What is it about?
This 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.
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Why is it important?
This essay deals with the more subtle modes of imperial sovereignty that mediate competing nodes of trans-regional violence in imperial settings. It is therefore applicable to most imperial/colonial settings past and present.
Perspectives
Dr. Tolga U. Esmer received his PhD in History from the University of Chicago in 2009. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Central European University in Budapest and fellow at the Collaborative Research Center “Heroes, Heroizations, and Heroisms” (SFB-948) at the University of Freiburg. Among others, he most recently published an article entitled “Economies of Violence, Banditry and Governance in the Ottoman Empire Around 1800,” Past & Present, 224/1 (2014): 163-199. He is now completing a monograph on the imbrication of crime, legal pluralism, imperial knowledge production and sovereignty in the late Ottoman world.
Dr Tolga U. Esmer
Central European University
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This page is a summary of: Notes on a Scandal: Transregional Networks of Violence, Gossip, and Imperial Sovereignty in the Late Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Empire, Comparative Studies in Society and History, January 2016, Cambridge University Press,
DOI: 10.1017/s0010417515000584.
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