Date of Award
Spring 4-25-2023
Document Type
Honors Project
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
History and American Studies
Department Chair or Program Director
Ferrell, Claudine
First Advisor
Nabil Al-Tikriti
Major or Concentration
History
Abstract
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Ottoman Empire and European states clashed during warfare, resulting in mutual enslavement and the collision of cultures. The first-person accounts from enslaved Europeans and Ottomans and the secondary works of historians suggest that, despite losing freedom and experiencing poor treatment and violence, captives adapted to their captors’ culture and could actually gain opportunities for social mobility, power, and agency through cultural exchange. Living and working within an otherwise unknown culture, they participated intimately in a cultural exchange that included learning and applying new languages, skills, and customs. This cultural exchange did not stay solely with individual experience. As they used and shared what they learned, through interpersonal relationships, literature, and diplomacy, captives changed both the new culture and their own. The impact of these captives’ cultural exchange reverberated throughout Europe and the Ottoman Empire, in their own time and in centuries to come.
Culture as Capital:
Slavery as an Instrument of Cultural Exchange in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Ottoman Empire
Laura Baldwin
HIST 485: Historical Research
Professor al-Tikriti
April 17, 2023
Abstract
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Ottoman Empire and European states clashed during warfare, resulting in mutual enslavement and the collision of cultures. The first-person accounts from enslaved Europeans and Ottomans and the secondary works of historians suggest that, despite losing freedom and experiencing poor treatment and violence, captives adapted to their captors’ culture and could actually gain opportunities for social mobility, power, and agency through cultural exchange. Living and working within an otherwise unknown culture, they participated intimately in a cultural exchange that included learning and applying new languages, skills, and customs. This cultural exchange did not stay solely with individual experience. As they used and shared what they learned, through interpersonal relationships, literature, and diplomacy, captives changed both the new culture and their own. The impact of these captives’ cultural exchange reverberated throughout Europe and the Ottoman Empire, in their own time and in centuries to come.
Recommended Citation
Baldwin, Laura, "Culture as Capital: Slavery as an Instrument of Cultural Exchange in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Ottoman Empire" (2023). Student Research Submissions. 525.
https://scholar.umw.edu/student_research/525