Ottoman History Podcast - Language, Power, and Law in the Ottoman Empire

Episode Date: December 12, 2019

Episode 441 with Heather Ferguson hosted by Zoe Griffith Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud In this episode, historian Heather Ferguson takes us behind the scenes of early modern Ottoman state-making with a discussion of her recent book The Proper Order of Things. We discuss how the architecture of Topkapı palace, the emergence of new bureaucratic practices, and the administration of space from Hungary to Lebanon projected early modern discourses of “order” that were crucial to imperial legitimacy, governance, and dissent. Heather also offers rare insights into the challenges, vulnerabilities, and victories of transforming a dissertation into a prize-winning book manuscript. « Click for More »

Hello and welcome to another episode of Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Zoe Griffith, and this time we're recording from New Orleans, Louisiana. We actually have a beautiful view of the Mississippi River as we speak. We're at the 53rd Annual Middle East Studies Association Conference. Our guest today is Heather Ferguson. She is professor of history at Claremont McKenna College. She wears a couple of other hats as well. She's the editor of Review of Middle East Studies and associate editor of the International Journal of Islamic Architecture.

This episode is going to be a little bit of a hybrid. Of course, we're going to talk about her recent book entitled The Proper Order of Things, Language, Power, and Law in Ottoman Administrative Discourses, which is recently out with Stanford University Press, and which very recently here at MESA was awarded the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 2019 Fuat Kiprulu Book Prize for the best book in Ottoman history of the year. So huge congratulations for both. Along with, you know, our discussion of the book, we're going to take the celebratory occasion to talk about the process of academic book production. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you, Zoe. And it's also really lovely to be here and to be interviewed by you,

given the fact that we shared an original graduate student space at University of California, Berkeley. So it's kind of coming around full circle. That's right. That's lovely. Let's actually start with your kind of journey with this book. We've known each other about 10 years. You were working on your dissertation project when I met you. And the book project is different from what you kind of wrote the dissertation on and got the job on. And so why don't you tell us a bit about what you started out doing and then how you came to this amazing project? Well, there's something really extraordinary, I think, that we all experience as we are writing in general throughout our careers. And, you know, the graduate student phase where we read and critique books on offer throughout the semester.

And, you know, that tends to kind of create a performative space in which critique is the operating mode. And then we're faced with the challenge of writing our own dissertation and kind of producing our own knowledge on that. challenge of writing our own dissertation and kind of producing our own knowledge on that. And at the time, like I kind of knew what I was aiming to work toward, that I was interested in how categories of knowledge were produced in legal documents within the Ottoman imperial context, but I wasn't exactly sure how to go about that. And especially given the fact that when you're preparing a kind of research project, you know the types of materials and documents that you want to look at. But when you arrive on the scene, so to speak, often your ideal plans do not fully materialize as such. One of the biggest things for me, kind of moving away from the dissertation into the book was to take head on the fact that the training that I received as a grad student from someone like Bishara Dumani, who's really intent on social history and ground up processes, was something difficult to achieve.

If what I'm really interested in is what happens with the kind of framing of imperial governance immediately after the conquest of new territories. And so in that regard, if our primary kind of ground-up analysis as Ottoman historians tends to be more often than not the Sharia sigillat, but what happens if you don't have archive materials for that period? So, for example, if I'm looking at Therabasus Sham, those kinds of archive sigillate or materials that we have access to don't actually commence until around 1582. And I was also interested in not only the kind of what becomes an internal frontier of Biladisham, but also how Ottoman governance patterns materialize with external frontiers. So there I was looking at

