Henrietta Liston's Travels

The book is the first print publication of Henrietta Liston’s Turkish Journals, a significant yet virtually unknown work of women’s travel writing. It is composed of the full text of the 1812-1814 journal and some further writings, such a significant 1813 letter from Liston to her nephew, Dick Ramage and extracts from other journals, and these are preceded by an extensive critical introduction. The journals reveal that as the wife of the British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Liston had privileged access to the Ottoman elite and to the diplomatic corps. They reflect on British-Ottoman relations, combining Orientalist perspectives with a human-centred version of the picturesque. Liston offers astute commentaries on people, places, and events – including a plague-ridden Constantinople, the harem of the Grand Vizier’s deputy, the presentation of ambassadors in the Seraglio and the departure of pilgrims on the hajj. The introduction includes sections on Liston’s life and the diplomatic context of her writings, and the Ottoman social and political context of the period. Liston’s writings are considered in relation to the discourses of travel writing, to British-Ottoman relations, to Orientalism and the picturesque, and to other eighteenth-and nineteenth-century women travellers and their works on the Ottoman Empire. There is also discussion of the manuscripts on which the book is based, and of issues such as their composition, revision, and transcription.

Feminismo/s ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 49
Author(s):  
Swati Moitra

Kailashbashini Debi’s Janaika Grihabadhu’r Diary (The Diary of a Certain Housewife; written between 1847 and 1873, serialised almost a century later in the monthly Basumati in 1952) chronicles her travels along the waterways of eastern Bengal. Her travels are firmly centred around her husband’s work; in his absence, she is Robinson Crusoe, marooned in the hinterlands of Bengal with only her daughter.Bearing in mind the gendered limitations on travel in the nineteenth century for upper-caste Bengali women, this essay investigates Kailashbashini Debi’s narration of her travels and the utopic vision of the modern housewife that Kailashbashini constructs for herself. The essay looks into the audacious nature of Kailashbashini’s effort: to claim a space in public memory alongside her husband. In the process, the essay seeks to address the restructuring of domestic life made possible by the experience of travel, and explore the contours of women’s travel writing in nineteenth-century India


Feminismo/s ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 49
Author(s):  
Swati Moitra

Kailashbashini Debi’s Janaika Grihabadhu’r Diary (The Diary of a Certain Housewife; written between 1847 and 1873, serialised almost a century later in the monthly Basumati in 1952) chronicles her travels along the waterways of eastern Bengal. Her travels are firmly centred around her husband’s work; in his absence, she is Robinson Crusoe, marooned in the hinterlands of Bengal with only her daughter.Bearing in mind the gendered limitations on travel in the nineteenth century for upper-caste Bengali women, this essay investigates Kailashbashini Debi’s narration of her travels and the utopic vision of the modern housewife that Kailashbashini constructs for herself. The essay looks into the audacious nature of Kailashbashini’s effort: to claim a space in public memory alongside her husband. In the process, the essay seeks to address the restructuring of domestic life made possible by the experience of travel, and explore the contours of women’s travel writing in nineteenth-century India


Journeys ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-153

Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories of a City Fiona SmythGerald MacLean (ed.), Re-Orienting the Renaissance. Cultural Exchanges with the East Clifford Edmund Bosworth, An Intrepid Scot. William Lithgow of Lanark’s Travels in the Ottoman Lands, North Africa and Central Europe, 1609–21 Alex Drace-FrancisDaniel Carey (ed.), Asian Travel in the Renaissance John E. Wills, Jr.Gerald M. MacLean, The Rise of Oriental Travel: English Visitors to the Ottoman Empire, 1580–1720 Felipe Fernández-ArmestoDebbie Lisle, The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing Benjamin J. MullerBassam Tayara, Le Japon et les Arabes. La vision du Monde Arabe au Japon, des époques anciennes jusqu’au tournant de Meiji Elisabeth AllèsAlain Roussillon, Identité et Modernité – Les voyageurs égyptiens au Japon Bassam TayaraBenoit de L’Estoile, Federico Neiburg, and Lygia Sigaud (eds.), Empires, Nations, and Natives: Anthropology and State-Making Talal Asad


2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-102
Author(s):  
Melike Tokay-Ünal

This article illustrates American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions’ support of the “missionary matrimony”, mid-nineteenth-century New England women’s perceptions of the missionary career obtained through matrimony, and their impressions of the Oriental mission fields and non-Christian or non-Protestant women, who were depicted as victims to be saved. A brief introduction to New England women’s involvement in foreign missions will continue with the driving force that led these women to leave the United States for far mission fields in the second part of the paper. This context will be exemplified with the story of a New England missionary wife. The analysis consists of the journal entries and letters of Seraphina Haynes Everett of Ottoman mission field. The writings of this woman from New England give detailed information about the spiritual voyage she was taking in the mid-nineteenth century Ottoman lands. In her letters to the United States, Everett described two Ottoman cities, Izmir (Smyrna) and Istanbul (Constantinople), and wrote about her impressions of Islam and Christianity as practiced in the Ottoman empire. Everett’s opinions of the Ottoman empire, which encouraged more American women to devote themselves to the education and to the evangelization of Armenian women of the Ottoman empire in the middle of the nineteenth century, conclude the paper.


1975 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 421-459 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stanford J. Shaw

One of the most significant, but unstudied, aspects of the reforms accomplished in the Ottoman Empire during the nineteenth century under the leadership of the Tanzimat statesmen and of Sultan Abd ul-Hamid II was a radical transformation of the traditional Ottoman tax structure and the introduction of the system that has remained in force, with relatively few changes, to the present day, at least in the Republic of Turkey.


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