Area of Research
Ottoman History; History of Archaeology
Biography
Dr Edhem Eldem is a historian of the Ottoman Empire whose doctorate focused on French trade in Constantinople in the eighteenth century. The discovery and classification of the Imperial Ottoman Bank archives led him to the nineteenth century, with particular emphasis on the role of this institution in the transformation of the urban middle and upper classes in the capital. These studies became the building blocks of a growing interest in the forms and dynamics of modernisation and sociocultural change throughout the ‘long’ nineteenth century, including the study of mentalities among Westernising elites, based on a variety of sources, from funerary epitaphs to photography, and from ego-documents to first-person narratives. A turning point in this quest was the artist, museologist, and intellectual Osman Hamdi Bey (1842–1910), whose personal documentation and oeuvre revealed the complexity of his efforts to navigate between the Ottoman Empire and Europe. He thus provided a strong incentive for further research on Orientalism, particularly in its localised forms, as a powerful undercurrent of Ottoman modernity, inextricably linked to the dynamics of Westernisation. Not surprisingly, Hamdi was also responsible for a snowballing interest in archaeology, museology, and heritage in the Ottoman Empire, the subject of his ViCAS project.
Citizenship
Turkey
ViCAS Project
From the Parthenon Frieze to the Pergamon Altar, from the Venus de Milo to the Mshatta Façade, some of the iconic remains of ancient civilisations preserved in Western collections have originated from the Ottoman lands during the ‘long’ 19th century. The most notorious names associated – for better or worse – with these and other acquisitions, from Elgin to Schliemann, and Layard to Wiegand, were all Western antiquarians, travellers, diplomats, and archaeologists. The grand narrative of archaeology and heritage in this part of the globe is thus a predominantly Western one, for which the Ottoman lands merely provide a setting, while its peoples, from administrators to commoners, are generally reduced to the role of indifferent and passive onlookers, when they are not portrayed as a threat to the integrity of a heritage, which they are considered incapable of appreciating and unjustified to claim. The project proposes an alternative narrative that brings local agency (or indifference) back into the picture, without succumbing to facile accusations of plunder and cries for restitution, or to simplistic crypto-nationalist and anti-Orientalist constructs. The aim is rather a ‘total’ history capable of fully integrating the global and local dimensions and dynamics of this complex and multilayered process.
Recent Publications
- “L’Empire ottoman et la Turquie face à l’Occident” (Paris: Collège de France, 2018, 2024).
- "L’Empire ottoman" (Paris: Que sais-je? / Humensis, 2022, 2025).
- “The Alhambra at the Crossroads of History” (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024).