Buda and the conquest of territories that kind of crisscrossed the Hungarian empire. And sorry, these conquests happened, I mean, earlier in the 16th century or even earlier? Yeah, so the dates of those would be for Bilad Hashem between, you know, 1516, 1519. And for the conquest of the Hungarian occupied territories, we're thinking something around 1526 to 1541, kind of intermittent periods. exactly yeah exactly the issue also with the conquest ultimately of buddha which would become a kind of capital so to speak of ottoman governance in the region and we don't have preserved sigilat from sharia records for there at all at all oh wow okay at all okay so then what happens for somebody interested, as many of us are,

in trying to get beneath the rhetoric of imperial governance? Right. What do you do when you're kind of faced with that conundrum? So in the dissertation, I went by hook or by crook through this process and I looked at the issuance of legal edicts

from the imperial court. But as I was facing the issuance of legal edicts from the imperial court. But as I was facing the book project, I did something that I think is risky, but it's achievable, and that is to kind of throw it all out and start over again. To do that, I kind of had to get my mind around a new conceptual framework, around a new conceptual framework, which was that the kind of imperial categories of governance present in sultanic edicts or in legal regulations or even in the treatises written by various bureaucrats kind of reflecting back on patterns of Ottoman strategies of rule, that all of these in and of themselves had within them a kind of messiness, that if we looked towards a kind of invention of imperial order within those, we were also doing a kind of careful analysis of social history as a process in the making. And I kind of wanted to talk

frankly about that because as we are graduate students or as we're kind of working on new or first or second book projects, I think often we look back retrospectively and attempt to articulate the coherent arguments that we've built there. So the work that we do, which in the end becomes a smooth and coherent argument, but in the process looks like the kind of imperial order I was attempting to address, very messy. And the kinds of revision processes that have bits and pieces of things all over the place especially if you're trying to make a theoretical argument and realizing that you have to move them around I think should be a really visible part of what we do when we talk about the book as a end result it's something that I believe very much in as a part of the kind of mentoring process

across generations as well. And as a professor at a liberal arts college context where I'm not consistently working with graduate students, I've found that these conversations at conferences and in casual at workshops actually generate a kind of mentoring relationship that crosses those institutional boundaries as well. Yeah, I mean, it's incredibly important to hear this stuff. I mean, as someone who is currently in the process of revising a dissertation into a

book, it's the more transparent people can be, the more honest they can be. It's, you know, It's the more transparent people can be, the more honest they can be. It's, you know, it's stressful for everyone, but it is helpful truly to hear that. Just as a sort of general, if it's possible to generalize about, how do you make a kind of risk benefit analysis of whether, of how much to start over, when to start over, if it becomes possible? Well, I think that is definitely kind of individually determined. For me, the risks were serious because what you're really jeopardizing is a timeline for tenure and promotion. So in that regard, I mean, I really fought all the way up to the end to make sure that the book contract and the proofs were available to the committees that were reviewing my materials. And I was kind of balanced on a pin in that regard.

However, it was something that I believed was necessary. I mean, these are materials that are not only evaluated for your promotion process, but it's also you on record as you're attempting to kind of position yourselves as knowledge producers instead of just consumers. And it's a truism, of course, that you want to put your best foot forward, but it's not so much that. It's actually making visible a kind of history of our ability to grapple with past scholarship and to do that with respect and acknowledgement of the fact that all of what we do

comes on the shoulders of those that have gone before. And in the case of my work, I mean, there's every single name in Ottoman history is of utmost importance to the kind of work that I'm doing, from the architectural historians like Guru Nejiboglu to the kind of scholars of bureaucracy and the palace life itself, such as Cornel Fleischer and Leslie Pierce, to those who think about patterns of governance in a consistent fashion, such as Linda Darling, and with Linda Darling also kind of attempting

to work with the fine-grained minutia of archival production and transform that into a comprehensive historical narrative. So these and many others are people that we build on. And of course, the doyen of the field in many regards in this sense is Inalgic himself. And I've been thinking a lot about the fact that the slash and burn kind of notion of academic production really jeopardizes our ability to recognize. And in my case, I kept thinking, wow, you know, all the things I'm trying to arguments are already present in these early efforts, especially with Nalgic and Cornell Fleischer and others to articulate what it means to produce records as embodiments of imperial governance. So that's something else I think is important as you're assessing risk is like making sure that even as you're putting out new knowledge,

