Crime, Punishment, and Social Control in the Late Ottoman Empire: An Introduction

<i>Prisons in the Late Ottoman Empire: Microcosms of Modernity</i>. By Kent F. Schull. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. Pp. xiii + 226. £70.

Security, Crime, Punishment, and Prisons in the Late Ottoman Empire 9 June 2015, Berlin Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) The bourgeoning literature on security, crime, punishment, and prisons in the Ottoman Empire presents opportunities to explore not only new archival investigations and methodological discussions about the notions of criminality in the Empire, but also encourages us to re-think the interconnected relation between law, security and penal policy in the Empire. This one-day workshop entitled “Security, Crime, Punishment, and Prisons in the Late Ottoman Empire” was a chance to present and discuss some recent examinations of the triangle of security, crime, and punishment in order to offer new insights into Ottoman social and legal history by providing case studies from throughout the Empire. As in many contemporary states, the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire saw the institutionalization of security forces and also the expansion of surveillance mechanisms, such as passport regulations in order to track population movements. More importantly, these mechanisms focused on hastening the process of surveilling criminals as defined by the State. Furthermore, through administrative and infrastructural urbanization attempts, particularly in the imperial center, which aided in regulating street life, new understandings of criminality generated novel relationships between Ottoman cities and their residents. This relationship was expressed through adherence, or not, to policies and the eventual construction of new prisons throughout the Empire. The workshop had three sessions and overall seven papers were presented during these sessions. In the first session of the workshop, Ebru Aykut (Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University) examined the practice of the death penalty and the meaning of justice in the late Ottoman Empire. Aykut argued that for the local authorities, the death penalty was a necessary instrument to deter criminals and maintain public order and security, which could be accomplished only if the punishment was inflicted immediately without delay. Aykut stated Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 447–449 Copyright © 2015 Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association. doi:10.2979/jottturstuass.2.2.19 that according to the State, the principle of legality and procedural correctness was more important and necessary than deterrence by punishment. Thus, there was a gap between the local understandings of justice, which were concerned more with the promptness of punishment than procedures and written law, and what justice meant for the central government. In this respect, Aykut elaborated that the death penalty turned into a contested and in some cases negotiable issue between the central and provincial authorities in the late Ottoman Empire. As the second presenter of the first session, Noémi LévyAksu (Boğaziçi University) focused on the use of martial law (örfi idare) in the aftermath of the Russo-Ottoman war of 1877–78 in various districts of the Balkans and Eastern Anatolia. Lévy-Aksu discussed and posited that banditry, gangs and ethno-religious tensions were the main reasons behind the application of martial law in these districts. By presenting many case studies from the late 1870s to early 1880s, Lévy-Aksu argued that martial law turned into a tool of government in terms of dealing with serious tensions at different levels of the state apparatus. In the second session of the workshop, İlkay Yılmaz (Istanbul University /ZMO) presented a paper on the hotel registers in the Hamidian Era, which were part of new mechanisms against security threats perceived by the Ottoman state. Yılmaz stated that some incidents occurred in the late Ottoman Empire, for instance assassination attempts and the demonstrations of Kumkapı in 1890 and Bâb-ı Âli in 1895, which played a major role in the shift of security practices of the Empire. Yılmaz argued that as in contemporary states such as in France and Belgium, the Ottoman government issued new registration regulations not only to collect individual information about the visitors of hotels and residents of apartments but also to track anarchists in the Empire. After presenting the relationship between city and crime in fin de siécle Istanbul, Nurçin İleri (Binghamton University) touched upon mapping criminality through space and time, which existed in the physical and social borders of the city, and analyzed the quantitative and...

