Cosmopolitan Mobilities: Khalil Bey and His Collection between East and West

This thesis explores Khalil Bey’s life as a site where modernity and cosmopolitanism were practiced through mobility, analysing political, aesthetic, and spatial dimensions of his cosmopolitanism. The study describes Khalil Bey’s self-fashioning as part of a process of imagining and performing a cosmopolitan Ottoman modernity whilst negotiating the frictions that accompany his mobilities. By situating Khalil Bey and his collecting practices in the complex and entangled relations between East and West, and centre and periphery, this thesis de-exoticises and problematises Orientalism and, in doing so, illuminates cultural encounters that have remained largely unexamined. The thesis approaches Khalil Bey’s cosmopolitan mobilities through the mobility studies framework, which understands movement as a site where identity, power, and representation intersect. Bringing this perspective into conversation with postcolonial and decolonial theory allows for a nuanced examination of the dichotomies that shaped Khalil Bey’s reception, including the tension between the Other and the self, the original and the copy, and the authentic and the imitation. This analytical lens reveals how the politics of mobility and friction intersected with the regimes of representation, visuality, and modernity that structured Khalil Bey’s strategies of self-fashioning. In its final dimension, the study employs digital mapping techniques as interpretive tools, rendering visible the spatial patterns and relational geographies produced through his movements and tracing the ways in which mobility constituted not only the backdrop but the very medium of his cosmopolitan identity.