019. Feza Günergun kindly provided corrections to errors that I would otherwise miss. I would like to thank Şevket Pamuk for allowing me to reproduce his graph of real prices and for his encouragement. I also want to thank Ozan Sağsöz, Cengiz Özdemir, and Murat Cankara for giving me the opportunity to share some of the central themes of this book with the wider public. Claire Sabel graciously became my model reader in the summer of 2018. Having her read through the manuscript was an author therapy of sorts. And, if you are holding this book in your hands, it is because of Abby Collier, Audra Wolfe, Amy Sherman, the staff of the University of Pittsburgh Press, and the three anonymous reviewers.

Over the years I have also enjoyed a great deal of institutional support. I would like to thank the Council for European Studies for a generous predissertation fellowship, the Mellon Foundation for funding my work at Oklahoma University’s History of Science Collections, UC San Diego’s Science Studies Program that supported many semesters abroad, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science for a predoctoral fellowship in 2012 and a two-year postdoctoral fellowship in 2013. The University of Pennsylvania has been a cozy home for my work. In addition to providing me with research funding whenever I needed it, I was also lucky to receive a University Foundation Grant in 2015 and a travel grant from the Middle East Center during the same year. The university also kindly relieved me from teaching during 2016–2017, when I put the finishing touches on many parts of this book. I was a traveling salesman of my own ideas in many places. Boğaziçi University, Cambridge University, CEU Institute for Advanced Study, Columbia University, CUNY Graduate Center, Freie Universität Berlin, Georgetown University, Johns Hopkins University, New York Academy of Medicine, NYU, NYU Abu Dhabi, Sabancı University, St. John’s College, Stanford University, Şehir University, UC Los Angeles, UC San Diego Science Studies Program, University of Macedonia at Thessaloniki, the University of Minnesota, the University of Oklahoma, and Wellcome Trust and Library have given me the opportunity to share my work with fellow scholars. Sara Aronowitz and Reza Hadisi kindly invited me to give a Minorities and Philosophy talk at the University of Michigan.

And, as a historian, I was often a body in a library. I have given much headache to librarians, mainly because of my taste for obscure books that were hard to get. I want to thank the librarians and archivists at the British Library, İSAM Library, Kandilli Manuscript Library, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Oklahoma University and Süleymaniye and Beyazıt Manuscript Libraries, Ottoman Archives of the Prime Minister’s Office, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, UC Los Angeles, UC San Diego, and the University of Pennsylvania for giving me access to the past. I would additionally like to thank Tahsin Tahaoğlu for helping me navigate the Kandilli collection.

Aristotle said that friendship between equals is essential to good life. And I have been blessed with some very old and very good friends who made my life that much better. Here, I want to thank especially Hande Aşık, Okan Aşık, Kerim Bayer, Deniz Boran, Pelin Boran, Sonny Das, Erolcan Erdoğan, Mehmet Eryılmaz, Ayşegül Eryılmaz, Adam Gies, Edyta Kuzian, Erdem Mutafoğlu, Esin Mutafoğlu, Can Sezer, Didem Ermiş Sezer, Eren Soyak, Ece Gelal Soyak, Merve Yücel, and Scott Zollner.

And, family. My parents have sacrificed a lot, including time we could have spent together, as I went through various stages of life. My mother, Ayfer Küçük, and my father, Özcan Küçük, have supported me through thick and thin. My sister Pınar Küçük—or Pınar Abi, as I have always called her—has never left me alone. My other family, Şeyma, Enis, and Yağız Zaimoğlu, have made my life all the richer. Civan Küçük and Jülide Küçük, I love you with all my heart. I never could have gotten through the grief of my mother’s passing and finished this book without them. The greatest thanks of all goes to my wife Merve Küçük, who sacrificed as much for my work as I did.

