Trees of Liberty and Asiatic Germs: Rethinking Metaphors of Transmission in 19th-Century European and Ottoman Political Thought

For all the dramatic historiographical upheavals that have reshaped the study of the Ottoman Empire in recent decades, discussions of the empire's “modern period” remain stuck in a curious holding pattern. Although few scholars today would agree with Bernard Lewis's assessment of the French Revolution as “the first great movement of ideas in western Christendom that had any real effect on the world of Islam,” most continue to conceive of the Ottomans' long 19th century as shaped by the mass import of European ideas. Late Ottoman political thought is thus understood to be essentially mimetic and derivative of European thought, a perception that persists despite conscious efforts to recognize its distinctiveness. To find a way out of this conceptual impasse, I argue that it is necessary to follow the lead of anthropologists, sociologists and philosophers who are seeking to develop new ontologies of ideas and their movement across cultural and linguistic borders. Only by re-conceiving the “spread” of European political thought in the 19th century can we develop a narrative of Ottoman intellectual history that preserves its specificity while acknowledging its parallels and convergences with other traditions.

I begin by considering the metaphors conventionally employed by Ottoman historians to describe the 19th-century Ottoman uptake of European ideas. Some European observers reacted to the 1839 Edict of Gülhane – guaranteeing the “lives, honor, and fortunes” of all Ottoman subjects – as a “spontaneous manifestation of liberal aspirations,” while others viewed it as the brainchild of British diplomacy. A century later, scholars would resort to the language of “impact,” or the softer metaphors of “influence,” “permeation,” and “adoption.” In the past decade, the metaphor of “appropriation” has gained ground with the aim of restoring a robust sense of Ottoman agency, yet it fails to capture the crucial transformations undergone by ideas themselves in transit.

By examining the transformative deployment of Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws by the Young Ottoman writer Namık Kemal (1840-1888), I seek to highlight the limitations of these metaphors in capturing the relationship between Ottoman and European thought. In their place, I argue for a return to a metaphor used by 19th-century historical actors themselves: the concept of ideas as germs. Europeans and Ottomans had long regarded each other as bearers of foreign contagions affecting the mind and spirit as well as the body. One of the leaders of a failed Greek rebellion in the Balkans in 1821 castigated his less revolutionary countrymen for bearing “asiatic germs.” The potent metaphor reminds us of the mutual vulnerability to ideological infection that arises from cultural encounters, and invites a consideration of how ideas proliferate, mutate, and transform their new hosts. I conclude by exploring how we might employ this metaphor to develop a new germ theory of ideas, one better able to articulate the historical means by which ideas spread and what happens when they do.

Madeleine Elfenbein is a Ph.D. student in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Her research is on the Young Ottoman movement of the 1860s and 1870s and its relationship to broader currents in 19th-century political thought.