Eavesdropping on the Pasha’s Salon: Usual and Unusual Readings of an Eighteenth Century Ottoman Bureaucrat

Abstract

Abstract  this contribution traces the intellectual activities and reading interests of 18th-century bureaucrats and high-ranking administrators as represented by a collection of excerpts, an endowment library, and books listed in probate inventories. The fındings are compared in order to determine whether the intellectual and reading interests of an influential individual, namely Rāġıb Paşa (d. 1763), were unusual within his social group.