CSI'S Monday Majlis: Ayşe Baltacıoğlu-Brammer

In a successful empire, Jane Burbank and Fred Cooper have argued, “neither consistent loyalty nor constant resistance [but] contingent accommodation,” was what took place. At the core of the imperial ideologies of the early modern era was, therefore, the implicit principle according to which “different peoples within the polity [would] be governed differently.” As political entities with a great degree of heterogeneity and of reliance on both incorporation and differentiation, most of the imperial centers followed the practice of “mix[ing], match[ing], and transform[ing] their ways of rule” to adapt to changing circumstances within and beyond their boundaries. In the Ottoman case, the territorial expansion of the empire and its intense bureaucratization in the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries did not fully eradicate the fragility and flexibility of the state. Rather than becoming an all-powerful state in the Weberian sense, the more expanded and bureaucratized the political establishment became, the more flexible (and also arbitrary) it turned out to be to simply accommodate the needs and priorities of its ballooning governing circle and increasing number of constituencies. Recognizing the limits, as well as the elasticity, of the early modern state and its religious outlook naturally raises another question: What was then the power of its subjects and what did their subjecthood mean? In this talk, I aim to answer this question with a novel approach that moves beyond the conventional theories of the state-subject dichotomy according to which the latter has denoted passiveness.