Boğaç A. Ergene - Böcker

How did the premodern Ottomans understand public office corruption? To answer this question, Defining Corruption in the Ottoman Empire explores how Ottoman jurists, statesmen, political commentators, and others characterized this notion and what specific transgressions they associated with it before the nineteenth century. The book is based on extensive research and a wide variety of sources, including jurisprudential texts, imperial orders and communications, chronicles, and travel and diplomatic accounts. It identifies articulations of self-interested abuses of power by official and communal actors in these sources and illustrates how they resonate in some ways with modern perspectives. These premodern formulations, however, are shown to have collectively constituted a conceptual space that was contentious and temporally unstable, and no single overarching term was able to encapsulate all the specific misdeeds frequently linked to modern depictions of corruption.The book's genre-specific discursive survey is complemented by discussions that highlight, in the Ottoman context, the shifty boundaries that separated legitimate and illegitimate forms of revenue extraction; that examine the state's efforts to monitor and punish abuses by government officials; and that explore the context-dependent and often contested moralities of many acts, such as gift giving as bribery, office selling, and favoritism. It also considers the ways in which "corrupt" state actors might have rationalized their offenses.Defining Corruption is a conceptually driven work that is both comparative and interdisciplinary, engaging seriously with non-Ottoman historiographies, including broader Middle Eastern, European, and Chinese, and multiple disciplines besides history, in particular anthropology and economics, to provide a comprehensive analysis of premodern Ottoman perceptions of administrative abuse.

This book features essays that explore corruption and its manifestations in the Ottoman Empire through social, political, economic, legal and discursive approaches. Its main goal is to contextualise the notion and investigate its meanings, conceptual parallels and associated behaviour via a nuanced historical framework. Combining theoretical analysis with detailed case studies, the volume also examines various corruption-related crimes and how they were regulated in the Ottoman polity across the early modern and modern periods.Bringing together established and emerging Ottoman scholars, the collection advances the field by considering contrasting perspectives on the topic. The book's scope extends beyond the Ottoman Empire to include comparative perspectives from other historical settings, such as Mamluk Egypt and Qing China, offering readers a broader understanding of how different polities defined and confronted corruption.

Despite their geographical separation from Western Europe, ethno-religious diversity, and subordinate status within the Nazi racial hierarchy, many Middle Eastern societies proved remarkably hospitable to National Socialist ideology during the 1930s and 1940s. By focusing on Arab and Turkish reactions to German anti-Semitism and the persecution of European Jews during this period, this expansive collection surveys the institutional and popular reception of Nazism throughout the Middle East. It provides nuanced and scholarly yet accessible case studies of the ways in which nationalism, Islam, anti-Semitism, and colonialism intertwined, all while sensitive to the region's political, cultural, and religious complexities.