Security, Crime, Punishment, and Prisons in the Late Ottoman Empire

Security, Crime, Punishment, and Prisons in the Late Ottoman Empire 9 June 2015, Berlin Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) The bourgeoning literature on security, crime, punishment, and prisons in the Ottoman Empire presents opportunities to explore not only new archival investigations and methodological discussions about the notions of criminality in the Empire, but also encourages us to re-think the interconnected relation between law, security and penal policy in the Empire. This one-day workshop entitled “Security, Crime, Punishment, and Prisons in the Late Ottoman Empire” was a chance to present and discuss some recent examinations of the triangle of security, crime, and punishment in order to offer new insights into Ottoman social and legal history by providing case studies from throughout the Empire. As in many contemporary states, the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire saw the institutionalization of security forces and also the expansion of surveillance mechanisms, such as passport regulations in order to track population movements. More importantly, these mechanisms focused on hastening the process of surveilling criminals as defined by the State. Furthermore, through administrative and infrastructural urbanization attempts, particularly in the imperial center, which aided in regulating street life, new understandings of criminality generated novel relationships between Ottoman cities and their residents. This relationship was expressed through adherence, or not, to policies and the eventual construction of new prisons throughout the Empire. The workshop had three sessions and overall seven papers were presented during these sessions. In the first session of the workshop, Ebru Aykut (Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University) examined the practice of the death penalty and the meaning of justice in the late Ottoman Empire. Aykut argued that for the local authorities, the death penalty was a necessary instrument to deter criminals and maintain public order and security, which could be accomplished only if the punishment was inflicted immediately without delay. Aykut stated Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 447–449 Copyright © 2015 Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association. doi:10.2979/jottturstuass.2.2.19 that according to the State, the principle of legality and procedural correctness was more important and necessary than deterrence by punishment. Thus, there was a gap between the local understandings of justice, which were concerned more with the promptness of punishment than procedures and written law, and what justice meant for the central government. In this respect, Aykut elaborated that the death penalty turned into a contested and in some cases negotiable issue between the central and provincial authorities in the late Ottoman Empire. As the second presenter of the first session, Noémi LévyAksu (Boğaziçi University) focused on the use of martial law (örfi idare) in the aftermath of the Russo-Ottoman war of 1877–78 in various districts of the Balkans and Eastern Anatolia. Lévy-Aksu discussed and posited that banditry, gangs and ethno-religious tensions were the main reasons behind the application of martial law in these districts. By presenting many case studies from the late 1870s to early 1880s, Lévy-Aksu argued that martial law turned into a tool of government in terms of dealing with serious tensions at different levels of the state apparatus. In the second session of the workshop, İlkay Yılmaz (Istanbul University /ZMO) presented a paper on the hotel registers in the Hamidian Era, which were part of new mechanisms against security threats perceived by the Ottoman state. Yılmaz stated that some incidents occurred in the late Ottoman Empire, for instance assassination attempts and the demonstrations of Kumkapı in 1890 and Bâb-ı Âli in 1895, which played a major role in the shift of security practices of the Empire. Yılmaz argued that as in contemporary states such as in France and Belgium, the Ottoman government issued new registration regulations not only to collect individual information about the visitors of hotels and residents of apartments but also to track anarchists in the Empire. After presenting the relationship between city and crime in fin de siécle Istanbul, Nurçin İleri (Binghamton University) touched upon mapping criminality through space and time, which existed in the physical and social borders of the city, and analyzed the quantitative and...