An Ottoman bureaucrat: Ali Fuad Türkgeldi's understanding of history

Ali Fuad Türkgeldi is one of the statesmen who witnessed the last century of the Ottoman Empire and is known for his historian personality. Ali Fuad Bey was born into a bureaucratic family in Istanbul, where there is both intellectual and political activity, absorbing his personality into characteristic features of the Tanzimat society in which he grew up. He was educated in modern educational institutions of the Ottoman Empire and grew up as an all-rounder by means of the influence of his social circle. He has worked in high civil servants such as Internal Lettering, Undersecretariat of Internal Affairs and Mâbayn Office a Head Clerk and has closely followed the events faced by the Ottoman State throughout his professional life. Ali Fuad Bey's special interest and curiosity in the science of history enabled him to examine and evaluate his circle more carefully. He became aware of new understandings of history and developments by reading domestic and foreign history books written during his lifetime. The author's close acquaintance with the figures who influenced the Ottoman politics, examining and recording the private documents belonging to these people and presenting them in his works offered the researchers the opportunity to look at the period from a different perspective. In his works, he preferred to go beyond the general political history telling style, in a sense, to examine the history of diplomacy and influential figures of the period. While doing this, he made an effort to adopt the modern methods of history, which has become a scientific discipline. Ali Fuad Bey, who did not want his knowledge of the period he lived in to be disappeared, tried to present this information in a critical style based on documents in a cause-and-effect relationship. It is important to know the method and technique, expression style and resource usage criteria that Ali Fuad Bey followed in his works, who dealt with the questions waiting to be answered in the last period of Ottoman history within the realms of possibility of his period. It is a shortcoming in this sense that the author's understanding of historiography, which has been the source of many scientific studies and has important information about the events witnessed by very few people, is not the subject of any study in a broad sense. This study tries to reveal Ali Fuad Türkgeldi's understanding of historiography in the context of his works.