you're recognizing that this new knowledge is framed and that it's framed by conversations that are ongoing and that should be sometimes revitalized that have been forgotten and ignored. That's, yeah, incredibly well said. And you've set us up really nicely in the historiography. So maybe we can talk a bit about, I mean, what the book itself is doing. There's a lot of nice ways that you phrase this in the book. I liked in the introduction, you mentioned the natural order of the state was an early modern mania, which I really, and you know, tying this idea of production of documents and the circulation of documents, the constructedness of the documents as a projection of imperial sovereignty

in the early modern period as being not just an Ottoman phenomenon, but a sort of trans-Eurasian phenomenon. You also mention the shift from a sort of conquest state to a sedentary state with a growing bureaucracy, and you juxtapose the idea of fet etmek and kalame-etmek.

So maybe we can start with, you know, this moment in time in the sort of 15th, 16th centuries where the Ottoman Empire moves from a sort of Feth-etmek mode to the Kalame-etmek. And you can maybe explain those terms and explain that shift. This transition from kind of a conquest um by military apparatus to what i kind of think of in the book and more generally in other context as a territorialization through pen so the calame et mech phenomenon and i think calame being pen Yeah. So, and thinking about that is from kind of both schemes of territorialization by military conquest and conquest by Penn. And that it's not that one replaces the other, which is kind of a heyday of expansion, but it's also important to kind of move past that periodization schema that suggests like there was a building up in terms of territory and then a kind of

stabilization or a gradual narrowing of that. That tends to be the typical kind of periodization scheme for the Ottoman Empire that, I mean, we have to acknowledge, but the way in which focusing on the kind of coincidence and conversant relationships between the constant reiterative process of re-territorialization schemes through the military and the pen through legal edicts allows us to break free a little bit, I think, from this idea of first conquest and then bureaucracy. And again, kind of going back to what we were saying in terms of historiography, this isn't new. I mean, it's not like I came up with this or anything. Surely that's not the case. But there are a couple of people I really depended on for that and many of you of course will recognize these names but Bakhti Tezjan and his framework of kind of second empire and that in conversation then with

Guy Barak's also using a framework of second empire for Guy Barak thinking about the kind of legal rubrics of governance that becomes solidified within the context of a Hanafi orthodoxy in the same period. And then Bakhti Tezjan thinking about the bureaucratic institutional transformations with the reorganization of the Tokapa palace life, the rise of the black eunuch, the kind of chancellor state that develops, like all of these things are issues that we've all been paying attention to. And then the question I was trying to frame was how can we bring this all together and recognize this early modern mania?

So on the one hand, this isn't unique. The Ottomans are a part of a kind of trans-imperial space in which this question of rendering legible, often diffuse and unwieldy territories from the perspective of a centralized centralized palace-based bureaucratic culture is a kind of crisis in governance that appears in this period. And you know, in terms of this trans-imperial space, we're talking about the Habsburgs, the Safavids.

Yeah, the Habsburgs, the Safavids, to some extent the Mughals. I think the territory there is a little bit more distinct, but it's not just that. I mean, it's also some extent the Mughals I think the territory there is a little bit more distinct but it's not just that I mean it's also thinking about the emergence of a kind of French courtly dynamic as well and the Portuguese and Venetians kind of having different configurations of how to rule unwieldy domains as well I mean the the biggest phenomenon here is really the term that is used often and which I also use, which is a composite domain. What is a composite domain? I mean, it's a domain that brings together different kinds of spaces. And by that, I mean, demographically different, geographically different, also different in terms of kind of the customs of social and legal order

and management of like land and tenural regimes. Like all of these are very different from each other and yet now kind of unevenly housed under the rubric of a single courtly establishment. And so this idea of composite domains and palatial establishments trigger a kind of obsessive production of documentary cultures, all of which are intent on working out how best to achieve a method of governance. And so, again, not unique to the Ottomans. What is unique is the fact that we have many of those materials preserved. So, you know, the hundreds upon thousands of individual loose leaf folios of documents, along with what will become a gradual process of bounding registers in specific categories. So it was an effort to take that kind of mania for creating legibility within a state and the tactics of producing multiple types of paper, documentary productions that reflect that. documentary productions that reflect that.

