In recent years, Ottoman studies have been developed and enriched through new questions as a result of newly adopted perspectives. Since the end of the 1990s, the attempt of some prominent historians to integrate the history of the Ottoman Empire into the field of post-colonial studies thus produced a certain scholarly literature. There is a recent historiographical turn claiming that “Ottoman colonialism” and its discursive corollary, “Ottoman orientalism”, appeared in the last decades of the nineteenth century and were consolidated at the beginning of the twentieth. It is a worldview that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century among the members of central bureaucracy who established a discourse of difference toward people living in the outlying provinces of the empire. This article presents and underlines the hypotheses of this literature in order to suggest a critical reading of it.