Between Geographic and Conceptual Fields: Mapping Microhistories in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Empire

Abstract:In Engaging the Ottoman Empire: Vexed Mediations, 1690–1815, Daniel O’Quinn uses microhistorical methods to construct a constellatory, rather than a cumulative, history of intercultural communication and representation between Ottomans and Europeans. By reducing the scale of his analysis to a singular event, individual, object, or place, he identifies unexpected moments of dissonance, instances of something that does not quite fit. Carlo Ginzburg and Giovanni Levi, both early practitioners of microhistory, called such observations “clues” and used them to complicate grand historical narratives, such as the emergence of modernity. This study proposes that O’Quinn methodologically innovates the use of microhistory by mapping his observations about Ottoman-European intercultural communication in a constellatory field in which each “clue” operates as a dynamic discursive node with many spatial and temporal connections. Throughout his book, he guides readers through this unwieldy spatiotemporal field, from one microhistorical node to the next, and thus models a new approach to tracing the historical and imagined itineraries that linked Europeans and Ottomans across the long eighteenth century.