E-Books →Defining Corruption in the Ottoman Empire Morality, Legality, and Abuse of Power in Premodern Governance

Free Download Defining Corruption in the Ottoman Empire: Morality, Legality, and Abuse of Power in Premodern Governance by Boğaç A. Ergene
English | 9 May 2024 | ISBN: 0198916213 | True EPUB/PDF | 352 pages | 2.5/2.3 MB
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.