Veiled Truths: Early Modern European Travel Accounts of Ottoman and Safavid Women

2021 ◽  
pp. 187-201
Author(s):  
Lindsay Weiler-Leon
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Travel Accounts

scholarly journals The Dido Story in Accounts of Early Modern European Imperialism—An Anthology

Itinerario ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-150
Author(s):  
Andrew Newman
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Sri Lanka ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Cape Of Good Hope ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
Travel Accounts

This anthology of excerpts from histories and travel accounts composed during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries features representations of indigenous oral traditions about the founding of European colonies in Sri Lanka, Melaka, Gujarat, Cambodia, Manila, Jakarta, Taiwan, New York, and the Cape of Good Hope. According to these accounts, the colonists first requested as much land as the hide of an ox could cover, and then cut that hide into strips and claimed all the land they could encircle. The “oxhide measure” is a widely-attested folkloric motif. The introduction, however, questions assumptions about the unreliability of oral traditions and looks to history instead of folklore for an explanation for the colonial parallels. It proposes that Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch colonists performed the “hide trick” in emulation of the classical story of the Phoenician Queen Dido’s founding of Carthage.

The “Criminal Tribe” in India before the British

2015 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 323-354 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anastasia Piliavsky
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Categories ◽  
Legal Texts ◽  
History Of ◽  
Imperial Politics ◽  
History Of Violence ◽  
Broad Consensus ◽  
Selection Of ◽  
Travel Accounts

AbstractThis paper challenges the broad consensus in current historiography that holds the Indian stereotype of criminal tribe to be a myth of colonial making. Drawing on a selection of precolonial descriptions of robber castes—ancient legal texts and folktales; Jain, Buddhist and Brahmanic narratives; Mughal sources; and Early Modern European travel accounts—I show that the idea of castes of congenital robbers was not a British import, but instead a label of much older vintage on the subcontinent. Enjoying pride of place in the postcolonial critics' pageant of “colonial stereotypes,” the case of criminal tribes is representative and it bears on broader questions about colonial knowledge and its relation to power. The study contributes to the literature that challenges the still widespread tendency to view colonial social categories, and indeed the bulk of colonial knowledge, as the imaginative residue of imperial politics. I argue that while colonialusesof the idea of a criminal tribe comprises a lurid history of violence against communities branded as born criminals in British law, the stereotype itself has indigenous roots. The case is representative and it bears on larger problems of method and analysis in “post-Orientalist” historiography.

scholarly journals English travelers in early modern Cyprus: Piety, commerce and anti-Ottoman sentiment

Sederi ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 93-115
Author(s):  
José Ruiz Mas
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Eastern Mediterranean ◽  
Holy Land ◽  
Subsequent Risk ◽  
Travel Accounts

English travelers in Lusignan and Venetian Cyprus saw the island as the last obligatory stop on their maritime pilgrimage route to the Holy Land. After the Ottoman conquest of Cyprus (1571) the island was visited almost exclusively by English merchants on the lookout for the construction of factories on Eastern Mediterranean shores. They were attracted by Cyprus’s famed fertility and by the abundance of much-valued products to trade with. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries English traders were nevertheless issued with warnings by English travel accounts. These dealt with the danger of over-trusting the paradise-like prospects of the island and remaining there for good, with the subsequent risk of “turning Turk.” In order to discourage English travelers and residents from becoming renegades in Cyprus, travel accounts included abundant morbid information on the brutal repression applied by the Great Turk upon Cypriot cities in the Wars of Cyprus and upon other anti-Ottoman Christian insurrections.

scholarly journals Oriental Despotism and European Orientalism: Botero to Montesquieu

2005 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-180 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joan-Pau Rubiés
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Technological Progress ◽  
Royal Power ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Differences Of Opinion ◽  
India And China ◽  
The Way ◽  
Travel Accounts

AbstractThe issue of how European images of the East were formed, used, and contested is far from simple. The concept of oriental despotism allowed early-modern Europeans to distinguish themselves from the most powerful and impressive non-European civilizations of the Ottoman Middle East, Persia, India, and China on grounds which were neither fundamentally religious nor linked to sheer scientific and technological progress, but political and moral. However, it would be incorrect to treat this as a pure European fantasy based on the uncritical application of a category inherited from Aristotle, because both the concept and its range of application were often hotly contested. By assessing the way travel accounts helped transform the concept from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, this article argues that oriental despotism was not a mental scheme that blinded Europeans to the perception of the true Orient, but rather a compelling tool for interpreting information gathered about the Orient, one which served a common intellectual purpose despite important differences of opinion in Europe about the nature of royal power.

The Persian Mirror

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Mokhberi
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Fairy Tales ◽  
French Intellectuals ◽  
Travel Accounts

The Persian Mirror explores France’s preoccupation with Persia in the seventeenth century. Long before Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, French intellectuals, diplomats, and even ordinary Parisians were fascinated by Persia and eagerly consumed travel accounts, fairy tales, and the spectacle of the Persian ambassador’s visit to Paris and Versailles in 1715. Using diplomatic sources, fiction, and printed and painted images, The Persian Mirror describes how the French came to see themselves in Safavid Persia. In doing so, it revises our notions of Orientalism and the exotic and suggests that early modern Europeans had more nuanced responses to Asia than previously imagined.

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