Recasting the Political Actors of the Ottoman Empire: Global Connections at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century, 1789-1815
Panel 227, 2013 Annual Meeting
On Sunday, October 13 at 8:30 am
Panel Description
The Ottoman Empire – as a multiethnic, multiconfessional, multilingual, and multicultural empire – was linked to a multitude of regional and trans-regional networks. Until recently, however, historians have tended to examine early modern politics and culture of the Ottoman Empire and its neighbors through the lens of modern national borders. This panel seeks to explore the porosity of such boundaries, focusing on the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. By looking beyond the traditional model of imperial exchange, which we argue implies a bilateral engagement between two independent state actors, we avoid a state-centric framework that posits the contemporary configurations of space onto the map of the nineteenth century world. Rather, our work examines actors who were connected to the Ottoman central government, but who were also engaged with their own unique, local circumstances and power relations. Our papers explore the entanglement of the Ottomans with the “world around them” by locating narratives in which individuals and groups find themselves in mutually-shared experiences or networks that transcend imperial lines and traditionally envisioned hierarchies of power.
Each presenter in this panel will focus on particular agents in these networks, from Ottoman diplomat-intellectuals and Baroque artists, to North African elites and expatriate French revolutionaries. Presenter 1 takes us to Berlin and Vienna, where Ottoman diplomats forge intellectual connections in Enlightenment society. Moving on to European expatriates in the Ottoman Empire, Presenter 2 investigates the way in which Ottoman capitulations provided French communities in the empire’s trading cities with relative autonomy to spread revolutionary conflict in the Ottoman lands. Off to central Anatolia, Presenter 3 will examine Ottoman provincial elites (‘ayan) as architectural patrons with pretensions to power and seemingly implausible global connections. Finally, Presenter 4 will explore connections between political notables in three Ottoman North African cities and their relationship to the Ottoman Empire. Beyond offering an expansive geographic diversity, these papers share two common themes. First, they seek to recast traditional actors in the Ottoman Empire in new roles: diplomats as intellectuals, expatriates as revolutionaries, ayans as architectural patrons, and corsair captains as politicians. Second, the papers unite with an interest in the interconnectedness of Ottoman history and the networks linking various ideas, groups, and regions. This phenomenon is especially visible in our common time period, the turn of the nineteenth century, which reflects an era of significant Ottoman global engagement between the time of the French Revolution and the Tanzimat reforms. By sharing a common time frame and by focusing on a variety of agents drawing the Ottoman Empire into a “shared world”, we intend to emphasize the plurality and complexity of Ottoman global connections.
Disciplines
Art/Art History
History
International Relations/Affairs
Participants
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Dr. Mukaram Hhana
-- Organizer, Presenter
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Ms. Lela Gibson
-- Organizer, Presenter
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Emily Neumeier
-- Presenter
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Dr. Ali Yaycioglu
-- Chair
Presentations
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Ms. Lela Gibson
Secondary literature about the Ottoman Empire and the Enlightenment diverges in two directions: historians of the Ottoman Empire have often assumed the Ottoman Muslim elite disregarded the Enlightenment, while historians of Europe have recently turned their attention to the Enlightenment’s global connections. This paper offers a new perspective on Ottoman participation in the Enlightenment by examining the involvement of three Ottoman diplomats in central European Enlightenment society: Ahmed Azmi Efendi (Berlin, 1791-2), Ebubekir Ratib Efendi (Vienna, 1792) and Ali Aziz Efendi (Berlin, 1796-8). These diplomats served two political functions for the Ottoman state: first, to cement ties with the Prussian and Habsburg states as Ottoman alliances began to shift towards the German-speaking world in the wake of the French Revolution; second, to observe and report military and scientific institutions that would be of use for Ottoman reforms known as the Nizam-i Cedid (New Order). However, in addition to their political functions, these diplomats can also be seen as intellectuals who engaged with key debates of their time.
In their host countries, their political objectives also intertwined with Enlightenment philosophy, since the diplomats’ political and military counterparts in Berlin and Vienna were also society “men of letters” who were engaged in Enlightenment discussions relating to key themes such as reason, language, religion and human nature. Through social invitations from these figures, Ottoman diplomats participated in Enlightenment society in Berlin and Vienna in spaces where these ideas were discussed: salons, gatherings, philosophical correspondence and the theater. Drawing from the diplomats’ accounts in letters, diplomatic dispatches and travelogues (Sefaretname) in Ottoman Turkish, as well as German-language newspaper articles, letters, and memoirs of the people they met, this paper traces Ottoman diplomats’ participation in, and contribution to, Enlightenment discussions. By combining these sources with recent literature about global connections in the Enlightenment, this paper offers a new perspective on Ottoman participation in the Enlightenment.
