Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753–1914 and Ottoman Painting: Reflections of Western Art from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic are timely additions to a flourishing discourse on the instruments of modernity within the larger history of Ottoman visual culture. In a tightly edited and richly illustrated volume of sixteen essays, Scramble for the Past situates the practice of archaeology in the empire as a continual tug-of-war played out in global and local arenas of politics, science, and culture. The essays destabilize prevailing hegemonic narratives to make space for and locate Ottoman agency in the field of archaeology. The timespan covered by the essays is significant: each focused study forms an indexical node of inquiry between the founding of the British Museum (1753), a classical institution with an encyclopedic collection, and its polar opposite, Istanbul’s Museum of Pious Foundations (1914), an establishment dedicated to Islamic and Ottoman heritage. In spite of this long stretch of time, the editors do not intend the volume to be a comprehensive historiographic reader on archaeology in Ottoman territories, which explains the absence of certain important areas such as Palestine; rather, the selections collectively point to an incomplete map where many Western, imperial, and local interventions still remain uncharted. Essays are grouped into five untitled sections separated by “interludes”—pictorial and textual primary-source vignettes—which reinforce the editors’ petition in the introduction for scholars to engage more intimately with Ottoman archival and museal material. The book is an accompaniment to the Scramble for the Past exhibition held at SALT, an interdisciplinary research institute in Istanbul, from November 2011 through March 2012.

The second book, Wendy M. K. Shaw’s Ottoman Painting, is a provocatively original monograph on the development of oil painting in the last century of the Ottoman Empire and the first decades of the Turkish Republic. Having reshaped an understanding of the emergence of Ottoman museums in her earlier book, Possessors and Possessed: Museums, Archaeology, and the Visualization of History in the Late Ottoman Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), and through several articles including a contribution to Scramble for the Past, she now turns to rectify the largely Eurocentric reading of Ottoman oil painting as merely mimetic or epigonic. Through compelling argumentation aimed at complicating this simplistic appraisal, Shaw demonstrates that Ottoman painting “established a differential modernity,” evolving outside the continuum of Western cultural discourse (9). Developing in tandem with massive socio-political reforms in the Ottoman Empire, this borrowed form of art “had to forge new meanings in its new home, an old world awash with change” (2). Although Shaw’s six chapters follow a chronological trajectory, the content of each is elegantly interwoven around several important themes: cultural habits of representation and reception, the undertow of shifting politics and competing loyalties, the inversion of exotic Orientalist idioms, and the forging of Ottoman and Republican nationalisms.

Scramble for the Past and Ottoman Painting together enliven broader conceptual discussions involving contestations of the modern in the Ottoman Empire. Due to their focus on two different kinds of engagement with the visual—excavating material remains of a glorious past versus articulating cultural metamorphoses on canvas—the methodologies of each book are necessarily divergent and distinct. Scramble for the Past offers a corrective account of the people, institutions, sites, and objects involved in the “modern” practice of scientific archaeology based on critical analyses of textual evidence. Ottoman Painting, on the other hand, constructed around the notion of “translation as painting,” illuminates historical resonances during the late Ottoman and early Republican periods with contemporary theories of post-colonialism and perspectival vision (10). Nevertheless, both works often converge on figures such as the Ottoman artist, archaeologist, and museum director Osman Hamdi Bey or imperial administrative units engaged with the arts, and thus offer a more holistic view of transformations ensuing within the empire. Together they break away from the “belatedness” paradigm frequently plaguing earlier studies on Turkey’s imperial and republican pasts.

In an introduction subtitled “Archaeology and Empire,” Zainab Bahrani, Zeynep Çelik, and Edhem Eldem, editors of Scramble for the Past, delineate the conceptual framework for the volume, provide a historical overview of archaeological ventures in the Ottoman realm, and assess the subsequent scrutiny these politically charged missions have received in recent scholarship. Following the first interlude, Yannis Hamilakis’s “Indigenous Archaeologies in Ottoman Greece” focuses on the Ceres of Eleusis as a foil for the conventional trope of archaeology as an entirely modern pursuit. Taking archaeology to specifically mean “the discourses and practices involving material things of a past time,” he argues for indigenous veneration of objects as a form of archaeological practice outside the linear temporal frame of modernity (52). George Tolias, in “‘An Inconsiderate Love of the Arts’: The Spoils of Greek Antiquities, 1780–1820,” explores European, particularly British, popular reactions to the indiscriminate harvest of antiquities from Ottoman Greece. His study reveals concerns for “preservation of the genius loci,” albeit mired in a power differential between Western intellectuals and the rightful local owners (85). Both essays underscore the local populations’ intimate associations with ancient materials and the resulting derision by Western antiquarians.

