Conclusion

The creation of a culture of widespread peacetime paramilitary crime and terror following large-scale war had an impact that reached far beyond the Balkans. Its corrosive effects penetrated the highest cadres of the state and had a long-term impact on Ottoman society.

III and his successor, Mustafa IV in 1808. This was the first of a series of wars in which the Russians would launch full-scale attacks against the Ottomans following revolts by non-Muslim subjects in the Balkans. These wars resulted in Balkan Christians' independence from Istanbul: Greek independence and Serbian autonomy was won after the war of 1828-31, whereas Montenegrin, Romanian and Serbian independence/Bulgarian autonomy were won after the war of 1876-8.

The history of the Ottoman Empire after 1683 suggests that the transition from the early modern to modern period was profoundly different from that of western European states because of the degree to which the Ottomans over-outsourced violence and governance to fight successive two-front wars against the Habsburgs and Romanovs.

Lauren Benton's work suggests that we need a more nuanced approach to state formation. She demonstrates that a monopoly of violence in large dynastic states and empires, characterised by a high degree of ethnic and religious diversity, was inconceivable. Scarce resources meant that early modern empires were generally forced to outsource governance to networks of men who specialised in violence, and these actors enjoyed a high degree of autonomy. The incorporation of warrior networks was crucial to the imper­ial expansion of mercantile empires. The British state outsourced its colonial project in India to a private company, whose success required the co-option oflocal elites and the recruitment oflocal manpower. The Royal Navy's prize system was akin to a form of state-sponsored piracy.^[348] Ottoman strategy was more problematic because it faced two imperial rivals across Eurasia along its northern frontier, in addition to Safavid Persia in the east. It is worth noting here that the Austrians and the Russians also struggled to control their clients effectively. However, the Ottoman imperial strategy of arming and organis­ing mobile ethnic warrior populations against one another, though it might have worked in the short term, laid the foundations for future dysfunction and intercommunal violence. In particular, it led to the blurring of the boundaries between state violence and private violence. Subjects on the ground, who suffered from the collateral damage caused by Istanbul and its rivals' outsourcing of violence and terror to different ethnic warrior popula­tions, saw these actors as well as their terror as representative of the state.

The ways in which the state outsourced imperial violence to ethnic warrior populations in a manner that pitted them against one another and then criminalised them once they had fulfilled their purpose forged ethnic identities based on a sense of injustice and grievance. Ethnicity was shaped by a culture of paramilitary violence: this was a direct consequence of the state's promotion of collective violence between ethnic groups and its demonisation and criminalisation of whole groups once they carried out the ‘dirty work' of empire.^[349] The Albanian-Serbian conflict created by the Ottoman state and its rivals is only one example of a wider, recurring phenomenon: the Tatar refugees commissioned to suppress the Bulgarian uprisings in 1876 were soon criminalised as ba$ibozuks (‘masterless'); the Kurdish warrior tribes commis­sioned to fight Russian-backed Armenian revolutionaries (Dashnaktsutyun) that culminated in the Armenian genocide of 1915 were collectively crim­inalised soon after World War I. These later examples point to the continua­tion of a policy first formulated in the eighteenth century.