Science without Leisure

The topical breadth, comparative perspective, and bold arguments of Küçük’s book make it an engaging and provocative read for specialists in the history of science, the early modern period, and the Ottoman Empire. Its contemporary relevance, solid historical material, and easy style also make it accessible to nonspecialists—academics and others—who will enjoy reading the book as well.

An erudite and engaging exploration of the scientific and academic life of Istanbul in the early modern period. . . . Küçük’s engaging and insightful approach to the history of scientific production serves to open up major new fields of enquiry, while providing a range of equally useful approaches to aid further studies.

With clear prose and brilliant theoretical insights, Harun Küçük offers a refreshingly original and persuasive account of the connected global history of science and scientists in the Ottoman imperial metropole during the early modern period. This is the most important book in the field of both Ottoman studies and the histories of early modern science, one that will truly reorient our understanding of global intellectual history and challenge our entrenched assumptions about imagined civilizational borders between the West and the Ottoman East.
Cemil Aydin, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Harun Küçük’s Science without Leisure is eye-opening. The cosmopolitan and practical naturalism bubbling up in early modern Istanbul exemplifies science as it was commonly expressed around the globe. The variety and vigor of the city’s practitioners challenges our notions of Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment. But it is a caution, too, about how Ottoman practitioners could not fully express their talents when supported by practical results alone.