Politics of Archaeology in the Late Ottoman Empire:The Case of a British Aristocrat Özge Aslanmirza (bio) KEYWORDS Mark Sykes, archaeology, Britain, Ottoman Empire, Middle East Mark Sykes was an eminent British diplomat and agent, known today largely for the Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916), which led to the partition of the post-Ottoman Middle East. Indeed, he was an active figure in the creation of the Mandate regimes in the region after the end of the First World War. He was also known as a member of Parliament and specialist on the Middle East due to his frequent travels, although he was a lay scholar. He had attended diverse schools, both in Britain and abroad, and he had dropped out of Cambridge University. Nevertheless, he was passionate and curious about history, politics, archaeology, geography, and linguistics. His aristocratic background provided him with numerous opportunities, including travelling and conducting amateur research in the Middle East. By combining his diverse abilities, political connections and immense interest in the Middle East, he would become one of the most influential figures in British politics and foreign policy. This article will explore Mark Sykes' use of archaeology as a political tool, based on archival sources; namely, The Papers of Mark Sykes, a collection currently held at Hull University. I made use of the microfilm versions of these documents from the Turkish Historical Foundation. Alongside this, I benefited from the archival sources at the Hull History Centre, and the Prime Ministry Ottoman Archives (Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi). Sykes was the son of a "world wanderer" and trader, who was himself particularly fascinated by the Middle East. In his youth, he had read popular Orientalist books, such as Richard Burton's translation of the Arabian Nights,1 as well as travelled with his father, Tatton Sykes, to the Middle East; later, he would be fascinated by his Cambridge professors' knowledge of antiquity. As [End Page 261] may be gleaned from Mark Sykes' writings, his father was familiar with the local people of the Middle East. For instance, in 1888, when he made his trip to Egypt, Sykes stated that he learned about the antiquities of the region from the Sirdar Lord Greenfell,2 who had close relations with the Sykes family. In the biography of Mark Sykes written by his grandson, Christopher Simon Sykes, he conveys that during Mark Sykes' journeys in the Levant, "he befriended the sheiks of different tribes, who told him of the local sights, kept him fed and watered, and more importantly gave him their protection."3 A year later, when he went to Jerusalem, Sykes related that "one of the old Sheikh Fellah recognized me and shouted to the crowd that I was his son."4 This example indicates the close relationship between Sykes and the locals. Although the travel notes of Tatton Sykes have not survived to the present day, it is likely that Mark Sykes' father was engaged in intelligence gathering activities, which would influence the later career of his son. Like his father, Mark Sykes was able to travel safely in different regions throughout the Middle East. He worked for a long time with an experienced dragoman, named İsa Kıbrıslı, who knew the region well. Kıbrıslı was an experienced guide, who had previously been employed by "Lord Chelmsford in the Abyssinian campaign and accompanied Sir Charles Wilson to Mount Sinai."5 The journey which is the subject of this paper took place when he was nineteen years old, in 1898. This was also the time when small scale explorations were transforming into more systematic and larger-scaled ones.6 Thus, the case of Sykes fits into the zeitgeist of the era, particularly considering his further investment in politics began with his journeys to the Middle East for the purposes of knowledge gathering. The original notes kept during the journey, as well as his related sketches, are among the Papers of Mark Sykes catalogued under the title of 'Journey from Jericho to Damascus.' His notes and observations were originally published as an article in the 1899 issue of Palestine Exploration Quarterly, the journal of Palestine Exploration Fund.7 The PEF is important in the...

