Territoriality, Governmentality, and the Production of Geographic Knowledge in and about the Ottoman Empire, c. 1700–1900

The Renaissance geographers included the Ottomans lands in their depictions of the world as part of Europe.  Despite the stifling difficulties of charting lands beyond the shores of the Mediterranean and the well-travelled land routes, the domains of the “Grand Turc” were not entirely terra incognita for them.  Neither were the Ottomans uninterested in charting territories beyond their own, including the Mediterranean, the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans.  More importantly, there seems to have been significant contact and sharing of information between Ottoman geographers and their European counterparts in the sixteenth to early seventeenth centuries.  In contrast, the post-Enlightenment period emerges as a watershed with regard to the commonalities in geographic methods, as well as awareness of territoriality between the Ottoman and the western European worlds. 

This paper will explore the reasons for this divergence.  It will focus on the Ottomans’ occupation with cartography as a tool of military technology rather than a tool of governmentality, and the post-Enlightenment development of geography into a discipline with a distinct focus on the physical world, following the Cartesian split between mind and matter.  The empirical material presented will follow this divergence into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Ottoman efforts to close the gap ended in failure.