عنوان

A Chinese system for an Ottoman State: The frontier, the millennium, and Ming bureaucracy in Khatāyī's Book of China

TL47955

انگلیسی

A Chinese system for an Ottoman State: The frontier, the millennium, and Ming bureaucracy in Khatāyī's Book of China

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[Thesis]

Kaveh Louis Hemmat

Woods, John

The University of Chicago

2014

482

Committee members: Fleischer, Cornell; Lewis, Franklin

Place of publication: United States, Ann Arbor; ISBN=978-1-321-22391-0

Ph.D.

Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations

The University of Chicago

2014

At least since the Mongol conquests, the main cultural and political centers of the Muslim world in the Nile-to-Oxus region were linked by rich and multifarious commercial and cultural networks to the eastern and western extremities of the Afro-Eurasian oikumene, including China. This study is concerned with the role that awareness of the Chinese polity played in Islamic political thought. Muslim polities', and especially the Ottomans', turn to more centralized political structure that would become typical of Early Modern absolutist empires over the course of the 16^th century, was anticipated a century and a half earlier by the rise of the Ming dynasty in China. And yet, little has been written about how the Chinese polity was perceived and represented in the Muslim world during the Ming period, or even about representations of China in Islamicate culture, more generally. This study turns to the Khatāynāmah or 'Book of China,' a description of China written in 922/1516 for the Ottoman Emperor, Selim I, by Sayyid 'Alī Akbar Khatāyī, a merchant from Transoxiana who had traveled to Beijing during the Zhengde reign (1505-1521), for evidence of how the Ming state was perceived in western Eurasia, and the role these perceptions may have played in the turn towards bureaucratization and centralization in the Ottoman Empire. The most substantial text on China in any west Eurasian language before the late 16^th century, the Khatāynamah addressed the Ottoman court as well as a larger urban, Muslim public, and argued for a turn towards more centralized, bureaucratic governance and the complete regulation of the polity by an artificial law and system. The depiction of Chinese bureaucracy and the relationship between codified law, legal tradition, custom, and policy presciently anticipates, and may have served as a model for, the expansion of the bureaucracy and codification of law that occurred in the reign of Selim's successor, Süleyman 'the Lawgiver'. As a text that concerns both a specific non-Muslim polity, and general themes such as empire, political centralization, bureaucracy, and the nature of crafts, trades, and technology, which were of interest in Islamicate political and imaginative literature in the 15 ^th and 16^th centuries, it can also serve as evidence of how improved firearms and other technological developments, occurring within western Eurasia, were perceived. Although it is never possible to determine the exact cultural and political legacy of any single book, the Khatāynāmah was not the only channel through which Central Asian Muslims, and even the Ottoman court, learned about China. In addition to constituting an important episode in the history of contact between China and western Eurasia, it tells us about what other travelers are likely to have said, and provides a window onto the larger processes of communication underlying hemisphere-wide political trends that culminated in, or were foreclosed by, the modern world order.

History; World History; Islamic Studies

Social sciences;Central asia;China;Chinese bureaucracy;Early modern absolutis empires;Ottoman;Travel

Ben Daniel, Tallie

Woods, John

Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations

The University of Chicago

1620261486; 3638591

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276903

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