The Ottomans at the Fair: Shifting Politics of Representation

In the heyday of European industrialism and colonialism, the imperial powers organized grand exhibitions in which they not only flaunted their colonial loot in the form of objects and people displayed but also disseminated a stagist theory of progress to convince both their own citizens and their subjugated others of the legitimacy of their colonial rule. These exhibitions were designed to place Western visitors in a position of difference and achieved humanity while situating the rest at the bottom of the evolutionary scale. Much ink has been spilled over this founding principle as many scholars attempt to bring these historical events to light and produce a post-colonial critique of them. However, what is scant in this growing literature is the discussion of the ambiguous presence of non-Western empires like Imperial Japan and the Ottoman Empire as the exhibitor and the exhibited. This thesis intends to expose how the Ottoman state and society negotiated the construction of their image by using untapped, non-Western sources. The first half of this thesis focuses on the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 where the Ottoman state and private entrepreneurs displayed hundreds of people and objects from the different parts of the empire. It particularly focuses on the Bedouin encampment whose inhabitants were exhibited as a showcase of nomad savagery. The second half relies on a short article published in Servet-i Fünûn (Wealth of Sciences) in which the reporter humorously describes his encounter with a Muslim Sudanese man in the ethnographic exhibition of West Africa at Champ de Mars in 1895. This document is particularly interesting as it allows us to hear the exhibited talk. Based on these niche sources, this paper intends to complicate the presence of the Ottoman Empire in the exhibition mania of the 19th century.