AGENCY AND REPRESENTATION

Expositions were potent sites of information about the contemporaneous state of technology, art, architecture and culture at an international scale. In the nineteenth century, in Western perception the world was composed of two parts: the Orient and the Occident. The world expositions of the nineteenth century, however, cannot be evaluated based merely on the representation of Eastern countries by the Western World. Western historiographers of architecture criticize ‘other'' architectures from an Orientalist perspective where the uniqueness and dominance of the West were emphasized. This book focuses on Ottoman participation in these exhibitions. The main argument is that the Ottoman representation cannot be evaluated under the category of colonial countries on the one hand and Western perceptions of Ottoman society at the time being on the other. Analyzing the active agency of the Ottoman presence in the World Exhibitions, the present study challenges the passive role that is usually attributed by contemporary historiography to the representation of non-Western cultures.