Dhe Ottoman Empire plays a key role in discussions about colonial crimes and postcolonial justice. Because on the one hand it was an empire that behaved like other empires and subdued and exploited foreign territories, suppressed uprisings and secured trade privileges militarily. On the other hand, in the nineteenth century it increasingly came under the influence of the great Western European powers. That is why some pioneers of post-colonialism attribute a victim role to the kingdom of the Sublime Porte in colonial history.
The attribution also has a strategic function, making it easier to establish a link between contemporary criticism of Islam and modern Western imperialism, while at the same time blurring the thirteen-century practice of slave trade and importation in Muslim empires and states. The guidelines of the German Museums Association for dealing with colonial collections, in which the North African bases of Spain in the war against the Ottomans are described as “formal colonial rulers”, encourage this tendentious interpretation.
Under asymmetric power relations
In a “Picture Atlas on Art Looting and Cultural Heritage”, which forms the illustrated half of a double publication with the main title “Beute”, the excavation of the so-called Alexander sarcophagus by Osman Hamdi Bey in the spring of 1887 is now described as the “birth moment of Ottoman archaeology”. The author of the article, Sebastian Willert, correctly describes the recovery of the sarcophagus, which is now the icon of the Archaeological Museum in Istanbul, as a violent “extraction” using “invasive methods”, but nevertheless distinguishes it from “frequently illegal and destructive” western excavations States and individuals on the territory of the Ottoman Empire. The publication of the Sidon finds, on the other hand, demonstrated “the scientific contribution” of the empire.
Another contribution, signed by two authors, deals with the transport of the facade of the Jordanian desert castle Mschatta to Wilhelmine Berlin under the heading “Mschatta – a plan for taking away”. Here it is “the colonial infrastructure” (read: the Hedjaz railway built by the German Reich) that guarantees the object’s smooth relocation, and its acquisition is not, as with the Alexander sarcophagus, an “appropriation” but a “removal”. The same applies to the shipment of a limestone relief from the royal city of Nimrud in today’s northern Iraq to the British Museum, which another essay describes as an “expression of colonialist exploration of the Greater Middle East”.
The destruction of cultural treasures
In other words, for the authors of the Booty Atlas, there is good archeology and bad archaeology, just as there is good imperialism and bad imperialism, and in both cases the good side is with the Ottomans. Both northern Iraq and modern-day Lebanon, where the city of Sidon is located, were provinces of the Ottoman Empire until 1918. According to the editors’ criteria, all artefacts previously acquired from there count as looted art because, as the foreword says, they “were relocated under asymmetrical power relations”. In the case of the Alexander sarcophagus, however, the volume gives the impression that its relocation to Istanbul was a legitimate act of scientific policy. One would love to know what today’s Lebanese cultural politicians have to say about it.
The unequal treatment of Ottoman and European cultural imperialism is a small but crucial crack in the facade of encyclopedic impartiality that the two “Booty” volumes erect before their readers. It was clear that the double publication, which represents a kind of final balance sheet of the “translocations” project cluster at the TU Berlin, financed by Bénédicte Savoy with the prize money from her Leibniz Prize, would not be a handbook for conservative museum people. Nevertheless, the editors try to appear objective both in the tone of their own contributions and in the text and image selection of the other contributions. The robberies of the crusaders in Constantinople are honored, as is the looting of their Arab predecessors in the Persian metropolis of Ctesiphon. The second volume, which contains an anthology of texts on art theft, opens up a broad panorama that ranges from the reports of the Assyrians to the instructions of Japanese cultural bureaucrats on the plundering of Korea and eastern China. Many finds refute the post-colonial legend of the greed of “the” Europeans for foreign cultural assets.
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