Layered Imperialities: The 'Experts in Corruption' and the Ottoman Educational Field

N. Yasemin Bavbek, Brown University

Despite the focus of postcolonial theory on imperial power relations and world-systems analysis on global inequalities, the interaction of global and imperial power relations has been an unexplored topic in the sociology of empires. This paper focuses on foreign educational institutions in the Ottoman Empire, and develops a theory of “layered imperialities” that explains the imbrication of global and imperial power differences within the fragmented Ottoman educational field that accommodates competing foreign, millet, and Ottoman state schools. I show how, by the late 19th century, the American educational network in the Ottoman Empire was understood by the Ottoman state as a novel imperial power-knowledge network dubbed the ‘experts of corruption,’ specializing in corrupting the newly discovered Ottoman ‘civil society.’ I unpack how this American educational network, despite not achieving cultural domination or hegemony, nevertheless altered the ‘rules of the game’ in a more subtle “dialectic of challenge and riposte” (Bourdieu 1979, 99). To explain the specific power relation inhering in the dialectic of ‘challenge-riposte’ in the American education-Ottoman state relation, I analytically adopt a Bourdieusian field approach to Ottoman education and develop a theory of ‘layered imperialities’. I argue that American institutions became a threat to Ottoman sovereignty because of their ability to move and broker across multiple different global and imperial fields. In the field of Ottoman education, we see the effects of three layers. These three levels of imperiality based on international treaties, bilateral privileges, and the Ottoman system of difference based on religious community (the millet system), together constitute a specific power relation composed of layers of multiple logics of empire. We can observe the effects of layered imperialities in the Ottoman field of education entangled in the web of increasing racialization and minoritization of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire by the late 19th century.

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 Presented in Session 153. Production of Knowledge Regimes: Experts, Political Authority, and Legitimation I