OTTOGLOB - Ottoman Sefaretnames: A New Source Base for the Early History of Global Diplomacy

In the early 18th century, the ambassadors of the Ottoman Empire began to file detailed sefaretnames, or mission reports, upon the completion of their embassies abroad. As the earliest serial collection of diplomatic travel reports to be preserved by any extra-European state, sefaretnames offer an untapped window into the origins of both global diplomacy and global knowledge production from a uniquely non-Western perspective. OTTOGLOB proposes the first systematic study of these distinctive sources, the majority of which remain unpublished and in some cases even uncatalogued, in part through the adoption of new handwriting-recognition technologies for Ottoman Turkish texts.