There is also a more general, darker past to this book. I think the reader will demand such an account, as the book that follows does not seem to celebrate anything. It is what was at first an inadvertently sociological history—perhaps a natural consequence of my intellectual engagement with Fernand Braudel. Politics, especially as it creeped into my daily life, was the first of my concerns. I have observed immigrants vote far right in their old home and vote far left in their new. Islamophobia in the United States. Xenophobia in Turkey. Militant atheism on the one hand. Islamism on the other. Remembering the scientific past of Islam, but choking the universities in Turkey. It seemed like attacking one problem made another one a bigger problem. Was there no way to level a critique that would help with both sets of issues? There also was a second problem, perhaps a more fundamental one. The Cold War fostered a sense that following capitalism and the will of the people was the best way to live. Yet I think we are now discovering that what made capitalism and democracy work was neither capitalism nor democracy but rather all the ways in which capitalism and popular will were curtailed by regulations and institutions. It was not fostering entrepreneurship, but paying good wages. The Cold War, it seems, did not leave in its wake a better life for all, but rather populist countries with extremely predatory capitalists. This book is my best shot at developing a political position that addresses these impasses as I see them.

I wrote this book as a methodological work, but some readers may prefer the content over the method. First, for certain analyses, I found that culture confounded rather than explained things. Too many mazes of erudition cluttered what I thought could be a straight path. That is, cultural modes of inquiry did not explain that for which I sought an explanation. Perhaps I committed the cardinal sin of seeking clarity when I should have been appreciating the complexity. I got out of this book what I sought to get and I can only hope that the reader will be likewise satisfied. Secondly, much research, including my own, has come to serve as proxy for the Islamic world at large, leaving little breathing room for those of us seeking to understand specific locales. If this proxyism aims to bring peace to the Middle East, I do not believe that Islam holds the answer. Of course, I realize that there are many researchers whose work seeks to unite otherwise disparate corners of the Islamic world. I do not wish to undercut their efforts but rather to open up alternative venues of research. I would like to think of this book as an analytic inverter that takes the opposite tack of comparable studies. My goal is not to antagonize but to invite the professional reader to mull the benefits of what I think is a novel approach. I hope that the many little inversions in this book will render moot some of the current impasses having to do with the relationship between Islam and modernity.

I believe history serves to improve the future rather than to glorify the past. I hope that the readers will find the generosity in their hearts to read it this way.

Notes on Naming Conventions, Translation, and Transliteration

NAMING CONVENTIONS

Efendi, which comes from the Greek word authentes, means a learned person who often holds an official position that requires learning. Çelebi, an honorific term of unknown origin, can mean anything from godly man to merchant. I think the closest match in the English language is gentleman or esquire. Paşa applies to people who hold the very top administrative ranks in the Ottoman Empire. More often than not in this book, Paşa means grand vizier, who sits just below the sultan in administrative authority.

TRANSLATION

All translations, except those from Mustafa Ali’s Counsel for the Sultans, are mine.

TRANSLITERATION

In transliteration, I have kept things as simple as I could. Ottoman Turkish is particularly problematic because it contains many words that are of Arabic and Persian origin. High modern Turkish makes ample use of such words in a particular Latinized form. I chose to use living Turkish as my model, a choice that echoes the somewhat informal tone of the monograph. Alternative transliteration standards such as IJMES or the Encyclopaedia of Islam make many words look alien to a living Turkish speaker such as myself. This means that I will be using, say, ulema rather than ‘ulama’ or ‘ulemâ and ilm rather than ‘ilm. I hope my decision will be acceptable to most readers and infuriating to none.

Introduction

AFTER SCIENCE

OTTOMAN PRACTICAL NATURALISM

BY 1732 ISTANBUL HAD nearly three hundred colleges, possibly the world’s largest marketplace for drugs, and a community of naturalists that numbered in the thousands. When measured against the narrative of European science, science in Istanbul during the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries was far less scholastic, far less philosophical, far more cosmopolitan, and far more practical. In Istanbul everything was new in the seventeenth century: diseases, drugs, almanacs, ephemerides, alchemy, maps all proudly bearing the title cedid (new). Yet, this city, arguably the largest in the world at the turn of the eighteenth century, has no place in the global history of early modern science.

