John-Paul Ghobrial, The Whispers of Cities: Information Flows in Istanbul, London and Paris in the Age of William Trumbull, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, 208 pp., ISBN 978-0-19-967241-7

Abstract

There are a significant number of books written about how early modern Europe perceived the Ottoman Empire, i.e., what decision-makers, scientists, artists, authors and the common people knew about this exotic land whose “otherness” played a great role in the shaping of Europe itself. John-Paul Ghobrial takes a more innovative approach to the issue of encounters between the “East” and the “West” when he shifts his focus from what people living in Europe knew about Ottoman Empire to how they actually knew what they knew. This required him to concentrate on “information flows” between Istanbul, Paris, and London, with a focus not on flows themselves, but on the people who made these flows happen. Given that there was no printing press in seventeenth-century Istanbul, he is thus faced with the hard task of tracing the myriad forms of oral communication that took place every day between an exclusive group of individuals whose personal interactions were the starting point for a long “process that carried information originating in Istanbul to audiences in London and Paris through the circulation of oral, scribal and printed media” (p. 6).