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  • Engaging the Ottoman Empire: Vexed Mediations, 1690–1815 by Daniel O'Quinn
  • Julia Landweber
Daniel O'Quinn, Engaging the Ottoman Empire: Vexed Mediations, 1690–1815 (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). Pp. 552; 29 color, 10 b/w illus. $75.00 cloth.

Engaging the Ottoman Empire: Vexed Mediations, 1690–1815 spans the fields of history, literature, and art history, while also putting the varied cultural [End Page 712] experiences of Dutch, British, French (and to a lesser degree, Ottoman) perspectives in dialogue, to assess the question of what the Ottoman Empire meant conceptually to Western Europeans across the long eighteenth century. O'Quinn proposes that in the process of grappling with the question of how to represent Ottoman culture and politics, certain European powers "found themselves examining the ways and means in which they represented themselves"—which in turn helped frame their emerging senses of national identity (4). This is not a new question, but by bringing together all these fields of inquiry, O'Quinn marshals a more nuanced response than those of many who have explored this subject area before him. His particular innovation is the creative decision to approach European engagement with the Ottoman Empire through the concept of "mediation," which he deploys doubly: on one hand, he explores the role of ambassadors as diplomatic mediators; on the other, he examines the many uses of media to represent these and other intercultural communications to the public, as was transmitted via circulated letters, printed news, published books, and the visual arts (39). There is a venerable tradition of scholars following these paths separately. The records and experiences of diplomats, and the language of diplomatic communication, have been recognized as a key entry point for studying European-Ottoman relations dating back at a minimum to the nineteenth-century work of Albert Vandal. In the early twentieth century, art historian Auguste Boppe launched the study of Europeans who painted Ottoman or Turkish subjects, and Pierre Martino did the same for Eastern themes in Western literature—making Boppe and Martino pioneer interrogators of the practices and attitudes in art and literature that later came to be considered under the heading of "Orientalism."1 Recently there has been a strong resurgence of interest in the subject of European-Ottoman relations, but for the most part military/political historians and cultural-studies scholars still follow those separate paths of inquiry laid out long ago by Vandal, Boppe, and Martino. O'Quinn does us a great service by uniting all these strands within a single compelling study.

Engaging the Ottoman Empire is divided topically and chronologically into two sections of four chapters each. Part I, "After Peace," covers the period 1690–1734, an era marked at the beginning by the Ottomans' last attempt to expand their empire westward, and marked at the end by the Patrona Halil rebellion, which badly shook up the imperial Ottoman government. In keeping with O'Quinn's dual interest in diplomatic mediators and cultural mediation, Part I focuses on the long aftermath of the Treaty of Karlowitz (1699). This peace treaty concluded the War of the Holy Roman League that had pitted the Ottoman Empire against the combined forces of Habsburg Austria, Russia, Poland, and Venice; it has traditionally—if wrongly, argues O'Quinn—been understood to be the beginning of the end for the Ottoman Empire (40). Chapter 1 focuses on words and imagery generated by the process of making peace. O'Quinn produces a remarkable close reading of the choreography for mediating the peace that British ambassador Lord William Paget and Dutch ambassador Jacobus Colyer worked out with their Ottoman counterparts, minister of foreign affairs Rami Mehmed Efendi and the sultan's dragoman (translator) Alexander Mavrocordato, in a house custom-built for this purpose along the frontier between Ottoman and Habsburg lands. This structure was literally a "theater of peace," in which each side intended the other to perform deference or reverence to their opponents, while presenting themselves as the victors, in an effort to achieve a détente (51).

The rest of Part I analyzes the works of two Europeans, Franco-Flemish painter Jean-Baptiste Vanmour and English author Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who were...

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