Beyond art and science: Thalassographic epistemology and the history of the Ottoman Red Sea

In four interrelated chapters, along with all-important prolegomena, this dissertation explores the practice of history-writing through a sustained interrogation of the concept of the sea, especially relating to its formulation, past and present, as an object of historical study.;In the wake of Fernand Braudel's famous thesis on the Mediterranean, and following the critique of modernization theory coupled with an acute crisis in national historiography, sea-centered history has emerged as an apparently dynamic and rich alternative avenue for the discipline. It has been seen as a method of avoiding the bias of the state with its landed boundaries and inbuilt prejudices, an original and neutral mode of representing the past.;This dissertation questions the smug assumptions of historical "thalassologists" by unveiling a long but masked tradition, stretching back to the very fixation of the disciplines of history and geography in the early nineteenth century, standing behind and hovering over Braudel's re-invigoration of maritime history. It also examines the civilizational implications of a discourse on the sea that emerged at the time and continues to the present, according to which the very idea of Europe (and of European superiority) is seen as intertwined with an exceptional relationship to maritimity. The geo-historical categories that preside over thalassological discourse are called into question, including the a priori but fallacious assumption of the secular historical consciousness of an Ottoman "Red Sea." A close textual analysis of late eighteenth-century Ottoman seafaring in the Red Sea is then offered, as providing the type of alternative exegesis with potential for rejuvenating and reorienting (maritime) history, reborn as thalassography.