This book seeks to place the city in the narrative of early modern science by providing an account of science in Istanbul between 1660 and 1732, from the Great Fire to the quelling of the two-year-long Patrona Rebellion. Both 1660 and 1732 point to clusters of translations from Latin into Turkish and Arabic. In 1660 these translations were of calendars and drug recipes. In 1732 they were also of university textbooks. The process as a whole merits the nominal designation as early westernization, because many texts in fact came from the West. However, my focus is on the social transformations that had taken place in Istanbul within three generations, transformations that had nothing to do with the West. In this sense, I follow the spirit of Rifa’at Abou-El-Haj’s Formation of the Modern State and of Baki Tezcan’s recent Second Ottoman Empire.¹ This period is also the high point of what has been called the Scientific Revolution and its first successes, notably in England. Thus certain comparisons with narratives about European sciences in this same period will be an essential, but also playful feature of the book—and will help readers see what is distinctive about natural knowledge in Istanbul. My intention here is to contribute to the ongoing discussion rather than to settle the matter. As there is no comparably complete analysis of cities other than Istanbul, I will simply touch on some striking similarities and differences before I proceed to the next matter at hand. I will also provide what I hope will be new perspectives on familiar stories about Western science. I believe the comparative perspective will also help the reader think beneath what may otherwise appear to be cultural differences between different parts of the world.

Science in Istanbul during this period was practical naturalism. It was neither quite artisanal knowledge nor quite applied science, nor yet popular science. Istanbul produced the kind of natural knowledge that had immediate and tangible results rather than pure cognition as its end. It was productive labor and lacked an essential and sometimes overlooked unproductive labor component that gives science as it is often understood its distinctive quality. As purely productive labor, science in Istanbul was missing the higher intellectual registers. It was astronomy that paid no attention to the order of the planets. It was medicine that had lots to say about drug preparation, but nothing about anatomy. It was science where experience replaced proof and logic of practice replaced formal logic. On all these fronts, science in Istanbul closely resembled science as it was practiced around the globe, including most parts of Europe.²

Yet the practical naturalism that we find in Istanbul is purer than what historians might find elsewhere, because in this sprawling city the pursuit of natural knowledge was not at all encumbered by theoretical ambitions, nor were naturalists paid for producing works that could not quickly turn into products and services. While historians have thoroughly explored the practical nature of scientific activities across the globe, Istanbul provides additional insight into how practical naturalisms that flourished in cities and countries without powerful universities may have been inflected.

What did Ottoman practical naturalists do? They cast horoscopes, cured patients, produced elixirs, wrote poems, collected taxes, drank, and a few, like Şemseddin Ahmed (d. 1708), did all of these things. Şemseddin Ahmed was better known as İshak Hocası, or İshak’s Tutor, as he taught elementary observational astronomy to İshak Efendi, a court favorite and future chief accountant to the sultan who would one day be involved in Ottoman calendar reform. Trained in Iraq, Şemseddin Ahmed prepared horoscopes in military camps, swore off astrology, tried to quit drinking, and kept a medical shop in the Eminönü neighborhood of Istanbul. He was a follower of Niyazi-i Mısri, an exiled Sufi who profoundly bothered the sultan and his preacher because of his religious beliefs. Şemseddin Ahmed also taught religious sciences for many years in Bursa, but he never really made it big in Istanbul. He harbored doubts about Greek and Arabic measurements for a degree of longitude, but he never cared to resolve the matter. He left behind a book of poems, three short works on using astronomical instruments, and a brief alchemical treatise, plus several scholarly works on exegesis and lexicography.³

