Sea Change: Ottoman Textiles between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean.

• Author: Kucuk, Teoman Kenn

By Amanda Phillips

University of California Press, 2021, 340 pages, ISBN: 978520303591

Sea Change: Ottoman Textiles between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean by Amanda Phillips is a book that is at once a specialist work, and relevant to so many other fields. Covering the textile production, art styles, and trade of the 15th-19th century Ottoman Empire, Phillips is attempting to use this subject to create links to the rest of Ottoman, and even world history.

Perhaps the best way to evaluate the success of this particular goal, is to use an example from the work itself. In the first chapter, Phillips describes the form and production of kadife, or velvet. The main body makes up of warps stretched out by the loom and wefts that weave across them, this "most complicated of compound weaves" is set apart by its use of "piles"--extra warp or weft threads that stick out in tufts or loops to create a more voluminous fabric (p. 39).

Sea Change is like a velvet cloth. A book requiring great expertise and painstakingly rigorous work, it is a rich synthesis of information, the closely studied and helpfully illustrated examples making up the loom-bound warps, while the intricate knowledge of the context provided by written sources weave through these and pull them together like wefts. The pile, however, would be the connection to history outside of the immediate purview of textile production and consumption. These are brought up and used, in part, to contextualize the samples studied; however, oftentimes they do not run through the book and help give it structure, but instead terminate in loose ends, making it hard to see evidence of Phillips' rightful insistence that material sources such as textiles can be used to elucidate history beyond these sources themselves.

Phillips states her numerous intentions in the introduction, from challenging narratives of steady rise and decline to arguing for the value of textiles and other materials that blur the line between "art" and "craft" as sources in history and art history (p. 7). All in all, Phillips sets out to champion the role of textiles as worthy of research and complicate their histories that at present, whether temporally or spatially, are too readily glossed over.

Where the introduction contextualizes the work with art historical terms and references to past works on the subject, the first chapter performs the same function but for the matter at hand: textiles in what would become the Ottoman...