In the tumultuous last quarter of the 19th century, many Ottomans produced universal history narratives for the reading public, as textbooks for the newly established universities, as column series in the prolific medium of the age, newspapers, and as print books. This was after all the century of reform in the empire, which meant the formation of the modern state, in the name of saving the empire. I situate Ottoman Turkish universal history writing in this age as a new genre for recasting empire in history in general, and for rescripting Ottoman history in world history in particular. The ways in which Ottoman Turkish universal history narratives situate the changing Ottoman Empire, in a world where 19th century Western historical discourse of ‘progress’ was already engrained in the idea that history was European, reveal an intellectual milieu far more complicated than the very problematic positionalities of ‘traditional’ versus ‘modern’. Indeed, the universal history oeuvre of Ahmed Midhat (1844-1912), a well-known literati of the age, circumvents the binary narratives of reformist versus Islamic, of constitutionalist versus Pan-Islamic despotic, of Turkish nationalist versus Ottoman imperial. His three different and voluminous universal histories published in the 1880s and 1890s have never been studied. Yet they point, I argue, to a particular construction of empire distinct from both its own past version and European colonial empire.