162 - Richard Robert Madden: The Turkish Empire, In Its Relations with Christianity and Civilization London, 1862

Richard Robert Madden: The Turkish Empire, In Its Relations with Christianity and Civilization London, 1862 First edition, in quarto, complete in two volumes,contemporary leather over boards slightly rubbed, joints weak, text clean and bright, overall in very good condition A massive work that remains one of the most blistering critiques of the Ottoman state ever written by a Westerner. Madden was a fascinating figure, a doctor, a diplomat, and a fierce abolitionist who fought against the slave trade in the West Indies. He brought this same social justice lens to the Levant. Having first traveled to the Levant in the 1820s, his 1862 work is the culmination of forty years of observation and correspondence. Madden was a vocal skeptic of the reforms. He argued that the Turkish government was incapable of true civilization because its foundational laws were incompatible with the progress Madden was a lifelong Philhellene. He describes the suffering of the Greek and Christian populations under Ottoman rule in graphic detail, viewing the 1821 Revolution as only the beginning of a necessary total collapse of the Empire. Drawing on his background as a slave-trade abolitionist, Madden provides one of the few contemporary accounts that centers on the domestic slave trade in Constantinople and the provinces, a topic many other travelers glossed over as picturesque.He argued that the Christian Question was actually a moral struggle. He believed the Empire's survival was an affront to the Christian Civilization of Europe. Much of the two volumes is dedicated to a history of Ottoman atrocities, intended to remind British readers of the Empire's violent past.