And then within the Ottoman establishment, I suppose the wonder and then the challenge of the bewildering amount of materials that one faces when you show up at the Bashbakan Lik. Indeed. And to go back to like the mentoring elements of all of this kind of stuff, I mean, the honesty of like showing up into the Bosh Pecan Lake

and trying to figure out just how to manage one's days. And the transition over the course of my career from working in a non-digital environment where you're using catalogs printed and otherwise in order to track down the materials that you want to use. And now the kind of search term approach to finding materials in the kind of computer field of the reading room of the Bosh Pecan Lake. So navigating those transitions is a whole kind of separate question, but I think it should be brought into a conversation

when I'm reflecting on archives and the production of text as a means of governing. We'll take a short break, but please stay tuned for more discussion of the proper order of the Arabian. We're back with Heather Ferguson And I, you must not forget. We're back with Heather Ferguson discussing her book, The Proper Order of Things. So, Heather, you set us up really well to talk about, you know, this experience of going to the Bosch McCormick. You're confronted with this overwhelming array of documents, different types, different genres. Most graduate students are not really

equipped actually to kind of understand the production, the logics of production of those genres to begin with. So maybe you could talk about, you know, there's a number that you engage with in the book, the mhimehs, the shikai at Defter Lare. So yeah, tell us a bit about which genres you found useful in thinking through these questions. So to bring this back to where we started as well, when I was framing my grave concern with trying to maybe defensively argue for the possibility that what I was doing was a kind of social history, even if I wasn't working on the kinds of materials generated from regional contexts, such as the Sharia sigillary. My approach to that is, in some sense, I guess on the surface an easy one,

because it's not like I was engaging with materials that weren't also obvious. And in a way I wanna kind of highlight that, because it's not that anyone who works on Ottoman imperial context isn't fully cognizant of these two things you mentioned at the outset here, which is the Muhime and the Kanunami. So the Muhime are edicts of state,

primarily sultanic edicts, kind of statutory materials sent out to various officials, to various provinces, stating basically kind of commands or decisions or frameworks developed by the Ottoman establishment writ large. And what's interesting about those is that what they contain within them is also a kind of brief litany or summary of the reason that gave rise to this edict. So internal to these materials,

you actually see a social process at work. And so, yes, on the first hand, everyone knows about the Muhmeh. Everybody also knows about the Qalununameh, which are kind of bound legal regulatory materials that are very diverse in terms of their nature. What I was primarily looking at are ones that were issued to various provinces after they

were conquered. And then looking- When did they start? What was the sort of first kanuname? Well, you know, that's a little bit of a problematic kind of summary because there are also kind of bound registers that appear in like 1487 or so. So you're thinking of the reign of Bayezid and the Ahkam daftar, Larry. And these are a significant kind of bridge between the edicts that are sent out on an almost daily basis called the Muhymeh and the

as a kind of regulatory protocols, almost from the implementation of a territorial regime-based empire, you have the as a framework for that. The kind of legal regulatory nature of the and their articulation into a kind of framed code of regulations was inherently a part of a kind of territorialization of imperial space. new but what I was attempting to demonstrate is that we're not necessarily looking at these materials in relationship to each other how one the Mihmeh is a kind of constant reiterative refrain of the Ottoman

imperial establishment attempting to address specific concerns across its territories and the Konunami as a kind of hit pause moment in which those constant refrains present in the Muhime are then formalized into a kind of set of regulatory codes addressed to the officials, to the power brokers who are regionally situated and to the inhabitants of different provinces. And that these are in conversation with each other. And it's not just the vocabularies that they use are similar, but also that the kind of strategies of attempting to create an ordered realm, like one that is legible not only for mechanisms of taxation and revenue collection, for the meeting out of criminal punishment, for incidences of social disorder. incidences of social disorder. So those are all present, but it's also important to kind of recognize or attempt to draw out how these are kind of feints of, or performances in a way,

like a performance of coherence that barely masks the uneasy disorder underneath it, and that that disorder is in and of itself visible in the kind of, as I said, the summaries of social disturbances in the region that are present in the Muhimeh, or in the kind of minutiae in the Kononame that attempt to create legal and social and political categories that suggest rigidity, but in their insistence actually reveal fragility.

