title: Perceptions of the Islamic ottoman empire in the British enlightenment: Race, religion and cultural difference 1680-1800
Creators: name: Bird, Karen M
Publisher: name: Griffith University
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: Islamic ottoman empire
subject: race
subject: British enlightenment
subject: religion
subject: cultural difference

description: Growing levels of religious and cultural toleration have long been identified as a “hallmark” of the British and European Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. This period has since been interpreted as a turning point in the advance of greater political liberty and religious freedom across the Western world over the last three hundred and fifty years. Today, the notion of a tolerant, liberal, and free West is being undermined from within and without by a rising tide of intolerance towards the religion and followers of Islam in Western societies. This thesis returns to the era of Britain and Europe’s Enlightenment, between the late seventeenth century and the end of the eighteenth century, in order to reassess how a range of British intellectuals and travellers perceived the religion and peoples of the Ottoman Empire across this period. I provide much needed historical context for contemporary invocations of ‘Enlightenment’ in response to current geo-political tensions. By doing so, I do not claim that Europe’s era of Enlightenment offers any neat solutions to current world problems. Rather, my purpose is to illustrate the tensions inherent in Enlightenment British engagements with, understandings of, and responses to Islam and Ottoman Muslim peoples. I argue that the acquisition and circulation of knowledge of Islam and Ottoman societies during Britain’s Enlightenment defied a simple East/West binary so often invoked today. Specifically, I will consider how transnational and trans-imperial knowledge circulation during Britain’s prolonged engagement with the Ottoman Empire contributed to a softening of old intolerances. My thesis chronologically examines the literature produced by four British Enlightenment writers whose work and careers map an expanding global engagement in Enlightenment thought: the philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) whose commentary relied on second hand accounts of life in the Ottoman Empire, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762), the wife of the British Ambassador who travelled overland from Britain, to reside in the Ottoman Empire between 1716-1718, and two brothers, Alexander (1715-1768) and Patrick Russell (1727-1805), who served consecutively as doctors in Ottoman held Aleppo between 1730-1768. While Locke’s writings deserve attention for his remarkable but inconsistent use of source material, Lady Mary and the Russell brothers provide us with personal testimonies as a traveller and as residents, respectively, that offer a window into the deepening engagements between Europe and the Ottoman Empire across the era. Both Lady Mary and the Russell brothers provided interpretative comparisons which engaged with the religious, intellectual, and societal traditions they experienced in the Islamic Ottoman Empire. This thesis will contribute to existing scholarship by recording how shifting British political, economic, and material interests shaped the level of tolerance exhibited towards Islam and Muslims in the Ottoman Empire during this period. More to the point, I draw attention to the crucial contribution made to the circulation of knowledge of Islam and Ottoman society in Britain of those who travelled to and resided in the East. In the process, a complicated picture emerges of Britain’s Enlightenment abroad, on the one hand challenging old prejudices against Islam, while fuelling the natural historical delineation of physical and societal differences between human beings with consequences that have currency today.