Dangerous Gifts: Imperialism, Security, and Civil Wars in the Levant, 1798–1864

Empire by Law: Ottoman Sovereignty and the British Occupation of Egypt, 1882-1923 Aimee M. Genell This dissertation is an analysis of the Ottoman-European legal contest over Egypt. I explore the relationship between international law, imperial expansion and state formation in the late Ottoman Empire against the joint reconfiguration of ideas of sovereignty and imperial control during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The British occupation of Egypt (1882-1914) was a novel experiment in quasi-colonial administration, where legal justifications for the occupation demanded the retention of Ottoman institutions and shaped administrative practices. My research examines the significance and consequences of maintaining Ottoman sovereignty in Egypt during the British occupation in an effort to explain the formation of a distinctive model of sovereignty, both for late empires and for successor states in the post-Ottoman Middle East. I argue that a new model of client-state sovereignty, produced during the course of the occupation, emerged out of the intense imperial rivalry between the Ottoman and Europe Empires in Egypt. This model had lasting significance more generally for how we define states and sovereignty today. These findings recast the Ottoman Empire as a major, albeit weak, actor in European diplomacy. Though Ottoman and European history have developed as separate fields of academic inquiry, my research shows that nineteenth and early twentieth century European and Ottoman political practices and ideas were inextricably intertwined. The Ottoman Empire contributed to and was perhaps the key testing ground for enduring political and administrative experiments in the post-imperial international order.

<i>Orphans and Destitute Children in the Late Ottoman Empire</i>. By Nazan Maksudyan. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2014. Pp. xviii + 232. $39.95 (hardcover).

The Gender and Sexuality of Armenia

Depending on the angle of view, the first and second Balkan1 wars of 1912–13 have been considered either as the culmination of a freedom struggle2 for the Christian nations of south-eastern Europe ...

There is a general consensus among Ottomanists that capital punishment became a rare occurrence in the Ottoman Empire from the 1840s onwards. This paper argues that two structural aspects of the reformed criminal justice system functioned as constraints on the imposition of the death penalty in the late Ottoman Empire. The first concerns the Tanzimat state’s particular attention to the principle of legality and procedural correctness with regard to criminal prosecution and sentencing. These principles, together with a centralized judicial review procedure, deprived local authorities of discretionary punishment powers that left them little leeway to administer the law on their own. This resulted in the circumscribed use of summary executions and death sentences for crimes against the state. The second aspect concerns the merging of Islamic criminal law, particularly Hanafi doctrines, with state-enacted penal codes, and, in parallel, the dual trial procedure carried out in crimes committed against individuals, i.e., homicide. Drawing on archival sources as well as distinct viewpoints harbored by the Ottoman elites, this article contends that the mingling of two spheres of jurisdiction extensively restricted the power of the judicial councils/Nizamiye courts to pass death sentences for acts of premeditated murder.