The second section begins with Shawn Malley’s “The Layard Enterprise: Victorian Archaeology and Informal Imperialism in Mesopotamia,” which brings into sharp relief the interconnectedness of archaeological finds, political ambition, and imperialism vested in the personage of Austen Henry Layard. Malley draws distinctive parallels between nineteenth-century European imperialists who assumed the mantle of stewardship for antiquities in blatant violation of indigenous rights and “the comfortable humanist rhetoric” of the U.S. Department of Defense during the war in Iraq (117). A similar argument is fashioned in Bahrani’s “Untold Tales of Mesopotamian Discovery,” where she traces the deeply rooted and persistent rhetoric of discovery celebrated in the West at the expense of a much longer and local involvement. The continuation of this rhetoric is evident in European and U.S. propaganda as saviors of cultural heritage during the Iraq war.

Sophie Basch’s essay, “Archaeological Travels in Greece and Asia Minor: On the Good Use of Ruins in Nineteenth-Century France,” discusses the disjuncture between scientifically trained and amateur archaeologists in connection with various debates raging on separating artifacts from their original contexts. In “The Rediscovery of Constantinople and the Beginnings of Byzantine Archaeology: A Historiographic Study,” Robert Ousterhout provides a detailed lineage of growing interest in the Byzantine remains of the city through a closer look at travel and photography. Further, he traces the development of the discipline of Byzantine archaeology from its beginnings as a facet of historical geography to the intellectual activities of organizations such as Istanbul’s Hellenic Philological Society (1861) and the Russian Archaeological Institute (1894). In the final essay of the section, Henry Lauren’s “Ernest Renan’s Expedition to Phoenicia” exposes Renan’s hierarchy of interest in Classical Greece and Judaea, the “miracles” of history, rather than his life’s work on Phoenicia (229).

The third section concerns larger issues of ownership and diplomacy. Philippe Jockey’s “The Venus de Milo: Genesis of a Modern Myth” sheds light on how a single work of art becomes victim to the vicissitudes of inter-European rivalries and, despite insufficient aesthetic virtue, gains entrance to the revered demesne of masterpieces. In contrast, competing imperial interests and nationalisms imposed on a single site are the subject of Ussama Makdisi’s “The ‘Rediscovery’ of Baalbek: A Metaphor for Empire in the Nineteenth Century.” Baalbek simultaneously functions as a monument to a biblical past for Europeans, a pre-Islamic appropriation to enrich Ottoman sovereignty, and a symbol of an emergent local Arab nationalism. Eldem’s “From Blissful Indifference to Anguished Concern: Ottoman Perceptions of Antiquities, 1799–1869” fleshes out Ottoman interest in antiquities from earlier dismissive attitudes, to a growing realization of their diplomatic value, to the culmination of bylaws, particularly of 1869, for the protection of heritage. In “Archaeology and Cultural Politics: Ottoman-Austrian Relations,” Hubert Szemethy provides a refreshing contrast in discussing the relative apathy of the Habsburgs to personally finance the quest for antiquities in Ottoman lands while their peers in Europe formulated imperialist policies in concert with excavations and material finds.

