author
Edwin Pears
1835–1919
A British barrister and historian who spent about forty years in Constantinople, he became one of the English-speaking world’s best-known interpreters of the late Ottoman Empire. His books blend eyewitness memory, legal insight, and a strong sense of the political drama of his time.
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About the author
Born in York on March 18, 1835, Edwin Pears was educated privately and at the University of London, where he took first-class honours in Roman law and jurisprudence. He was called to the Bar at the Middle Temple in 1870, then moved a few years later to Constantinople, the city that would shape the rest of his career.
Living there for roughly four decades, Pears worked as a lawyer in the consular courts and wrote widely on Ottoman politics, history, and society. He was valued in Britain as a close observer of events in the empire, and his long residence gave his writing an immediacy that many armchair historians lacked.
He is especially remembered for books such as Turkey and its People, Forty Years in Constantinople, and The Life of Abdul Hamid. Knighted in 1909, Pears remained an important interpreter of Turkish affairs until his death on November 27, 1919.