The book repeatedly showed that what we customarily assume as exogenous or in opposition to the state domain, such as local dynasties, were in fact a product of the imperial social system. Argumentatively, A Nation of Empire challenged the canonical state-society distinction firmly embedded in historiography and instead gave us an elaborate picture of "state society" relying on exhaustive ethnographic and archival evidence. Methodologically, Meeker combined extensive ethnographic fieldwork with in-depth historical research, which was unprecedented and perhaps is still unmatched. What came out in 2002, A Nation of Empire: The Ottoman Legacy of Turkish Modernity, was simply a unique product. Although he did his PhD fieldwork in the town of Of, Turkey, in the late 1960s, he never published his dissertation and did not study Turkey for the following two decades until he resumed his research on the Black Sea Coast in the late 1980s, this time with a historical focus. Meeker, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, has conducted ethnographic, historical, and literary research on Turkey, the Middle East, and North Africa.
During his half-century of scholarship, Michael E.
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