The Ottomans at World’s Fairs

The world's fairs were among the most popular international events and worldwide spectacles of the 19th century, at which a wide array of countries would promote their industry, technology, progress, and culture. Starting in 1851 with the Great Exhibition in London, the world's fairs provided stages for displaying industrial and technological developments, raw materials, local products, and cultural heritage. As Istvn Ormos has phrased it, "the aspects of public relations, politics, education and even scholarship emerged and gained considerably in importance in the context of world's fairs. World's fairs became important means of spreading the image of a given country all over the world in the aspect which the given country or its leading circles preferred to display themselves" (Ormos 2016: 115). Consequently, various countries re-discovered, re-defined, and re-presented their identities to be able to display themselves for an international audience. Timothy Mitchell defines these grand spectacles as "the world as exhibition", referring to "the world conceived and grasped as though it were an exhibition", in which the "non-West" was object to the critical gaze of the "West" (Mitchell 1989: 222). Zeynep elik brings the notion of the "fair as a microcosm" into the discussion, defining the experience as "an imaginary journey around the world, [in which] foreign and especially non-Western societies were often represented in phantasmagoric images, themselves determined by Western legacies" (elik 1992: 2)

Ancient history · Art · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Islamic Studies and History · Turkey's Politics and Society

• Displaying the Orient

  Hugh Kennedy, Zeynep Çelik•The American Historical Review•1993

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