Citing the Law and the Site of the Archive: Preservationist Practices as Comparative Early Modern Axis

“Citing” the Law and the “Site” of the Archive: Preservationist Practices as Comparative Early Modern Axis

While attention to both Ottoman legal and archival history has inspired significant efforts to reassess the emergence of imperial sovereignty and its transformation between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries, the connections between the two remains an underexplored afterthought. This paper foregrounds the linkages between the expanding territorial reach of the Empire, the record-keeping practices that administer this expanse by invoking the register as a standard of judgment, and the evolution of an Ottoman legal consciousness that is manifest in and constituted by a wide range of documents and documentary depositories. In tracing these linkages, this paper is in conversation with recent studies on the emergence of an archival consciousness that shaped AfroEurasian political thought in imperial formations from the twelfth through the early nineteenth centuries. Yet, attentive to how legal formulations, claims, and expectations both shape and are shaped by preservation practices, it moves beyond an unproblematic reliance on either legal edict or archive as stand-ins for a historical process. Instead, by exploring the various textual “citings” of an impulse to record and preserve, the paper also traces an alternative “site” for the archive and thus for analyzing the “law”: these “citings” thus reveal a “site” that is at once more mobile even as it remains integral. Further, by tracking these interlocking archival and legal dynamics, this presentation aims to participate in a broader effort to avoid Eurocentric approaches to either the archive or to the early modern as a historical formation.