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

Turkish Historical Review 3 (2012) 144148

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Introduction
Virginia H. Aksan*

We live in an age of paranoia, a fin de sicle moment delayed by more than a decade of the new millennium, characterized by uncertainty and visions of rising apocalyptic dystopias, where the individual has become the last frontier for commercial exploration and exploitation. Small wonder then that strategies of survival in the pre-modern world, the common theme of the three papers on Russo-Ottoman relations in this volume, have surfaced among historians as a vibrant focus of imperial, colonial and even national approaches to history. The revival of the interest in world empires, generated at least in part by the stumbling American version, has equally led to an ongoing debate about identity, ethnicity and agency as part of the toolkit of subjecthood in the pre-nation state setting. One certainty of my youth was the fixedness of identity, or so we thought. The nation state, now likely doomed to the dustbin of history, provided each of its citizens with a fixed boundary, a marker of identity, which might include a passport, a citizenship card, a drivers or marriage license, all prop erlyvetted and made public, signalling the relationship of a particular indi vidualto a particular state. When I first visited Turkey in the 1960s, I was often asked Nerelisiniz? or more often in the countryside, Memleket nere?, both of which can be translated as Where are you from, 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 are you really from? Although initially puzzled, I came to represent myself as New Amsterdam Dutch and French material, with a touch of late Liverpool thrown in, a Yankee through and through, until I moved to Canada, where I have spent the last thirty years, and where I have long celebrated being a

*Department of History, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, vaksan@ mcmaster.ca.

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

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hyphenated Canadian. In another one of those historical coincidences which we ignore at our peril, this also happens to be the bicentennial year of the socalled war of 1812, when Yankees and loyalists were hard to tell apart and newly minted American and Canadian identities largely untested. Cast back those two hundred years, for the same period in Russian and Ottoman worlds, and one is struck by a similar ambiguity and ambivalence about fixing ones identity, when not already imposed by imperial fiat, such as serf or kul (slave), and more importantly, about an admittedly limited range of options that could appear to offer some flexibility for negotiation with authority for individuals and groups with means and a community of support. The markers were clearly different family or communal affiliation, circumcision (or not), clothing, body parts, slave status (or not), language, maybe. In the pre-ethnographic age, assuming an individual predilection for a particular ethno-religious identity or an affiliation to a particular group beyond that is fraught with potential historical anachronisms. What are we to make of this? One of the striking trends of the past quarter century has been the destabilization of our linguistic labels and categories: the certainties of Victorian knowledge about race, ethnicity, civilizations and empires have gradually given way to an increased focus on comparative societies and the agency of groups and individuals in the face of exploitative political powers. Historians do agree by now that labels: ethnic, religious, sexual, very often emerge in the very questioning of their existence, hence, for example in the long discussion of Zulu peoples in Africa.1 Edward Said exhorted us to recognize the bias of the colonial gaze, and we have performed exorcisms on suspect sources, but remain caught in the conundrum of the silence of most individuals beyond the charmed circle of educated Ottoman Muslim and non-Muslim elites. In spite of difficulties, 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 of how communities survived the

Etherington, Norman, Barbarians ancient and modern, American Historical Review 116 (2011), 31-57. Etherington is an African historian, but explores here not just the long debate over African tribalism, but the rootedness of our understanding of empire in Roman history. Karen Barkeys Empire of Difference: the Ottomans in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), begins with that premise in order to highlight the Ottoman variations. Jane Burbank and Frederick Coopers Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), has established a new template for comparison. It includes an interesting chapter on the Spanish and Ottoman empires.
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repeated upheavals and dislocations of the eighteenth through the twentieth century.2 The three papers that follow demonstrate precisely what is possible when new sources are brought to bear and new questions are asked of old assumptions. All are situated in the pivotal moment 1780s-1830s, a pregnant pause of global reordering, and what used to be called the beginning of the Eastern Question. Kahraman akul invites us to revisit the old question of Ottoman barbarism as related to their treatment of prisoners of war following Napoleon Bonapartes invasion of Egypt in 1798, and the subsequent curious Second Coalition alliance of Russian, British and Ottoman navies in the eastern Mediterranean from 1799-1801. His source is the well known, much cited contemporary Franois Pouqueville, philhellene extraordinaire, who was captured by the Ottomans and forced marched to Istanbul. Testing the travellers account against other ambassadorial and Ottoman documentary sources, akul suggests that the Ottomans were attuned to the emerging rule of international law relating to treatment of prisoners of war. Throughout, he consciously evokes the long literature on Turkish barbarity, especially in military matters, which has rarely been seriously challenged among western historians. Post-Saidians all, we understand that the other is a historical construction of our enemy, but the Turkish/Muslim version has had an extremely long shelf life and remains a universal to European imaginaries past and present. There is no doubt that the image of bags of decapitated heads, used either to secure monetary rewards on the battlefield, or as here, as proof the individual died on route to prison in Istanbul, evokes horror in present-day hearts, but in many other particulars, the Ottomans clearly had started to play by the international rules. While there would appear to be very little possibility for individual negotiation and escape in such dire situations, the evidence offered by akul indicates otherwise. Barbarity and civility could exist side by side, as even Poucqueville himself was ready to acknowledge. We need much more exploration of the practices of warfare in this period to move beyond the
2 Other efforts at exploring the possibility of comparison include: Aksan, Virginia, Locating the Ottomans among early modern empires, Journal of Early Modern History 3 (1999), 21-39. Gbor goston, who has written extensively on Austro-Hungary and the Ottomans, is embarked on a project to make it a three way comparison, for example, Military transformation in the Ottoman empire and Russia, 15001800, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 12 (2011), 281-319. Other examples include Birdal, Mehmet Sinan, The Holy Roman Empire and the Ottomans: From Global Imperial Power to Absolutist States (London and New York, NY: IB Tauris, 2011), and for the end of empire: Aydn, Cemil, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).