Compare Şemseddin Ahmed to his contemporary and fellow omnibus naturalist William Whiston (1667–1752), Newton’s successor as the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge. Whiston was an Arian who faced heresy trials for rejecting the divinity of Christ. He expounded his religious views in a series of multivolume works and translations of patristic texts. He sat on the Board of Longitude, a prize committee that sought a certain method of finding coordinates at sea. He wrote a book popularizing Newtonian physics, another work on the dipping needle (for which he expected the Longitude Prize), plus a few works on prognoses and practical astronomy. What are the main differences these comparable characters, as both seem to be practical naturalists who seemed to have uncommon religious views? One might be inclined to say Newton or English Christianity but in this book, I want to bring to your attention the fact that there were no Lucasian chairs in Istanbul, and there were no professors of natural philosophy or of mathematics. As a consequence, Şemseddin Ahmed was never lecturing to large halls full of math students. He was not trained in Cambridge, where Cartesian natural philosophy was the norm when Whiston was a student. Şemseddin Ahmed never seems to have bothered with natural philosophy.⁴

Natural philosophy, theoretical astronomy, theoretical medicine, and all manner of theory were ancient Greek ways of confronting nature. Engaging in any of these disciplines in any capacity meant that you were at least familiar with Greek texts and disciplines, whether it was handed down in an Arabic manuscript or in a Latin or Greek text produced by a humanist. It meant that you had been not an apprentice but a student, like many people since Aristotle’s Lyceum, and had been disciplined into Greek ways of thinking by reading books and listening to lectures. In some cases it also meant that you occupied a university chair, teaching the same Greek disciplines to new generations of young men. It meant that you had the leisure to engage in a very specific kind of nonproductive work. Most people around the world, including many Europeans, did not have the leisure to be students and did not have access to the accumulated knowledge of the past. Most naturalistic practices around the globe were done by people who did not have a university education. Some parts of the world, like China or Latin America, were hardly aware that you could or should confront nature at an abstract, demonstrative, and theoretical level.⁵ And herein lies the story Istanbul has to tell: What does science look like in a very large and very cosmopolitan city where institutions of higher education barely inflected scientific practices? How would science work if it was done in a place where nothing resembling a life of leisure was available to scientists? How would familiar disciplines such as astronomy or medicine change in the absence of highly trained people who were not, so to speak, doing it for the money? These questions strike at the heart of early modern science—what was early about it and what was modern—and of what remains of the narrative of the Scientific Revolution.

THE LEISURED AND THE LEISURELESS

Leisure is the central concept that informs this book. It means being in a state of leisure, having leisure time, and producing what I call leisured or scholastic science.⁶ My use of leisure is not entirely in line with the meaning of leisure that one may find in, say, Travel + Leisure. In my version, leisure is far closer to the classical concepts of otium and skhole. I use Bourdieu’s critique of scholastic reason as my starting point, partly because of its explanatory power and partly because Istanbulites themselves talked frequently about leisure since the city provided so little of it. But one does not need to subscribe wholly to Bourdieu’s sociology in order to appreciate leisure. It so happens that leisure is central to the oldest social analysis of science. It permeates most of Nicomachean Ethics, where Aristotle probes the connection between knowledge and the life of leisure. Leisure is the efficacious freedom to have intellectual pursuits. In this sense, a modicum of wealth, education, and an orderly society as well as good company are requirements of science. All science, without doubt, falls short of a purely intellectual life, but even the imperfect presence of leisure and especially the massification of leisure—when a great number of people prefer edifying pastimes over solely entertaining ones—can make a massive change. All of this requires the teaching of leisure—something we are no longer particularly good at—by someone who has experienced it. And, in most cases, this person is a teacher or a professor.

I believe the reader already has a sense of the relationship between leisure and science. Leisure is what allows someone like Newton to say to an English cannon shooter who needs to improve his shot, ‘Let me write a technical treatise on celestial mechanics in Latin and your successors, with the proper training, can perhaps solve this matter after a while.’ You go to Max Planck with a light bulb problem and he comes up with blackbody radiation and Planck’s constant in several years’ time. Leisure is why, for example, the public face of science since at least the sixteenth century has continued to be the physicist—or what we today call astrophysicist, the most nonproductive person among scientists—and not the management scientist. To put it another way, leisure is temporal and cognitive distance, and it is also what gives science much of its specificity.

