Description:
Why did the main challenge to the Ottoman state come not in peasant or elite rebellions, but in endemic banditry? Karen Barkey shows how Turkish strategies of incorporating peasants and rotating elites kept both groups dependent on the state, unable and unwilling to rebel. Bandits, formerly mercenary soldiers, were not interested in rebellion but concentrated on trying to gain state resources, more as rogue clients than as primitive rebels. The state's ability to control and manipulate bandits--through deals, bargains and patronage--suggests imperial strength rather than weakness, she maintains.
Brief description: Karen Barkey is Associate Professor of Sociology at Columbia University.
Review Quotes:
An important contribution to Ottoman studies.... Barkey is persuasive in showing how the structure of the Ottoman state and the mechanisms it employed deterred rebellions from various sources and bargained away potentially fatal internal conflicts.
-- "International Journal of Middle East Studies"