In the past decade, studies on the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire have taken an “archival turn.” Scholars, such as Engin Deniz Akarli, Suraiya Faroqhi, Hasan Kayali, Süevket Pamuk and Zeynep Celik, have begun reassessing the Ottoman archives in order to challenge the sweeping historical narratives of an earlier generation of scholars, like the theses about the inevitable demise of the empire or about the radical break in political culture with the emergence of the Turkish Republic. This is also the case with Selim Deringil's The Well- Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876–1909, which considerably revises our understanding of Sultan Abdülhamid II's centralization program.