This basic, comprehensive survey of the politics, economics and sociology of Turkish modernization begins with a review of the pressures building up on the Ottoman Empire, and the recurring confrontations between the conservative and the reform-minded wings of the ruling elite, through the 17th and 18th centuries, dovetailing into the challenges confronting the porte under Selim III and Mahmud II. The long drawn-out tragedy of the Turkish 19th century, comprising: a context of continuing retreat and territorial contraction, as well as of deepening despair, summed up as a non-colonial pattern of incorporation; the complicated relationships between the Great Powers and the various Balkan nationalisms; the initial introduction and the subsequent expansion of modernization agendas from the top down; the interplay of political and economic factors, and of local vs international forces, in the major crises of the 1830s, the 1850s, and the 1870s; the course of restructuring in the legal, administrative, educational, fiscal and economic spheres; the ancien régime complexity set up by Tanzimat dualisms; the Ottomans' ambition to modernize and to be recognized as modern (and hence of being admitted into the Concert of Europe); the gradual emergence of a state of law, and the replacement of the First Constitution's abortive liberalism by the resurgent authoritarianism of the Hamidian era.