Introduction: Charting New Ground in the Study of Ottoman Foreign Relations

Abstract

This essay proposes a revisionist historiography of Late Ottoman foreign relations and (para)diplomacy and examines previously overlooked forms, venues, geographies, and levels of Ottoman engagements with the international. The article first draws out a historical sketch of Ottoman diplomatic practices and demonstrates how the empire participated in, and influenced the ways in which the (Western, colonial) 'diplomatic system' developed throughout the long nineteenth century. It then offers a critical reading of the rich, but uneven historiography of Ottoman foreign affairs, long caught up in 'modernisationist' and 'westernisation' paradigms. We elucidate the relation of this body of scholarship to some of its precursors in older, pre-1923 strands of literature that centred on the pervasive trope of the 'Eastern question' and mystified Ottoman agency. We overturn the main teleological and Eurocentric axioms of this literature by giving voice to some of its contemporary Ottoman critics. Turning to comparative history and postcolonial critiques of IR, we juxtapose the Ottoman Empire with other often ignored 'peripheral' polities in Latin America to suggest new pathways for writing more inclusive kinds of international history that do not conform to conventional hierarchizations of the world between a European centre and its supposed global peripheries.