If you’ve read Koh Choon Hwee’s 2023 Goody Award-winning essay, “The Mystery of the Missing Horses: How to Uncover an Ottoman Shadow Economy,” you know that sleuthing is its central method and motif. The horses of the Ottoman post keep disappearing. Who is taking them? Why does this problem persist for over a century? Do the bureaucrats who manage the system understand what’s happening? It’s a true crime procedural, Ottoman-style, and Koh is directing the investigation.
If you’ve not read it yet, we won’t spoil the ending.
The Goody Award jurors were impressed by Koh’s rigorous blend of micro and macro history, quantitative and qualitative analysis. What makes it all “delightful,” they add, is her “meticulous sleuthing.” Koh’s arguments account for absent data and abundant evidence, which is good for establishing links between, say, missing horses and a shadow economy of commodity transport and trade. As Koh solves the mystery, her investigative skills produce meta-puzzles appropriate to the detective genre. The subtext for all of them is: How are you figuring this out? Every good sleuth, it seems, is part magician.
We asked Koh to tell us more about how she works. Her responses are generous and filled with surprises. Along with backstories, Koh shares her views on writing and revision, on developing new conceptual frameworks and handling criticism, on getting past modernist assumptions and doing concrete, empirically grounded analysis. She even engages in a bit of artful interrogation herself.
For a masterclass in meticulous sleuthing, read on.
CSSH: First things first. Congratulations on winning the Goody Award!
Koh: Thank you very much!
CSSH: We just re-read your essay. It’s superb. On several levels. We’re excited to talk to you about it.
Koh: And I’m excited to chat with you.
CSSH: Are you interested in the detective genre, in whodunits and crime novels?
Koh: Not any more than other genres, like romcoms or bro-comedy like Harold and Kumar go to White Castle; sorry to disappoint!
CSSH: No, no. That’s good. We can go straight to the forensics, without all the allusions to Agatha Christie. You use the term “whodunit” several times in your paper. We find this intriguing, not only as a way of framing the essay but also as commentary on what historians do. You’re dealing with horse theft, or misappropriation, but the crime scene is over a century deep and thousands of miles long. Plus, much of the evidence is missing, or it’s masked by special bureaucratic terms.
How did you locate this “crime” to begin with? Were you interested in horses, or the postal service, or bureaucracy?
Koh: I was not particularly interested in those things. I didn’t even like stamps. I didn’t know at the outset that I was going to be writing about “crime” or “corruption.”
This was how it happened. I was interested in the early modern state formation literature. Charles Tilly stuff. I had a great teacher in Beirut, Prof. Tariq Tell, who taught us all this political science and sociology literature. My early PhD years were pretty disastrous. I changed three advisors, changed fields and time periods, and found a topic only at the end of my third year: the postal system as a proxy to study the Ottoman state. When I arrived in Istanbul in 2018 for my archival fieldwork year, I had zero training in Ottoman documents.
CSSH: Wow.
Koh: I shamelessly emailed Turkish professors to ask for permission to audit their documents classes. One of them, Prof. Kenan Yıldız, was at the time the head archivist of the sharia/şeriyye court records (sicil) at a library called ISAM (İslam Araştırmaları Merkezi). He’s now at Istanbul Medeniyet University. He kindly accepted me as his student. Every week in class you sat with 5-6 other Turkish students and just read court records; everyone took turns reading one line and translating it (into modern Turkish). It was really, really great.
So that’s how I learned how to use Ottoman court records. And for the next 12-18 months, I just went every day to this library-archive (ISAM) and read page by page these digitized (scanned) Ottoman court records. These were bound registers and were not organized thematically. You just read everything from page 1 to the end and noted down every entry that had something to do with the Ottoman postal system. I collected 50 odd copies of imperial decrees pertaining to the postal system, transcribed them into the Latin alphabet, and then just kept reading my transcriptions. I tried to find a pattern. I thought it was weird that these decrees kept accusing different people (couriers, postmasters, random officials) of various “bad” actions (taking more post-horses, charging more than they should, pursuing their “personal affairs”). But all the decrees were focused on the same problem – not enough horses; courier delays – for over a century.
