Empire of Manners

It is easy to believe that manners are empty gestures, little more than social artifice or practiced etiquette whose sole purpose is to project civility and facilitate social interaction. But if we look more closely, they can tell us much more than we might first suppose, revealing what conventional accounts of state, economy, and religion often ignore. With this book, James Grehan offers a panoramic view of manners and sociability across the eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire, from the Balkans t