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Emily Neumeier
The late eighteenth century of the Ottoman Empire saw the rise of provincial elites (‘ayan), a new class that was unique both in being rooted to a particular geographic location, and in the ability to amass a level of wealth, prestige and power previously impossible for those outside of the palace system. As such, these notables became major architectural patrons, building both mosque complexes and large mansions overflowing with conspicuous consumption, decorated in a style that could be described as “Ottoman Baroque.” This paper will focus on the patronage of one such provincial family, the Çapano?lus of Yozgat (now central Turkey), who transformed their political base, previously a minuscule settlement, into a town of 16,000 inhabitants within two or three decades. The title of this paper comes from a Turkish saying that typically implies a questionable situation; I re-purpose the phrase here, however, to reflect on the political and social aspirations behind the Çapano?lu family’s constructions.
Drawing on archival sources such as pious endowment records, I will specifically examine the Great Mosque (1779) and three subsequent neighborhood mosques in Yozgat (Cevahir Ali [1788], Ba?çavu? [1800-1] and Kayy?mzade [1804]) constructed by the members of the Çapano?lu family and their local court. Extensive visual comparison with other contemporary decorative programs as well as with objects found in local museums will allow us to observe how local artisans created unique styles that incorporated local building knowledge with variations on the Baroque—perhaps the first true trans-imperial or “international style” of architecture. My paper proposes possible mechanisms for this trans-imperial transmission of knowledge, whether Christian artisans trained in Europe or portable media such as engravings, textiles, or ceramics. While imperial architecture in eighteenth-century Istanbul also participates in the global Baroque style, the fact that the ‘ayan patrons, because of their non-royal status, did not have direct access to the sultan’s architects, but still aspired to participate in the latest fashions, resulted in creations by provincial artists that are far more exuberant in their improvisation than anything found in the capital. By focusing on the monumental architecture from a new class of patrons, this study aims to complicate the standard top-down model of center and periphery that is so often imposed on Ottoman architecture.
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Dr. Mukaram Hhana
My paper focuses on the socio-political connections among three Ottoman North African cities and their elites at the turn of the nineteenth century. It interrogates the socio-political networks and local alliances of governors and notables in Alexandria, Tripoli and Tunis. I argue that by tracing the overlapping and intermingled narratives of these regional leaders, we can observe the emergence of a new framework of political space and an associated regionalism at the turn-of-the-nineteenth-century in North Africa. My paper argues that the current historiography of Egypt and the Maghreb is overly reliant on the anachronistic delineations of the nation-state in understanding Early Modern North African space. Thus, while works by Egyptian historians, such Khaled Fahmy, and Tunisian scholars, such as Asma Moalla demonstrate political ties between the Egyptian or the Tunisian provinces and the Porte, their demarcations of space still adhere to modern nation-state boundaries and do not explore the horizontal political relationships between the North African eyalets, their rulers, or the sea to which they were so closely tied. Moreover, it does not account for the dependence that imperial powers, including the Ottomans, had on these individuals in negotiating the day-to-day imperial re-configurations of nineteenth century North African coast.
By adopting a framework that focuses on the political ambitions and endeavors of this handful of geo-politically mobile and influential elites, we can not only see the broader geo-political repercussions of Bonaparte’s 1798 Egyptian invasion but that we can also re-frame Mehmed Ali’s later interest in Mediterranean in a regionally integrated North African context. This paper uses Ottoman imperial and naval sources, as well as contemporary-Arabic chronicles and local histories to retrace the historical narratives of these governors and elite whose behaviors and movement regularly underscored the horizontal connections between the cities of the North African coast. My paper shows just how connected Egypt was with its Maghrebi and Mediterranean neighbors during the Age of Revolutions. By looking at North Africa as a holistic region rather than a collection of fragmented proto-national spaces, a new narrative in North African history emerges that challenges current conceptualizations of the Early Modern Maghrebi and Egyptian worlds.
