8 ottoman trading to south east asia

I. The Ottoman Empire, to 1750

A. Expansion and Frontiers

1. Osman established the Ottoman Empire in northwestern Anatolia in 1300. He and his successors consolidated control over Anatolia, fought Christian enemies in Greece and in the Balkans, captured Serbia and the Byzantine capital of Constantinople, and established a general border with Iran.

2. Egypt and Syria were added to the empire in 1516–1517, and the major port cities of Algeria and Tunis voluntarily joined the Ottoman Empire in the early sixteenth century. Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent (r. 1520–1566) conquered Belgrade (1521) and Rhodes (1522) and laid siege to Vienna (1529), but withdrew with the onset of winter.

3. The Ottoman Empire fought with Venice for two centuries as it attempted to exert its control over the Mediterranean. The Ottomans forced the Venetians to pay tribute but continued to allow them to trade.

4. Muslim merchants in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean requested Ottoman naval support against the Portuguese. The Ottomans responded vigorously to Portuguese threats against nearby ports such as Aden, but saw no reason to commit much effort to the defense of non-Ottoman Muslim merchants in the Indian Ocean.

Islam, Trade and Politics Across the Indian Ocean is a research project which was funded by the British Academy over the period 2009–2012 and administered by the Association of South-East Asian Studies in the United Kingdom (ASEASUK) and the British Institute at Ankara (BIAA). The project was directed by Dr Andrew Peacock (BIAA and St. Andrews University) and Dr Annabel Gallop (ASEASUK and British Library).

The aim of the project was to investigate links between the lands of the Ottoman Empire and early Republican Turkey on the one hand and the Muslim peoples of South East Asia on the other over the sixteenth to twentieth centuries. The project was interested in all forms of interaction between these two regions, political, religious, literary, commercial and cultural, including exchanges and mutual influences in material culture. The project conducted research on evidence for these links, and offered small grants to researchers of all nationalities working on relevant themes.

At the conclusion of the project, an International Workshop From Anatolia to Aceh: Ottomans, Turks and Southeast Asia was held in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, 11–12 January 2012, in association with the International Centre for Aceh and Indian Ocean Studies (ICAIOS) and the State Islamic Institute (IAIN) Ar-Raniry.  The results of the project and workshop were presented in a travelling photographic exhibition, launched in London in 2012 in association with the British Library, which travelled to venues throughout the UK during 2012–2013. Two books will be published: an edited collection of papers from the International Workshop, and a volume of selected documents in Ottoman Turkish, Arabic and Southeast Asian languages.