Ottoman Rule of Law and the Modern Political Trial

Ottoman Rule of Law and the Modern Political Trial
Author: Avi Rubin
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2018-11-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 0815654553

In 1876, a recently dethroned sultan, Abdülaziz, was found dead in his cham- bers, the veins in his arm slashed. Five years later, a group of Ottoman senior officials stood a criminal trial and were found guilty for complicity in his murder. Among the defendants was the world-famous statesman former Grand Vizier and reformer Ahmed Midhat Pasa, a political foe of the autocratic sultan Abdülhamit II, who succeeded Abdülaziz and ruled the empire for thirty-three years. The alleged murder of the former sultan and the trial that ensued were political dramas that captivated audiences both domestically and internationally. The high-profile personalities involved, the international politics at stake, and the intense newspaper coverage all rendered the trial an historic event, but the question of whether the sultan was murdered or committed suicide re- mains a mystery that continues to be relevant in Turkey today. Drawing upon a wide range of narrative and archival sources, Rubin explores the famous yet understudied trial and its representations in contemporary public discourse and subsequent historiography. Through the reconstruction and analysis of various aspects of the trial, Rubin identifies the emergence of a new culture of legalism that sustained the first modern political trial in the history of the Middle East.

Ottoman Rule of Law and the Modern Political Trial

Ottoman Rule of Law and the Modern Political Trial
Author: Avi Rubin
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2018-11-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780815635970

In 1876, a recently dethroned sultan, Abdülaziz, was found dead in his cham- bers, the veins in his arm slashed. Five years later, a group of Ottoman senior officials stood a criminal trial and were found guilty for complicity in his murder. Among the defendants was the world-famous statesman former Grand Vizier and reformer Ahmed Midhat Pasa, a political foe of the autocratic sultan Abdülhamit II, who succeeded Abdülaziz and ruled the empire for thirty-three years. The alleged murder of the former sultan and the trial that ensued were political dramas that captivated audiences both domestically and internationally. The high-profile personalities involved, the international politics at stake, and the intense newspaper coverage all rendered the trial an historic event, but the question of whether the sultan was murdered or committed suicide remains a mystery that continues to be relevant in Turkey today. Drawing upon a wide range of narrative and archival sources, Rubin explores the famous yet understudied trial and its representations in contemporary public discourse and subsequent historiography. Through the reconstruction and analysis of various aspects of the trial, Rubin identifies the emergence of a new culture of legalism that sustained the first modern political trial in the history of the Middle East.

Political Trials in Theory and History

Political Trials in Theory and History
Author: Jens Meierhenrich
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 451
Release: 2017-02-27
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1108107656

From the trial of Socrates to the post-9/11 military commissions, trials have always been useful instruments of politics. Yet there is still much that we do not understand about them. Why do governments use trials to pursue political objectives, and when? What differentiates political trials from ordinary ones? Contrary to conventional wisdom, not all political trials are show trials or contrive to set up scapegoats. This volume offers a novel account of political trials that is empirically rigorous and theoretically sophisticated, linking state-of-the-art research on telling cases to a broad argument about political trials as a socio-legal phenomenon. All the contributors analyse the logic of the political in the courtroom. From archival research to participant observation, and from linguistic anthropology to game theory, the volume offers a genuinely interdisciplinary set of approaches that substantially advance existing knowledge about what political trials are, how they work, and why they matter.

Imperial Citizen

Imperial Citizen
Author: Karen M. Kern
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2011-11-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 0815650817

Imperial Citizen examines the intersection between Ottoman imperialism, control of the Iraqi frontier through centralization policies, and the impact of those policies on Ottoman citizenship laws and on the institution of marriage. In an effort to maintain control of the Iraqi provinces, the Ottomans adapted their 1869 citizenship law to prohibit marriage between Ottoman women and Iranian men. This prohibition was an attempt to contain the threat that the Iranian Shi‘a population represented to Ottoman control of these provinces. In Imperial Citizen, Kern establishes this 1869 law as a point of departure for an illuminating exploration of an emerging concept of modern citizenship. She unfolds the historical context of the law and systematically analyzes the various modifications it underwent, pointing to its far-reaching implications throughout society, particularly on landowners, the military, and Sunni women and their children. Kern’s fascinating account offers an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the Ottoman Iraqi frontier and its passage to modernity.

