Alhambra at the Crossroads of History

Edhem Eldem is a Professor in the Department of History of Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. He has also taught at Berkeley, Harvard, EHESS, EPHE, ENS, Columbia and has held the International Chair of Turkish and Ottoman Studies at the Collège de France. Among his fields of interest are the Levant trade in the eighteenth century, Ottoman funerary epigraphy, the development of an urban bourgeoisie in Istanbul, the history of the Ottoman Bank, the history of archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, late-nineteenth-century Ottoman first-person narratives and biographies, the history of photography in the Ottoman Empire and the interaction between Westernization and Orientalism.He is the author of L’Empire ottoman (PuF, 2022), L’Alhambra. À la croisée des histoires (Belles Lettres, 2021), L’Empire ottoman et la Turquie face à l’Occident (Fayard, 2018), Camera Ottomana (Koç University, 2015), Scramble for the Past (SALT, 2011), Un Ottoman en Orient (Actes Sud, 2010), The Ottoman City between East and West (Cambridge University Press, 1999), A History of the Ottoman Bank (Ottoman Bank, 1999), French Trade in Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century (Brill, 1999).

Using original and unexpected sources, Edhem Eldem follows the trail of Arab and Turkish visitors to the Alhambra in the nineteenth century. Describing with great erudition their thoughts and emotions before this icon of Islamic heritage, he offers a stimulating analysis of the many facets and layers of orientalism.

• List of FiguresIntroduction: Trailing a Photograph1 North: Western and Spanish Visions of the Alhambra2 South: Visitors from the Maghreb3 East: Ottomans at the Alhambra4 Modernity: Dreams and IdealsConclusion: Connections, Entanglements and InfluencesBibliographyIndex