CSSH bestows this year’s Jack Goody Award upon Koh Choon Hwee for her article “The Mystery of the Missing Horses: How to Uncover an Ottoman Shadow Economy” (CSSH 64-3). Congratulations!
The award jury, comprised of Michael Meng (History, Clemson University), Marc Garrido (Sociology, University of Chicago), and Ajantha Subramanian (Anthropology, Harvard University), had the following praise for the article:
Over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Ottoman Empire’s postal system suffered a constant shortage of horses. Despite the best efforts of bureaucrats, the problem persisted. Koh Choon Hwee frames this “mystery” rather cheekily as an Ottoman whodunit. Who took the horses? The courier? The postmaster? Some other official? It soon becomes clear, however, that she has a larger mystery in mind. Her aim is to identify not so much the culprit as an emerging shadow economy, and to underscore the “blinkered informational order” that prevented Ottoman bureaucrats from seeing it for what it was. Koh shows that official and non-official actors were increasingly using horses for profit-making ventures, but the bureaucrats were unable to recognize this shadow economy because they treated the multiple reports of missing horses as discrete, unconnected events. Thus, they failed to connect the rising incidence of “horse borrowing” to the growing market demand for horses on the one hand and official entitlements regarding horse usage on the other. Koh’s paper brilliantly highlights the broader social transformation afoot. “Like a color dye used to trace flows in scientific and medical experiments,” she writes, “these missing horses help us see the diachronic diffusion of commercial actors and forces across hierarchy, space, and the pages of bureaucratic documents whose idiosyncratic language betrayed—even as it obscured—traces of shadow market transactions and shifts in the social order” (p. 580).
The paper is impressive not only structurally, but empirically. As the mystery deepens, the scope of Koh’s argument expands but remains ever on solid evidentiary ground. Indeed, a good deal of the paper’s delight lies in Koh’s meticulous sleuthing. To make her case, she draws upon fifty-one Ottoman decrees and imperial reports issued from 1690 to 1833, treating the reader to horse rationing lists from various years, the hourly rates of post horses for officials, and official fixed prices for sea travel in Istanbul. This data becomes the basis for a far-reaching argument about the post horse as a window onto emergent forms of commercial capitalism that are parasitic on state infrastructure and catalyze transformations in status hierarchies and norms.
A model of empirical research, Koh’s article exemplifies topnotch case-study analysis: it takes a seemingly minor matter and shows its broad historical importance for our understanding of the Ottoman Empire, bureaucracy, and capitalism—microhistory at its best!
About the Author
Koh Choon Hwee is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) specializing in the Ottoman empire. She received her BA in Philosophy and South Asian Studies from the National University of Singapore, her MA in History from the American University of Beirut, and her PhD in History from Yale University in 2020. Apart from CSSH, her articles have appeared or are forthcoming in Past & Present, Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, and Turcica. She has reviewed manuscripts for the Journal of Economic History, Iranian Studies, and History Compass, and serves as a book review editor for the Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association (JOTSA). She plays the darbouka (goblet drum) with the UCLA Ottoman music ensemble — although she is not very good, she is very enthusiastic.
Congratulations, Koh Choon Hwee! Learn more about CSSH‘s Jack Goody Award here.
