This admirable, innovative volume offers a unique panorama of archaeology and the traffic in antiquities generated in Ottoman lands during the essential formative period of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While it does not discuss Ottoman Egypt and Palestine (whose inclusion might have doubled the page count), Scramble for the Past engages strategically with archaeology and its institutions in modern-day Turkey, as well as Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Greece. The book’s editors and contributors analyze activities by English, French, German, and Austrian scholars and archaeologists at home and abroad. Further, and crucially, they break new ground by considering the motivations of the Ottoman peoples and government, rescuing them from the more common role of largely passive or picturesque backdrop for Western narratives of discovery.

In their introductory essay, “Archaeology and Empire,” the editors state as their goal to challenge the view that “scientific archaeology” constitutes “a purely disinterested realm...

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