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Their comparative discourse on the Japanese nation-state possessed a heavily anticolonial tone that also emphasized the particularistic heritage of the Egyptians and thus disconnected them from the larger Ottoman Arab population in other provinces, who considered themselves part of a fledgling pan-Arab nation stretching across the Levant and North Africa. As all these members of the Ottoman community shared in pan-Asian feelings of solidarity with Japan, an intimation of equality with one another could be said to have been etched into Ottoman consciousness despite 20 Ottomans Imagining Japan ethno-religious distinctions.

I explore the historiography of East and West as binary categories, then move on to look at the rise of Japan and the Chinese response to this in comparison to Islamic civilization’s relationship to the West. Japan reversed the global political order according to many Asian observers; I probe some of the relevant commentary made by Ottoman writers claiming that Japan had done precisely this, juxtaposing their views within the context of other Eastern or Asian attitudes toward Japanese modernity.

The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them . . has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations. . It is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were 28 Ottomans Imagining Japan destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm. . 8 European expansion and the secular, scientific rationalism of the Enlightenment dictated the historicization of the nation-state. 9 The Western nation-state was implied to be and indeed was accepted as the norm demonstrating the successful achievement of progress and modernization in the current era.