Sea Change: Ottoman Textiles between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, by Amanda Phillips

Abstract

This book is a comprehensive, beautifully illustrated and much-needed-art historical study of Ottoman textiles. Drawing on surviving material, legal texts and other historical documents, Amanda Phillips effectively guides the reader through four hundred years of weaving, exchanging, wearing and using woven materials. Textiles were a centrally important material in the pre-modern and early modern period across the globe and tracing their history and use between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries in the expansive Ottoman empire allows Phillips not only to open an entire art-historical world to the reader, but also to give insight into the political, economic and cultural history of the Ottomans. A central argument of Phillips’s book is the importance of textiles and the need for art historians to take them seriously. Long relegated to the realm of ‘craft’, and not considered proper objects of art-historical study (as opposed to painting, sculpture and architecture), textiles have long been overlooked by art historians. What work has been done in the field of textile studies has been almost uniquely the bailiwick of museum curators and conservators working in museums with large textiles holdings. In recent years, however, textiles have been enjoying a larger art-historical profile, attested by a growing number of art history books focusing on textiles, and on museum exhibitions centred on pre-modern and early modern textiles (initiated by When Silk Was Gold at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1998 and continuing with more recent shows such as The Interwoven Globe, also at the Met, in 2015). Phillips is a leading voice in this movement, and her book is a welcome addition to the growing field.