A tulip age legend: Consumer behavior and material culture in the Ottoman Empire (1718--1730)

This dissertation does not aim to tell a legend in the 'tulip age' but to assert that the tulip age itself is a legend. It is a historian's response to a historiographical invention. The main thesis of the dissertation is that the tulip age is not an appropriate conception of 1718-30 in Ottoman history. Tulip age does not indicate the historical realities of 1718-30 but rather diverts attention from these realities. That is to say, tulip age is a conception which has much to tell about the context and intellectual/political milieu of the twentieth century Ottoman Empire on the eve of its final disappearance. Nevertheless, this conception does not reveal much about Ibrahim Pasha, his faction, and Ottoman society at large in 1718-30. Ibrahim Pasha is just one of the members of bureaucracy whose rule was considered corrupt by the ones who intended to replace him. The period of 1718-30 does not show a deviation in the wealth and consumption norms in the course of Ottoman history. The claim of moral corruption does not correlate with the changing patterns of wealth accumulation and consumption, but rather within the rise of commercial capitalism.;This dissertation rejects the representation of 1718-30 as the beginning of Westernization/modernization, secularism, new-worldism in modern Turkey. It refutes the notion of this period as one of leisure and Ibrahim Pasha as a lavish man beyond the norms of his rank. Instead, it places this period within the process of the rise of the vizier and pasha households prevalent from the seventeenth century and sees nothing abnormal in the conditions of material wealth.