Captivity, Migration, And Diplomacy in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries

7/30/2019 Captivity, Migration, And Diplomacy in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries

1/6

Dossier

Captivity, Migration, and Diplomacy in the Late Eighteenth and EarlyNineteenth Centuries


2/6

Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2012 DOI 10.1163/18775462X00302003

Turkish Historical Review 3 (2012) 144148 brill.com/thr

Introduction

Virginia H. Aksan*

We live in an age o paranoia, a n de sicle moment delayed by more than a

decade o the new millennium, characterized by uncertainty and visions orising apocalyptic dystopias, where the individual has become the last rontieror commercial exploration and exploitation. Small wonder then that strate-gies o survival in the pre-modern world, the common theme o the threepapers on Russo-Ottoman relations in this volume, have suraced among his-torians as a vibrant ocus o imperial, colonial and even national approaches tohistory. Te revival o the interest in world empires, generated at least in partby the stumbling American version, has equally led to an ongoing debateabout identity, ethnicity and agency as part o the toolkit o subjecthood in

the pre-nation state setting.One certainty o my youth was the xedness o identity, or so we thought.

Te nation state, now likely doomed to the dustbin o history, providedeach o its citizens with a xed boundary, a marker o identity, which mightinclude a passport, a citizenship card, a drivers or marriage license, all prop-erly vetted and made public, signalling the relationship o a particular indi-vidual to a particular state. When I rst visited urkey in the 1960s, I wasoten asked Nerelisiniz? or more oten in the countryside, Memleket nere?,both o which can be translated as Where are you rom, but the latter really

intending What is your homeland? Being a typical American mongrel,I blithely answered America, but the probing extended to Yes, but where areyou really rom? Although initially puzzled, I came to represent mysel asNew Amsterdam Dutch and French material, with a touch o late Liverpoolthrown in, a Yankee through and through, until I moved to Canada, whereI have spent the last thirty years, and where I have long celebrated being a

* Department o History, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, vaksan@

mcmaster.ca.


3/6

V.H. Aksan / urkish Historical Review 3 (2012) 144148 145

hyphenated Canadian. In another one o those historical coincidences whichwe ignore at our peril, this also happens to be the bicentennial year o the so-

called war o 1812, when Yankees and loyalists were hard to tell apart andnewly minted American and Canadian identities largely untested. Castback those two hundred years, or the same period in Russian and Ottomanworlds, and one is struck by a similar ambiguity and ambivalence aboutxing ones identity, when not already imposed by imperial at, such as seror kul (slave), and more importantly, about an admittedly limited range ooptions that could appear to oer some exibility or negotiation with author-ity or individuals and groups with means and a community o support. Temarkers were clearly dierent amily or communal afliation, circumcision

(or not), clothing, body parts, slave status (or not), language, maybe. In thepre-ethnographic age, assuming an individual predilection or a particularethno-religious identity or an afliation to a particular group beyond that israught with potential historical anachronisms.

What are we to make o this? One o the striking trends o the past quartercentury has been the destabilization o our linguistic labels and categories: thecertainties o Victorian knowledge about race, ethnicity, civilizations andempires have gradually given way to an increased ocus on comparative societ-ies and the agency o groups and individuals in the ace o exploitative political

powers. Historians do agree by now that labels: ethnic, religious, sexual, veryoten emerge in the very questioning o their existence, hence, or example inthe long discussion o Zulu peoples in Arica.1

Edward Said exhorted us to recognize the bias o the colonial gaze, and wehave perormed exorcisms on suspect sources, but remain caught in theconundrum o the silence o most individuals beyond the charmed circle oeducated Ottoman Muslim and non-Muslim elites. In spite o difculties,new scholarship is emerging that makes imperial and regional comparisons,such as across the Austro-Russo-Ottoman divide, not only possible, but

necessary to reach a new understanding o how communities survived the

1 Etherington, Norman, Barbarians ancient and modern, American Historical Review116(2011), 31-57. Etherington is an Arican historian, but explores here not just the long debateover Arican tribalism, but the rootedness o our understanding o empire in Roman history.Karen Barkeys Empire o Diference: the Ottomans in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2008), begins with that premise in order to highlight the Ottomanvariations. Jane Burbank and Frederick Coopers Empires in World History: Power and thePolitics o Diference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), has established a new

template or comparison. It includes an interesting chapter on the Spanish and Ottomanempires.


4/6

146 V.H. Aksan / urkish Historical Review 3 (2012) 144148

repeated upheavals and dislocations o the eighteenth through the twentiethcentury.2

