Defining Corruption in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire

Boğaç Ergene, Professor of History at the University of Vermont, will address how recent scholarship on Ottoman state and society in the early modern era defined political and administrative corruption. The discussion will provide clues about how the Ottomans differentiated legitimate and illegitimate forms of government and the ways in which modern historians have interpreted relevant historical evidence. In his presentation, Ergene will also propose an alternative approach to studying corruption in the Ottoman context.

Ergene is the author of Local Court, Provincial Society and Justice in the Ottoman Empire: Legal Practice and Dispute Resolution in Cankiri and Kastamonu (1652-1744) (2003), and co-author of The Economics of Ottoman Justice: Trial and Settlement in the Sharia Courts (2016) and the award-winning Halal Food: A History (2018). In the past, he served as Aga Khan Distinguished Professor in Islamic Humanities at Brown University.