Policing the Poor in the Late Ottoman Empire

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The police represent the state for most of the people who are not close to the centre of polity. In that sense, they are the transmission belts of the state, having the capacity to make the values of the centre palpable in the daily lives of citizens.' Since public order policing constitutes a major arena in which various societal forces and the state have stakes, it provides an especially convenient ground for discussing state-society interactions. In this context, the main goal of this article is to analyse the relationship between the state and the lower classes in the late Ottoman Empire, more specifically, after the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) came to power with a revolution in 1908. The CUP emerged as a liberal and bourgeois reaction against the system developed since the Tanzimat (1839-76). Having experienced Abduilhamid's personalistic rule later (1876-1909), the Unionists incorporated two strings of oppositional ideology. Against the Tanzimat, they were nationalist; and against Abdtilhamid, they were liberal. But above all, they were centralizers and modernizers par excellence. Capitalist considerations in economy were accompanied by a considerable increase in the circulation of money, and in the number of companies founded by the native bourgeoisie.2 The structure of cities consequently started to change. Effort was made to eliminate the traditional buffer institutions such as guilds and intermediary social forces in order to impose the will of the state. Moreover, various political parties, associations and, most importantly, the mobilized masses appeared on the political stage as important actors for the first time in Ottoman/Turkish history during this period. Surprisingly, however, although the CUP period is one of the most studied periods in Ottoman history, no scholar has mentioned - let alone analysed the highly important role of policing in this radical transformation of both state and society. It is not surprising that it was between 1908 and 1918 that the bureaucratic and structural specificities of the police were laid down and completed as part of the process of the centralization/modernization of the state.3 The capitalist logic of the new regime dictated a particular way of