Nineteenth-Century Local Governance in Ottoman Bulgaria

The Institute is very happy to announce the new publiation by Safa Saraçoğlu at the Edimburgh University Press.

This book by Safa Saraçoğlu, former Fellow at the Institute and Professor at the Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania provides a detailed exploration of the way in which administrative and judicial offices and practices provided an essential space for politics in 19th-century Bulgaria, securing local inhabitants’ participation with Ottoman imperial governance. Combining a wealth of primary documents in both Bulgarian and Ottoman Turkish, this is the first systematic and comprehensive study of the connection between imperially-designed institutions and local politics.

Key Features

Draws on provincial documents from Bulgarian archives to reveal a well-connected provincial political and economic environment in which the local elite played important roles alongside state officials.

Provides a comprehensive discussion of the provincial bureaucratic and judiciary structure in Ottoman Balkans in the 19th century.

Explains the investment of the local elite in the 19th century transformation of the Ottoman Empire.

Provides an account of the main political structures in a key Bulgarian province at the eve of Bulgarian independence and in the midst of significant demographic movements involving the Turks, Bulgarians and the Adyghe people (Circassians).

Safa Saracoglu is a Professor of History at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on Middle-East with a particular focus on the Ottoman Empire and the Balkans. He is co-editor (with Kent F. Schull) of Law and Legality in the Ottoman Empire and Republic of Turkey (2016) and the founding editor of the Collaborative Research Initiative in Ottoman Sociolegal Studies (CRIOS), an open-access database dedicated to exploring the nineteenth-century Ottoman legal transformation (http://crios.bloomu.edu/).

Further information on the publication can be found on the editor’s website, here.