I’m so pleased that Alena Strohmaier and Angela Krewani’s Media and Mapping Practices in the Middle East and North Africa is finally in print. The book is published by Amsterdam University Press. It is open access and available online through the publisher’s site. Congratulations Alena and Angela, and all the contributors in this volume!

My chapter ‘Mapping Empire: Knowledge Production and Government in the Ninteenth Century Ottoman Empire’ is included in the book and can be downloaded with the publication, or as an individual chapter (links below).

In this chapter, I look at the development of techniques of social scientific knowledge, and their consolidation and application as techniques of government in the nineteenth century Ottoman realm. As Zeynep Çelik (2008) has argued in Empire, Architecture and the City, inter-imperial knowledge networks were not unidimensional, and vectors of influence were multidirectional. Using a Foucauldian approach to knowledge within a post-colonial sociological framework (with reference to the work of Raewyn Connell, 2016, 2014, 2007; Julian Go 2016, 2013; and Dipesh Chakrabarty 2000), I argue that the adoption of European scientific techniques and practices, their adaptation to local conditions, and the transformation of that knowledge into techniques of government, was a response by Ottoman elites to fluctuating geopolitical circumstances and emerging national identities in the context of inter-imperial rivalry.

These complex cultural exchanges led to new approaches in the organisation of the state and its institutions, and reshaped Ottoman imperial administration. As disciplinary boundaries were fluid, and practices of social organisation developing, knowledge formations rapidly intersected with techniques of government. Novel social scientific techniques were studied and adopted, with geographical knowledge and statistical data emerging as instruments of power in the quest for hegemony.

Image: The Löytved map of Beirut, made in 1876. The map was presented by the Danish Vice-Consul Julius Löytved to the last Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II, and offers one example of the complex cultural exchanges of this period. Some say the map was a gift, others say it was petitioned by the Sultan. 

Focusing on the formation of geographical and statistical knowledge in this period, I argue that the precision of the knowledge yielded by the new techniques allowed for an expansion of the bureaucratic apparatus and a change in approach to the government of population within the Empire. Drawing on the work of historian Kemal Karpat, particularly his volumes on the development of Ottoman population statistics – Ottoman Population 1830-1914 (1985) and Studies on Ottoman Social and Political History (2002) – I argue that the merging of geographical and statistical knowledge became a pivotal vector in the Empire’s quest for power and legitimacy. The application of demographic data to the government of population ultimately had disastrous consequences for minority groups with competing claims.

Download my chapter Mapping Empire: Knowledge Production and Government

Download the publication Media and Mapping Practices in the Middle East and North Africa

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