Leisure allows us to think in timescales that go beyond the moment, the day, or the matter at hand. It is a temporal regime unto its own and it has a sense of a more distant past and a more distant future than what we experience on a daily basis. This is partly why many people today associate science with states, institutions, and traditions. And shortening the temporal cycle of science to keep the rhythm of wars, reigns, grants, elections, fiscal years, or other urgencies has tangible effects. Some scientists even believe that short grant cycles are the culprit when we fail to observe and to understand long-term changes that are taking place around us.⁷ Yet theoretical science is a long game and has always been so. The researcher is lucky to see her nonproductive labor bear fruit in her lifetime. Most research done at laboratories would be meaningless if all of our problems were urgent problems that required a solution today.

Leisure may also challenge the utilitarian arguments for science. Theoretical science may become useful, but by its very nature it is distant from its use. In other words, theory is not possible without risking lack of utility, and those things that seem to us the most scientific are those things where understanding is essential and utility is merely incidental. Doing science for the sake of something else takes away from this essence—and most of us know and feel it when we see it. At the extreme, this brings up the well-known ivory tower issue. But some tower, however short and shoddy, is necessary to gain perspective beyond the smoking chimneys of daily life. We can all use some distance from day-to-day concerns, and higher education is uniquely qualified to do that by providing what Max Weber has called Klarheit, or clarity.⁸

History of science in the last few decades has made strides toward understanding the relationship between the production and circulation of natural knowledge. However, I think these accounts sometimes omit the about what of science. What we do seems to take on a scientific character once we identify our subject by reference to an existing and generally very old textual corpus that is discernibly scientific to our contemporaries. Thus, while scholarship readily explains how Boyle may have figured out a way to establish facts, it is not entirely clear how he could have done so through building a useless and expensive version of an air pump and making it say something about Aristotelian physics unless he was already familiar with and constantly reminded of Aristotle’s Physics—not familiar enough, it seems, according to Hobbes. How was it that Boyle not only chose scholarship over endless glasses of brandy in front of the fireplace but also went beyond the quintessential gentlemanly pursuit of alchemy to pick a fight on a very specific matter in Aristotelian physics? It seems to me that a discussion of necessary and sufficient conditions is in order. What I propose, based on the example of Istanbul, is that everything that is discernibly theoretical is the beneficiary of extensive education and of massive accumulation of knowledge. I also think that science education is a kind of unappreciated and invisible labor.

The case of Istanbul and the concept of leisure partly explain why we have been unable to shed the Western canon. There is a longue durée element in the history of science that dictates the about what of science despite all the theoretical revolutions we may claim to see. The canon of the Scientific Revolution is still unrivaled in theoretical sophistication during the period despite our best efforts to show that many particular aspects of natural knowledge were in fact global in origin. There is something exceptional about the West, and that is: the survival of the scholastic dispositions toward problems and concerns of daily life. And the expansion of the university has made many nonacademics a bit more scholastic in their approach to life—an approach they can sustain for as long as they do not feel crushing pressure from material exigencies. Those of us who have an excess of the scholastic disposition find our homes in universities—Western institutions that have somehow survived and expanded across the globe.

Science still is a register of human activity that attaches to leisure. While we should critique the canon of the Scientific Revolution, we are also heirs of it if we are engaging with theory at any level—and I suspect almost everyone at a modern university is. We consume the productive labor past and present of technicians visible and invisible as well as the surplus produced by many more people, but our task, so to speak, is essentially nonproductive. That is, we are direct beneficiaries of a past we have come to despise. Certainly, none of us are pure and free minds, but the case of Istanbul suggests that thoughts may get a lot purer and freer if someone is paid to pursue them seriously and at leisure. The specific virtue of seventeenth-century Europe was not innovation or rationalism; it was, rather, accumulation and preservation of knowledge and, to a lesser extent, providing access to this knowledge. I think it is self-evident to most of us non-Westerners that this is still the virtue of the West—most academics outside the West complain about the poverty