Abstract
In this article, I try to answer how the study of bureaucracy may contribute to the history of knowledge. In the broadest terms, the story goes like this: The Ottoman treasury had a difficult time collecting taxes in the seventeenth century. The administrators needed to have a sense of who to tax and how much to tax. To produce the necessary knowledge quickly, they had to rely on a small bureaucracy. And they had to do this without the help of a robust educational system. All of these issues implicated the relationship between knowledge and time. This article provides a preliminary investigation of bureaucratic numeracy with special emphasis on seventeenth-century Ottoman almanacs, or ruznames. I hope to give the reader an integrated understanding of what we usually treat separately as skills, bureaucratic practices, and, ultimately, the wireframe of statehood. I use the expression “sense of the forthcoming” instead of “knowledge of the future,” prognosis, or planning because first, “the forthcoming” was not simply about the natural passage of time but also about prognoses and expectations. Second, “sense” is more appropriate than knowledge because the forthcoming here also means an epistemic fore-closure. It suggests that knowledge may merely be “good enough,” especially at times of epistemic urgency, as was the case in seventeenth-century Istanbul. Some types of bureaucratic knowledge are fore-closed in that certainty or accuracy is simply not pursued beyond a certain point. This article is part of a special issue entitled “Histories of Bureaucratic Knowledge,” edited by Sebastian Felten and Christine von Oertzen.
Highlights
This article provides a preliminary investigation of bureaucratic numeracy with special emphasis on seventeenth-century Ottoman almanacs, or ruznames
Norbert Elias has even argued in his Essay on Time that we buy into the regular, Newtonian time-grid not because it inheres in our reason, but because we are forced into a regular time-grid from an early age.[2]
Does the seventeenth-century Ottoman bureaucrat have a place in the history of knowledge? In this article, I have tried to portray the bureaucrat’s modest efforts to bring some order to seventeenth-century Ottoman budgets
Summary
I try to answer how the study of bureaucracy may contribute to the history of knowledge. Sociologist Lisa Adkins goes so far as to suggest that we think of the future in largely economic terms because the commodification of futures projects, creates, and enforces time.[3] The religious field, the scientific field, the financial field, and the bureaucratic field constitute the modern state. They collectively put us through a type of civilizing process, which includes time discipline.
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