The waning Ottoman threat turned European orientalism from fear into amusement

Evidence

In the absence of the historical conditions that motivated it in the first place, it sometimes became a purely formal minor genre, employed for its value as an exotic conversation piece more than its power to evoke earnest religious sentiment. Privileged Europeans could now for the first time afford to imagine the exotic not as something to fear and admire, but as something to be amused by. (There were chinoiserie rooms and busts of Turks and Africans inside the chateaux. In the parks outside there were caged monkeys and free-roaming peacocks. Live “Turks” and “Tatars” often added to the exotic coterie, as in the case of the Kamerturken at the court of Prussia’s Frederic III.) — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 183

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s trees-as-infrastructure piece and general worldbuilding interest: how a geopolitical threat’s decline reshapes an entire artistic genre is a map of how symbolic systems track power, echoing how Osage-orange thorns track extinct megafauna. — connects to: British views of Ottomans mixed fear and awe without colonial designs