Sorry, it’s just a plodding, unsurprising story of archival research! Nothing exciting.
CSSH: So, you isolated this recurrent pattern of missing horses. It’s there from 1690 to 1833. But you also show how an entire world is changing around this pattern. That’s where the paper does some counterintuitive work. At one point, you note that evidence of change often comes to us in concepts and usages that are rooted in an earlier order. The new order, so to speak, arrives in the clothes of the era it is displacing. Unaware of its own novelty.
We’re curious: where would you place this realization in the development of your own analysis? How did it occur to you, and did it help you solve the crime in a way you hadn’t foreseen?
Koh: On December 8, 2020, CSSH emailed me the second round of reviewer reports. Reviewer #2’s comments forced me to put into words things I didn’t know how to articulate. At the time, I had a vague sense that social change sometimes doesn’t necessarily look like change. Even in our everyday lives, in the most trivial of settings, people we know and love don’t always admit they’ve changed their minds about things; maybe they’re not aware that they’ve changed their minds. On the other hand, when social change is obvious, it can be difficult to remember a time when we used to condone, accept, or even do things that are completely unacceptable today. We can find it hard to acknowledge that we once considered these things unremarkable. It’s messy.
I looked for crutches to help me articulate these thoughts, and I found a few. You know how you borrow other people’s words to express what you want to say? Good writing, literature, even song lyrics can do that for you. I remembered that Jane Austen example from Edward Said’s writings from my student days.
CSSH: Contrapuntal reading.
Koh: Right. Later I found the AHR Conversation piece on “Explaining Historical Change” (2015). I found the words that uttered what I was thinking; they were Bill Sewell’s words expanding on Caroline Arni’s point.
It’s a really profound point. Arni was talking about the reconceptualization of the fetus in late eighteenth-century physiology, when “what had been the unborn became the not-yet-born” (p. 1407). It’s quite moving if you sit and think about it for a while. It’s like a scalar versus a vector; the “unborn” has a magnitude but no direction, the “not-yet-born” has a magnitude and a direction – an expectation, an expected destination. It’s a bad analogy, sorry.
CSSH: Clearly it helped you see something. What was it?
Koh: Bill Sewell said it better. He said it so well that I’m going to quote it in full (pp. 1409-10), with some bolded text and paragraph breaks to help with the pacing:
[Caroline Arni’s] example of the strikingly different way that the unborn came to be conceptualized in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century is a nice example of a sharp discontinuity that could easily be missed without the epistemological probing characteristic of the poststructuralist mode of thought.
The commonsense point of view would say that in both the early eighteenth century and the mid-nineteenth century, people were talking and writing about “fetuses.”
The critical poststructuralist point of view would argue that the unborn entity was understood in such a different way, through such a different set of codes or discourses, based on utterly different assumptions about temporality (from “enclosed beginning” to “prenatal organism”), that it would be incorrect to see the emergence of the new discourse as anything but a radical discontinuity. …
… The new discourse or practice does not appear suddenly in its fullness. It typically incorporates terms or technologies or concepts or materials that were part of the old discourse or practice, elements that are modified by their incorporation into a new configuration but that also indicate a form of continuity with the old.
The new is often formed by an articulation between two preexisting practices/discourses not previously articulated, and the new articulation takes place over time. The old configurations don’t disappear in some instantaneous flash. It typically takes time and repeat performances for the new to congeal into something solid enough to displace the old.
CSSH: That’s good framing. It’s not the kind of insight you could simply impose on your analysis, like a doctrine, but it would keep you alert to articulations.
Koh: Yes. Reading Sewell, it became clear to me that the phrase “using horses for personal affairs” was like Arni’s “fetus.” I suspected that it was understood in a very different way in the 1790s than it had been in the 1690s. But that “new” understanding was wearing the clothes of the “old discourse” or the “old configuration.” My job, to use your words, was to understand how “the entire world was changing around” this phrase, and to identify the point at which “repeat performances” of this phrase “congealed” into something new.
