Ottoman Empire

Abstract

In the nineteenth century, Britain had intense political, economic, and cultural relations with the Ottoman Empire: they were political allies during the Crimean War; for several decades, British creditors ran the Ottoman economy via Ottoman Public Debt Administration; many Ottoman cultural institutions, such as the Imperial Museum, were modeled after their British counterparts. Given this interconnected history, this essay argues that the Ottoman Empire could provide a rich field of inquiry for the Victorian studies as the field tries to “undiscipline” itself.

When Jane Eyre advises Rochester to go “to the bazaars of Stamboul without delay” if he is in search of a submissive wife, and immediately begins to plot a mutiny in Rochester's future harem wherein she herself will “preach liberty to them that are enslaved,” Charlotte Brontë does little more than reinstate the well-worn tropes of an already established Orientalism: the Ottoman Empire is the exotic, gendered, sexualized land of the imaginary “Other,” ready to represent whatever desires and anxieties Europe would project onto it.¹

Nevertheless, the Ottoman Empire was not simply a discursive construct but a real entity with which Britain had intense political, economic, and cultural relations in the nineteenth century: they were political allies during the Crimean War and various Balkan independence movements. Simultaneously, all throughout the Victorian period, they competed for the control of diverse geographies from Egypt to Cyprus and Iraq.² Disraeli drew much criticism for his support of the Ottoman cause against Bulgaria;³ Florence Nightingale gained recognition through her work in Istanbul; the famous Battle of Balaclava, which inspired Tennyson's “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” began with the sound of Ottoman guns firing. Many Ottoman cultural institutions, such as the Ottoman Imperial Museum, were modeled after their British counterparts. At the same time, a large number of Ottoman treasures, from the so-called Elgin Marbles to Assyrian reliefs from Nineveh, made their way—through archaeological excavations, purchase, and looting—from the Ottoman Empire to Britain.⁴

Although most of these processes, events, and facts are well documented in the scholarship, Ottomans still do not constitute an active area of research for Victorian studies. As Edward Said and Linda Nochlin both argued, the Ottoman Empire continues to remain an imagined Other (“the Orient”), rather than an actual political, economic, and cultural entity in literary scholarship.⁵ Even when Orientalism constitutes the explicit subject matter of scholarship, its gaze is directed toward Britain and how British writers and artists represented the Orient.⁶

Meanwhile, most studies of British imperialism in the nineteenth century turn to former colonies, such as India and South Africa, to understand how the empire functioned globally. However, though never formally a colony, the Ottoman Empire was de facto run by the Ottoman Public Debt Administration (1881–1923), an organization comprising representatives from Britain, France, Italy, and other European creditors.⁷ In other words, the Ottoman Empire was as much subject to policies of British imperialism as were most of its colonies, even though it continues to remain largely invisible in Victorian studies.

The field of Victorian studies is already in a state of reckoning: a special issue of Victorian Studies calls for an “undisciplining” of Victorian studies by rethinking how the field understands issues of race, colonialism, and Orientalism as well as its privileged geographies and Eurocentrism.⁸ The 2018 “Keywords” issue of Victorian Literature and Culture  shows some of the ways in which the field can be reenergized: articles on the Caribbean, imperialism, the transimperial, and settler colonialism all urge productive ways of redrawing the borders of the field.⁹ Recent work involving Latin America and Britain's informal empire also widens the scope of what we talk about when we talk about “the Victorian.”¹⁰

This article joins in this tradition and argues for the greater integration of Ottoman sources into our understanding of Victorian Britain. We already have excellent accounts of how the British press represented the Crimean War, for instance, or how the Oriental woman is represented in British fiction and travelogues. But how did the Ottoman press represent the same war? What did the Ottomans think of their British allies? How is the British woman represented in Ottoman fiction, or how did Ottoman fiction respond to the problem of its representation in the British imaginary? Jane Eyre's account of submissive Ottoman wives would look even more dubious when read side by side with Fatma Aliye's Women of Islam (Nisvan-ı İslam; 1891–92), a book she penned specifically to correct Western women's mistaken assumptions about Ottoman women and polygamy.¹¹ Or Ömer Seyfettin's short story “Secret Sanctuary” (1919), about a Western traveler who arrives in Istanbul in search of an “Oriental experience,” and who ends up mistaking the pots laid out to collect rainwater for some mystic religious totem, could do much to ironize the popular European travelogues.¹² Scholars who situate themselves in Ottoman studies already do a great deal of productive cross-cultural work, and it is time for greater dialogue between them and scholars of the Victorian era.¹³