Reading Ottoman Costume Albums in Early Modern Europe

Not until the eighteenth century did the printing press gain a serious foothold in Ottoman lands. The delayed introduction of the revolutionary technology for the printing of the Arabic script has long been a sore spot for historians of the Ottoman Empire, understood as a symptom, or even catalyst, of the empire’s decline. When viewed in the context of the frenetic global exchange uncovered by recent generations of early modernists, Ottoman indifference to print seems all the more inexplicable.

Yet the Ottomans were not alone in their resistance to ideas and goods seen as eminently desirable elsewhere. The potato, now a staple in many regional cuisines, was slow to catch on in the Old World. While coffee spread like wildfire through first Ottoman, then European lands, the fermented grain drink boza never made it much past the Balkans. Ottoman military music influenced regiments and even orchestras across Europe, but Ottoman court music rarely resonated with the same audience. Nor did the turban gain acceptance in Europe beyond the occasional portrait or masquerade ball.

Keen to document global connectedness and exchange, early modernists have not adequately accounted for instances of immobility, indifference or downright resistance. This paper, which is part of a larger collaborative project, aims to make a contribution to the study of early modern entanglement by examining the disconnected – or seemingly disconnected – history of the Ottoman printing press. How might focusing on the process of transmission help to explain the technology’s rejection? To what extent did the absence of the press depend on the presence of other institutions and practices? Balancing histories of exchange with histories of inertia gives us a fuller picture of the hierarchies and continuities that structured the early modern world.