Gendering Culture in Greater Syria

Gendering Culture in Greater Syria
Author: Fruma Zachs
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2014-11-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0857736728

The Nahda (lit. 'the Awakening') was one of the most significant cultural movements in modern Arab history. By focusing on the neglected role of women in the intellectual Islamic renaissance of the late Ottoman Period, Fruma Zachs and Sharon Halevi provide a refreshingly interdisciplinary exploration of gender and culture in the Arab World. Focusing mainly on Greater Syria, this book re-examines the cultural by-products of the Nahda - such as scientific debates, journal articles, essays, short stories and novels - and provides a new framework for rethinking the dynamics of cultural and social change in what today we know as Syria and Lebanon. The lasting impact of the Nahda is given an innovative and thoroughly unique interpretation, providing an indispensable perspective to studying the nuanced roles of the construction and development of gender ideologies in the nineteenth century Middle East. The authors explore contemporary ideas concerning modern gender roles in the Middle East, and the extent to which these emerged in nineteenth-century Greater Syria. How were these ideas incorporated into daily lives, consumer patterns and cultural activities? Was class a determining factor in the creation of gender relations in the Muslim world? How were the subjectivities of gender moulded and articulated in fictional and non-fictional texts? The authors delineate both the evolution of a discourse on gender as well the "real-life" activities of men and women as writers, readers and participants in philanthropic and cultural societies, literary salons and educational enterprises. This book reemphasizes the position of the Nahda in the worlds of Damascus, Aleppo and Beirut as an innovative, deeply influential, and significant socio-cultural and political movement in its own right, which played a major role in shaping modern Arab culture, worldviews and self-perception. Zachs and Halevi here provide a new framework for rethinking the dynamics of cultural and social change, and present a groundbreaking new interpretation of the cumulative impact of the Nahda on gender perception in the late Ottoman Period.

Defining Corruption in the Ottoman Empire

Defining Corruption in the Ottoman Empire
Author: ?a? A. Ergene
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2024-05-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 019891623X

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.

Who Killed Panayot?

Who Killed Panayot?
Author: Omri Paz
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2021-04-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 1351053590

Who Killed Panayot? retells the true story of an opium robbery and subsequent police investigation that took place in the port-city of Izmir in 1850-52. What started as a simple case soon turned into a diplomatic crisis between two bygone empires, as the investigation provoked strong tensions between the British community in Izmir and the local Ottoman authorities. These tensions were exacerbated by the death of one of the suspects – a gardener named Panayot – after he was interrogated by the police. Drawing on a wide range of archival sources from the affair, Paz skilfully reconstructs this untold saga. Through microhistory and sociolegal analysis, he pieces together the lives of the outlaws and policemen involved in the case, and sheds important light on the history of opium smuggling and the impact of interrogation under torture. Paz argues that a "culture of lying" was adopted by both British and Ottoman officials, in face of the new legal reality that forged the concepts of human rights and the rule of law. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of microhistory, as well as those interested in sociolegal history, non-Western modernity, and the Ottoman Empire.

State Law and Legal Positivism

State Law and Legal Positivism
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2021-12-13
Genre: Law
ISBN: 9004498710

There was a truly global revolution that reflected a Great Divide between ancient and new legal regimes. The volume emphasizes its depth and scale and explores the phenomenon in the contexts of Morocco, Egypt, India, the Ottoman empire, China, and Japan.

Routledge Handbook of Constitutional Law in Greater China

Routledge Handbook of Constitutional Law in Greater China
Author: Ngoc Son Bui
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 517
Release: 2022-12-29
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1000800571

The Handbook of Constitutional Law in Greater China surveys important issues of constitutional law in Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan. It synthesizes existing scholarship, debates, and views on important constitutional issues in the four jurisdictions. Written by a range of scholars, it contributes to both national and comparative scholarship on constitutional law in these jurisdictions. The book includes four parts: Part I: History. This part explores the constitutional movement of the Qing dynasty; constitutional projects in modern China; and aspects of the drafting and implementation history of the Hong Kong and Macau Basic Laws Part II: Structure. This part discusses the relationship between the party-state and the Chinese constitutional order; Chinese constitutionalism; constitutional aspects of city development under the SAR concept; constitutional review in Mainland China; a history of Taiwan’s ‘Council of Grand Justices’; and judicial review in both Hong Kong and Macau Part III: Rights, Society, and Economy. This part deals with Hong Kong’s National Security Law and its impact on the ‘one country, two systems model’; social movements and constitutionalism; LGBT rights advocacy; the integration of capitalist regions within socialist China; the constitutional relevance of labour reforms in Mainland China; healthcare rights in both the Mainland and the SARS; and foreign investment under Art. 18 of the PRC Constitution Part IV: Transnational Engagement. This part surveys comparative writings on China’s constitution; the influence of international human rights treaties on China’s constitutional order; the international dimension of Hong Kong’s constitutional order; and the changing role of the ‘overseas judges’ in Hong Kong Exploring both historical and cutting-edge constitutional issues, this reference book is important reading for law researchers, lawyers, graduate students, undergraduates, and practitioners in the field of constitutional law and politics in Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau.

The Economics of Ottoman Justice

The Economics of Ottoman Justice
Author: Metin Coşgel
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 365
Release: 2016-10-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107157633

A systematic analysis of legal practice in a sharia court in the Ottoman Empire during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.