The eight chapters of Engaging the Ottoman Empire are arranged into two chronological parts—“After War” and “Beside War”—in keeping with Daniel O'Quinn's desire to track relations between sociohistorical process, in this case warfare, and changes to formal and generic features of literary and visual representations. “After War” concerns works produced during the three decades following the Treaty of Karlowitz (1699), which, by ending Ottoman militarized imperial expansion into western Europe, shifted perceptions of the Ottoman Empire from invincible foe to subordinate polity. “Beside War” concerns competing French and British representations of the Ottomans in the decades following the Treaty of Paris (1763), during which persistent wars with Russia encouraged fantasies of the Ottoman Empire coming to an end.
Chapter 1 kicks off with detailed explorations of how the peace conference at Karlowitz was represented in western European reports by examining newsletters, diplomatic records, and diaries, alongside engraved illustrations of the conference, ending with discussion of the gifts exchanged to confirm the agreement.
Chapter 2 turns to the 1720s when, following wars with Russia (1710–11) and Venice and Austria (1715–1718), Ottoman urban society entered into a period of lavish consumerism under the grand vezir Nevşehirli Damad Ibrahim Pasha. Focused on Ottoman costume, O'Quinn examines Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's descriptive accounts alongside engravings produced from paintings by Jean-Baptiste Vanmour. Arguing that these costume portraits were not merely descriptive but invariably allegorical, O'Quinn shows Vanmour reducing Ottoman militarism and despotism to a hierarchical and gendered theatricality of state. Lady Mary, meanwhile, wrote from “inside these images,” offering readers “intimate contact not only with the body but also with Ottoman material culture and the social forces that impinge upon it” (114).
In chapter 3, O'Quinn develops the allegorical aspects of Vanmour's artistry by “looking at” his paintings of marriage processions next to diplomatic reports, and suggests how they promised the future stability of multicultural Ottoman society even as court expenditure was causing traditionally stable social formations to start unravelling. In 1730, a Janissary uprising led by the Albanian Patrona Halil deposed Sultan Ahmed III (r. 1703–1730) and executed the vezir Ibrahim Pasha before the rebel leaders themselves were summarily executed. Recording the insurrection challenged Vanmour's artistic practice: first portraying Patrona Halil heroically but in an “unsettling image of cultural and social rupture,” and later documenting his murder in a painting that “reassert[s] visually the dominance of the Ottoman regime,” thereby disposing of the rebel leader “as a kind of working-class or bourgeois hero” (159, 163). In chapter 4, O'Quinn returns to Lady Mary and contrasts her attitude to the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, arguing that she found the former as distasteful for the constitutive violence of its imperial nationalism as she admired the Ottoman state for its multicultural underpinnings. Her imperial ambivalence entailed direct engagements with the uncertainties of Virgilian epic and an implicit critique of Alexander Pope's version of Homeric heroism.
Chapter 5 leaps ahead to 1764, when the Society of Dilettanti sponsored Richard Chandler, Nicholas Revett, and William Pars to undertake Britain's “first archaeological expedition to Asia Minor” (215). O'Quinn argues that Pars's illustrations to the co-authored Ionian Antiquities (1769) and Chandler's Travels in Asia Minor (1775) resulted in Ionia’s becoming “a zone of phantasmatic compensation for the corrosive effects of early capitalist modernity” since pondering classical ruins brought culture and violence into crisis (215). Fascinated by the romance of classical ruins, these British travelers thought the Ottomans were to blame and unworthy of rule. Chapter 6 shows how the French ambassador, Auguste de Choiseul-Gouffier, set out to compete with them by producing his own lavishly illustrated travelogue that revealed his obsession with Greek antiquity and fantasies that war with Russia would bring about “regime change” (294). Choiseul-Gouffier's racist contempt for the Ottomans was matched by that of Lady Elizabeth Craven, whom he entertained during her stay in Constantinople. The two aristocrats also shared a highly refined aesthetic sense of the world that could only find expression in nostalgic admiration for classical forms and fantasies of reviving ancient “liberty” against Ottoman tyranny.
In contrast to this anti-Ottoman orientalist melancholia, chapter 7 opens by observing how Antoine-Ignace Melling aimed his Voyage pittoresque de Constantinople (1807–1824) as a critical response to Choiseul-Gouffier's Voyage pittoresque de la Grèce (1782) by way of illustrating not antique ruins but “vibrant scenes of everyday Ottoman life” that celebrated “the hybrid possibilities of the modern world” (325). Similarly, Luigi Mayer produced landscapes during the 1780s featuring scenes of local Ottoman informants collaborating with European visitors, thus emphatically insisting on the possibilities of intercultural sociability against the hostile tendencies of the French ambassador. In this enterprise, Mayer was allied with the British ambassador Robert Ainslie, who, charged with improving diplomatic and trading relations, began his embassy to Constantinople in 1776 with a direct attack on Choiseul-Gouffier and went on to become a close friend of Sultan Abdülhamid I (r. 1774–1789). The final chapter returns to Melling's work, placing his engravings of Constantinople and hybridized architectural work for Sultan Selim III (r. 1789–1807) and his sister Hadice Sultana alongside Byron's poem The Giaour (1813) to indicate ways they both challenged emerging national and racial norms linked to heterosexuality. In Melling's “distortion” of space, as in Byron's fragmentation of epic conventions, O'Quinn argues, they exemplified “the resilience of intercultural sociability” when confronted by “the strict enforcement of racial and sexual” normativities (367).
This simplified summary necessarily passes over a good deal of the subtleties and details of O'Quinn's argumentation. Engaging the Ottoman Empire is an impressive work that has ambitiously taken on the challenge of insisting that “comprehending the global dynamics of French and British imperialism” requires “understanding European engagement with the Ottoman Empire” (366). Ottoman historians will certainly agree. Early modernists working comparatively between Europe and the Ottoman world will also consider such a claim indisputable. What O'Quinn's book brings to light is the rich and largely unexplored collection of European literary and visual materials produced about the Ottomans that can no longer be ignored by scholars of the long eighteenth century.
