This is the second part of a two-part blog series- the first part, ‘Colonising the West, or: How the English Built an Empire- Part One’ can be found here

Not all English travellers were drawn to the novelties of the Atlantic world although its commercial opportunities seemed to call for further colonial penetration. Another, albeit very different, arena of English travel lay in the East, where the Ottomans, Safavids and Mughals had founded three powerful Muslim empires between 1453 and 1526.[1] ‘By the early seventeenth century,’ as Stephen F. Dale explains, these empires ‘controlled territories that encompassed much of the Muslim world, stretching from the Balkans and North Africa to the Bay of Bengal and including a combined population of between 130 and 160 million people.’[2] Frequently overwhelmed by the military power, splendour and vastness of the three early modern Muslim empires, European travellers had to be civil and recognise their guides, interlocutors and hosts as members of highly advanced, if not superior, cultures with both a global reach and a long history that stretched back at least to the dissolution of the ‘Abbasid Caliphate in 1258. Yet cross-cultural civility and cosmopolitanism practiced in the Orient were not ends in themselves but crucial coping mechanisms that, as Alison Games has explored in The Web of Empire (2008), ‘facilitated survival and success overseas, and thus emerged in part as a series of learned behaviours.’[3] Accordingly, whereas the English slowly but surely established themselves as emerging colonial power in the Western hemisphere, they could not but admire, and even envy, the realms occupied by the Ottoman Turks, the Safavid Persians and the South Asian Mughals in the East.

In the context of exploration and empire, however, envy is particularly complex and ambivalent. By 1634, when Henry Blount (1602 – 82) set out to survey the Ottoman realms, a growing corpus of texts had already been written about those whom the English simply called ‘Turks’. Often based on hearsay and religious prejudice, this term could denote a wide spectrum of ideas and associations, ranging from a practicing Muslim to ‘the Great Turke’ – in other words, the Ottoman Sultan – himself. Blount’s Voyage into the Levant (1634), however, set aside bequeathed wisdom and religious propaganda by applying a comparative framework and seeking ‘knowledge,’ which ‘advances best, in observing of people, whose institutions much differ from ours.’[4] He wants to see for himself whether ‘the Turkish way appeare absolutely barbarous, as we are given to understand, or rather an other kinde of civilitie, different from ours’ (2). Organised along strictly logical lines, Blount’s Voyage did a great deal to systematise travel writing, even attracting the poetic praise of Henry King, Bishop of Chichester, who wrote that Blount’s ‘piercing judgement does relate/The policy and manage of each state.’[5] But try as he might, Blount often loses his critical distance and his account tips over into what Gerald MacLean has called ‘imperial envy’, a complex structure of feeling indicating the lack of, and desire for, an imperial identity.[6] In other words, whilst Blount describes Ottoman institutions – ‘Armes, Religion, Iustice, and Morall Cuftomes’ (61) – in a sober fashion and considerable detail, he also admires the Ottomans and envies them their empire, ‘I was of opinion, that he who would behold these times in their greatest glory, could not finde a better Scene then Turky’ (2).

It seems that the Ottomans, whom Blount sees as ‘the only moderne people great in action’ (2), left a strong impression on him. After all, the Ottomans fascinated many Europeans at the same time as they threatened them with their military capabilities. And unlike today, the frontiers of the Muslim world cut right across the continent’s centre. Accordingly, a complex amalgam of fear and fascination governed European interaction with the Ottomans in particular and the Muslim world more generally. But by virtue of these encounters, as well as the cultural and commodity exchanges they inaugurated, the English and, after the Acts of Union in 1707, British were able to re-fashion themselves from a peripheral island nation into a global empire. And just as the Ottomans, they often concentrated on promoting trade and commerce whilst simultaneously exploiting local elites for their imperial ends. Without learning from the Ottomans, then, the history of the British Empire would be a much smaller chapter in the book of world history.

Image: Map of Istanbul, 1660 by Jan Jansson, available at Wikimedia

[1] Stephen F. Dale, The Muslim Empires of the Ottomans, Safavids and Mughals (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 1.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Alison Games, The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560 -1660 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 10.

[4] Blount, Henry, A Voyage into the Levant (London: John Legatt, 1636), 1. (All further references are to this edition).

[5] Henry King, ‘To my Noble and Judicious Friend Sir Henry Blount upon his Voyage,’ in George Saintsbury, ed., Minor Poets of the Caroline Period. 3 vols. (1905; repr. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), Vol III., 223 – 226, here 225 (line 98).

[6] Gerald MacLean, ‘Ottomanism Before Orientalism? Bishop Henry King praises Henry Blount, Passenger in the Levant,’ in Ivo Kamps & Jyotsna G. Singh, eds., Travel Knowledge: European Discoveries in the Early Modern Period (New York: Macmillan, 2001), 85-96, here 86.