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.

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