The Sublime Post: A History of Empire and Power Through the Ottoman Postal System

Marshall Bldg rm 490

Choon Hwe Koh

PhD Candidate

Dept of History

Yale University

Prevailing historiography views the use of contractors by states as indicative of the loss or decentralization of power. This talk uses the cases of the Ottoman postmaster and villager to demonstrate how contracting could in fact strengthen early modern empires and to argue that the binary spatial metaphors of ‘centralization’ and ‘decentralization’ cannot adequately explain how power worked in the early modern world.