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. The book's genre-specific discursive survey is complemented by discussions that highlight, in the Ottoman context, the shifty boundaries that separated legitimate and illegitimate forms of revenue extraction; that examine the state's efforts to monitor and punish abuses by government officials; and that explore the context-dependent and often contested moralities of many acts, such as gift giving as bribery, office selling, and favoritism. It also considers the ways in which "corrupt" state actors might have rationalized their offenses. Defining Corruption is a conceptually driven work that is both comparative and interdisciplinary, engaging seriously with non-Ottoman historiographies, including broader Middle Eastern, European, and Chinese, and multiple disciplines besides history, in particular anthropology and economics, to provide a comprehensive analysis of premodern Ottoman perceptions of administrative abuse.

This book explores how premodern Ottomans characterised public office corruption and what specific transgressions they associated with this notion before the nineteenth century. It identifies articulations of self-interested abuses of power in this context and illustrates how they resonate in some ways with modern perspectives.

Anticorruption in History is a timely and urgent book: corruption is widely seen today as a major problem we face as a global society, undermining trust in government and financial institutions, economic efficiency, the principle of equality before the law and human wellbeing in general. Corruption, in short, is a major hurdle on the "path to Denmark" a feted blueprint for stable and successful statebuilding. The resonance of this view explains why efforts to promote anticorruption policies have proliferated in recent years. But while the subject of corruption and anticorruption has captured the attention of politicians, scholars, NGOs and the global media, scant attention has been paid to the link between corruption and the change of anticorruption policies over time and place, with the attendant diversity in how to define, identify and address corruption. Economists, political scientists and policy-makers in particular have been generally content with tracing the differences between low-corruption and high-corruption countries in the present and enshrining them in all manner of rankings and indices. The long-term trends & social, political, economic, cultural; potentially undergirding the position of various countries plays a very small role. Such a historical approach could help explain major moments of change in the past as well as reasons for the success and failure of specific anticorruption policies and their relation to a country's image (of itself or as construed from outside) as being more or less corrupt. It is precisely this scholarly lacuna that the present volume intends to begin to fill. The book addresses a wide range of historical contexts: Ancient Greece and Rome, Medieval Eurasia, Italy, France, Great Britain and Portugal as well as studies on anticorruption in the Early Modern and Modern era in Romania, the Ottoman Empire, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Sweden and the former German Democratic Republic.

Tributaries and Peripheries of the Ottoman Empire offers thirteen studies on the relationship between Ottoman tributaries with each other in the imperial framework, as well as with neighboring border provinces of the empire’s core territories from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries.

This work focuses upon the military problems of the Ottoman Empire in the era 1839 to 1878. The author examines the Crimean War (1853 to 1856) from the perspective of the Ottoman army, using British and French sources, as well as the few available Ottoman materials. Scholarship on the war has ignored this aspect, but the high quality of work about the British, French, and Russian involvement in the war has enabled the present study to advance its own work. The inability of the Ottoman high command to learn the lessons of the Crimean War led to serious defeats in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878. Revolts occurring in this period also receive attention. While the book analyzes the nature of war in the Balkans and Anatolia, its primary objective is the study of the war's social and psychological influences. This perspective runs as a theme throughout the book, but the author focuses on the psychological aspects in the final chapter using comparative perspectives. .

A detailed history of the Ottomans written by a leading Turkish historian.

This book is a collection of chapters on corruption. It highlights the importance of corruption, transparency, and accountability and ways to deal with it. Understanding the types of corruption is very important to know how to deal with it. Types of corruption include bribery, lobbying, extortion, cronyism, nepotism, parochialism, patronage, influence peddling, graft, embezzlement, double-dealing, under-the-table transactions, manipulating elections, diverting funds, laundering money, and defrauding investors. Identifying corruption in all its forms requires analyzing the country and its political system and laws and rooting out the sources of corruption and the people behind it. Corruption and those participating in it must be identified to find ways to deal with it, including installing proper governance mechanisms with complete transparency and accountability for politicians, people in power, and/or citizens, as well as applying rules and holding those who infringe them accountable. This book provides a comprehensive overview of the many types of corruption and how to handle them.