Invisible Hands: Ottoman Nature Studies and Knowledge Exchange in the Early Modern Mediterranean

A perspective from labor history suggests some insights on the invisibility of the historical records of what I call Ottoman nature studies. The making of pictorial representations of nature in the early modern Ottoman Empire required strenuous attention and physical labor. While being rare and fragmentary, these drawings of indigenous plants remain neglected in the current scholarship on grounds of being brute and clumsy illustrations of nature—a presumed indication of absence of arduous intellectual labor involved in producing them. Yet, these pictorial documents functioned as translations in cross-cultural interactions between the Ottomans and Europeans in the seventeenth century. In lieu of considering these illustrations only as end-products of Ottoman material culture, I explore how they aimed at making foreign species recognizable to the European eyes by creating a visual vocabulary. The proximity of the Ottoman pictorial representations to European naturalists’ notebooks indicates how they saw these materials as their central tool in producing knowledge about the natural world. Composed and circulated through the labor of countless hands and minds, these images represent a link in a chain through which cross-cultural knowledge exchange has remained invisible for the scholarship both of the past and of the present.