Reviewed by: Orthodox Christians in the Late Ottoman Empire: A Study of Communal Relations in Anatolia by Ayşe Özil İpek K. Yosmaoğlu (bio) Ayşe Özil, Orthodox Christians in the Late Ottoman Empire: A Study of Communal Relations in Anatolia. New York: Routledge. 2013. Pp. xv + 186. 11 Illustrations, 5 maps. Cloth $140. Appearing almost simultaneously with Nicholas Doumanis’s Before the Nation: Muslim-Christian Coexistence and Its Destruction in Late Ottoman Anatolia (Oxford, 2012), this book is a welcome addition to the growing English-language literature about the Greek Orthodox communities of the Ottoman Empire. Özil taps into a rich selection of primary sources, including the collections of the Center for Asia Minor Studies in Athens; the Greek Foreign Ministry and State Archives; Archives of the Greek Educational Association; the Prime Ministry Ottoman Archives; Ottoman Court Records; and the British National Archives. Some of this material had remained virtually untapped, and the author does an admirable job of parsing these sources to further our understanding of what she calls “the notion [of community] in practice” (15)—specifically, in this instance, the koinotites of Greek Orthodox Christians in northwestern Asia Minor and not the Orthodox Christians, writ large, of the empire, despite what the title suggests. The author’s focus is on the province of Hüdavendigar that extended from the shores of the Marmara Sea in the north to the west-central Anatolian hinterland in the south, including a stretch along the Aegean around the town of Ayvalik (Kidonies). Building on the work of scholars such as Richard Clogg, Haris Exertzoglou, Socrates Petmezas, Eleni Frangakis-Syrett, and Edhem Eldem, among others, Özil acknowledges, and proceeds to challenge, a common misperception in conventional narrative histories of the Ottoman Empire, namely that the (Greek) Orthodox mainly comprised a class of “merchant bourgeoisie.” She emphasizes the diversity and social stratification within the Greek Orthodox community, not only across the empire, but also in relatively more homogenous administrative entities such as the Hüdavendigar province. Moving beyond the well-worn paradigm of a monolithic Rum milleti, the book, in the author’s words, “tries to understand what the community was about by exploring the notion in practice. … [It] takes a relational approach and treats the Christian presence under the Ottomans as a variable set of contexts and situations” (15). In order to accomplish these objectives, Özil turns her focus to “institutions,” an understanding of which, she argues, is necessary to make sense of communal relations (17). The book is organized in five chapters following this institutional framework, in the following order: local administration; local finances and taxation; legal corporate status; law and justice; nationality. Özil’s most significant contributions are in the sections where she carefully defines the post- Tanzimat (administrative reforms staring in the 1840s) koinotita as a vital institution of local governance for the Greek Orthodox subjects. While discussing at length its membership structure and relationship with the church, the author nevertheless notes the limitations of the koinotita and the simultaneous existence of other, less formal ways of communal organization. Another important intervention of the author is her discussion of the “legal corporate status” of non-Muslim millets in the Ottoman Empire, including Orthodox Christians, which presumably allowed their highest-ranking religious authority to govern these groups with a great degree of autonomy, easily lending itself to the construction of a sense of collective identity. These assumptions were central to the static and old-fashioned view of millets and [End Page 203] the millet system—to the extent that one can speak of a system as such—as the kernel of nations and national resistance to the Ottoman yoke. Özil does not merely add to the old discussion of whether or not there were autonomous millets in the Ottoman Empire; instead, she directly tackles questions concerning the authority accorded to communities in addressing internal legal disputes. By using examples of such disputes over communal ownership of real estate, she demonstrates that any notion of communal “corporate legal status” is false. Furthermore she shows that until the legislation of March 1913, which allowed “the registration of immovable property in the name of institutions,” communal property was deeded to individuals—a...

Reviewed by: Orphans and Destitute Children in the Late Ottoman Empire by Nazan Maksudyan Heidi Morrison Orphans and Destitute Children in the Late Ottoman Empire. By Nazan Maksudyan. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2014. 232 pp. Cloth $39.95. Historian Nazan Maksudyan breaks new ground as one of the first scholars to insert children into the Ottoman Empire’s historical narrative. Through the lens of meticulously collected archival records on orphans and destitute children, [End Page 327] Maksudyan argues that children are invaluable historical actors in the late Ottoman Empire’s process of modernization, including projects of urbanization, citizen formation, and welfare policies. As the multinational and decentralized late Ottoman Empire sought to transform to a centralized modern nation state, concerned parties saw the regulation of abandoned, vagrant, begging, and refugee children as a way to refashion religious and political identities, as well as create a new workforce. The state, foreign missionaries, and religious and civil leaders competed to save unfortunate children, who went from being once invisible, non-political members of society to prospective future subjects. Maksudyan’s book begins by making a generalized case for why it is important to write a “history from below,” then traces marginalized children’s activity from the innermost recesses of society to the international stage. Chapter one examines new state techniques for the governance of foundlings, which were propagated to advance the image of modernity. In reality, children in the institutions were ill-cared for, and non-Muslim communities felt alienated by the state’s intrusion into the care of its youngest members. Chapter two provides an intimate look at domestic servant girls’ resistance to abuse by fostering patriarchs. Government concern for these girls did not focus on abuse, but instead on using the girls as a means of policing sexuality and furthering its reach into the population. The third chapter argues that the expansive number of vocational orphanages at the heart of cities was linked to the process of disciplining urban centers and furthering industrial progress. The final chapter looks at the role that abandoned children played in international politics. Foreign missionaries rivaled the Ottoman state and local communal leaders in their thinly veiled proselytizing relief efforts for war-orphaned children. Overall, Maksudyan’s book shows that orphaned and destitute children were at the center of creating the new, modern social order of the late Ottoman Empire. Maksudyan’s book does not provide novel arguments about Ottoman history, nor does it purport to do so. Several historians have documented that the late Ottoman state, and other interested parties, sought to manipulate and control subjects in the modernization process. The contribution of Maksudyan’s book comes from the light it shines on destitute and neglected children as integral to the process of Ottoman modernization. (Historian Benjamin Fortna has already shown that mainstream schoolchildren were part of this process.) Maksudyan’s book successful rescues the most marginalized of children from the past and triumphantly reminds historians to pay attention to the human terms of modernization. From cries at the doorsteps of police stations to little dead bodies without registered names, discarded children are makers of history. It is up to future researches to take the torch Maksudyan has helped light [End Page 328] and move forward in discerning what new insights children can provide about Middle Eastern history. Beth Baron’s The Orphan Scandal: Christian Missionaries and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood (2013) provides perhaps one of the first examples of how this can be done, albeit in the context of modern Egypt. Maksudyan’s book can be of interest to historians seeking to unearth the subaltern in the Ottoman past, and also to historians of other world regions seeking to compare care-taking systems for abandoned and orphaned children. Adoption is not legally possible in Islamic law, and hence unknown in Ottoman society. Heidi Morrison University of Wisconsin, La Crosse Copyright © 2015 Johns Hopkins University Press

