Engaging the Ottoman Empire: Vexed Mediations, 1690–1815. Daniel O’Quinn. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. Pp. 468.

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Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewEngaging the Ottoman Empire: Vexed Mediations, 1690–1815. Daniel O’Quinn. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. Pp. 468.Michael TalbotMichael TalbotUniversity of Greenwich Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreA number of new studies have appeared in recent years by a range of scholars on European perceptions of the Ottomans, many of which have done little except rehash old arguments or make thinly veiled digs at postcolonial studies. Daniel O’Quinn’s beautifully written and compellingly argued Engaging the Ottoman Empire stands out as an exception. In part this is because there is an intellectual honesty in O’Quinn’s work that is rare from non-Ottomanists engaging with Ottoman history. In the introduction, O’Quinn frames his contribution as “a useful counterpoint to the current within Ottoman studies,” which “may well operate like a photographic negative of the scholarship on Ottoman social, political, and cultural history” (35). In addition to presenting an original argument on perceptions of the Ottomans in various forms of literature and art, O’Quinn makes clear throughout that he builds his analysis on the foundations of the scholarship produced by Ottoman historians, a rare enough admission that it deserves mention and thanks, at least from this Ottomanist.The book takes us from the late seventeenth century until the early nineteenth, with each of the eight chapters focusing on particular literary or artistic productions and exploring them within their immediate historical context and within the broader argument. Ideas of translation and mediation shape its structure, taking some often well-studied pieces of literature and works of art and reexamining them through close readings and intertextual analyses to present them in a new light that both Ottomanists and Europeanists, historians and literary scholars, will surely find fascinating.The first part of the book, “After Peace,” explores the period between the negotiations for the Treaty of Carlowitz in 1699—the first negotiated peace settlement between the Ottomans and their European enemies—and the aftermath of the Patrona Halil rebellion of 1730, which brought to an end the reign of Ahmed III and the so-called Tulip Era of Ottoman history. The first chapter examines the writings of the British diplomats William Paget and Paul Rycaut, who were involved in mediating the peace negotiations at Carlowitz. Discussions of the choreography of negotiations and silences in the British accounts are very helpful contributions, but the observation that while the treaty formally ended the conflict it opened up a new “struggle for economic, political, and ultimately territorial precedence” (88) was a very illuminating contribution. The second chapter brings together two of the most important European observers of early eighteenth-century Ottoman elite life, the painter Jean Baptiste Vanmour and the writer Mary Wortley Montagu. By analyzing their representations and self-representations side by side, O’Quinn begins to bring in a key component of his argument, representations of women and femininity.The ways in which Montague and Vanmour engage with and present Ottoman women not only emphasizes the limits of most Europeans in gaining access to the lives of women in the Sublime State, but also shapes their understandings of its society. A great example is given here of a spectacle of self-mutilation by young men seeking to impress young women, which Vanmour’s engraving portrays as an act of pure passion, whereas Montagu sees this display as one demonstration of loyalty within a wider performative political culture of processions and ceremonies. The link between women, the erotic, and power is something that will recur throughout the study, with the European feminization of the Ottoman realms linked to increasing desires for political dominance. Chapter 3 takes on this theme in the context of the Tulip Era (1718–30), which saw an explosion of consumption and desire for luxury and pleasure, with women at the heart of anxieties in both Ottoman and European society surrounding new mercantile power. Chapter 4 explores Montagu’s agency through authority, specifically her authority on the Ottoman realms through her knowledge of Ottoman Turkish as expressed in correspondence with Alexander Pope. Yet despite showing evident knowledge of and even affinity for Ottoman society, Montagu’s departure to North Africa following a stay in the war-torn Balkans shows a change in her attitudes that O’Quinn compellingly explores. The questions of sociability and hospitality within broader political pressures raised by this first part of the book are very stimulating indeed.The second part of the book, “Beside War,” jumps forward in time to the 1760s and considers the descent into imperialism and the beginnings of the Eastern Question. If depictions of various kinds of Ottomans dominated the literature and art of part 1, then part 2 emphasizes the growing absence of the Ottoman present at the expense of an idealized classical past and its hopefully soon-to-be-realized post-Ottoman future. Chapter 5 considers the Society of Dilletanti, their expeditions to the Ionian Islands and the makings of British philhellenism, with the conflict that broke out between Russia and the Ottomans in 1768 being framed not as a war of Russian aggression, but as a means to liberate Greece. The processes of this transformation are superbly traced in chapter 6, in which O’Quinn analyzes two journeys, one by the Comte de Choiseul-Gouffier and the other by Lady Elizabeth Craven, understanding which, he contends, helps us to untangle “the knot that ties together geopolitics, aesthetics, and ethnocentric fantasies of Ottoman domination into a particularly dangerous cultural formation” (260). Women become vehicles for articulating political fantasies, with Choiseul-Gouffier using portraits of Greek women to feminize Greece as a damsel in distress. Craven increasingly sought to replace the Ottoman present with a classical past by commenting on the ugliness of Ottoman women compared to ancient maidens, quite a different attitude from Montagu just half a century earlier.Chapter 7 shows an important and fascinating nuance to the story of the development of European imperialist designs on the Ottoman Empire through a comparison of the texts of Choiseul-Gouffier and Sir Robert Ainslie, both of whom served France and Britain, respectively, as ambassadors in Istanbul, and the paintings of Luigi Mayer under Ainslie’s patronage and the engravings of Ignatius Mouradgea d’Ohsson. O’Quinn convincingly argues that Ainslie and Meyer represented a collaborative effort between Ottomans and Western Europeans, in stark contrast to Choiseul-Gouffier’s narrative of Greek subjugation and the ruin of civilization under Ottoman control. The book concludes with a chapter on the origins of Orientalist discourse through the work of Antoine-Ignace Melling and Lord Byron, again bringing in questions of gender and sexuality to help understand the growing narrative of the superiority of Western European civilization fueled by changes in the geopolitical scene.This book weaves together a number of themes that in their sum provide a challenging and thought-provoking analysis. Although I devoured Engaging the Ottomans relatively quickly, I found myself returning several times to different chapters and finding new links and nuances in the comparative readings. The emphasis on gender, sexuality, and agency and the importance of sociability—or, in the case of part 2, lack thereof—is an effective way of thinking about cultural and political transformations across the eighteenth century in both Ottoman and Western European societies. In the final chapter O’Quinn tells us that he aims to show “not only that studying non-literary genres, visual media, and sociability can expand our understanding of canonical literature, but also that understanding European engagement with the Ottoman Empire is necessary for comprehending the global dynamics of French and British imperialism” (366). This book indeed provides fresh ways of thinking about how we might employ a range of Western European sources in understanding their societies’ engagements with the Ottoman Empire, and the relationship between local cultures and global pressures.A brief postscript to the publishers: it is frustrating enough to keep having to to flick backward and forward to the endnotes when footnotes would have made so much more sense here, but the absence of a bibliography is quite unforgivable. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 117, Number 4May 2020 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/708466HistoryPublished online March 23, 2020 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.