Art, archaeology, imperialism: Western Anatolia and its railways in the Victorian imagination (1854-1877)

Thesis

My dissertation focuses on the visual cultures that emerged around the British railways built in Ottoman Anatolia during the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Connecting the eastern Mediterranean port city of Izmir with the Anatolian interior, the railways were anticipated to bring economic benefits to both the British firms and the Ottoman state. Beyond these foreseeable economic outcomes, the railways produced a number of second-order socio-cultural effects, including the expansion of the British community resident in Izmir, the commencement of the archaeological excavations at the site of Ephesus, and the development of a burgeoning tourist infrastructure in the region. It is these developments, as seen through the eyes of painters, photographers, and printmakers, as well as travelogue authors, clerics, journalists, and politicians, who worked for a British audience in Izmir and at home, that form the subject of my dissertation.

Artists who represented Western Anatolia and its railways during this period were impacted by two competing impulses: on the one hand, the Orientalist pictorial and ideological conventions that dictated how that artists ought to portray the so-called Orient to the British public; and on the other, the realities of railway construction these artists experienced on the ground, emblematic of the wider efforts at modernisation that defined the Ottoman Empire during the Tanzimat era. How, then, to reconcile these competing impulses and represent the ‘timeless Orient’ in the railway age? My dissertation demonstrates the complex and contradictory ways that artists answered this question. I argue that the heterogenous responses of these artists reflect the broader heterogeneity of British Orientalist discourse during this period, which, while not uniform or unified in the ways it perceived and represented the Ottoman Empire, nevertheless inscribed an imperialist way of seeing the empire, its people, and its landscapes into the broader British consciousness.

Authors: Solovyev, A

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-gwy50zdgm
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: history of art; Izmir (Smyrna); British Orientalism; railway infrastructure; modernity; tourism; Anglo-Ottoman relations; Ephesus; Western Anatolia; travel photography
• Subjects: Orientalism in art; Railroad companies; Turkey--Izmir, Gulf of; Arts, Victorian; Turkey--History--Ottoman Empire, 1288-1918; Turkey--Ephesus (Extinct city)