So I went back to re-read Ottoman historiography. One of the reviewers wanted me to talk about the “decline” of the Ottoman empire, but I didn’t know how to address this point. Because in graduate seminars we were taught that the field had already moved past the “decline” paradigm. Clearly, it had not. So I re-read everything. I noticed that half of what I read talked about new fashions, styles, consumption patterns, picnics, tobacco, and the other half talked about military losses and humiliating treaties. Eventually, I was able to respond to the reviewer’s point about military defeats by showing how they were not incompatible with economic expansion and dynamism. This seems obvious now, but I was stumped by it for longer than I’d like to admit.
From there it was a small step to the problem of status hierarchy, the third crutch. Ottoman historians had long connected new clothing laws with loosening social boundaries and status anxieties. Bill Sewell and Francesca Trivellato have also connected status hierarchy to economic change. The notion of status helped me describe how the entire social world changed around this phrase, “using horses for personal affairs,” and then I connected that with my horse-rationing lists.
I’m still thinking a lot about status hierarchy these days. I’ve not fully understood it yet. Anyway, to answer your question, this is how I “solved the crime” in a way I had not foreseen. That and endless writing and rewriting.
CSSH: The rewriting probably helped you keep track of the complexities of your analysis. There really are a lot of moving parts. You’re showing how a governmental infrastructure became a site of parasitical economic development, or (slightly different) had its component parts sucked into an already churning economy. It makes for all kinds of resonances, and comparisons within comparisons. Is it right to think of the Ottoman postal system as kind of highway?
Koh: Not really. It was just a dirt road, and anybody could use that road, including bandits and rebels. But the relay stations that were the pit-stops in this postal system were, in principle, not open to everyone. Only officials were allowed to access them and use their resources (which were taxes-in-kind.)
CSSH: Was it relatively safe?
Koh: Not always.
CSSH: But you say it enabled faster movement.
Koh: Did I really? I think I meant that fresh horses enabled one to travel faster.
CSSH: Yes. Fresh horses. Available for free (if they were “purloined” or “gifted”), or for rates much cheaper than the going rates for non-postal horses. How were things moving outside the postal routes?
Koh: Camels, donkeys, mules, horses, on foot.
CSSH: So, the postal system was a kind of dedicated, high-speed corridor. On paper at least. As you show, officials immediately started using the horses for other purposes, and people started impersonating couriers, or altering their identities and statuses to travel in the postal corridor. It must have been a boon, and a temptation, to merchants. And to Ottoman officials doing business with merchants. Being able to move goods cheaply (with government-procured horses), under the escort of state officials, probably evading taxes, and stopping at stations designed to facilitate movement.
Koh: I don’t think it was easy for merchants to access these horses. Later European travelogues (which CSSH Reviewer #3 kindly alerted me to) show that even in the 19th century Ottoman merchants were pretending to be the servants of Tatar couriers to get from point A to point B in the empire. You have to remember the social order—this social order did not only start and stop within the locus of the post station. You met a lot of people on the road. Bandits, militias, Ottoman military troops. If you didn’t “fit” properly in one of the expected social categories of people who could be on the road, if you stuck out, people might pick a fight with you.
We see this in a 17th-century travelogue (Evliya Çelebi’s Seyahatname), where the protagonist gives cover to a rebel on the run by saying he was part of his entourage, and they were couriers headed to the governor of Damascus. There was also a nominal rule that Christians could not ride horses in the empire (another reason why Christian merchants might want to pretend to be servants of couriers.)
CSSH: The theme of protection is so strong. In addition to a shadow economy, there’s also a shadow polity. Lots of concealment, covering; literally, disguise. Horses were siphoned into this economy; things and people moved through and around various relationships of protection.
Koh: Thinking of Ottoman society in the framework of protection (and “cascading” or nested bubbles of protection) is very interesting. I had not thought about it this way before. I think all travel in that era came with risks. Ottoman couriers were definitely mugged and murdered.
