Tolga U. Esmer, Economies of Banditry in the Late Ottoman Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2026. 336 Pages.
Öz
This review examines Tolga U. Esmer’s Economies of Banditry in the Late Ottoman Empire, which reframes the career of Rumelian bandit leader Kara Feyzī as evidence that Ottoman governance was continuously negotiated through banditry, and not simply weakened by it. The review evaluates the fluid boundaries between legitimacy and criminality, the transformation of honour into political capital, and organised violence as a revenue source. It also draws attention to the relatively limited treatment of the fiscal dimensions of banditry and to the limitations of generalising from a single case.
Anahtar Kelimeler
Ottoman Empire, Banditry, Provincial Governance, Violence and Power, Kara Feyzî
Kaynakça
- Anscombe, Frederick F., ed. The Ottoman Balkans, 1750-1830. Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2006.
- Barkey, Karen. Bandits and Bureaucrats: The Ottoman Route to State Centralization. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994.
- Esmer, Tolga Uğur. A Culture of Rebellion: Networks of Violence and Competing Discourses of Justice in the Ottoman Empire, 1790-1808. Chicago: University of Chicago, Department of History, Ph.D. Dissertation, 2009.
- Esmer, Tolga U. “Economies of Violence, Banditry and Governance in the Ottoman Empire Around 1800”. Past & Present 224/1 (August 2014), 163-199. https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtu013
- Esmer, Tolga U. “Notes on a Scandal: Transregional Networks of Violence, Gossip, and Imperial Sovereignty in the Late Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Empire”. Comparative Studies in Society and History 58/1 (January 2016), 99-128. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417515000584
- Yaycıoğlu, Ali. Partners of the Empire: The Crisis of the Ottoman Order in the Age of Revolutions. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016.
