From Ottoman Borderlands to Dismembered Archives: Governance and Security across the Early Modern/Modern Divide

This paper revisits the presumed fixity of the “border” between early modern and modern in historical research projects and provides an alternative genealogy for both borderlands scholarship and for the contested territorial and political sovereignty of Israel and Palestine. The paper begins with the trans-imperial circuit of texts, objects, and personages that created an imperial geography of governance within the Ottoman imperial domains of occupied Greater Syria. One key “node” in this imperial circuit was Akko/Acre, a city variously administered from 1517-1918 through the Ottoman provincial district seats of Damascus, Sidon, and Beirut and shaped by a complex interplay of local, regional, and trans-imperial agents. The archived repository of this city and region includes maps generated by regional officials, financial surveys, reports from “informants” such as travelers and merchants, and petitions from the inhabitants, all focused on the maintenance of order and security (of revenue, goods, and personages). As British and French colonizing interests escalated in the late 18^th century, the strategic value of the city re-situated it within new regulatory regimes of surveillance and of record-making and shifted its nodal significance from the landmass of Greater Syria to the commercial and legal contest playing out via the Mediterranean Sea. Finally, with the establishment of Israel via neo-colonial modes of state-making, Akko/Acre was permanently severed from its trans-regional heritage and thereby serves as an example of how the dismemberment of transregional networks also leads to the dismemberment of archive. This paper argues that following the archival remnants of the city of Akko/Acre from trans-imperial Ottoman mechanisms of security to the securitization formulae of surveillance and population management in colonial and state-making projects provides an alternative index of disrupted lifeways and histories and a method of borderland analysis that defines “border” as neither fixed or pregiven (spatially or conceptually).