The fourth section covers the German pioneers of Islamic archaeology. Unlike their French and British counterparts whose interests concentrated on classical material culture alone, German archaeologists also took note of the early centuries of Islamic civilization. Filiz Çakir Phillip’s “Ernst Herzfeld and the Excavations at Samarra” briefly chronicles Herzfeld’s role in this shift in attention from classical antiquity to the classical period of Islamic history. Similarly, Oya Pancaroğlu’s “A Fin-de-Siècle Reconnaissance of Seljuk Anatolia: Friedrich Sarre and his Reise in Kleinasien” narrates Sarre’s interest in Islamic remains, the difficulties he faced in publishing his work, and his derision-free observations of the Middle East. The concluding section directly investigates Ottoman involvement in utilizing museums and material remains to construct a narrative of modernity. In “From Mausoleum to Museum: Resurrecting Antiquity for Ottoman Modernity,” Shaw problematizes the Imperial Museum’s (1846) role in animating the past in service of the present. She argues that because the museum stood for the legacy, longevity, and territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire, it “was conceived . . . as a mausoleum” rather than a space for active contemplation of the multiple meanings attached to its contents (440). Finally, Çelik’s “Defining Empire’s Patrimony: Late Ottoman Perceptions of Antiquities” looks to the Ottoman salname, official records of the empire’s provinces, as a source for embedded narratives on the imperial desire to own the past.

This compendium on the long history of archaeology gives the specter of Ottoman agency corporeal form, one that still remains to be strengthened. Each chapter in its own way dislodges the notion of archaeology as a tool of European modernity alone. Rather, much like an excavation, the book unearths the multiplicity of meanings associated with archaeological practice and modernity in the Ottoman Empire.

Shaw shares this interest in the emergence of the modern and its impact in Ottoman Painting. Her introduction, “The Translation of Art,” sets the stage for her investigation, which seeks to understand the transformation of painting “from an exotic import to tool of national expression” (10). Chapter 1, “From Old Niches to New Paintings,” examines the flexibility of prevalent visual modes of representation in Istanbul during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to allow mediated transference of Western artistic modalities. Instead of the valorized one-point perspective of Western art, Shaw explains how variations of girih (traditional Islamic geometric interlacing) continued to structure space for new subject matter such as landscape murals, imperial portraiture, and still lifes. Even though Western oil painting often depended on direct inspiration from nature, Ottoman interpretation of Islamic strictures, according to Shaw, prohibited “copying from nature” (34). She elucidates how photographs circumvented this reluctance and supplanted nature as muse for early Ottoman painting on canvas.

In chapter 2 “Digesting Western Art: The Academy and Realism,” Shaw describes the political environment in the Ottoman capital which created a space for new art in the public sphere. She highlights the role played by Ottoman collectors of European art such as Halil Şerif Pasha, who provided a cultural forum imbued with Western political thought. Her insightful analysis of artists such as Süleyman Seyyid, Ahmet Ali, and Osman Hamdi, each schooled in form and technique in Europe, shows how their art suggested hybridity in style and symbolism relating to their political leanings and social standing. Chapter 3, “A New World of Art,” focuses on oil painting as social comment during the tense political atmosphere of the last decades of the Ottoman Empire. For instance, Shaw convincingly demonstrates how the incorporation of the female figure was fraught with contradictions—it symbolized modernity but did not secure rights for women. This period of rapid urban change also witnessed a rise in idyllic landscapes, cataloging Ottoman history and monuments in the service of “religious, nationalist, and humanist patrimony” (99). Shaw carries forward a careful examination of this interest in chapter 4, “Art Goes Public.” In response to foreign military threat, individuals—rather than the Ottoman state—created works of art to “celebrate imperial glory and national cohesion” (111). The final two chapters, “Ten Long Years of War” and “Art for a New Nation,” reflect on the socio-political exigencies pressing artists, including women, to focus on content rather than style in “the representation of a new national identity” and “in the service of political modernization” (131, 166).

Shaw’s sophisticated approach in analyzing numerous paintings, exhibitions, and institutions, along with her skillful utilization of sources, make the book not only a pleasure to read but also a significant contribution to scholarship on Ottoman oil painting, which until now has been “made subaltern by the restrictions placed on its disciplinary legibility” (185). Unlike Scramble for the Past, however, which will be readily accessible to a wide range of readers, Ottoman Painting is more suited for an audience that has a degree of familiarity with art theory and Ottoman history. Nonetheless, the deft and revelatory discourse of both texts resists the temptation to characterize nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Turkey’s engagement with the visual as being propelled by Eurocentric or Ottoman imperial ambitions alone. The texts are refreshing in their nuanced reading of local agents and artists as they negotiated new cultural and political identities in the cultivation of heritage and the transformation of artistic practice. The volumes shatter widely held myths about Ottoman passivity and imitation. They should be required reading for anyone with an interest in the visual culture of the late Ottoman period.