The Proper Order of Things

Abstract

The Proper Order of Things demonstrates how early modern Ottoman territorial control, both in general practice and in the specific contexts of Greater Syria and occupied Hungary, was enabled through the creation of a particular web of textual authority. The book therefore focuses attention on an Ottoman paper trail of legal edicts, administrative reports, and reflective treatises that extended the jurisdiction of sovereign power through an evolving textual corpus. This corpus sublimated anxieties of fragmented regional power to assertions of imperial universalism. Formalized registers and circulated protocols fostered the development of a trifecta of imperial order: the emergence of an elite administrative class defined in and through an emerging court bureaucracy; the circulation of a documentary corpus of edicts that promulgated and registered imperial supremacy via a specific idiom of power; and the establishment of a dynastic linguistic and legal medium that defined the shape, even if it did not control the content, of intellectual activity, speculative inquiry, and literary stylizations. The Proper Order of Things thus argues that a link between territorial and textual authority also formalized a particular discourse that became the means by which the Ottoman establishment managed distance and organized diversity into an ordered system of state power. This discourse created a particular orientation to authoritative texts and bridged the divide between conceptual or ideological frameworks and administrative practices.