Between Geographic and Conceptual Fields: Mapping Microhistories in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Empire

Abstract

In Engaging the Ottoman Empire: Vexed Mediations, 1690–1815, Daniel O’Quinn uses microhistorical methods to construct a constellatory, rather than a cumulative, history of intercultural communication and representation between Ottomans and Europeans. By reducing the scale of his analysis to a singular event, individual, object, or place, he identifies unexpected moments of dissonance, instances of something that does not quite fit. Carlo Ginzburg and Giovanni Levi, both early practitioners of microhistory, called such observations “clues” and used them to complicate grand historical narratives, such as the emergence of modernity. This study proposes that O’Quinn methodologically innovates the use of microhistory by mapping his observations about Ottoman-European intercultural communication in a constellatory field in which each “clue” operates as a dynamic discursive node with many spatial and temporal connections. Throughout his book, he guides readers through this unwieldy spatiotemporal field, from one microhistorical node to the next, and thus models a new approach to tracing the historical and imagined itineraries that linked Europeans and Ottomans across the long eighteenth century.

When examining the many visual and textual accounts produced at the time of the 1699 Treaty of Karlowitz, Daniel O'Quinn poses a central question using a theatrical metaphor: why is the stage—the simple four-room building constructed "in the middle of nowhere" to house the treaty negotiations—accorded far more attention in these sources than the actors?¹ This question is a characteristic example of how O'Quinn's close examination of a nexus of related images and texts frequently uncovers surprising repetitions, absences, and contradictions at his subject's very center. These are, of course, the "vexed mediations" named in his subtitle that he weaves together to construct a constellatory, rather than a cumulative, history of intercultural communication and representation between Ottomans and Europeans. Such unexpected discoveries of dissonance, instances of something that does not quite fit, exemplify what Carlo Ginzburg and Giovanni Levi, both earlier practitioners of microhistory, might call "clues."² The recognition of these clues—in this case, O'Quinn's microscopic observations—is made possible by focusing, singularly, on a particular event, individual, object, or place. This reduction of scale is central to microhistory's methodology.³ O'Quinn uses microhistorical approaches to identify significant encounters between early modern Ottomans and Europeans unaccounted for in previous scholarship; however, he innovates with the method by moving beyond a single restricted spatial or temporal scope. Instead, he positions his observations in a vast, interconnected constellatory field, wherein each "clue" operates as a dynamic discursive node, a site with myriad connections to both historical and invented past, present, and future versions of itself. O'Quinn thus guides readers from one microhistorical node to the next—up, down, and around—through the historical and imagined itineraries that linked Europeans and Ottomans in an eighteenth-century imperial field that was, simultaneously, both physical and discursive, both geographical and conceptual.

The origins of microhistory are often traced to a group of Italian historians working in the 1970s who became interested in the possibility that a variation in the scale of one's analysis might lead to radically new interpretations of commonly accepted grand narratives.⁴ Indeed, narrative itself became a tool favored in later microhistories by European and American scholars. Robert Darnton, Natalie Zemon Davis, and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie turned to microhistory as a way to enliven, rather than merely reconstruct, what cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz would term "local knowledge," or the experience of reality that originated in people's daily lives.⁵ Francesca Trivellato has highlighted how the heterogeneity of findings obtained in such microscopic spheres cannot be automatically transferred to the macroscopic space. This impasse, she argues, is both the greatest difficulty and greatest potential benefit of microhistory.⁶ Since its inception, microhistory has contested and complicated "big picture" narratives, such as the emergence of modernity or the operation of empire. Tonio Andrade has similarly argued that, following the turn to globalism in much of the scholarship of the current century, "global microhistory" has provided a necessary counterpart to the proliferation of social science studies focused on modeling large-scale processes, such as trade and migration.⁷ Microhistory's biographical, narrative-based approach has continued to highlight instances in which such models break down when considered at the more granular level of individuals, events, or single sites.

