[7] His work on Timur drew the attention of Mehmet Fuat Köprülü, who facilitated his entry as an assistant to the Modern Age Department of the university.

His PhD thesis was on the Bulgarian question in the late Ottoman Empire, specifically during tanzimat, and constituted one of the first socioeconomic approaches in Turkish historiography.

[1] In 1949, he was sent by the university to London, where he worked on Ottoman and Turkic inscriptions in the British Museum and attended seminars by Paul Wittek at the School of Oriental and African Studies.

In 1992, he returned to Turkey after an invitation by Bilkent University, where he founded the history department, teaching at the postgraduate level,[1] and taught until his death.

[13] He aimed at both countering what he saw as the hostile, biased narrative presented by western sources at the onset of his work and what he saw as an exaggerated, romanticized and nationalistic historiography in Turkey itself.

He exemplified the biased western narrative he tried to dispel as Franz Babinger's depiction of Mehmed the Conqueror as a bloodthirsty, sadistic personality.

When he first started his research in the 1940s, such documents were believed to be useless due in part to the recent change of alphabet and were being stored in unfavorable conditions or altogether destroyed.

[8] According to Immanuel Wallerstein, İnalcık shaped the discipline of historical research with his unique methodology and led to many students in his school of thought approaching issues from a number of socioeconomic and cultural perspectives.