This year\u2019s Book History Graduate Essay Award goes to Kathryn A. Schwartz, for her essay titled \u201cDid Ottoman Sultans Ban Print?\u201d The entire field of the history of the book in the Ottoman Empire rests on a deeply-rooted and longstanding fallacy, that is, the idea that Ottoman sultans at some point in the fifteenth or sixteenth century \u2018banned\u2019 print. In this article, Schwartz provocatively and convincingly argues that the accepted interpretation of an ordinance banning print has no documentary basis. Her careful and informed analysis of the historiography helps to chart the processes through which an idea without sources has been perpetuated in scholarly and mainstream histories. But she doesn\u2019t just challenge the veracity of this claim, which has become accepted through repetition to the status of fact, she also challenges the thinking behind such a claim. Schwartz argues that most accounts of the history of printing in the Ottoman Empire are based on a European perspective, comparing \u2018progress\u2019 in the art of printing in European countries with an apparent \u2018delay\u2019 in printing in the Ottoman world. There were crucial nationalist and political reasons why twentieth-century Turks and Arabs were persuaded to accept claims about the previous Ottoman rulers.\u00a0In this way, the author reveals with great precision just how the study of the history of printing served a particular, nationalist purpose in the modern Middle East.<\/p>\n
The co-editors found the paper ambitious, thoroughly researched, and highly original.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This year\u2019s Book History Graduate Essay Award goes to Kathryn A. Schwartz, for her essay titled \u201cDid Ottoman Sultans Ban Print?\u201d The entire field of the history of the book in the Ottoman Empire rests on a deeply-rooted and longstanding fallacy, that is, the idea that Ottoman sultans at some point in the fifteenth or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1884],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1090","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-events-announcements"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1090","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1090"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1090\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1092,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1090\/revisions\/1092"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1090"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1090"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1090"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}