The Politics of Punishment, Urbanization, and Izmir Prison In
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The Politics of Punishment, Urbanization, and Izmir Prison in the Late Ottoman Empire A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Cincinnati in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of History of the College of Arts and Sciences 2015 by Ufuk Adak M.A., Ege University, 2006. Committee Chair: Elizabeth B. Frierson, Ph.D. Abstract This dissertation examines the politics of punishment and application of Ottoman prison reform in the three major port cities, Izmir, which receives the greatest attention, Istanbul, and Salonica in the late Ottoman Empire. This work explores Ottoman prisons on a daily scale and in a larger imperial frame by re- thinking the idea of social control and surveillance in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including the ways in which the Ottoman government dealt with the prisons as ‘modern’ and ‘European’ legal institutions. By using primary sources drawn from Ottoman archives, and relying heavily on Ottoman and British newspapers and journals, this dissertation examines Ottoman prison reform from various angles such as sustenance of prisoners, health and hygiene; the usage of cannabis (esrar) in Ottoman prisons; prison work; prison architecture; and urbanization. Until the first half of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire was using various buildings as prisons, including old fortresses, such as Baba Cafer Zindanı and Yedikule in Istanbul; military barracks; shipyards, such as Tersane Zindanı (Bagnio); khans, such as Cezayir Hanı in Izmir; and local notables’ (ayan) palace dungeons. The bureaucratization and centralization attempts of the Tanzimat reformers and, more importantly, the promulgation of the criminal codes of 1851 and 1858 not only paved the way for the shift from corporal and capital punishment to imprisonment but also allowed for the establishment of a new set of definitions in terms of crime and punishment. However, the establishment a modern prison remained merely an ideal until 1871 when the first general prison (hapishane-i umumi) was built in Istanbul. The construction of purposefully built prisons continued in the major cities of the Empire, including Izmir and Salonica, in the second half of the nineteenth century. i Izmir as one of the major port cities of the Empire saw immense and fluctuating flows of people due to wars, migration, and territorial losses of the Empire, and was faced with increased crime rates during this late Ottoman period. Nineteenth-century Izmir also saw the restructuring of its urban and governmental space with new military barracks, hospital, governor’s palace, prison, reformatory, and school that all symbolized the presence of the ‘centralized’ government. The uniformity of state architecture provided visual and physical representations of progress and modernity through which the Ottoman imperial government strove to ‘enlighten’, ‘modernize’, and homogenize cities and their provincial hinterlands. The public sphere of Izmir was foundationally shaped in the period from 1825-1901. Izmir Prison, constructed in 1873, remained until the disintegration of the public space in Izmir in 1959. From its construction to destruction, Izmir Prison as a central part of the new Ottoman public space presented to the people living in the city not only the dichotomic image of a threatening (punitive) and reassuring (order) space, but also symbolized an apparatus of power in terms of the legitimatization of social control, even at the increasingly well-known cost of inhumane treatment of prisoners. ii © 2015 – Ufuk Adak All rights reserved iii To My Mother and Father iv Acknowledgements This dissertation started taking its very primitive shape after I submitted my M.A. thesis entitled the Ottoman Prisons in the Province of Aydın at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century to Ege University in Izmir, Turkey in 2006. My research on Ottoman prisons and prisoners at the Prime Ministry’s Ottoman Archives (BOA), the libraries of Boğaziçi University, Istanbul University, Atatürk Kitaplığı and SALT Research Library, and the National Library in Izmir in 2010 and in 2012-2014 provided me the necessary sources to construct a clear narrative of Ottoman prison reform in depth. I am especially grateful to my advisor Elizabeth Frierson at the University Cincinnati, for her incredible support and help through this arduous journey. I would like to thank her again for hours of discussions about my project and the sources that I used in this work. I benefited tremendously from those discussions. I also owe a thank you to Maura O’Connor. Frankly, I learned a lot in her graduate research seminar class that helped me very much in terms of methodology. I presented several papers on Ottoman prisons and prisoners in various venues, including Great Lakes Ottomanist Workshop (GLOW) in Montréal and in Cincinnati, the Middle East History and Theory Conference (MEHAT) in Chicago, and the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) in Washington, D.C. Thank you to Julia Philips Cohen and Carole Woodall for their indispensable comments for the papers I presented at GLOW in Cincinnati and the MESA in Washington, D.C. that were the pillars of this work. A very big thank you goes to Kent Schull who generously sent me his book on Ottoman prison reform in the late Ottoman Empire before it was published. I also owe a thank you to Schull for his valuable and constructive comments and questions that v enriched this dissertation. I would like to thank Vangelis Kechriotis for his support and powerful comments particularly on discussions about port cities. I also would like to thank Raja Adal for his valuable comments particularly on the extraterritoriality discussions. I would like to thank Isaac Campos for his comments on my paper examining drug trafficking in Ottoman prisons, which turned into one of the sub- sections of this work. This dissertation could not have been written without the generous financial support from the Department of History at the University of Cincinnati, and Charles Phelps Taft Research Center. I thank both institutions for their support. I am grateful to Ann Elizabeth Deluca and Maribeth Mincey who proofread all the drafts of the chapters presented in this dissertation. Maribeth also deserves special thanks for her invaluable comments. I would like to thank my friends Yiğit Akın, Ebru Aykut, Nurçin İleri, Isaac Hand, Rengin Ataman, Şahin Sonyıldırım, Fatih Kuzucu, Onur İnal, and Faika Çelik who supported me through the writing process of this dissertation. Finally, I would like to thank my dear fiancée Merve Bayram for her loving support, encouragement, and inspiration. vi Table of Contents Abstract .......................................................................................................................... i Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................... v List of Tables and Charts ........................................................................................... ix List of Figures ............................................................................................................... x List of Abbreviations ................................................................................................. xii Introduction .................................................................................................................. 1 1. Crime, Punishment, and Prisons: Theoretical, Historical, and Global Perspectives .............. 4 2. The Literature on the History of Ottoman Prisons ............................................................... 13 3. Sources ................................................................................................................................ 16 4. Focus and Method ................................................................................................................ 18 5. Content ................................................................................................................................. 22 Chapter 1: The Politics of Punishment in the Late Ottoman Empire .................. 25 1. Criminal Law and Imprisonment: From the Classical Age to the Age of Prison Reform .... 27 2. Punishment and Prisons in the Ottoman Empire in the Eyes of the British Press ................ 42 3. ‘Western’ Reformers for ‘Eastern’ Problems ....................................................................... 58 4. Prison Reform in the Late Ottoman Empire ......................................................................... 64 Chapter 2: The Politics of Space and Prison Reform in Izmir in the Late Ottoman Empire ........................................................................................................ 80 1. Historical Background of the City ........................................................................................ 83 2. The Beginnings of the Construction of Governmental Space in Izmir ................................ 87 3. Nineteenth-Century Izmir ..................................................................................................... 92 4. Crime, Security, and Punishment in Izmir ........................................................................... 98 5. From Cezayir Hanı to Izmir Prison: Institutionalization of Imprisonment in Izmir ........... 103 6. Conclusion .........................................................................................................................