Some decades ago Michael Ursinus related the development of a corpus of Ottoman Turkish works between 1870 and 1920 dealing with Roman and Byzantine history to the “westernizing trends in the historiography of the Ottoman Empire over the same period.” Indeed, the nineteenth century, particularly the last quarter, signified the prevalence of the writing of ‘universal histories’ by Ottoman intellectuals based on European sources. This genre paralleled the new need for texts beyond Ottoman history for the curricula in the specialized schools such as Mekteb-i Mülkiye. As such the genre temporally matched the production of Ottomanism which entailed an Ottoman nationalist historiography. Ahmed Midhat also repeated this trajectory, especially when it came to his views of Ancient Greek Civilization, Byzantium and the contemporary Greek Kingdom. I aim to look at his histories to study the Ottoman Turkish products of historicism as part of a universal historical production which meant a different kind of political modernity like that of colonial contexts to which European thought has a relationship of struggle if not contradiction. The Ottoman self-image of the time also reflected a struggle in establishing a legitimate modern political entity in a similar fashion to those of other multi-ethnic empires’ policies and even to the value systems of the west: But the paradigms of modern statehood was not simplistically appropriated, instead they were filtered through Ottoman aspirations through a process. Ahmed Midhat penned a 15 volume Kainat (Universe) in which a very country based history follows, one of which is Greek history from ancient to the kingdom. As more of a literary person then a historian, his work points to making universal history an Ottoman intellectual endeavor in which not just histoire eventielle but story telling, narrative, also mattered for the construction of Ottomanism.