The travel narratives of Daniel Defoe are filled with images of heroic English travelers and the natives they encounter. I argue that those natives are portrayed in the texts in terms of the relationship between their agency (as either potential aid or hindrance) and the travele…
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After Russia's annexation in the 1550's of the Western Eurasian Khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan and its occupation of the Volga-Ural region, large groups of Turkic-speaking Muslims found themselves subjects of a powerful European and Christian state. These Muslim communities rem…
This dissertation studies specific features of the Ottoman administration of justice in Anatolia during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In particular, it examines the functions and responsibilities of Islamic courts within the framework of the Ottoman provin…
This study reveals how Enlightenment writers use exotic encounters, real and imagined, as a stage for criticizing their home culture and for examining the limitations on their ability—through literature—to step outside of that home culture. If self-critique is the ultimate goal …
This dissertation examines the genre, narrativity and use of humor in Colonel José Cadalso's 1774 work Cartas marruecas (Moroccan Letters). The Moroccan Letters consists of a fictitious correspondence carried on between three people: Gazel Ben-Aly, a Moroccan youth traveling in …
The idea of culture came into circulation in the European vernacular languages simultaneously around 1780. A dynamic concept implying development and change, culture described the origin and progress of civil society from the primitive state of nature to modern Enlightenment. In…
The large Muslim communities of the Malay-Indonesian archipelago are situated on the periphery of the Muslim world, and this area is one of the least Arabicized. Despite this, religio-social changes among its Muslim communities are inseparable from those occurring in the Middle …
So far, the topic of Moroccan-Ottoman relations from the 16th through the 18th centuries has received only superficial attention in both Moroccan and Ottoman historiographies. The general assumption was that since Morocco was not an Ottoman province, relations between Morocco an…
Taking sterotypical notions of the Orient (here understood as the Arab/Islamic world) as departure point, this dissertation examines the question of change in the context of cross-cultural representations. The dissertation focuses in particular on French cultural representations…
This study examines the extraordinarily prevalent images of oriental women in eighteenth and nineteenth century French and English literature and painting. Although many works have addressed the development of orientalism in this period, there has not been a study specifically d…
Despite inspiring a rich and varied literature from historians of Europe and North America, topics related to everyday life have remained an obscure and neglected field of Middle Eastern social history. As part of the effort to recreate the long-forgotten habits, tastes, and per…
Black captives and voyagers comprised the vast majority of all eighteenth-century Atlantic migrants, yet the migration history of the British Atlantic largely ignores them. The oversight holds hostage the development of a more global understanding of transatlantic dislocation. T…
This dissertation analyzes popular spy narratives written during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as a means of speculating on the nature of the relationship between clandestinity and truth-telling in the early English novel (c. 1684-1750). Turning to the nove…
This project centers on the city of Patna in northeastern India, today the capitol of the state of Bihar. Because of its status as a provincial center for British colonialism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Patna does not represent a major facet of the stu…
European narratives of travel to Africa multiply greatly in the eighteenth century. By the end of the century, as the slave trade is winding down and projects for colonizing sub-Saharan Africa are gearing up, most of these travel narratives are highly conventionalized: open almo…
During the first half of the `long' eighteenth century the English were, as anation, vehemently anti-Catholic, yet the art that was most admired, collected andtalked about, was Catholic in origin and subject matter (pictures showing theintercession of saints or the figure of God…
Liberalism originated and developed during the progressive expansion of European overseas empires. Through its early history, the ideology was utilized both to reinforce and attack imperial endeavors. Even where liberal ideas bolstered imperial projects, the ideology often coexi…
This dissertation examines the socioeconomic history of Kütahya, an inland town in western Anatolia, with a specific emphasis on the transformation that took place in the Ottoman Empire during the eighteenth century. However, it is not a socioeconomic history of an urban center …
This thesis examines the reading lives of eighteenth-century English men and women. Diaries of the middling sort and the gentry show that reading entwined daily routines and long-term aspirations. This life-writing also demonstrates that readers performed and contextualised read…