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

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Previous article FreeBook ReviewsPrisons in the Late Ottoman Empire: Microcosms of Modernity. By Kent F. Schull. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. Pp. xiii + 226. £70.Cihangir GundogduCihangir GundogduIstanbul Bilgi University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreKent F. Schull’s Prisons in the Late Ottoman Empire: Microcosms of Modernity explores prison reform and prisons in the late Ottoman Empire. The book identifies Ottoman prisons as “laboratories” of Ottoman modernity and nation-state construction. It argues that Ottoman prisons, besides serving as instruments of social control and discipline, became “a microcosm of Ottoman modernity” (p. 61), thus going beyond their conventional role as disciplinary institutions and providing a venue in which many pressing questions of Ottoman modernity were tested,such as administrative and centralisation, the role of punishment in the rehabilitation of prisoners, economic reform and industrialization, issues of gender and childhood, the implementation of modern concepts of time and space, identity, social engineering, the rationalisation and standardisation of Islamic criminal law, and the role of the state in caring for its population. (p. x)In analyzing prison reform in the late Ottoman Empire, Schull utilizes official documents and correspondence available at the Prime Ministry Ottoman Archives (BOA) and the British National Archives (BNA), as well as published government papers, law codes, and newspapers. The book relies primarily on documents classified by the Ministry of Interior’s Directorate of Prisons (DH. MB. HPS), which include prison statistics, photographs, and expenditure and sanitation reports.Prisons in the Late Ottoman Empire is organized into six thematically intertwined chapters, each examining a certain aspect of the reform program, the prisons and their inmates. In the first two chapters, Schull delineates the historical and intellectual foundations of prison reform in the late Ottoman Empire, highlighting the implementation of the reform, the experiences of prisoners and officials, and the challenges that awaited them. Chapter 1 traces the transformation of Ottoman legal practices and structures in the premodern and modern eras, and outlines the Ottoman judicial accommodations of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, mainly to underscore the continuities between the two periods. This chapter provides a review of the recently emerging literature on Ottoman criminal and judicial practices, such as policing, transformations in legal codes, and the empire’s court system (p. 23). The section on the transformation of the Imperial Ottoman Penal Code (IOPC), which is examined over two successive eras (the Tanzimat-Hamidian period [1850–1908] and the Second Constitutional period [1908–1919]), explores the structure of the code and the various modifications/alterations that it underwent.Chapter 2 elaborates the prison reform from the state perspective and explains the possible motivations of the actors. It particularly describes the intellectual basis of the prison reform in association with other broad themes such as “civilizational transformation, prisoner rehabilitation, increased administrative centralization, standardization, and rationalization, order and discipline, and the creation and expansion of state patriarchy” (p. 43).According to Schull, the Tanzimat-Hamidian era—and especially the Hamidian period, which lasted until the 1908 Revolution—marks a critical turning point in the history of Ottoman prisons, particularly in comparison with the Second Constitutional period. Many important reforms, such as the establishment of the first model prison (1871) (p. 46), the issuance of the Prison Regulation (1880) (p. 47), and the establishment of the Commission for Expediting Initiatives, were realized in this period to improve the conditions of the incarcerated (p. 49). In contrast, the Second Constitutional period is described as a period when “police and prisons constitute[d] key institutions for maintaining power and imposing order and discipline upon a population, especially during times of crisis,” that is, institutions essential for “social control and modern state formation” (p. 50). Moreover, he claims that prison reform in this period “began almost immediately with the intent to exploit penal institutions for the purpose of social engineering” (p. 51). Schull identifies the inauguration of the first comprehensive prison census in January 1912 as a turning point in the Committee of Union and Progress’ prison-reform program, since the information gathered helped the Committee to “meld the empire’s population and administration into a modern nation-state” (p. 53).Whereas the first two chapters of the book outline the transformation of Ottoman penal practices and judicial transformations, the subsequent chapters focus on the implementation of the Ottoman prison reform program—particularly, the techniques and technologies used, the experiences of the prison inmates and officials, the various challenges faced, and the social and ethno-religious background of the incarcerated. Chapter 3 provides an examination of the conduct and contents of the 1912 prison survey and the various categories that state officials employed to classify the empire’s prisoner populations. Some of the categories included in the 1912 survey are age, gender, and social and ethno-religious background. Based on the survey Schull argues that “the vast majority of the 1911–12 prison population came from the lowest socio-economic classes”—that is, from “the masses that CUP feared so intensely” (p. 98). “The CUP,” he further claims, “was very keen to monitor and control these segments of society” (p. 83). According to Schull, the use and importance of statistics, which the members of CUP realized during the 1903 Macedonian census, also help us to understand the Committee’s “conceptualizations of difference, in terms of race, ethnicity, religion and nationality” (p. 91). The use and meaning of millet in the questionnaire, the author further observes, “reveal several significant insights into CUP conceptions of difference” (p. 94). For Schull, “this investigation into the use and meaning of millet in the prison survey possesses the potential for much greater implications regarding late Ottoman ‘nationalist’ history—particularly in terms of the development of Turkish nationalism” and “challenges the claim that the CUP was dominated by Turkish nationalists bent on ‘Turkifying’ the empire in order to create a Turkish state” (p. 101).Chapters 4, 5, and 6 provide