When Ignatius Mouradgea d’Ohsson’s “Tableau General de L’Empire Othoman” (TGEO) was printed in 1784, this cultural and historical account of the Ottoman Empire was one of the first ones written by a native author. Building on Hayden White’s conceptualization of historical narrativity, this paper explores the complex interweaving of moralizing storytelling and historical claims-making in TGEO, and it argues that this interweaving allows d’Ohsson to transform his precarious nativeness as an Ottoman-Armenian translator for the Swedish Embassy into a source of epistemological authority. Although d’Ohsson asserts that his knowledge of Ottoman history and customs is much more truthful than many of his European contemporaries throughout the TGEO, he remains ambivalent about his nativeness throughout the work. In the introduction, for instance, he states that as a person “born in Constantinople, raised in the same country, and attached all [his] life to the service of a Court tied intimately to the Sublime Porte” he has “more than anyone else the means to overcoming these difficulties [in accessing the knowledge of the Ottomans].” Yet, he also calls his talents “weak” and “unsophisticated.” How does d’Ohsson reconcile admitting to his own inadequacy as a scholar with the claim that he is better equipped than anyone else to overcome the difficulties of knowing the nation of the Ottomans? To what extent does the genre of “tableau” enable such reconciliation? Contrasting the textual instances in which d’Ohsson constructs his nativeness as a source of epistemological authority with his appeals to “Enlightened Europe,” this paper explores how educated members of religious and ethnic minorities within the Ottoman Empire were seeking to cope with the increasing institutional hostility they were experiencing. First, it contextualizes d’Ohsson’s life and work within the developments of the late eighteenth century. While the Ottoman Empire was becoming increasingly interested in the manners of the Europeans, the economic and political tensions within the Empire were creating sharp cleavages between Muslims and non-Muslims, along with revolts that were conservative. Then, the paper turns to the text of TGEO, and examines how the interaction between d’Ohsson’s authorial position and his use of narrative tropes allows him to formulate a critique of the exclusionary violence of the Empire’s recent sociopolitical transformations. Finally, the paper discusses the limitations of TGEO in offering a critique of political exclusion by studying the ways in which d’Ohsson relies heavily on tropes of progress and decline.