In this book roundtable, Choon Hwee Koh (UCLA) and Nir Shafir (UC San Diego) will present on their new publications, The Sublime Post: How the Ottoman Imperial Post Became a Public Service (Yale University Press, 2024) and The Order and Disorder of Communication: Pamphlets and Polemics in the Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Empire (Stanford University Press, 2024).

Before the advent of steamships or the telegraph, the premier technology for long-distance communication was the horse-run relay system. Every empire had one—including the Ottoman Empire. In The Sublime Post, Choon Hwee Koh examines how the vast Ottoman postal system worked across three centuries by tracking the roles of eight small-scale actors—the Courier, the Tatar, Imperial Decrees, the Bookkeeper, the Postmaster, the Villager, Money, and the Horse. There are stories of price-gouging postmasters; of murdered couriers and their bereaved widows; of moonlighting officials transporting merchandise; of neighboring villages engaged in long-running feuds; of bookkeepers calculating the annual costs of horseshoes, halters, and hay; of Tatar couriers and British travelers sharing drunken nights at post stations; of swimming with horses across rivers; and of hiding from marauding bandits in the desert. 

By weaving together chronicles, sharia court records, fiscal registers, collective petitions, appointment contracts, and imperial decrees from the Ottoman archive, this study of a large-scale communications infrastructure reveals the interdependence of an empire and its diverse imperial subjects. Koh traces this evolving interdependence between 1500 and 1840 to tell the history of the Ottoman Empire and its changing social order.

The seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire was rife with polemical debate around worshipping at saints' graves, medical procedures, smoking tobacco, and other everyday practices. Fueling these debates was a new form of writing - the pamphlet, a cheap, short, and mobile text that provided readers with simplified legal arguments. These pamphlets were more than simply a nove wy to disseminate texts, they made a consequential shift in the way Ottoman subjects communicated. The Order and Disorder of Communication offers the first comprehensive look at a new communication order that flourished in seventeenth-century manuscript culture.

Through the example of the pamphlet, Nir Shafir investigates the political and cultural institutions used to navigate, regulate, and encourage the circulation of information in a society in which all books were copied by hand. He sketches an ecology of books, examining how books were produced, the movement of texts regulated, education administered, reading conducted, and publics cultivated. Pamphlets invited both the well and poorly educated to participate in public debates, thus expanding the Ottoman body politic. They also spurred an epidemic of fake authors and popular forms of reading. Thus, pamphlets became both the forum and the fuel for the polarization of Ottoman society. Based on years of research in islamic manuscript libraries worldwide, this book illuminates a vibrant and evolving premodern manuscript culture.

About the Speakers

Choon Hwee Koh is assistant professor of history at UCLA. Born and raised in Singapore, she has lived and studied in Lebanon, Iran, India, the US, and Türkiye. Her work has won various prizes, including the Jack Goody Article Prize 2023 (for “The Mystery of the Missing Horses”), the Berkshire Conference Article Prize 2022 (Honorable Mention for “The Ottoman Postmaster”), and the Malcolm Kerr Dissertation Prize (Social Sciences) by the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) in 2020. At UCLA, she is a member of the Ottoman Music Ensemble where she plays the goblet drum (darbouka)-she is not very good but is very enthusiastic. Together with history department colleagues, she helps to run the History Brown Bag Seminar Series.

Nir Shafir is a historian of the Middle East, in particular, the Ottoman Empire, between 1400-1800. His research focuses on the histories of communication, religion, and science and technology. His first book is titled The Order and Disorder of Communication: Pamphlets and Polemics in the Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Empire. The first half provides a unique and comprehensive description of the world of books, reading, and education in the early modern Ottoman Empire, where nearly all written works were copied by hand rather than printed until the late nineteenth century. The second half details how “pamphlets” fractured this world by exacerbating the virulent and vicious socio-religious debates that polarized Ottoman society in the second half of the seventeenth century. Future projects include a social history of the Turkish language in the Ottoman Empire and an investigation into the cultural role of antiquity and antiquarianism in the early modern Middle East. Shafir is an occasional contributor and editorial board member of the Ottoman History Podcast.

The event will be moderated by Nile Green (UCLA History) and Meng Zhang (UCLA History). 

Light lunch will be served.

Sponsor(s): Center for Near Eastern Studies