Collecting as History Making: 19th-Century Ottomans and Their Objects

This talk traces Ottoman collecting practices between the drastic administrative state reforms of the mid-19th century and the autocratic turn of the late-19th century. It highlights two collectors: the renowned statesman Abdüllatif Suphi Paşa (d. 1881) and the relatively obscure Hakky-Bey (d. 1906), who amassed sizable collections of pre-Islamic and Islamic antiquities. These collections and their accompanying texts spoke to the larger 19th-century socio-cultural context of the Ottoman Empire, including the special position of Egypt as an Ottoman vice-royalty, as well as ideas of reform.