Anti-Black Racism, British Orientalism, and the Ottoman Empire: Rereading The Turkish Embassy Letters

Abstract

This essay reads Mary Wortley Montagu’s The Turkish Embassy Letters (1763) as an entry point for an investigation of the entwinement between the British anti-Black racial consciousness and orientalist rhetoric concerning the Ottoman Empire. Montagu’s racially marked depictions of women in Ottoman lands not only reveal the limits of her capacity to identify and sympathize with the oriental other, but also prompt a wider scrutiny of the anti-Black racial rhetoric that percolates through eighteenth-century British orientalist narratives about the Ottoman Empire.