Yeah. No, I mean, that's really fascinating to think about, in a way, doing a kind of social history of these institutions of bureaucratic production or imperial projection. bureaucratic production or imperial projection. I guess, I mean, it would be useful to talk for a minute about some of the external conditions or the political economic conditions that gave rise to this mania of natural order. I mean, from Leslie Pierce's work, we know how sedentarization completely transformed

the kind of household you know the power within the imperial household stuff like this and what you're saying is is reminiscent i think of you know where is the sultan in the empire once he kind of you know is no longer a campaigning figure yeah and there's a number of elements in this actually. So the first I was kind of talking more abstractly about working with the muhime and the kanuname and then also bringing in as well a kind of tradition of a device giving. And what you see in all of these is,

as I was suggesting, a kind of space of textual production in which each of these genres are conversant with each other and build off of each other. But I was speaking abstractly about that and there's nothing abstract about first the moments which give rise to the necessity of these and then also the ways in which they reflect

a kind of transformation in terms of the institutions of themselves of the Ottoman imperial palace and bureaucracy and scribal cohorts that produce them. So the first thing that I think is really important, and it's always recognized, especially with the Muhammet, as the first kind of bound registers of legal edicts. So they only are organized chronologically. So they're not organized in terms of discrete regions or anything. Except, I mean, there is the Muslim Muhammese that becomes available only in the 18th century.

Only in the 18th century. But Egypt has its own. Exactly. It's the only one. Well, the moments in which the kind of Muhammes really come on the scene, so to speak, as bound registers, but something that Naljik actually talked about

as a defterization, speaking of building on the shoulders of those who come before, but they appear specifically in the moment after the kind of conquest in terms of a full solidified conquest of Buddha andarian occupied territories 1541 1543 15 to 1545 is our first kind of full text of a bound register of the muhime and there's

nothing coincident about that because the conquest of these territories despite the fact that we are all fully aware that this kind of turn towards the uh you know the vocabularies of the regions are hard to configure but like the southeastern european territories were always kind of first and foremost of interest to the ottoman establishment but it's still it was a conundrum because there wasn't, you know, the kind of established Muslim families, religious hierarchies, the religious functionaries of the ulama and the mechanisms of the Sharia courts, which all play such an integral part of governance throughout the territories of, you know, say Egypt or Damascus or, and Syria and even unevenly, of course, into the Arabian Peninsula. So there's a kind of conundrum with like, how do we understand the categories of land governance,

the personages involved there, and who do we issue orders to? So the phenomenon of the primacy of a governor or the bay baylor bay or the baylor bay lick as the institutional establishment of the government really i would argue kind of appears as a foremost space within the context of Buddha, as opposed to the kind of edicts of commands, of a sultanic edicts of commands being copied into the sigil. There you have the Baylor Bay is actually being kind of the space

of administrative coherence. And so the Muhammet would like really emerge out of that moment of deliberate questions concerning the nature of governance in territories that do not have other tried and true mechanisms to turn toward. And so what was interesting for me then is to kind of focus in on what's the difference between a governor situated, say, in Theravada Sashim and a governor situated in Buddha.

And so those were the two kind of big case study-ish chapters within the context of the book. And maybe you can just tell us a bit about, I mean, you have the idea of an external frontier in Southeast Europe or whatever we're calling it. And then the internal frontier within Bilad Hashem, within greater Syria. So the internal frontier is a reaction to, to rebellion if I'm not mistaken. So maybe you can, yeah, just lay out some of the differences that came through there.

