Economies of Banditry in the Late Ottoman Empire

Economies of Banditry in the Late Ottoman Empire analyses archival sources written by Ottoman officials from across the empire about one notorious bandit ringleader—Kara Feyzî—and his criminal network. The diverse phenomena Ottoman imperial officials labelled as ‘banditry’ concealed complex patterns of political, social, and economic behaviour at the turn of the nineteenth century. Tolga Esmer explores how Kara Feyzî and his accomplices forged a transregional network that expanded their once state-sanctioned terror against the empire’s Serbian community to the general Christian and Muslim population across the Balkan peninsula. His book explores the enmity, intrigue, corruption, and mistrust that led to the Ottoman empire’s first national revolution, the First Serbian Uprising (1804–13). It contends that this paramilitary violence in the Balkans along with its moral geographies that spread from the Balkans resulted in coups that toppled three regimes and killed tens of thousands between 1807 and 1808 in Istanbul itself. Esmer writes a riveting microhistory of empire that penetrates deep into the pores of the Ottoman empire’s corrosive political culture and analyses the moral, emotional, and economic regimes that informed it. It exposes the effects that the chronic imbrications between large-scale criminal organizations and elite impresarios of imperial governance had on the ability of the Ottoman empire to govern its diverse polity justly. The book offers the reader a timely analysis of an Ottoman dystopia in which strongman aesthetics, racketeering, fake news, and corruption became conventionalized modes of imperial politics during the Napoleonic age of revolution and war.