For those of us who work on the 18th century Ottoman Empire, Mouradgea d'Ohsson's monumental Tableau general de l'Empire othoman, published in Paris between 1787 and 1824, has not been readily accessible and its publishing history something of a mystery. With the publication of Enlightening Europe, Carter Findley has reconstructed an extraordinary story of one of the greatest of the large folio productions on the Ottomans in the age before engraving gave way to lithography and photography, making the Orient accessible and widely popular across Europe and North America.
While focusing on the life of one individual and his obsession with the completion of a compendium on the Ottomans, Enlightening Europe also engages with the literature on the history of Swedish-French-Ottoman relations, the nature of consular life in Istanbul, the circulation of knowledge prior to Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798, and the rarefied world of engravers and printers in France. In his introduction, Findley acknowledges the influence of d'Ohsson's taxonomy of Ottoman government on his own studies of the Ottoman bureaucracy: Bureaucratic Reform in the Ottoman Empire: The Sublime Porte 1789–1922 (1980) and Ottoman Civil Officialdom: A Social History (1989) both of which PhD students will recognize from their reading lists. It was only by serendipity of visits to different libraries holding the rare volumes that Findley encountered what he describes as “the most profusely illustrated book of its century on Islam and the Ottomans” (p. x). With forensic intensity, in a collegial collaboration worthy of the original effort itself, he has managed to establish the lineage of many of the exquisite engravings of Tableau and their passage into print in Paris of the early 1800s.
Ignatius Mouradgea d'Ohsson (1740–1807), half French and half Armenian, was born to a Catholic family in Istanbul and spent altogether 50 years there. His father had been a translator in the Swedish consulate in Izmir, where, like so many of the non-Muslim families of the period, he acquired a consular berat (warrant) through the capitulations and engaged in trade. Mouradgea was educated in Catholic schools. He spent 1763 to 1784 serving the Swedish legation in Istanbul as translator and is particularly associated with Gustaf and Ulric Celsing who were successive heads of the mission from 1750 to 1780 at a time of great Swedish prosperity and reputation as the most enlightened of the Istanbul diplomatic missions. In 1774, Mouradgea married Eva Kuleliyan, with whom he had three children, a boy and two girls. Her father, Abraham Kuleliyan, was an important financier (sarraf) who in 1774 was put in charge of the Treasury of the Two Holy Cities under the aegis of the chief black eunuch. These connections suggest that Mouradgea had an insider's access to aspects of the Ottoman governance that is reflected in his deep knowledge of the way it functioned. He also served the Celsings in financial transactions benefiting the family and the Swedish government from which he profited himself. He aligned himself with the abortive reform movement of Grand Vizier Halil Hamid of 1783 and later the more extensive new order reforms of Selim III (1789–1807) and served both Ottoman and Swedish masters profitably. Swedish King Gustaf III (1771–1792) knighted him in 1780, after which he adopted the name d'Ohsson [from the Armenian Tosunyan by which his father had been known] by which he is known today in Europe. In Ottoman circles he remained Mouradgea.
Findley has thus painstakingly established the career of Mouradgea as a successful non-Muslim insider who nonetheless remained the quintessential outsider—a common profile of marginal figures who chronicle whole worlds by crossing cultural boundaries (p. 380). Mouradgea's desire to preserve the history of the Ottomans, their laws, customs, and practices was a driving force in later life, encouraged by the Swedish court which wished to chronicle Swedish king Charles XII's 1709–1714 brief sojourn under Ottoman protection after being defeated by the Russians at Poltava.
By the 1780s, Mouradgea's chief desire was to go to France to finish the manuscript and pull together the projected volumes. One aspect of a consular beratli that became a chronic problem for Mouradgea was his finances and the uncertain state of Ottoman affairs. When he left Istanbul for Paris in 1784, he rounded up his finances in Istanbul which would haunt him in coming years especially when the French revolution got underway. He arrived in France a wealthy man but still an outsider, establishing royal relationships that both enabled and protected him in the highly censored French publishing world. His ambitions made him approach leading publishers and engravers while pulling together the Tableau, establishing a cross-continental network of painters and engravers that Findley covers in considerable detail. In 1787, Mouradgea issued a prospectus for a two volume Tableau for subscription. This was a deluxe folio edition, finished with a third volume in 1820 by Mouradgea's son Constantine, and included 233 engravings. At the same time, an affordable octavo edition with the same text but with far fewer plates was published in seven volumes from 1788 to 1824. As Findley notes, it is the latter that most contemporary scholars use—the deluxe edition is extremely rare.
Chapter 3 continues the life of Mouradgea, now perpetually in need of more financing to complete the publication of the Tableau. When he returned via Vienna to Istanbul in 1791, once again Mouradgea became the Ottoman servant of the sultan. There, he found himself in the reform circle of Selim III with Ebu Bekir Ratib Efendi, an old friend. But the French revolution had changed Istanbul where rumors circulated that Mouradgea was a Jacobin. What shines through the turmoil of the period in Findley's account is Mouradgea's extraordinary range of knowledge about Ottoman affairs and practices which distinguished him from other consular staff. In his desperation to restore his finances, he became pugnacious in late negotiations with Sweden about his appointment at the consulate in Istanbul, and litigious with most of the artists who worked with him. But Napoleon's invasion of Egypt changed his fortunes when the consequences of an apparent triple allegiance and servitude to revolutionary France ended his consular career. The Ottomans demanded his recall and replacement by a “real Swede.” Returning to France in 1799, apart from working on some less distinguished writing, he languished on a small Swedish pension until he died in 1807. The final parts of the Tableau, assembled and published by Mouradgea's son Constantine (1779–1851), appeared just as the encyclopedic Description d’Égypte made its way onto the European market, first under the aegis of Napoleon in 1809 as a deluxe imperial edition, and then in 1820 as an affordable edition sponsored by King Louis XVIII (1814–1824).
Chapter 4 introduces the reader to the highly regulated and closed shop of printers and engravers in Paris. The firm of Didot, patronized by then future King Louis XVIII, was commissioned to print Mouradgea's work, but records of the publisher do not survive. Again, in a minutely detailed exploration of multiple archives this chapter lays out the fierce literary struggle that developed between Choiseul Gouffier, author of the similarly massive Voyage pittoresque de la Grèce (published 1782–1822) and Mouradgea in the context of French debates around absolutism and despotism. It is Findley's contention that Mouradgea chose deliberately to argue for parity among the French, Swedish and Ottoman states, making him the man of the ancien régime while Choiseul's attack on Ottoman despotism foreshadowed the philhellenism of the new world order of the colonial powers.
Chapter 4 also includes a discussion of the international circle of artists that Mouradgea employed, some of whom were also hired by Choiseul Gouffier. The names of local Istanbul artists apart from the well-known Konstantin Kapadaǧlı have not survived, but clearly the influence of his “school” is all over the artwork of Tableau. Findley has chosen to include the reproduction of originals (some reproduced by Paris artists) of many of the subjects of the engravings of the final work (pp. 85–100). Artists include Jean-Baptiste Hilaire (1753–c.1822), Jean-Jacques-François Le Barbier (1738–1826), Jean Michel Morneau (1741–1814) and Louis-Nicolas de l'Espinasse (1734–1808). At two a page, the reader can enjoy the complete immersion in a delicate and lightly tinted style uniquely evocative of the period. Chapter 5 is Findley's engagement with the full Tableau text and its eccentricities, notably the fact that Ottoman law is represented solely through al-Halabi's compendium of Muslim jurisprudence and ignores the large corpus of kanun law altogether (p. 122).
The remainder of the volume is taken up with explanations and reproductions of the various pieces of the Tableau as organized by Mouradgea. In Chapter 5, Findley summarizes the contents of the work, noting that “[t]his was an age that aspired to create rationality and order, expressed preferably with mathematical precision or at least in a taxonomic array” (p. 123). This leads Mouradgea to organize his work from “particular facts” to “general principles” to “great debates” (p. 123). What follows is three sets of paired chapters—starting with Chapter Six, “Explaining Islam: Beliefs, Rituals, Ethics,” and Chapter 7, “Illustrating Islam: Beliefs, Rituals, Ethics”—with the first chapter comprising Findley's interpretations of the written text, and the second setting Mouradgea's text translated into English against the illustrations being described. Chapters 8 and 9 on “Islam: Elites, Movements, explanations” and Chapters 10 and 11 on “The State: Structure and Function” are similarly organized. A final chapter on “Arguments, Audiences, Receptions” discusses Mouradgea's didacticism and reception of the text in the 1780s.
In the final the few pages, Findley lays out the influence of the work on successors such as Joseph Von Hammer (1774–1856), Namık Kemal (1840–1880), Ismail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı (1888–1977), and Hamilton A.R. Gibb and Harold Bowen's incomplete Islamic Society and the West (1950). Findley closes by crediting his own collaborations with Kemal Beydilli, Folke Ludwigs, Günsel Renda, and Sture Theolin of the Swedish Research Institute as essential to his restoration of Mouradgea d'Ohsson to his rightful place as the foremost chronicler of the late 18th century. Brill too needs to be congratulated for the care with which this volume has been assembled.
