The Ottoman Imperial Archives had never been opened to Western scholars

Evidence

I also applied, with little expectation of success, for permission to use the Imperial Ottoman Archives. … No Westerner had however been admitted to these archives, apart from a very small number of expert archivists brought in as consultants. … It was obvious that these archives would be a precious, indeed an indispensable, source for the history of all the lands that had ever formed part of the Ottoman Empire, and of value even for others, like Iran, that had been involved with the Ottomans in one way or another. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 80

Categorization

• XREF: This is a mechanism passage about access to primary sources structuring who could write Ottoman/imperial history — relevant to knowledge-production claims about which histories got written and by whom.