Te three papers that ollow demonstrate precisely what is possible whennew sources are brought to bear and new questions are asked o old assump-tions. All are situated in the pivotal moment 1780s-1830s, a pregnant pauseo global reordering, and what used to be called the beginning o the EasternQuestion. Kahraman akul invites us to revisit the old question o Ottomanbarbarism as related to their treatment o prisoners o war ollowing NapoleonBonapartes invasion o Egypt in 1798, and the subsequent curious SecondCoalition alliance o Russian, British and Ottoman navies in the easternMediterranean rom 1799-1801. His source is the well known, much cited

contemporary Franois Pouqueville, philhellene extraordinaire, who was cap-tured by the Ottomans and orced marched to Istanbul. esting the travellersaccount against other ambassadorial and Ottoman documentary sources,akul suggests that the Ottomans were attuned to the emerging rule o inter-national law relating to treatment o prisoners o war. Troughout, he con-sciously evokes the long literature on urkish barbarity, especially in militarymatters, which has rarely been seriously challenged among western historians.Post-Saidians all, we understand that the other is a historical construction oour enemy, but the urkish/Muslim version has had an extremely long shel

lie and remains a universal to European imaginaries past and present. Tereis no doubt that the image o bags o decapitated heads, used either to securemonetary rewards on the battleeld, or as here, as proo the individual diedon route to prison in Istanbul, evokes horror in present-day hearts, but inmany other particulars, the Ottomans clearly had started to play by theinternational rules. While there would appear to be very little possibilityor individual negotiation and escape in such dire situations, the evidenceoered by akul indicates otherwise. Barbarity and civility could exist side byside, as even Poucqueville himsel was ready to acknowledge. We need much

more exploration o the practices o warare in this period to move beyond the

2 Other eorts at exploring the possibility o comparison include: Aksan, Virginia, Locatingthe Ottomans among early modern empires,Journal o Early Modern History3 (1999), 21-39.Gbor goston, who has written extensively on Austro-Hungary and the Ottomans, is embarkedon a project to make it a three way comparison, or example, Military transormation in theOttoman empire and Russia, 15001800, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History12 (2011), 281-319. Other examples include Birdal, Mehmet Sinan, Te Holy Roman Empireand the Ottomans: From Global Imperial Power to Absolutist States(London and New York, NY:IB auris, 2011), and or the end o empire: Aydn, Cemil, Te Politics o Anti-Westernism in

Asia: Visions o World Order Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Tought(New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 2007).


5/6

V.H. Aksan / urkish Historical Review 3 (2012) 144148 147

tales o atrocity and woe which make up most o the national histories o theregion.

Will Smileys contribution begins with the disputed clause o the 1774Kk Kaynarca treaty concerning Russian rights to protection o Orthodoxbrothers under Ottoman rule, and proceeds to demonstrate the limits to suchintervention in the case o putative Russian prisoners o war. Smiley exploresall the new literature on imperial identity and legality, arguing that by the endo the eighteenth century, Russian ofcials were very careul to limit theirintervention to those they could prove to belong to the tsar, itsel a challenge.3Smileys descriptions o individual manipulations o such interrogations, byclaiming to be a Greek (Orthodox) or a convert to Islam when it suited the

situation, drawn rom Ottoman and Russian, as well as oreign consular docu-mentation, are convincing. What is evident here, as well as in the akul piece,is a system in transition, when captivity and ransom, protable enterprisesboth, were giving way to an understanding o the states authority (and itlimits) over its citizens.

Andrew Robartss piece concerns the territories o present-day Bulgaria andRomania, and the rans-Danubian, Black Sea passages in the period rom1780s-1830s. Te Austro-Russian-Ottoman rontier has generated muchwork about zones o enterprise and low level conicts, but little about the

motivation o movements o peoples, here specically labelled Bulgarian.4

Robartss uidity with both Russian and Ottoman archives allows us to showhow catastrophes like war prompted the realignment o communities o aith,but also how entrepreneurial and amilial ties complicated choices andloyalties.

3 Pitts, Jennier, AHR orum: empire and legal universalisms in the eighteenth century,American Historical Review 117 (2012), 92-121, is a striking discussion o the openness o

European intellectuals, especially Edmund Burke, William Scott and Abraham Antequil-Duperron, to the early development o international law, amalgamating both eastern and west-ern systems, within a context where many considered the indel ineligible or thatconsideration. While the older Christian-indel ault line had retreated in legal terms, the starkdivision between barbaric and civilized nations or races so characteristic o the nineteenth cen-tury had not yet become entrenched (pp. 97-8).

4 Peacock, A.C.S. (ed.), Frontiers o the Ottoman World(NY: Oxord University Press, 2010);David, Gza and Pl Fodor (eds.), Ransom Slavery Along the Ottoman Borders: Early Fiteenth toEarly Eighteenth Centuries(Leiden: Brill, 2007); Aksan, Virginia H., Whose territory and whosepeasants? Ottoman boundaries on the Danube in the 1760s, in Te Ottoman Balkans, 1750-1830, ed. Frederick F. Anscombe (Princeton: Markus Weiner Publishers, 2006), pp. 61-86;

Davies, Brian (ed.), Warare in Eastern Europe 1500-1800(Leiden, E. J. Brill, 2012), includesarticles on all the communities bordering on the Muslim/Christian rontier.


6/6

148 V.H. Aksan / urkish Historical Review 3 (2012) 144148

Tese case studies demonstrate that mobility and ambiguity allowed vulner-able populations, ree or enslaved, a certain amount o autonomy. Te degree

to which the Ottomans undertook to settle and/or civilize these populationsater the 1830s is part o the ongoing debate o the nature o late Ottomanimperialism.5

5 Gavrilis, George, Te Dynamics o Interstate Boundaries (Cambridge, MA: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2008) begins his book with a long discussion o the Greek-Ottoman boundarybeore and ater 1831, and precisely what it did to local community networks. Reat Kasaba

explores the problem o mobility in his recent Te Moveable Empire(Seattle, WA: University oWashington, Press, 2011).

Documents

Captivity, Migration, And Diplomacy in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries