Meddling with Medals, Defending the Dead: Late Ottoman Soft Power from South Asia to North America

Abstract

Before the Ottoman and British empires clashed on the battlefields of World War I, imperial rivalries between Istanbul and London often took more subtle forms. In the diplomatic realm, late Ottoman-British tussles were not limited to disputes over Ottoman territories and populations, but extended to Ottoman interventions in British domains as well. Utilizing archival and museum collections from Istanbul, New Delhi, New England, and Ottawa, this article contributes to a growing literature on late Ottoman extraterritoriality by probing Istanbul’s diplomatic and consular activities within two very different and distant British territories: India and Canada. First, the study examines discord between Istanbul and London over a seemingly innocuous yet increasingly sensitive issue: the Ottoman sultan-caliph’s conferral of honorary medals upon Indian Muslim notables. Second, the article pivots to the western hemisphere to explore Ottoman consular interventions surrounding the estates of Ottoman subjects who died in Canada. By considering examples of Ottoman ‘soft power’ in two far-flung regions of the world, the study contests one-dimensional narratives of extraterritoriality that fixate on European interventions in the Ottoman domains, or frame the Ottomans as passive spectators resigned to Western superiority in the Middle East, eastern Mediterranean, or other conventional geographies associated with Ottoman history.