So this is the internal frontier, thinking about Bilad-e-Sham. So the regions kind of really transformed into an Ottoman imperial space, seized from the Mamluks under Selim I. And yet a space that has its own kind of difficulties in terms of administration, mostly because there are regional power brokers

that play a prominent role. And again, kind of thinking of scholarship that has preceded my own, the work of Stefan Winter, who really pays attention to 1581, 1582, major military campaigns sent from Istanbul into territories we would now consider Lebanon, into Mount Lebanon and the Shuf, but also into the Bekaa,

and confronting the fact that these kind of regional power brokers had an autonomous zone there, disrupting what does the Ottoman establishment care about the most, like revenue extraction, right? So a coercive mechanism for extracting revenue. I think it's important to recognize that our notions of frontiers tend to be fixed on borders between empires and not on the tactics assumed by many interested parties, so to speak, of which the Sultan and the Ottoman establishment is only one.

And that more and more, as you were suggesting with a reference to Leslie Pierce, we're not even sure like who is the representative figure of power in this moment. Is it the Sultan, so to speak, or is it the bureaucratic apparatus that ensures the reinforced reproductive abilities of the dynasty to sustain itself?

And so hence my focus on Balad Hashem and Trablus Hashem and on one particular family, the Saifa and how these individuals from this family kind of populate, I would say, the materials of the Mehime to populate, I would say, the materials of the Mehmed from the 1520s and 30s all the way up to the 1620s. And what you see there are regional rivalries with other families and the use of the position of the Ottoman government, the Beylerbeylik,

as a strategy not only for asserting regional control by the Seifa, but also by the Ottoman Imperial Administration to use that struggle to their own benefit. And so the Seifa, what's interesting there is to see a different kind of threshold or frontier articulated between somebody who is supposedly recognized within the Muhammay as a loyal servant, as part of the extensive household, so to speak, of the Sultan and a rebel. so to speak, of the sultan and a rebel. And what's important for us to realize is that an individual over the course of his lifetime

is often both, sometimes even simultaneously. You would think, I mean, depending on how long it takes for sultanic edicts to arrive, you can read as a researcher back from one page to the next, somebody who in one moment is recognized as a loyal servant, issued sultanic robes of honor, commended for his prosperous ability to kind of support the realm. And then in the next, judges and other authorities of the region are told to kind of like get on their trail and hound them and find them and imprison them and then ultimately bring them to Istanbul for execution. So this kind of threshold

between loyal servant and rebel is something that also helps to problematize our assessments of what kinds of frontiers exist. And I was working to kind of think about a frontier as a space in which the authority of the sultan, even ifham or in a battle with the Habsburgs in Hungarian occupied territories. I mean, right. So not to draw everything back to Istanbul all the time, but I really enjoyed in the book the way you also bring in kind of architectural urban life and architectural history.

And specifically in a way that I've never thought about Topkapi Palace before as another imprint of these kinds of ordering discourses. So yeah, if you could talk a little bit about, yeah, how do you use architecture as well as one of these sources in your work? So this is also kind of a call out to how books emerge

and the kind of messiness of that as well which is it's really wonderful as scholars to participate in like multiple fields even if they don't directly pertain to what we think might be our core research goals and so my the hat i wear as a part of the team for the international journal of Islamic Architecture, was something I turned toward because I was interested in how Ottoman dynastic power was embodied in multiple forms. So the textual forms, yes. The military mechanisms of conquest, yes. But also spatially in terms of not just the invention of a palace culture

under Mehmet the second but also in terms of how that focus on a fixed space of rule even if they're also migrating to a Dara etc transforms an understanding of what Ottoman dynastic authority consists of. And then to also push beyond that and think of how monumental architectural projects are conversant with and inscribed by textual claims of authority as well. And so I kind of focus back in as many have,

I mean, beginning with the preeminent example of Guru Najibullah's notion of ceremony and power as manifest in the Topkapi Palace. But I was thinking of that space as also a threshold, as also a kind of threshold of authority so in terms of fixing a vision of sovereignty but also one in which that fixity is constantly tested and one of the basic ways in which that happens is is just the expansion of the bureaucracy itself so if we think of the messiness of a composite domain

and what kind of categories render legible space for administration and collection of taxes, you also have to think like what's happening when you go from like 30 to thousands as part of a scribal cohort of those who kind of are working within the kind of personal household domains of the sultan as servants,

the populated nature of the kitchens and the imperial council and how all of these are methods to actually transform the figure of the Sultan into an industry, really, and then into an institution that is reproduced through the actions of the many as opposed to necessarily through the figure of the sultan.

