Outlaw Economics and Ottoman Successor States

Type: 
Lecture
Audience: 
Open to the Public
Building: 
Nador u. 9, Faculty Tower
Room: 
609
Tuesday, November 29, 2011 - 5:30pm
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Date: 
Tuesday, November 29, 2011 - 5:30pm to 7:00pm

INVITATION TO

UNIVERSITY-WIDE MIDDLE EAST SEMINAR

 co-organized by

History Department, Medieval Studies Department, Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Department of International Relations and European Studies, Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies and Religious Studies Program

Outlaw Economics and Ottoman Successor States

 TOLGA U. ESMER   

Central European University, History Department  

Lasting imperial influences can often reveal themselves on the former margins of empire.  This presentation aims to look back to Ottoman borderlands in the Balkans and Middle East in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to discuss the question of social and economic organization in conditions of insecurity and inconsistent recourse to state policing and justice.  These types of research agendas are often motivated by public policy concerns in the region today, especially the complex issue of institution-building in transition economies or so-called “crisis” or “failed” states.  Nevertheless, the defining characteristics of such states – limited authority of a central government, weak institutions, ineffectual bureaucracies, widespread “corruption” – are perennial questions with which historians of the Ottoman Empire and other pre-modern polities consistently grapple.  This talk looks into the lives, networks, and practices of largely forgotten social actors on the fringes of the Ottoman political and legal regime to suggest theoretical insights into the construction of alternative, private-order enterprises predicated on banditry that challenged imperial authority yet became intimately connected with the highest imperial officials of the day.  These newly-formed enterprises would become an important pillar of imperial consolidation and emerging nation-states in the former Ottoman world but still showcase lingering legacies emanating from the borderland practices of yesteryear.     

 

Tuesday, 29 November 2011, 17:30

 Faculty Tower,  609

All are welcome