Ottoman Dress and Design in the West

Charlotte Jirousek

Description

Ottoman Dress and Design in the West is a richly illustrated exploration of the relationship between West and Near East through the visual culture of dress. Charlotte Jirousek examines the history of dress and fashion in the broader context of western relationships with the Mediterranean world from the dawn of Islam through the end of the twentieth century. The significance of dress is made apparent by the author's careful attention to its political, economic, and cultural context. The reader comes to understand that dress reflects not simply the self and one's relation to community but also that community's relation to a wider world through trade, colonization, religion, and technology. The chapters provide broad historical background on Ottoman influence and European exoticization of that influence, while the captions and illustrations provide detailed studies of illuminations, paintings, and sculptures to show how these influences were absorbed into everyday living. Through the medium of dress, Jirousek details a continually shifting Ottoman frontier that is closely tied to European and American history. In doing so, she explores and celebrates an essential source of influence that for too long has been relegated to the periphery.

Foreword: The World-Historical Importance of the Ottoman Empire / Douglas A. Howard

Preface: Perspectives

Acknowledgments / Sarah Catterall

Timeline

1. Before the Ottoman Era, East and West

2. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries: Emergence of the Ottomans

3. The Sixteenth Century: Reaching for the East

4. The Seventeenth Century: Shifting Power, Emerging Modernities

5. The Eighteenth Century: An Expanding World

6. The Nineteenth Century: Empires Bloom and Fade

Postscript: The Decline of Empire and the Rise of Globalism

Index

Sujets

• Islam
• Textile
• ART
• Global
• West
• Costume
• General
• East
• Design
• Fashion
• Middle East
• Social sciences
• General officer
• Social history
• Custom
• History of the Middle East
• Globalism
• Visual culture
• HISTORY

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 25 janvier 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253042187
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 16 Mo