And what's interesting about that is this, what, I mean, many of us now, if you attended the panel at Mesa on the neoliberalization of the academy, think of administrative bloat and the problems with that so i mean we're really talking about administrative bloat here right and what are the problems with that right like the disconnect between establishment figures and what's actually happening on the ground and the increased duress of those who sustain

the functioning of the Ottoman Empire as a whole. And this returns us to the work of people like Linda Darling and others who think about just systems of rule as the key legitimizing framework of the Ottoman mechanisms of rule as it also functioned much earlier within Greco-Roman worlds and articulated in Aristotelian literatures

and referenced in Arabo-Islamicate and Persianate literary treatises and inventions as well. So this notion of justice is really troubled in a framework of administrative bloat because the notion of a just order is dependent on harmony across the key domains that support a frame of dynastic rule. So those who produce the wealth of the realm,

the agricultural producers, those who defend it, the military, those who administer it, so the men of the pen again, and the one who heads it all and secures the fortunes of each of those categories. So my book kind of started out with another recognizable figure

used in a slightly different way, and that is Khatib Chalabi. And just using that as an entryway into the fact that this kind of administrative bloat, as I'm now configuring it, was a cause for alarm. it, was cause for alarm. And it was cause for alarm, not just again within the Ottoman domains, but across all of the trans-imperial spaces we kind of started out with.

This cry of chaos and crisis and there's disturbance across the realms and how do we ensure a restoration of a just system? And that in many ways that actually starts again with the palace, right? a threshold of order and as a kind of monumental figure in and of himself who also is the patron of monumental architecture that gives an imprint of that authority across his regime but it's an ideal that always has vulnerabilities within it and especially if it is considered by those who believe there's a moment of crisis in the especially late 16th and beginnings of the early 17th century, that Sultan is no longer at the pinnacle of a ordered realm,

but rather of a disordered one. And so I turn in the end to kind of thinking about in a collection of treatises, the Nasihatname and the work of figures such as Khattab Chalabi, who in the moment in which they attempt to identify crisis are doing two things. First, they're giving us a kind of record of legibility of what their perceptions of proper governance consisted of. And so there's a kind of prismatic effect here. We're understanding order as their narrating disorder, but they're also embodying

these new mechanisms that I think I attempted to trace and people like Bakhti Tezjan and others attempt to trace as well, which is an awareness of the fact that the pen has power, that the pen itself is a producer of order. And so as they were articulating crisis, they were also beginning to reflect on the kind of archived history of the Ottoman imperial system as a whole. And so this moment I was really interested in, this moment in which you begin to see in the Nasi Hatname

an awareness of the importance of records and documents. And they of course were obsessed with what they believed was the collapse of the tax cadastral registers and how that was meant to be a reflection of an ordered administrative system. But if we kind of step away from that particular concern, what we see instead is an awareness that part of the power of the imperial establishment existed within the production of a well-ordered documentary regime and that the chaos these nasihatname authors were recognizing was a chaos in the

categories of documentary production that they perceived the imperial establishment depended on. And as a result of that, you actually see the production of gradually new genres. So for example, the disambiguation of sultanic edicts sent out from the petitions of complaints such as the shikayet that were sent in. So before we had just like small kind of summaries of these petitions and had to look for them in other places,

but now you have them separated out from each other. That happened about a century after the mehemeh were kind of bound and defterized, so to speak. And then after that, you do begin to have more provincial registers. So beginning to recognize the unique features of different regions of the empire requiring different kind of methods of an awareness that the organization of authoritative statements sent out by the Ottoman establishment contained within themselves methods of control that sustained the empire. I mean, as you've incredibly eloquently expressed here, and anyone who

has read the book or will read the book after listening, you think incredibly deeply about a lot of genres and concepts and terms that I think, as you say, a lot of these things will seem familiar, but you've rethought them in new ways. You paused on whether we want to call Hungary part of Southeast Europe. What are some of the terms that you found needed some rethinking in the work? So this brings me kind of back to the classroom as well as another kind of research space.