a closer examination of the implementation of the prison reform—the conditions of the prisons, their spatial organization, the efforts to rehabilitate the conditions of the incarcerated, reformers’ vision of the prison staff, official attempts to combat corruption in prisons, and the transformation in the conception of juvenile delinquency—from the perspective and experiences of its subjects (i.e., the prisoners and those charged with implementing the reforms, including government officials and prison staff). Chapter 4 investigates conditions in the prisons during the Second Constitutional period, when they were paralyzed by the “constant problem with overcrowding” (p. 115), and examines the plight of their inmates and the government’s attempt to construct new prisons. According to Schull, “During the Second Constitutional Period, the Prison Administration viewed the design and construction of modern prisons as the remedy for poor sanitary conditions” (p. 121) and intended to bring the health and hygiene of Ottoman prisons “into conformity with the ‘laws of civilization’” (p. 144). He further claims: “Ottoman officials, however, did not appropriate these ideas from the West” (p. 130). More importantly, he sees the establishment of prison factories as one of the CUP’s first steps in implementing its plan to create an Ottoman “national economy” (milli iktisat) (p. 132).Chapter 5 gives an overview of the government’s attempt to eradicate corruption among prison staff and “discipline the disciplinarians” (p. 160). It discusses the qualifications and responsibilities of prison officials and CUP’s attempts to eradicate indiscipline among the prison staff. The book illustrates cases of corruption through prisoners’ petitions intended to draw the attention of the authorities to abuses by prison staff. Chapter 6 mainly provides a discussion of the implementation of prison reform, focusing particularly on juvenile delinquency. Starting with the social and legal definitions of childhood in the Middle East in general and the Ottoman Empire in particular, the chapter considers the legal status of children in terms of criminal culpability and the various institutional means employed by Midhat Pasha and Abdülhamid II (r. 1876–1909) to reform juvenile delinquents. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of CUP’s legal arrangements concerning juvenile delinquents.The present study contributes to our understanding of the Ottoman modernization project by expanding it to the relatively less-studied field of prisons and prisoners’ experiences, which, except for a few studies, has largely been ignored in favor of other macroinstitutional changes in the army, economy and administration. In that regard, this study and others like it, unlike the above-mentioned macroinstitutional narratives, help us to delineate the official perspective and motivations that aimed at a wholesale transformation of state-society relations.In spite of the originality of the research, the present book suffers from certain shortcomings. In chapter 4, Schull’s analysis of the spatial organization of the prisons includes the note that “there are literally thousands of prison architectural designs, building estimates, and expenditure reports held in the Ottoman archives that illustrate the massive scale of this operation” (p. 56). It would have helped the reader to better grasp the prison model and the reform program that the government intended if the book had included some of these prison plans or sketches. Furthermore, comparing some of these plans with model prisons in other parts of the world would have made the chapter more productive and interesting. Such a comparative perspective, if employed, would enable the reader to better appreciate the peculiarities of the Ottoman modernization program in general—which Schull frequently emphasizes—and of the prison reform in particular.Whereas the book claims to adopt a bottom-up perspective, one reads in it very little about the experiences of incarcerated women, juvenile delinquents, and members of non-Muslim communities. Although one rarely encounters members of these classes writing about their experiences, an “archaeology” and close reading of Ottoman official documents, correspondence, and prison reports would provide important insights into the voices of the subaltern.Moreover, the book’s argument that prisons played a key role in Ottoman modernization—and the decision to identify them as “laboratories of Ottoman modernization,” or sites where the pressing questions of Ottoman modernity were tested—is quite strong, and this argument need to be re-evaluated in the light of recent scholarship on similar institutions, such as state orphanages and mental asylums. In the case of mental asylum reform, for instance, one sees a medico-official intention to build model institutions in the capital and provinces as a remedy primarily to the problem of overcrowding, of which asylum officials were complaining, and also a means of improving the condition of the patients. Unlike the mission attributed to prison reform in the present research, these modern institutions, apart from their disciplinary agendas, were not, in my opinion, intended specifically to be testing sites for remedies to empire-wide problems or proving grounds for modern reforms; rather, the reforms were intended to ameliorate the conditions of their inmates and to cope with the unintended consequences of the modernization program itself. Furthermore, the global interest in such confinement institutions in the nineteenth century, as we see in the cases of criminals, vagrants, beggars, orphans, the unemployed, and the mentally ill, was probably not solely a matter of nation-state construction or of social control and discipline, but arose also from a belief in the curative potential of these buildings and their physical structures. This is perhaps why so much time and energy was spent on their architectural designs.This book, in spite of the above-mentioned limitations, nonetheless contributes to our understanding of the Ottoman modernization program that intended to transform state-society relations, and identifies the actors and their motivations. In that regard, it goes beyond conventional histories of Ottoman modernization by expanding into the relatively less-studied field of prisons and the experiences of their inmates. Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of Near Eastern Studies Volume 76, Number 1April 2017 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/690657 Views: 441Total views on this site © 2017 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse a book review in this section, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.