The proposed project focuses on the evolution of published compilations of Ottoman laws that eventually became the well-known series Düstur. (There are three editions that were published [1851, 1863 and 1866] before what we commonly know as “Düstur, 1. Tertib” was published in 1872.) The Tanzimat era witnessed the growth of a “public sphere” of state administration within which the imperial publications such as Düstur served as “textually mediated organizations of state”—a phrase that I am borrowing from Giddens. I believe focusing on these publications we can see how the Ottoman government used the legal framework to identify the roles and the expanse of government. To be more precise, I seek to explore whether we can read the Düstur compilations to see how Ottoman government defined its own responsibilities and limitations. This attempt is inspired by Foucault’s focus on political economy as a platform within which the efficiency of the state or rather the extent to which one should govern is assessed and negotiated, in this case, among participants to Ottoman governmentality. This is a particular evolution that happened with the development of “liberalism,” which, as an ideology, argues for the least amount of governing possible to run a state. Law gains a particular function with this transformation concerning itself mostly with “how to set juridical limits to the exercise of power by a public authority.” My presentation will connect economic liberalism in the nineteenth century Ottoman Empire with the administrative codes selected from the early Düstur compendia. I aim to trace the evolution of laws pertaining to specific administrative practices in this light, and I think Düstur is a good place to do this.

The millet system under Ottoman law experienced significant modifications and changes in the 1860s, following the Treaty of Paris of 1856. Nineteenth century legal reforms regarding relations of different religious groups to the Ottoman state were not only the result of outside influences and pressure exerted by the European Powers regarding the Ottoman Empire’s Christian subjects. The Ottomans themselves had seen the need for internal reforms and some elites from both the Christian and Jewish communities were advocating for change. In 1861, for example, the Italian Jewish Community petitioned to separate from the Jewish millet, a legal structure that recognized Judeo-Spanish Sephardic Jewish authorities as the legal representatives of an extremely diverse community. The Greek Orthodox Patriarch was the authority over most Orthodox Christians with the Armenians being the exception, until the Bulgarian church broke away in 1870 with the Sublime Porte’s recognition of the Bulgarian Exarch. The Armenians were divided among at least three faith communities, and elites in Istanbul represented vast numbers of their community in Anatolia. This paper explores the modernization of the millet system as it was applied to Greeks, Jews and Armenians. The 1860s were a time of increasing community participation in the creation of new legal structures that were recognized by the Ottoman state for non-Muslims. The Armenian Constitution of 1863 was iconic in its formation of both a religious superstructure and civic council of lay leadership. The idea of having a dual communal structure between religious authorities and elite business leaders is still present in Modern Turkey in the Greek, Armenian and Jewish communities, today, as an extra-legal structure. This communal structure was articulated by the Ottoman state authorities with the participation of non-Muslim leadership in the 1860s and incorporated into the Constitution of 1876. Today, this communal structure is recognized by the contemporary Turkish state in Ankara, but it is no longer part of the constitution, as Christians and Jews are regular citizens without any special, official or separate legal status.

This paper examines Ottoman engagement with the formal field of international law during the last four decades of the empire. After the Congress of Berlin, the Ottoman Empire worked on several fronts to establish its membership in the community of European powers. In some ways, Ottoman law resembled from certain other marks of sovereignty brandished by the Hamidian empire: it was a performance meant to convince an external audience and forestall internal opposition. Ottoman legal reform was not merely a show, however, because it depended on the steady generation on positive content. One of the accouterments of legitimacy required to meet the international “standard of civilization” was a cadre of experts in international law. Like many other non-European powers, the Ottomans recruited European-trained lawyers to consult on their international legal work. The papers of these legal advisors, which are preserved in the Ottoman archives, are one source for this study. Another source is the activity of these lawyers in the fledgling field of international law, in particular through the Institut du Droit International and through legal publishing. Because Ottoman international law was performed above all for a foreign rather than a domestic audience, the empire’s lawyers did not seek to legitimize their activity in terms of Ottoman or Islamic legal traditions in the first instance. As they explored the resources available to them for implementation, rather than mere legislation, the lawyers made consistent use of these non-European traditions. The emerging global history of international law (Anghie 2005, Benton 2010, Fassbender and Peters 2013, Becker Lorca 2013) wrestles mightily with the question of international law’s Eurocentrism. This paper seeks to offer fresh resources in this debate, arguing that late Ottoman international lawyers were both followers and leaders in the emerging field of international law. In the late nineteenth century, international law was an experimental discipline. Ottoman legal work, undertaken to manage and bolster its membership in the community of powers, tracked a moving target. Critically, I argue that Ottoman legal questions were by no means peripheral in the development of the discipline as a whole. The models of international law that the Ottomans had to imitate in order to establish their legitimacy were being formed by Ottoman practice itself.

Within the field of Ottoman studies, the last decade has witnessed a growing number of studies devoted to law and order, criminal history, and legal history in a broader sense, and the present article forms part of that body of knowledge. Most studies, though not all, exam the passage to modernity during the 19th and 20th centuries. Most studies however, focus on one legal institution be it the legislator, the judicial, the police, or the penal institutions. Not many studies cross institutions. Examining the criminal procedures during the middle decades of the 19th century I noticed that the development of the criminal court system and its needs had a critical impact on the development of the police. Although the Ottoman police at the time, called the Asakir-i Zaptiye, was established as a paramilitary force, and took its structure and main mission from the French Gendarmerie, the criminal court system established alongside it in 1840 needed a law enforcement body able to carry out pre-trial procedures, collect evidence and record on paper testimony of suspects, victims and witnesses. The Supreme Council of Judicial Ordinances was the one that instructed local units to do so. Institutional historians tend to view the birth of a modern Ottoman Police in 1879, when a civil police force came into being. Accordingly, such historians show the Asakir-i Zaptiye was not really a police force, and had very little crime investigation capabilities. This paper will follow defining moments that imposed the judicial establishment to address the police and delegated it with new tasks. The civil police established in 1879 did not pop up out of the blue, it was after four long decades during which the need, the problems and the understanding such a force was due matured.