But if you think about it, postal workers today get attacked, too. I’m not sure if you saw, but in April this year Theda Skocpol (yes, the Theda Skocpol) defended a USPS mail carrier in Cambridge, MA from two turkeys (the bird) that were attacking him.
CSSH: Skocpol is currently #7 on CSSH’s “most cited” list. It’s good to know she’s also capable of defending a mailman against violent birds. Can you see her helping a Tatar courier fight off bandits?
Koh: I can imagine her using her moral authority and snowy-haired seniority to shame Ottoman bandits, who might have felt too embarrassed to hit an old lady.
CSSH: Sounds about right.
Koh: But Tatar couriers were physically pretty strong, and they were usually armed. Nineteenth-century British travelers who accompanied them wrote about Tatars using their whips to attack villagers to get them to give over their horses and other resources. Couriers also drank a lot, got into drunken brawls, and could even sleep while riding a horse (if we believe these travelogues). When they did get murdered by bandits, though, imperial authorities would investigate. This is probably what you meant by protection. Authorities did step in.
But rather than protection, when I was writing the CSSH article I was thinking about the friction of horse procurement. The postal system began as an ad hoc arrangement of confiscations, where couriers violently seized horses from random passers-by. Over time, fixed post stations were established and managed by local officials. Couriers did not have to grab their own horses any longer. They could go to these relay stops and simply show their ID and get a new horse. The friction of procuring horses decreased. But this also meant decreased friction for interlopers who could inveigle their way into these stations to get horses.
CSSH: And, as you note, officials themselves were facilitating the process. Your image of the postal system as a proxy for the Ottoman state is powerful. It’s as if key resources and personnel were being continually re-routed, or diverted, generating alternative power/wealth structures that were neither completely within nor outside the state. The idea of managing “friction” in a system like this is probably a good way to analyze it in ways truer to its constitution.
Koh: You’re right about Ottoman officials re-routing, diverting, and generating alternative power/wealth circuits. But we don’t quite know yet the size of this shadow economy. I have some ideas on how to quantify it, and I’m working with a quantitative economic historian to see what we can come up with.
On that note, I’m quite wary about projecting how we understand the “profit motive” today onto the eighteenth-century Ottoman world. To use the metaphor of the whodunit, I don’t think we have a motive yet. I don’t think we know what really motivated Ottoman officials to transport commercial merchandise on the side. There must have been more factors involved. (A bad analogy: it’s kind of like academics writing textbooks or trade press books. It seems a bit simplistic to say it’s purely about profit.)
It’s really difficult for me to think about commercial activity and the “economy” before 1800. My mind is too cluttered with modern assumptions. I’m having trouble finding the concepts to help me say what I want to say.
Anyway, I hope the folks interested in histories of capitalism, in Marx, in political economy, who tend to focus on later periods (19th century and after), will want to have conversations with those of us working on the pre-1800 world.
CSSH: This is music to our ears. We want to publish more comparative work on early modern societies, on premodern and precolonial ones too. It’s precisely the taking apart of modernist assumptions that we’re after. Too much knowledge is locked up (or locked down) in those assumptions.
Koh: I’m so happy to hear that! Well, one idea I’ve found to access the pre-1800 world is status hierarchy. It’s not new; I’ve been informed that it goes back to Weber. What can I say? I’ll be honest and confess that I haven’t read or mastered my classics!
CSSH: A great thing about dealing with the pre-1800 world, or with pre- and proto-capitalist systems, is that you suddenly have license to study a lot of vintage material that is widely cited but seldom read. The results can be eye-opening. You’ll find that you’ve independently re-invented Weber, or Mauss, or Polanyi – and you’ll feel like a genius! – but you’ll also find that much of what you’ve been told about these thinkers is not accurate.
Koh: I need to read Weber, Mauss, or Polanyi and stop reading Twitter.
CSSH: Here’s an obvious question. What if everyone involved in the matter of missing horses knew exactly what was going on? You come down on the side of blinkered knowledge, or bureaucratic inability to suss out the overall “cause,” but is it possible that folks knew what was happening and simply didn’t perceive it as the kind of crime, or process, that you solve in your analysis? Or they couldn’t say so (or didn’t have the terms or inclination to say so).
