Ottoman Rule as Social Collaboration: Power, Distance, and Trust in the Post Station System, 1500–1800

In the 1500s, Ottoman couriers and officials delivering imperial mail confiscated the horses of any passer-by whom they encountered on the road with impunity. By the 1700s, these same couriers and officials were obliged to follow new rules: either they paid fees to obtain horses, food, and lodging, or they submitted valid papers to waive those fees. How did central bureaucrats effect this transformation? Specifically, how did they empower lowly-ranked postmasters to deny high-ranking officials essential services that were once a traditional entitlement, even in distant provinces where direct, central authority was absent?

This paper asks how the ‘rule of law’ was established in the sprawling Ottoman post station network, an imperial relay communications system connecting Belgrade to Baghdad, Crimea to Cairo, and proposes that the reconfiguration of trust relations among central bureaucrats, postmasters, and officials enabled a transformation in the logic of power across the empire. It connects the establishment of new regulations (what I call 'law') with the emergence of a new discourse on illegitimate users of post station services in imperial decrees, and interprets the latter as articulating the Ottoman state’s continuous redefinitions and enforcement of the boundaries of who had legitimate access to state resources. These illegitimate users, whom I call 'free riders', were described in the 1690s as corrupt officials who extorted post station resources for their personal uses, but by the late 1700s, they expanded to include officials with expired passes and imposter-couriers who wore fake uniforms. By following the evolution of the free rider problem in the language of central bureaucrats, this paper unveils another parallel arc of state transformation and describes the Ottoman empire’s move from the currency of official rank towards the rule of law through the strategic cultivation of trust and suspicion among different classes of officials.