Dr. Ruth Ennis is a historian based in Leipzig, Germany. Between January 2022 and September 2024, she worked at the University of Leipzig as a researcher on ‘Violence as Self-Defense in 20^th Century American History’. Currently she is working on the final manuscript of a book entitled “The ‘Migrant’ and her ‘Trafficker’: European Empire, A Metaphor and the Law (1866-1881), which will be published with De Gruyter next year.

The Emperor’s Sister: Orientalist Depictions of the female “White Slave” and the European making of Uncertain Boundaries

Abstract:  The “Eastern Question” arose following the 1815 Congress of Paris. From a historiographical point of view, this refers to past debates in Europe as to whether the Ottomans were to be considered part of the European project. The sun set on the “Eastern Question” as a result of the “Great Eastern Crisis” (1875-1878) and the 1878 Congress of Berlin, with Muslims thereafter being established as other and not part of the European self.

This paper explores the process by which the uncertain boundaries between Europe and the “Orient” became accepted norms. In order to do so, a visual history of several nineteenth-century paintings and a sculpture are examined which show the emergence of the orientalist trope of the female “white slave”. In contextualizing and analyzing these works, the interplay between territory, culture and mental dimensions are explored in how the figure of the “white slave” was used to make political commentary.

Between the memory politics of the Greek Revolution (1821-1832) and the context of the “Great Eastern Crisis”, these works reflected the seeds of ideological change in Europe. Symbolically, they spoke of a politics in which the white Christian woman must be protected from the threat of the “Oriental” man. Through the appropriation of a white women’s body and the othering of “Oriental” men, the politics of art was part of the making and solidifying of boundaries which established the superiority of white men. Thus, this paper argues that these aesthetics were part of the legitimisation of the nineteenth-century European colonial project which countered any notion that the Ottomans were part of the European project.