Extrait

Ottoman Dress Design in the West
Ottoman Dress Design in the West
A VISUAL HISTORY OF CULTURAL EXCHANGE
Charlotte A. Jirousek
with Sara Catterall
Indiana University Press
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2019 by Sara Catterall and Zo Miller-Lee
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Manufactured in China
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Jirousek, Charlotte, author. | Catterall, Sara, author.
Title: Ottoman dress and design in the West : a visual history of cultural exchange / Charlotte A. Jirousek with Sara Catterall.
Description: Bloomington, Indiana, USA : Indiana University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018032609 (print) | LCCN 2018037305 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253042194 (e-book) | ISBN 9780253042156 | ISBN 9780253042156q (hardback : qalk. paper) | ISBN 9780253042163q (pbk. : qalk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH : Clothing and dress-Turkey-History. | Fashion-Turkey-History. | Europe-Civilization-Turkish influences.
Classification: LCC GT 1400 (ebook) | LCC GT 1400 . J 57 2019 (print) | DDC 391.009561-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018032609
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Contents
Foreword: The World-Historical Importance of the Ottoman Empire
Douglas A. Howard
Preface: Perspectives
Acknowledgments
Sara Catterall
Timeline
1 Before the Ottoman Era, East and West
2 The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries
Emergence of the Ottomans
3 The Sixteenth Century
Reaching for the East
4 The Seventeenth Century
Shifting Power, Emerging Modernities
5 The Eighteenth Century
An Expanding World
6 The Nineteenth Century
Empires Bloom and Fade
Postscript
The Decline of Empire and the Rise of Globalism
Glossary
Index
Foreword
The World-Historical Importance of the Ottoman Empire
Douglas A. Howard
Histories of Europe have often looked like selfies, with the Ottoman Empire photoshopped out of the picture. How would European history be different with the Ottomans restored to the frame? This beautiful book offers a sense of what that picture might look like, seen through the lens of the evolution of dress and clothing.
In physical geography Europe is more or less a peninsula, the northwestern region of the great Afro-Eurasian land mass, bounded by the Baltic Sea, the North Sea, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Mediterranean Sea. Before modern times a person might travel overland, by foot or cart or pack animal, benefitting from the occasional bridge or river barge, all the way from the Cape of Good Hope to Lisbon or Amsterdam or Venice in one direction and Delhi or Busan or Hangzou in the other. And when in the 1860s the Suez Canal was dug, it was Africa-not Europe-that was cut off from the rest. For hundreds of years, about one-third of this European peninsula was the Ottoman Empire.
What was the Ottoman Empire that was so prominently a part of Europe and is the focus of this book? In simplest terms, it was the part of the world governed by the Ottoman dynasty, not just in Europe but also partly in southwestern Asia and, after 1517, in northern Africa. Of several major Afro-Eurasian empires of the early modern age-the Mamluk, the Safavid, the Mughal, the Ming, the Habsburg, the Romanov-the Ottoman Empire proved to be the most durable. The dynasty s rule began around the year 1300 and lasted through the uniquely modern violence of World War I, much of which it perpetrated. It only ended in 1922, when the last sultan was dethroned by act of the national assembly of what was soon to be the Republic of Turkey.
What made the empire so successful for so long is more difficult to explain but, for ease of discussion, we might point to three interrelated factors. One factor was a stable political structure created by the sultans of the Ottoman dynasty. A second factor was a rich and variegated Ottoman culture, emanating from a worldview that valued the human encounter with God, especially as experienced in pain and loss. A third factor was a fiscal model to adequately manage and encourage prosperity. Unsurprisingly, all of these evolved with time, none remaining quite the same over the empire s six centuries of rule, and so perhaps the most remarkable feature of Ottoman history is the survival of the dynasty and its empire through centuries of sometimes dramatic change.
The Ottoman dynasty arose in the conditions of the early modern age or, as some would prefer to state, the late agrarian age. This was an age in which, while the great majority of the human global population was occupied full-time with settled agriculture, the most powerful kingdoms were built by originally seminomadic dynasties, mostly Turkic or Mongol, that recognized the great vitality of long-distance commerce both by land and by sea. With the Ottoman dynasty, as with the Safavid and the Mughal, all Turkic, sovereignty originated in bonds between a charismatic warrior hero (the sultan) and an equally charismatic saintly Sufi sheikh. Together, their worldly and otherworldly power infused Ottoman success. After the conquest of Constantinople, or Istanbul (1453), the sultan s public persona shifted, becoming more regal and remote. With S leyman the Magnificent (1520-66) and his successors, the sultans and family members increasingly sought seclusion in the garden palace of Topkap . The sultan s extended household governed the empire as his servants and thought of the subjects as the sultan s flock, which depended on their protection to flourish. The flock included those who were not Muslim-Jews and Christians had always made up at least half of the entire population of the empire, and there was no expectation that they should adopt Islam. Indeed the Christian church hierarchy particularly was dependent on, and in some ways even replicated, the imperial aura among its own communities.
The Ottoman sultans two main international rivals, the shahs of the Safavid dynasty of Iran (founded 1501) and the emperors of the Mughal dynasty of India (founded 1526), collapsed almost simultaneously in the early 1700s and with them the traditional linkage of political-spiritual charismatic monarchy. The Ottoman Empire withstood these upheavals. Not that the sultans were any less respected than before, but internal and external developments brought a growing emphasis on the empire as a territorial realm. The sultan, seen more and more as the defender of the religion of Islam and of Muslims, developed a new image as an unassailable autocrat leading the empire into modernity. Again the Ottomans were not alone in this, as their new rivals-Europeans now, the Russian Romanovs and the Austrian Habsburgs-exerted a similar royal persona. The territory of the Ottoman realm shrank steadily in size throughout this time. As a result of the separation of Christian populations into independent kingdoms and the arrival of Muslims who fled or were expelled and forced to migrate from these same newly minted Christian kingdoms, the population of the Ottoman Empire shifted in balance, so that by the time of the first true census (1880s) the empire s population was nearly three-fourths Muslims.
At the core of the empire s culture was the mystical experience of God, seen paradoxically in the universal human experience of irretrievable loss. The direct experience of God was something talked about, something longed for and actively sought; it was respected and institutionalized in Sufi dervish orders, and it drove cultural production in architecture, calligraphy, music, and literature, especially epic and lyric poetry. Sufi lodges were important academies of higher learning in the sciences and humanities, and the masters of the main Sufi orders were significant public figures. However, Sufi orders were neither the sole interpretation of Islam within the empire s population nor the only institutionalized avenues through which an education could be obtained or popular spirituality expressed. Mystical Islam had parallels both in Ottoman Christianity, especially in the Orthodox Hesychast movement, and in Kabbalistic Judaism. Repeated challenges to the authority of the Ottoman dynasty arose from within Sufi movements. One of these, the Kizilba movement, was particularly compromising because of its affiliation with the Safavid shahs of Iran. A growing reactionary movement clamored to define an acceptable fusion of Ottoman loyalty and Sunni Islam, giving the opening to popular preachers of a more narrow and moralizing orthodoxy. After 1800, Ottoman religious culture degenerated into Sunni chauvinism that drove violence first in a purge of Bektashis and Kizilba (or Alevis, 1826) and then increasingly in pogroms against Greek and Armenian Christians (especially in the 1890s).
The political and cultural evolution described above implied a similar evolution in the empire s fiscal model, since any such model arises from definitions of prosperity. Ottoman fiscal flexibility and resiliency are a major factor in accounting for the empire s lengthy survival. Besides plunder won in successful wars, early efforts were made to organize direct government collection of taxes on agriculture and trade. Early modern limitations of communication and transportation meant that the