So, and as I'm avoiding grading papers, this is probably something I should bring up, but I think we kind of flippantly say stuff in grant applications or as we're kind of naming our skills and values in annual reports or applications to jobs, etc. And we think about the relationships between pedagogy and research. when I first started paying attention to terminology, came out of graduate school seminars with Beshara and others in which we were intent on framing the Middle East

and something other than the term Middle East and the recognition that terminology and our use of particular terms frames what we can say and what we can see. And so I always struggled with that in the context of the class. Like how do you provide into historical narrative while simultaneously using the scare quotes necessary to give pause and to recognize if we use the word Europe and Islamic,

we've already assumed so many things that put them in an oppositional relationship to each other that negate the possibility of having a meaningful conversation about entangled historical processes and how they develop. And the fact that those kinds of geographical or cultural terms have their own history of production that we're erasing by simply using them as a placeholder. So I'm constantly thinking about that in the context of classes. And then when you go to write a book

and you wanna say, you know, Ottoman state, like can you say state or do you have to, is state okay as a word to use? Like, do you have to say empire if you say sultan and you and then suddenly you're saying sultanic power and then suddenly the sultan becomes like the personification of empire but you that's really problematic because there are certain moments you need to say sultan yeah and then other moments you need to say an ottoman establishment a bureaucratic system a set of methods And so I spent a lot of time trying to write paragraphs

that were both clear and were kind of avoided assuming things or erasing the evolution of a historical process whereby the sultan was transformed from a particular figure into the representative category of a state, right? And so I thought it would be good to kind of conclude my conversation, which started with this whole notion

of like, God, how do you write a book when you're frustrated with the kinds of materials you have available to you and kind of end with like, how do you write a book when you're frustrated with the kinds of materials you have available to you and kind of end with like, how do you write a sentence that doesn't erase all of these questions that we all have? And the biggest glaring thing in the room here is that even though I do believe it's present in the book, it's not in the title and it's not in our conversation today

is like I never use the word early modern. And I think maybe that's like a tip of the hand to work that many of us are doing and the kinds of frameworks I'm adopting for future projects in which it's almost like, can we just let go of this question of periodization of modern early modern or not like how is that meaningful as a way of thinking about these fine-grained on the ground mechanisms for producing order and and yet honestly when you're having a publisher sign on and when they want to give kind of a label of like, what period are you studying? And when you present yourself to a tenure board,

you say, I'm an early modern Ottoman historian because suddenly that makes sense. So I think it's really significant as we work on our book projects and as we figure out how to present ourselves to acknowledge those labels as part of kind of the production of power in academia and the publication cycle

as a whole, but also selectively determine which kind of questions and battles are important and to recognize that periodization schemes are actually more often than not also about territory and like which territorial body has the rights and the power to produce the categories that we then use for very diverse spaces. And these kind of periodization schemes as a kind of Eurocentric mechanism for organizing how we study the past, organizing how we study the past, we may not even have to converse with them, agonizingly debate their necessity. We can just use the frameworks established in the documents and the treatises and the manuscripts and the monuments and material objects that we look at and tell a story from those perspectives. No, thank you really for your honesty and your transparency

along with the incredibly erudite and thought-provoking book and the conversation about the book. This has been fantastic. And it was always such a pleasure to hang out and chat with you. And I love bringing it full circle back to grad school days and revisiting those rare moments we had together and kind of summon our spaces before we went our separate ways yeah no this is um this is the best of mesa and the best of ohp i think right we will have a bibliography provided by heather

on the website along with the episode so anyone uh who wants to read along with the prize-winning book. Some further readings that Heather will suggest. Of course, we invite you to check out our related episodes that we will feature alongside Heather's episode. Heather, thanks so much again for joining us. Thank you. It's an honor and a pleasure. And thank you all for listening, and tune in next time for another episode of Ottoman History Podcast.