O'Quinn's use of microhistorical methods to reduce the scale of analysis and thereby identify "clues," or changes at the level of form or genre in a body of images or texts, is foundational to his examination of intercultural communication because it highlights when and where representational transformations were occurring. A notable example is his investigation of the visual and textual accounts of the site Paul Rycaut termed "the void place" near Karlowitz that was used for treaty discussions in 1699 (50). Two of the formal changes O'Quinn pinpoints as significant "clues" are, first, the large number of depictions focused on the newly constructed conference house in which the negotiations took place and, second, the unprecedented combination of categorically distinct representational forms in these accounts. O'Quinn argues that the Viennese diagram from the Bericht (see Figure 1), for example, combines elements of topography and narrative composition as a way to map the negotiation, both geographically and politically, for its European audience. This hybridization of genres is thus a direct result of the need to communicate intercultural information. Indeed, this example evinces a central claim of O'Quinn's book: that microhistorical encounters, and the vexed mediations they provoked, initiated formal, aesthetic transformations in the visual and textual accounts that circulated information regarding the eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire.

Yet microhistory is but one of several equally significant analytical modes that O'Quinn employs in this project. Formal and generic disturbances are not only considered in relation to the specific place and time of their production, but also as dynamic nodes with many connections outward that both affect and are affected by social and cultural tensions in the broader imperial field. To return to the Viennese diagram as an example, O'Quinn posits that the central position of the conference house in this work—and the concurrent erasure of the Ottoman tent that had been used for negotiations while the new conference house was being constructed—functioned to formally

Figure 1.

Map of camp, in Gründ-und Umständlicher Bericht Von Demen Römisch-Kayserlichen Wie auch Ottomannischen Gross-Bothschafften, engraving, 1702. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2834–604). This appears as figure 8 in O'Quinn, Engaging the Ottoman Empire.

displace the Ottomans both from pictorial space and from historical time, thus asserting Habsburg dominance, present and future (59). Considering aesthetic transformation alongside the spatial and temporal itineraries that these images and texts variously depict, reference, and narrate reveals, he explains, "a complex relation to Europe's past that haunts many of my primary observers' present experiences in Ottoman lands" (4). These routes, both real and imagined, are impossible to assess with established microhistorical methods bounded by space and time. Instead, they require a different approach attuned to movement and networks, both geographical and discursive.

It is this positioning of multiple microhistorical studies in a dynamic, constellatory field that makes O'Quinn's approach so innovative. It requires a constant oscillation in both analytical scale (between the singular node and the broader network) and methodological mode, as he switches from microhistorical methods to cultural analysis to assess what he terms "the long view," or the broader imperial field (4). A final example will help further demonstrate how O'Quinn's method of locating multiple microhistorical studies in a constellatory field has particular resonance for cross-cultural studies of travel literature, maps, and other representations of movement through space and time. He points out that Ionian Antiquities, an influential account of the travels of Richard Chandler, Nicholas Revett, and William Pars to four ancient sites in the Ottoman Empire, lacks a map. An introductory map had been an essential component of antiquarian travel literature, as it helped European readers locate the narrative (and, by extension, themselves) in relation to sites with biblical, classical, or political significance. Moreover, beyond a single depiction of local residents near the Temple of Bacchus at Teos (see Figure 2), there is no visual or textual evidence in Ionian Antiquities of the encompassing Ottoman context in which those sites were encountered. O'Quinn posits that the absence of a map, this moment of microhistorical dissonance, transforms the entire experience of the book: readers are now forced to consider the sites in isolation. And this new mode of reading and viewing, in turn, transforms territory currently in use by the Ottomans into abstracted classical artifacts, detached from the surrounding physical landscape and the people inhabiting it.

The artifact-ization of Ottoman land in Ionian Antiquities is one case, then, that can (and should) be mapped, geographically and conceptually, alongside the many contemporaneous instances in which sculptures, architectural fragments, and other antiquities were similarly made into artifacts through their integration into European antiquarian frameworks and collections. By attending carefully both to very small units of analysis (a person, an event, a place) and the operation of a vast, unwieldy spatiotemporal field,

Figure 2.

Richard Chandler, Ionian Antiquities (1769), 1. The headpiece is an engraving after a watercolor by William Pars. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (84-B780). The headpiece appears as figure 45 in O'Quinn, Engaging the Ottoman Empire.

O'Quinn demonstrates an exciting new way to consider multiple historical scales in a single project. Future eighteenth-century studies of intercultural communication and representation between Europe and the Ottoman Empire will undoubtedly benefit from O'Quinn's identification, analysis, and elevation of the many microhistorical vexed mediations that come with—and have certainly shaped—the field.