Session Abstract

For many women and men in the Ottoman World, the Ottoman Empire, as a form of political and economic integrity in a large geographic setting with diverse cultures, did not mean much. Most of the inhabitants of the empire lived and died in their villages, towns, and immediate regions. Only a few had a chance or were forced to travel in the large space that made up the empire. Only a few acquired information about distant areas, remote cities, and fellow subjects. Only a few had visual and imaginary tools and reasons to imagine how diverse lands, oceans, cities and peoples were connected in the imperial space.

This panel is on the few who experienced and imagined the Ottoman imperial space in the early modern periods, roughly between the sixteenth and the early nineteenth centuries. The panel invites scholars of the Ottoman world to discuss how some men and women conceptualized, visualized, and imagined the diverse regions, climates, and peoples that made up Ottoman political order and unity. Some of these individuals traveled, such as office-holders, who were appointed from one province to another; merchants who operated through their trans-regional and trans-imperial networks; Muslim pilgrims going to the holy cities in Arabia; Christian pilgrims visiting Jerusalem; students, sufis, and monks moving from one medrese, sufi lodge, and monastery to another; scribes, poets, painters who were looking for patrons in different provinces; or travelers who just traveled. Other imperial actors did not experience the imperial space directly, but still imagined it: the central elite in Istanbul, those absentee entrepreneurs who received revenue sources in remote provinces, or sufi women sending their dream books to their sheikhs in remote cities. Different movers and imaginers might have had different understandings of the imperial space and its connections with the other spaces.

This panel invites scholars to think about these individuals and ask new questions about their spatial imaginations and experiences of the Ottoman Empire as implicitly or explicitly stated in their texts and visual expressions.  What can Ottoman historians learn about the political, economic, and social history of the empire by following these movers and imaginers? How can we examine competing or complementing conceptions of spaces and trajectories of rule, business, and knowledge? How did movements of capital, ideas, and commodities shape the imaginations of stationary figures? Ottoman historians have long focused on the multiple trappings of “the state.”  Our hope is that this panel can open up possibilities for making people, ideas, and things on the move our units of analysis to see what new sense of Ottoman space might result.