Rethinking the nineteenth-century museum via the Ottoman imperial museum

Abstract

Most accounts of the Ottoman Imperial Museum view the museum primarily as a Westernization project for the Ottoman Empire. In such readings, the museum follows a teleological trajectory toward the European norm. This article reads several of the early practices of the Ottoman Imperial Museum (such as interactive museum displays and the sultan's casual gifting of museum holdings to other European monarchs), not as hiccups on the way to Westernization, but rather as a distinctly Ottoman vision of museology and imperial power. Seen in this light, the early history of the Ottoman Imperial Museum challenges the standard account of the nineteenth-century imperial museum as a site where imperial subjects are molded and where the empire displays its might. Instead, in the case of the Ottoman Imperial Museum, the scientific and orderly organization of the museum artifacts become a testament not to imperial power, but to imperial powerlessness.