Selim III, Social Control and Policing in Istanbul at the End of the Eighteenth Century: Between Crisis and Order (Ottoman Empire and its Heritage: Politics, Society and Economy, 56)

In Selim III, Social Order and Policing in Istanbul at the End of the Eighteenth Century Betül Başaran examines Sultan Selim III’s social control and surveillance measures. Drawing mainly from a set of inspection registers and censuses from the 1790s, as well as court records she paints a colorful picture of the city’s residents and artisans. She argues that the period constitutes the beginnings of large-scale population control and crisis management and urges us to think about the Ottoman Empire as a polity that was increasingly becoming a “statistical” state, along with its contemporaries in Europe, and to go beyond mechanistic models of borrowing that focus primarily on military reform and European influence in our discussions of Ottoman reform and “modernity”.

Betül Başaran, Ph.D. (2006), University of Chicago, is Associate Professor at St. Mary's College of Maryland. She has published articles on Istanbul's population and artisans during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.