Constructing the Oriental Empire: Western Orientalism and the Fabrication of Ottoman Otherness

Abstract

The Ottoman Empire occupies a distinctive position in the history of Western Orientalism. Unlike many societies represented as “Oriental,” the Ottoman Empire was not merely an object of European curiosity or colonial observation; for centuries it was a powerful sovereign empire that directly confronted, negotiated with, traded with, and influenced European states. Nevertheless, European intellectual, political, literary, and artistic representations repeatedly constructed the Ottoman world as fundamentally different from—and ultimately inferior to—Europe. This article examines how that representation developed from medieval Christian polemic to early modern diplomatic writing, Enlightenment political theory, nineteenth-century discourses of decline, and Orientalist artistic representations of the harem and Muslim sexuality. It argues that Ottoman otherness was produced through three interconnected registers: the political, in which Ottoman government was represented as despotic and arbitrary; the civilizational, in which the empire was increasingly described through the categories of backwardness, stagnation, and decline; and the aesthetic and bodily, in which the Ottoman world was associated with sensuality, excess, gendered domination, and the imagined harem.

The article introduces the concept of “terminal epistemology” to describe the cumulative structure through which these representations increasingly made Ottoman decline appear natural, inevitable, and historically predetermined. The concept does not suggest that European observers consciously agreed on the destruction of the Ottoman Empire, nor does it deny the empire's genuine political, military, and economic crises. Rather, it identifies an interpretive framework through which diverse historical developments could be incorporated into an already established narrative of decline. Drawing on Edward Said's theory of Orientalism, Ottoman historiography, European intellectual history, travel literature, diplomatic accounts, and postcolonial theories of representation, the article also examines Ottoman responses to Western representations. It argues that Ottoman actors were not passive recipients of Orientalist knowledge but actively engaged with, resisted, appropriated, and sometimes reproduced classificatory practices associated with European modernity. The Ottoman case therefore demonstrates that Orientalism was not a simple opposition between a powerful West and a silent East; it was a historically changing field of knowledge, representation, negotiation, and power.