What is it about?
Coins, notes, fats, oils, soda waters, teas and wines, dyes and medicines, diplomas, certificates, patents and titles… Fakes were everywhere in the late Ottoman world. Did anyone care? As this book shows, calls to “discriminate the true from the fake”, a founding motto of philological practice from the 16th century onwards, prompted many encounters between forgers and bureaucrats in the late Ottoman world. Each tells a different story about how fakes occurred. Quoted and translated in full, reports of these forgery affairs shed new light on Ottoman state-society relations. They show that the taming of the fake has been crucial to the reforming of the state.
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Why is it important?
Both as an essay and a sourcebook, this work will be of interest to specialized Ottoman historians as well as educated readers interested in transverse topics (state formation, social change, forgery practices).
Perspectives
This work provides a laboratory for tackling the unique challenges posed by historical sources to philological methods of textual analysis. Ottoman Turkish, due to its script variations, morphological complexity and syntactic evolutions, is an ideal case study that puts analog and digital philologies to the test.
Prof. Dr. Marc Aymes
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Introduction to Part 2, February 2025, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004705722_009.
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