Response to Nir Shafir

Official URL: https://dx.doi.org/10.18589/oa.1145938

I wrote Science without Leisure as an accessible monograph for people who are interested in Ottoman science. Part of my intended audience were historians of science and Ottoman historians who perhaps did not have science in their ana- lytic toolkit. Although the subject has become more approachable, perhaps even somewhat fashionable, in recent years, there seemed to be little in the history of Ottoman science to attract broad scholarly attention merely a decade ago. Even classically trained historians of Islamic science have avoided the topic more or less entirely. Anyone who takes a close look at histories of science that include the Ot- tomans will note that the year 1600, give or take, is a common endpoint. When they do not end around 1600, the assumption on display is that things just kept going as they did before 1600. Many of these works read the lack of a theoretical leap as theoretical continuity, while Science without Leisure proposes that maybe there was no theory to keep or break.