Bibliographic Essay

Studies on violence in Ottoman society have concentrated mostly on late nineteenth­century national struggles, contingent inter-imperial wars and cultures of paramilitarism that culminated in World War I and the Armenian Genocide (1915), as well as more ethnic cleansing in a civil war that marked the empire's transition into the Turkish Republic (1919-23).

The Privatisation of Violence in the Ottoman Empire ambiguous discourse that left space for the participation of Greek, Armenian and Slavic Christians as well as Turks in the Ottoman enterprise. Karen Barkey's Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) similarly argues that the Ottomans networked across social, religious and ethnic divides to build one of the longest lasting imperial ventures in history. For Barkey, the key factor that buttressed the longevity of Ottoman rule was a prescient central bureaucracy that conceived and enacted a policy conducive to inter-confessional tolerance and coexistence.

The long eighteenth century, in contrast, has received much less attention, and continues to be plagued by the notions of ‘chaos' and ‘decline'. Traditional scholarship largely portrayed this period as one in which the Ottoman state and society deviated from the strong, centralised military-fiscal state model of its past. Since the 1990s, Ottomanists have been preoccupied with challenging traditional narratives on decline, which were often replete with Orientalist, monolithic characterisations of Islamic society, choosing to focus instead on the Ottoman dynasty's ability to adapt and reconfigure fiscal and administrative structures in a changing world. In Bandits and Bureaucrats: The Ottoman Route to State Centralization (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), Karen Barkey studied mostly Ottoman chroniclers to re-examine the chronic problem of banditry during the Celali rebellions that spread across Ottoman Anatolia after unsuccessful inter-imperial wars between the 1590s and 1620s. Barkey concluded that the Ottoman government negotiated with and co-opted bandits, thereby preventing them from building dangerous alliances with peasants and elites that could overturn state structures, underscoring Ottoman agency that pursued ‘non-European' paths to state formation that assured its longevity.

More recently, revisionist scholarship has turned back to this unresolved issue of widespread bandit violence that plagued different regions of the empire between the seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries, and has distanced itself from state-centric perspectives of chaos and decline that previous generations of scholars received uncritically through the language of imperial chronicles. Utilising a wider range of sources, such as Ottoman manuscripts, archival sources, court records, as well as foreign travel and ambassadorial accounts alongside court-commissioned chronicles, both Baki Tezcan's The Second Ottoman Empire: political and Social Transformation in the Early Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) and Ali Yaycioglu's Partners of Empire: The Crisis of the Ottoman Order in the Age of Revolutions (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2016) offer alternative assessments of the narratives of turmoil and disorder associated with the period between 1622 to 1808, when widespread banditry and violence escalated into large-scale revolutions that led to the dethronement and even execution of a number of sultans.

The imperial outsourcing and privatisation of imperial governance and military contracting figure positively in these new narratives of Ottoman experiments in ‘proto­democracy', but the roles of paramilitary warrior populations, whether Muslim or non­Muslim, are not explored fully. In contrast, in Ottoman Wars, 1700-1870 (London: Pearson,

2007) as well as more recent articles Virginia Aksan makes the connection between the over-outsourced, eighteenth-century Ottoman military machine and widespread, peacetime banditry but with a twist: she shows how the Ottoman military machine increasingly insisted on recruiting Muslim irregular troops precisely at the time when non­Muslim, ethnic identity began to matter right before the turn of the nineteenth century and the age of nationalism.