Europeans recognized Ottomans as diplomatic equals, not colonial targets

Evidence

The attitude of Britons toward the Turks was one of “fear, anxiety, and awe.” Further, the idea of colonization was not applied to the Ottomans. Thus, Queen Elizabeth “cooperated commercially and diplomatically with both the Turks of the Ottoman Empire and the Moors of the Kingdom of Morocco, and never entertained or articulated—and nor did her subjects—projects for colonizing them.” In the seventeenth century, the British either embraced Ottoman civilization or vilified it. All along, however, there was a sense that the Turks were not outsiders. Certainly, they were not “outside the diplomatic scope of alliance and peace treaty, individual friendship and amicable correspondence—and even marriage.” — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 113

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• SEED: Essay angle: ‘When Europe feared the East’ — the historical moment when the West was the anxious, awe-struck periphery, useful corrective to presentist anti-Muslim narratives.
• SHARE: The Queen Elizabeth detail — that she cooperated commercially with Turks and Moors and never contemplated colonizing them — is a great factoid for someone interested in early modern diplomacy.

Related

• Fear and anxiety about Muslims coexisted with equal diplomatic standing before imperialism (similarity 0.91)
• Elizabethan England never conceived colonizing the Ottomans or Moors (similarity 0.90)
• British views of Ottomans mixed fear and awe without colonial designs (similarity 0.84)
• English attitudes treated Ottomans as equals before Orientalism’s emergence (similarity 0.82)
• Europeans once considered the Ottomans ethnically European (similarity 0.81)
• Europeans regarded Ottomans as equals before Orientalism’s hierarchy emerged (similarity 0.80)
• Seventeenth-century Europeans did not yet dream of dominating the Muslim East (similarity 0.79)
• The Ottomans, not England, were the expansionist imperial power in the 1500s-1600s (similarity 0.79)
• Stereotyping of Muslims was constrained by England’s inability to challenge the Ottomans (similarity 0.79)