Imperial Formations

[...] Ussama Makdisi's essay on missionary encounters in the Ottoman Arab world demonstrates that whereas U.S.-based Protestant proselytizers brought cultural conversion as their modus operandi, the sultan leaders of the Ottoman Empire chose religious tolerance and political self-autonomy as their preferred method for managing the subordinated Muslim elements of their multiethnic polity. [...] it is on the latter tendency, or what the editors refer to as the "accommodation of difference," that Makdisi and the authors of the other essays in the first section focus.