Ottoman Historiography in the Late Empire: Teaching and Writing HISTOIRES UNIVERSELLES in Ottoman Turkish Ottoman historical writing have long been used as primary source. But this paper attempts to contextualize history writings in the late empire as narratives in their own right and analyze the ways in which they defined the study of the past. We already know of a powerful motif of transformation in late Ottoman history writing toward the standards of objective and documented historicism. Late Ottoman historiography has been discussed as a refashioning along European lines within the context of the Tanzimat era. Similarly, this late Ottoman historicism has been viewed as the result of mere translation, which in turn pointed to an understanding of Ottoman modernization only as a linear development of positivistic Westernization, without any input of its own. This paper is an attempt to visit the world of universal history texts as part of an analysis of the much complicated intellectual, historiographical and educational legacy of the last era of the Ottoman Empire in a combined framework. The first step is the analysis of scholarly historical production outside the better-known genre of chronicle writing, i.e. 'universal histories' by intellectuals based on European sources. This genre paralleled the new need for texts of Ottoman history again outside the chronicles and chroniclers. Indeed, historical works produced outside chronicle writing allow us to study a variety of practices and forms of historical knowledge, particularly after the opening of higher education institutions in the Ottoman Empire. Indeed the late Empire signified the prevalence of such texts for the curricula in the specialized schools such as Mekteb-i M-lkiye. One of these histoires universelles, that of Mehmed Murad written in the 1870s in 6 volumes (Tarih-i Umumi) was not a translation, but an original writing with a distinctly 'modern' character. I believe this and other universal histories embody what I will -for now- call a new genre reflects simultaneously Ottomanism, historicism and public education; signaling perhaps, a multiplicity of Ottoman historical/intellectual/academic genres, independent from other intellectual currents of the day such as Ottomanism, from contemporary European historical visions, from state-service oriented higher education policies, and finally from community-oriented ethno-histories. Indeed, that of Mehmed Murad at least is a fully developed historical construct aiming to place Ottoman history within general histories. Teaching his oeuvre at Mekteb-i Mulkiye "he made world history an Ottoman discipline" says Yahya Kemal.