Sultan's Court: European Fantasies of the East

Edward Said’s Orientalism has been much praised for its account of Western perceptions of the Orient. But the English-speaking world has for too long been unaware of another classic in the same field which appeared in France only a year later. Alain Grosrichard’s The Sultan’s Court is a fascinating survey of Western accounts of “Oriental despotism” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It focuses particularly on portrayals of the Ottoman Empire and the supposedly enigmatic structure ...