The so-called ‘Edict of Inheritance’ of 1841 formalized the autonomous status of Egypt as a privileged province within the Ottoman Empire and secured hereditary succession to its government for the...

Acknowledgements - List of Abbreviations - Introduction - Employment of Slaves in the Classical Ottoman Empire - Traditional Ottoman Policies towards Slavery before the Tanzimat - Means of Enslavement and Slave Acquisition in the Late Ottoman Empire: Continuation of Ottoman Slavery after 1839 - British Policy and Ottoman Slavery - Ottoman Policy during the Tanzimat Period, 1846-1876 - Ottoman Policy during the Reign of Abdulhamid II and the Advent of the Young Turks, 1876-1909 - The Emancipation and Care of Slaves in the Late Ottoman Empire -Conclusion - Notes - Bibliography - Index

Research Article| August 01 2001 Learning to Read in the Late Ottoman Empire and Early Turkish Republic Benjamin C. Fortna Benjamin C. Fortna Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (2001) 21 (1-2): 33–41. https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-21-1-2-33 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Benjamin C. Fortna; Learning to Read in the Late Ottoman Empire and Early Turkish Republic. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 1 August 2001; 21 (1-2): 33–41. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-21-1-2-33 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsComparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East2002 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Studies in the context of the professionalisation of the teaching profession in Turkey mainly focus on policies and practices for teacher training in the Republican Period. However, the practices and policies in the last period of the Ottoman Empire for training modern teachers, which have an extensive historical background for the professionalisation of the teaching profession, have not been analysed within a holistic framework. Based on this deficiency, the present study discussed the professionalisation process of the teaching profession in the Ottoman Empire. In this direction, the aim of the present study is to evaluate the teacher training policies and practices for modern civilian schools in the Ottoman Empire by analysing them in terms of professionalisation of the teaching profession. Five criteria were determined that indicate the professionalisation process of the teaching profession in the Ottoman Empire. In line with these criteria, it has been understood that important steps have been taken towards the professionalisation of teaching in the late Ottoman Empire. Efforts towards establishing specific criteria for entering the profession, the methods applied for the professional development of teachers, the increase in the roles and competencies of educators/teachers in subjects related to teaching, the possibility for teachers to form professional organisations and, finally, improvement in the social status of the teaching profession were the important steps taken in the last period of the Ottoman Empire. Study data included archive documents, regulations, and ordinances concerning the teaching profession, advertisements, and news or articles about the teaching profession in the press of the period. The historical method was used for this study.