Koh: I do think a lot of them knew what they were doing. But I have zero first-hand sources, and I needed to hew closely to the written record.
CSSH: Well, no one was looking for the global economy, or capitalist development, or anonymization via commodification. Perhaps the systemic analysis was, in fact, “personal affairs” as something ever present, legitimate, and always open to corruption. In contemporary Arabic, maslahah/masalih, is often translated into English as “interest/interests.” It’s probably not a coincidence that so many early European attempts to understand how capitalism works circulate around the idea of personal interests, even vices, combining to form something like a public good. Or an economy.
To put it another way, is there any likelihood that Ottoman bureaucrats could have done the kind of analysis you’ve done? Could they possibly have gotten this right?
Koh: I have another bad analogy to try to explain why this would have happened, why everyone would have acted the way they did individually and why, as an organization, the Ottoman bureaucracy behaved the way they did.
Consider grade inflation in US colleges and universities. Individually, we know that grade inflation is not a good thing. I think you and I share the same kind of moral code as teachers. But when you raise this to admin leadership, they probably respond by saying yes, sigh, grade inflation is a problem; but also, yes, shrug, what can we do about it? (A Singaporean friend of mine who works in government taught me the phrase, “learned helplessness.”)
So, even though everyone in the organization, including the leadership, knows it is not a good thing, there is no actual penalty for grade inflation. This has now become a norm, and each of us can decide to follow that norm to different degrees. My hunch is, higher education still works because a critical mass of faculty do not simply give A grades to everyone in class. Some do; but not all.
This is an imperfect analogy, but I think it’s kind of what happened with the horses. I’m saying you and I are not so different from those moonlighting Ottoman officials. We “know exactly what is going on,” we know things are bad in aggregate, but we still act in our personal interest (maslaha). Perhaps we’re trying to attract more undergrad majors to save a program, a department; perhaps we’re trying to get tenure. Diffuse costs/harms to indeterminate victims, but clear benefits to self. I’m not sure it would be meaningful to accuse all of us involved in perpetuating grade inflation of “corruption.” Sure, one could make that moral judgment, that’s fine—but that’s not analysis. Something systemic is happening here.
CSSH: That brings to mind all the Ottoman officials who tried to stick by the rules, only to be chastised for causing delays.
Koh: Uhuh. Those are the few of us who continue giving Bs and Cs but have dwindling enrollments in our classes, which probably creates problems for the department and division.
CSSH: Exactly. The horse rationing policies weren’t the only imperatives driving the system. There was the whole “shadow economy,” which the bureaucrats didn’t comprehend. We’re probably in a similar situation, which produces weird ideas, like getting rid of grading altogether.
Koh: There’s a separate question about the organization and its leadership and why didn’t they act. You and I are just trying to survive, so we behave like moonlighting Ottoman officials. But why would the organization not act?
You asked if Ottoman bureaucrats could have done the kind of analysis I’ve done, if they could possibly have gotten this “right.” I don’t think my analysis is “right” or suitable for the organization in question, the imperial bureaucracy.
Consider that the Ottoman postal system cost about 1% of the empire’s total annual budget. It was in no way a major institution, at least in terms of cost. The empire definitely had bigger challenges to deal with. My analysis served my interests as a 21st-century historian, but it might not have served the interests of an 18th-century imperial bureaucracy. This missing horses problem was probably annoying to Ottoman bureaucrats, but not that important in the grander scheme of things. (Kind of like how grade inflation is arguably not the most important problem universities are facing right now, with the student debt crisis, whole departments and programs being cut, faculty being fired, graduate workers being underpaid. Like what’s happening with West Virginia University, for instance.)
CSSH: Let’s move from grading to peer review, a tradition that, at CSSH, still works roughly the way it should. You share with other Goody winners the fact that you went through a rigorous process of revision, responded creatively to it, and blended that response with a pre-existing habit of collaboration with many colleagues. Your acknowledgements are generous and filled with the names of people who helped you.
