By Wendy M.K. Shaw

Possessors and Possessed analyzes how and why museums--characteristically Western institutions--emerged within the late-nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire. Shaw argues that, instead of at once emulating post-Enlightenment museums of Western Europe, Ottoman elites produced different types of assortment and modes of exhibit applicable to framing a brand new id for the empire within the sleek period. unlike late-nineteenth-century Euro-American museums, which applied organizational schema in keeping with positivist notions of growth to arrange shows of excellent arts, Ottoman museums featured army spoils and antiquities lengthy sooner than they became to the "Islamic" collections with which they may were extra quite simply linked. the improvement of those quite a few modes of assortment mirrored transferring moments in Ottoman identification construction. Shaw indicates how Ottoman museums have been in a position to use assortment and exhibition as units with which to weave counter-colonial narratives of identification for the Ottoman Empire. awesome for either the scope and the intensity of its study, Possessors and Possessed lays the basis for destiny inquiries into the advance of museums open air of the Euro-American milieu.

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31 Many of these members of the elite were interested in formulating new modes of identity, which would depend less on the sultanate and the caliphate than on contemporary notions of scientific progress. 32 While Ottoman museums developed as official organs of the state and thus faced notable restrictions on their modes of representation, the sympathies of their administration with the Young Turks rendered the museum an arena of internal political conflict. While many fought for a parliamentary system, Abdülhamid II envisioned a relationship with his subjects based on the institution of the caliphate rather than on a contractual agreement inspired by Europe.

1) retained symbolic value not only through its ecclesiastic architecture but also by virtue of the military and reliquary collections within. From nearly the beginning of the Ottoman reign in Constantinople, the Imperial Armory housed valuables that were captured during the siege of Constantinople, and it continued thereafter to develop as a locus of collection for the spolia of war. The armory also housed important Christian relics inherited from the Byzantine Empire, such as the gold-encased tibia and occipital bones of Saint John the Baptist, today on display in the Treasury section of the Topkapı Palace Museum.

The birth of Ottoman-Islamic identity came as a direct result of the recognition of multiple nationalities on Ottoman soil and the fragmentation of the empire into new, nationally based states such as Greece and Bulgaria. 25 The heightened concern with education expressed by the reforms of the Tanzimat created the most immediate and effective venue for the creation of communicative links between the state and the populace and the most effective means of making that populace into a citizenry. The prime instigators and promoters of the Tanzimat—Ali Pasha (1815–71), Midhat Pasha (1822–84), and Safvet Pasha (1814–83)—fervently believed that public education should be the primary role of the government and that the lack thereof was the primary cause of Ottoman decline.

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