Hachette

http://en.iae.org.tr/Publication/Journey-to-the-Center-of-the-East-1850-1950-/193/7

Journey to the Center of the East 1850-1950
100 Years of Travelers in İstanbul from Pierre de Gigord Collection
04 June - 17 October 2015
The exhibition tells the tale of İstanbul-centered travels of curious Westerners, who ventured out to the East from the 18th century onwards to quench their thirst for knowledge and discovery in their respective areas of interest.

Based on the changing profile of travelers of the East in time, it is possible to build a broad spectrum of people extending from missionaries, scientists, and merchants to politicians, adventurers, and artists. A crowded group of professionals including geographers, archaeologists, linguists, architects, botanist, and men of the cloth, traveled across Eastern geography from late 18th until mid-19th century.

After the Crimean War, the expedition-oriented, research language maintained until the 1850s was replaced by a travel-group language that devoured the Eastern culture. By then, the object of travel was no longer the information-gathering and interpreting travelers that scientific institutions sent to the East, but a type of tourist that rapidly pillaged this mysterious geography over images their predecessors created.

Based on materials selected from the vast collection of Pierre de Gigord, one of the leading collectors of Ottoman-era photographs and ephemera in the world, “Journey to the Center of the East 1850-1950” sheds light upon early years of mass tourism that replaced individual journeys of discovery, and the transformation of travel culture.

The accompanying catalogue is comprised of articles by the curators Ekrem Işın and Catherine Pinguet that examines the subject with a broader sense, and as well as articles by Jean-Michel Belorgey, Sophie Basch, Timour Muhidine and Thierry Zarcone on more spesific themes such as traveling to İstanbul by train, travelers' preferences of books, their interest in sufi orders, and tourist identity.

Historical geographers increasingly address editorial networks as an important element in contextual and situated readings of knowledge production. Recent work has shown that large publishing houses, such as Murray in Britain, Hachette in France and Perthes in Germany, played a primary role in shaping geographical knowledge. This paper's contribution is an analysis of the collaboration between Élisée Reclus (1830-1905) and Hachette over the Nouvelle Géographie universelle (NGU), a classic work in French geography that encompassed nineteen volumes between 1876 and 1894. Drawing upon archival sources, such as the published and unpublished correspondence between Reclus, his collaborators and the publishers, I argue that Reclus' negotiations with this mainstream publishing house were part of a political strategy that was deployed by early anarchist geographers to disseminate their views among broader audiences than just specialist and militant groups. This was a successful bargain for both sides, as there were approximately twenty thousand copies of each volume of the NGU printed. To understand this strategy of public communication and political influence, I examine the international group of anarchist geographers who were involved in Reclus' editorial endeavour within the wider context of Hachette's editorial networks. This involves situating the knowledge they produced in two locations: Paris, where Hachette's headquarters were established, and Clarens, the Swiss village to which Reclus was exiled, and where he worked with collaborators such as Pyotr Kropotkin and Léon Metchnikoff to establish the 'centre of calculation' for his large encyclopaedia.

Derrière l'image de la grand-mère aux récits édifiants, se trouve un écrivain prolifique, dont l’œuvre rencontra un succès colossal et qui sut prendre place dans le marché de l'édition. C'est l'image de la Comtesse de Ségur que nous questionnons dans ce deuxième volet.