In Other Worlds? Mapping Out the Spatial Imaginaries of 18th-Century Chroniclers from the Ottoman Levant (Bilad al-Sham)
Keywords:
18th-Century Ottoman Levant, Arabic chronicles, non-scholarly historians, spatial imaginary, geographical identity, visualized worldviewsAbstract
This essay is about the global spatial imaginaries of seven chroniclers from the Ottoman Levant (Bilād al-Shām/Syria and Palestine) in the eighteenth century. While being unified in an Arabic-speaking Levantine identity, on the one hand, and conscious of their Ottoman affiliation, on the other, the authors came from decidedly different social, religious, and occupational backgrounds. Given the unity and diver- sity of the backgrounds of the authors, this essay examines the consequent tensions found in each author’s spatial vision. By plotting and juxtaposing these authors’ ho- rizons into maps and graphs, both the differing and overlapping concepts of geograp- hical identities are visualized. In a pre-national age, when the state’s intervention in creating a territory-bounded identity was minimal, did eighteenth-century Ottoman Levantines live in the same world?