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tales of atrocity and woe which make up most of the national histories of the region. Will Smileys contribution begins with the disputed clause of the 1774 Kk Kaynarca treaty concerning Russian rights to protection of Orthodox brothers under Ottoman rule, and proceeds to demonstrate the limits to such intervention in the case of putative Russian prisoners of war. Smiley explores all the new literature on imperial identity and legality, arguing that by the end of the eighteenth century, Russian officials were very careful to limit their intervention to those they could prove to belong to the tsar, itself a challenge.3 Smileys descriptions of individual manipulations of such interrogations, by claiming to be a Greek (Orthodox) or a convert to Islam when it suited the situation, drawn from Ottoman and Russian, as well as foreign consular documentation, are convincing. What is evident here, as well as in the akul piece, is a system in transition, when captivity and ransom, profitable enterprises both, were giving way to an understanding of the states authority (and it limits) over its citizens. Andrew Robartss piece concerns the territories of present-day Bulgaria and Romania, and the Trans-Danubian, Black Sea passages in the period from 1780s-1830s. The Austro-Russian-Ottoman frontier has generated much work about zones of enterprise and low level conflicts, but little about the motivation of movements of peoples, here specifically labelled Bulgarian.4 Robartss fluidity with both Russian and Ottoman archives allows us to show how catastrophes like war prompted the realignment of communities of faith, but also how entrepreneurial and familial ties complicated choices and loyalties.

3 Pitts, Jennifer, AHR forum: empire and legal universalisms in the eighteenth century, American Historical Review 117 (2012), 92-121, is a striking discussion of the openness of European intellectuals, especially Edmund Burke, William Scott and Abraham AntequilDuperron, to the early development of international law, amalgamating both eastern and western systems, within a context where many considered the infidel ineligible for that consideration. While the older Christian-infidel fault line had retreated in legal terms, the stark division between barbaric and civilized nations or races so characteristic of the nineteenth century had not yet become entrenched (pp. 97-8). 4 Peacock, A.C.S. (ed.), Frontiers of the Ottoman World (NY: Oxford University Press, 2010); David, Gza and Pl Fodor (eds.), Ransom Slavery Along the Ottoman Borders: Early Fifteenth to Early Eighteenth Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 2007); Aksan, Virginia H., Whose territory and whose peasants? Ottoman boundaries on the Danube in the 1760s, in The Ottoman Balkans, 17501830, ed. Frederick F. Anscombe (Princeton: Markus Weiner Publishers, 2006), pp. 61-86; Davies, Brian (ed.), Warfare in Eastern Europe 1500-1800 (Leiden, E. J. Brill, 2012), includes articles on all the communities bordering on the Muslim/Christian frontier.

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These case studies demonstrate that mobility and ambiguity allowed vulnerable populations, free or enslaved, a certain amount of autonomy. The degree to which the Ottomans undertook to settle and/or civilize these populations after the 1830s is part of the ongoing debate of the nature of late Ottoman imperialism.5

Gavrilis, George, The Dynamics of Interstate Boundaries (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2008) begins his book with a long discussion of the Greek-Ottoman boundary before and after 1831, and precisely what it did to local community networks. Reat Kasaba explores the problem of mobility in his recent The Moveable Empire (Seattle, WA: University of Washington, Press, 2011).
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