The Land of the Foreign Padishah: India in Ottoman reality and imagination

Abstract

During the early modern period, India constituted one of the nodal points of world trade; yet, the relevance of India has been minimized within the Ottomanist field. This study seeks to elucidate various facets of the interactions of Ottoman lands with India by including evidence in almost twenty languages. It consists of four major sections of two chapters each.

The first section develops a historical sociology of western Asian military men ("Rumis") in India through sources in Romance languages as well as Arabic, Ottoman, and Persian. Before the rise of the Mughals, Ottoman connections with India were regular but often steered by non-state actors. The second section explores relations between Ottomans and Indian rulers through diplomatic correspondence and travelogues. The sources show that far from displaying Sunni solidarity, Ottomans and Mughals frequently clashed over minutiae of protocol and discourse.

The third section shifts attention from politics to culture. A wide range of Ottoman literary sources, including poetry, chronicles, and geographic literature, demonstrates that India was consistently present within the Ottoman collective imagination. The fourth section surveys Ottoman relations with India in the post-Mughal period through an anthropology of Indian and Indianizing textiles in the Ottoman empire. Evidence suggests that Ottoman textile trade with India peaked much later than it is usually supposed, at the end of the eighteenth century, which requires an examination of Ottoman relations with the emerging British Raj through diplomatic correspondence and Ottoman archival materials. Rather than destroying Indian Ocean networks, the British sought to reshape them to their own advantage.

The conclusion unpacks the concept of "Oriental" trade, suggesting possible trajectories of research for its constituent parts. Finally, Ottoman, Mughal, and Safavid hegemonic practices are compared and contrasted in order to understand the reason for the continuation of the Ottoman state through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, long after the collapse of the seemingly more powerful Mughals.