Introduction / Christine Woodhead -- Nomads and tribes in the Ottoman Empire / Resat Kasaba -- The Ottoman economy in the early imperial age / Rhoads Murphey -- The law of the land / Colin Imber -- A kadi court in the Balkans : Sofia in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries / Rossitsa Gradeva -- Imarets / Amy Singer -- Sufis in the age of state-building and confessionalization / Derin Terzioglu -- Royal and other households / Metin Kunt -- "On the tranquillity and repose of the sultan" : the construction of a topos / Hakan Karateke -- Of translation and empire : sixteenth-century Ottoman imperial interpreters as renaissance go-betweens / Tijana Krstic -- Ottoman languages / Christine Woodhead -- Ethnicity, race, religion and social class : Ottoman markers of difference / Baki Tezcan -- The kizilbas of Syria and Ottoman Shiism / Stefan Winter -- The reign of violence : the Celalis c. 1550-1700 / Oktay Özel. Between universalistic claims and reality : Ottoman frontiers in the early modern period / Darius Kolodziejczyk -- Defending and administering the frontier : the case of Ottoman Hungary / Gábor Ágoston -- The Ottoman frontier in Kurdistan in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries / Nelida Fuccaro -- Conquest, urbanization and plague networks in the Ottoman Empire, 1453-1600 / Nukhet Varlik -- Peripheralization of the Ottoman-Algerian elite / Tal Shuval -- On the edges of an Ottoman world : non-Muslim Ottoman merchants in Amsterdam / Ismail Hakki Kadi -- Masters, servants and slaves : household formation among the urban notables of early Ottoman Aleppo / Charles Wilkins -- Subject to the sultan's approval : seventeenth and eighteenth-century artisans negotiating guild agreements in Istanbul / Suraiya Faroqhi -- Literacy among artisans and tradesmen in Ottoman Cairo / Nelly Hanna -- "Guided by the Almighty" : the journey of Stephan Schultz in the Ottoman Empire, 1752-56 / Jan Schmidt -- The right to choice : Ottoman, ecclesiastical and communal justice in Ottoman Greece / Eugenia Kermeli -- Ottoman women as legal and marital subjects / Basak Tug -- Forms and forums of expression : Istanbul and beyond, 1600-1800 / Tülay Artan -- The old regime and the Ottoman Middle East / Ariel Salzmann -- The transformation of the Ottoman fiscal regime, c.1600-1850 / Michael Ursinus -- Provincial power-holders and the empire in the late Ottoman world : conflict or partnership? / Ali Yaycioglu -- The Arabic-speaking world in the Ottoman period : a socio-political analysis / Ehud Toledano.