Notes on a Scandal: Transregional Networks of Violence, Gossip, and Imperial Sovereignty in the Late Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Empire

2016 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-128
Author(s):  
Tolga U. Esmer
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Culture ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Linguistic Anthropology ◽  
Cultural Resource ◽  
Intelligence Gathering ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Ottoman Balkans ◽  
The City

AbstractThis essay reconstructs a scandal in the fall of 1797 involving Ottoman governors, leaders of a notorious network of irregular soldiers cum bandits, and residents of the city of Filibe (Plovdiv in Bulgaria). It erupted over whether or not state officials should pacify successful bandit enterprises by co-opting their leaders. The scandal escalated into a crisis in which the large armies of the governors of Anatolia and Rumeli (the Ottoman Balkans) verged on clashing because each wanted to lead the state's lucrative war against Rumeli bandit networks. Imperial administrators issued dispatches regarding this scandal that were based on gossip and rumor circulating within the general population as well as among bandits. I draw on understandings of gossip as a social and cultural resource from linguistic anthropology to make sense of Ottoman political culture. I analyze these dispatches to uncover how the performance of these informal scripts featured prominently in correspondence with the Imperial Council and related surveillance reports, and thereby mediated resources, power, and authority among different agents of imperial violence. I show that gossip, rumor, and related forms of seemingly informal “talk” played a fundamental role in sovereign decision making. I also transpose methodologies and approaches of “history from below,” conceived by earlier generations of cultural anthropologists and historians, onto elite letters to ask new questions about information brokerage, the negotiation of power among different agents of imperial violence and their interlocutors, and the contested nature of imperial intelligence gathering and sovereignty.

Slavery and Ransom

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Will Smiley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Young Men ◽  
Individual Characteristics ◽  
The State ◽  
Customary Law ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Law

This chapter explores captives’ fates after their capture, all along the Ottoman land and maritime frontiers, arguing that this was largely determined by individuals’ value for ransom or sale. First this was a matter of localized customary law; then it became a matter of inter-imperial rules, the “Law of Ransom.” The chapter discusses the nature of slavery in the Ottoman Empire, emphasizing the role of elite households, and the varying prices for captives based on their individual characteristics. It shows that the Ottoman state participated in ransoming, buying, exploiting, and sometimes selling both female and male captives. The state particularly needed young men to row on its galleys, but this changed in the late eighteenth century as the fleet moved from oars to sails. The chapter then turns to ransom, showing that a captive’s ability to be ransomed, and value, depended on a variety of individualized factors.

Robert Owenson’s macaronic song repertoire and the Dublin theatre audience of the late eighteenth century

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen Burke
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Song Repertoire ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The City ◽  
Radical Element

This article argues that Robert Owenson’s bilingual song repertoire represents an urban strain of the Irish macaronic tradition which developed over the course of the eighteenth century as Irish-speaking poets and song composers responded to a public that was increasingly diglossic. In Owenson’s case, this repertoire was formed from the crossings between songs and tunes from the Irish-speaking area where this performer grew up, and those that came out of the playhouses, taverns, and streets of Dublin, the city where he spent his twenty-year Irish stage career. The article also explores the politics of these songs and the Dublin audience’s shifting response to their performance. While Owenson’s songs were enthusiastically received in the years leading up to 1782, a period dominated politically by the patriots and the Volunteers, they provoked a reactionary backlash in the later 1780s and 1790s when Dublin’s radical element began claiming them as their own.

scholarly journals Using Microcredit and Restructuring Households: Two Complementary Survival Strategies in Late Eighteenth-Century Barcelona

2000 ◽  
Vol 45 (S8) ◽  
pp. 71-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Montserrat Carbonell-Esteller
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Survival Strategies ◽  
Natural Growth ◽  
Regional Specialization ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Major Transformation ◽  
Process Of Urbanization ◽  
The City ◽  
Intense Process

In the last third of the 1700s Barcelona was a city undergoing a major transformation. The regional specialization process that took place in Catalonia, and the intensification of exchange, generated spectacular economic growth and an unprecedented increase in population. The city of Barcelona tripled its population in just over seventy years; in 1787 it already had around 100,000 inhabitants. Immigration, both from the Pyrenean areas and from the proto-industrial areas of central Catalonia, the natural growth of the population, the intense process of urbanization, and the dynamism of the labour market explain the densification of the city and the rise in the price of rents.

scholarly journals Crossing the Mediterranean

2021 ◽  
pp. 21-41
Author(s):  
Ozan Ozavci
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
Discursive Practice ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Eastern Question ◽  
The Will ◽  
Political Economic

This chapter discusses that the French invasion of Egypt in 1798 epitomized a discursive practice in the Levant. European Great Powers of the time looked to supply security beyond their imperial territories by military expeditions, allegedly for the benefit of the locals even if against the will of the regional sovereigns—in this case, the Ottoman imperial rulers. The architects of the 1798 occupation, Bonaparte and Talleyrand, portrayed their expedition as a ‘service’ the Ottoman Empire. But, in reality, the 1798 expedition was the outcome of decades long debates in France. It ultimately resulted from a diverse set of geostrategic, political, economic and financial determinants that defined the Eastern Question in the late eighteenth century. What exactly did the Eastern Question pertain to before the nineteenth century then? And how did 1798 relate to it?

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