How do you incorporate advice? How do you differentiate between useful criticism and all the other kinds?
Koh: My essay was revised and re-revised during the pandemic, when Zoom workshops were flourishing. I was able to reach out to many different groups of friends and colleagues to get feedback via Zoom. This was super important because I’d been staring at my material for so long that I could no longer tell if the storyboarding and sequencing would make sense to a completely new reader.
People talk a lot about how to be a good teacher, but not so much about how to be a good student. It took me a long while to realize what I could best learn from whom. Some of the best feedback I received on my writing, as a grad student, came from undergraduates, rather than full professors. The absolute worst thing one can do is idolize and worship a professor or “famous” scholar. Fame is about power, but not always about scholarship.
Anyway, learning to make up my own mind about what advice helped and what didn’t took a lot of time. It was more difficult and lonelier than I’d expected.
CSSH: That’s important. Andrew Canessa, the 2019 Goody winner, told us that a slow pace was essential to his essay. He took a lot of time sorting through the peer reviews and deciding how best to revise. As he put it: “This is how it should be really: we should be able to spend time working on ideas and enjoying the luxury of thinking.”
Koh: I agree. My rule of thumb is to accept all advice as genuinely helpful from the outset, and to take my time to mull over it. I try not to “defend” a paper that I am workshopping. As far as I can, I try to just take the hit. I try to give the criticism its fullest hearing/airing.
For a few reasons: first, sometimes, the critical person may be completely off in what s/he is saying out loud, but they are actually on to something. They just don’t name the thing correctly; they don’t say the important things out loud.
But if you wait a bit before dismissing them outright and give them the benefit of the doubt, then you might discover a real gem. I think, What is it that’s disturbing this person who took the time and energy to plough through my badly written draft? What was so disturbing that it moved him/her to stand up in the (Zoom) room to tell me that there’s something off? I usually need some time to process it, to have the presence of mind to figure out what that thing is—and the times when I do figure it out, it’s gold. It’s super worth it.
CSSH: How do you avoid getting angry? If you have a secret, please share!
Koh: I do get upset. I can go into denial. I think it’s quite normal. But I do that privately, in my head. I let the emotional chemicals run their course. As adults I think most of us have the capacity to manage our emotions, and we’re mature enough not to feel like our self-worth can be so easily decimated.
In responding to your questions, I went back to re-read the various rounds of CSSH reviewers’ comments. I remember feeling sad and upset when I first received them, feeling maligned and misunderstood. But reading them now, I empathize with the reviewers’ frustration. I mean, I still feel frustrated myself because I think the final published version could be vastly improved for clarity.
(By the way, this piece by Laura C. Brown was and still is super helpful for me. I re-read it every few years during grad school, way before I submitted to CSSH.)
CSSH: It’s a cult classic. We’re glad you read it. We want our review process to be helpful and constructive. We try to weed out abusive readers – really, nothing irks us more than a sadistic reviewer – but they thrive in other locations. Every department has a few; every discipline has them.
Koh: That leads to my third point. Let’s say a senior scholar is giving you super mean, negative feedback at a workshop. You suspect your advisor had a feud with the person three decades ago, before you were born. Or perhaps the overly critical person is a junior scholar who distorted your words and willfully misrepresented your arguments. Sometimes it’s a group of peers taking turns to criticize your work –– and then you realize that this working group is a social clique and you’re the outsider. These are all examples of bad-faith feedback that is not about responding to the intellectual content of your research.
In all these cases, I would personally still give them the benefit of the doubt. Because I don’t trust my on-the-spot judgment; there might be a precious gem of truth in what the critics are saying, but I can’t see it yet. So I engage them to try to fully understand their critique. I ask them to clarify exactly what they hated, what they disagreed with, and I walk with them after the panel to continue the dialogue. Afterwards, I calmly pasture my mind on all the feedback (like a cow roaming on verdant pastures).
CSSH: Munching on critique.
Koh: Yum, yum! (*Burp*) Even when you revisit their comments later and find that they genuinely made no sense, it’s still okay. Take the hit. Move on.
It happens all the time in working life – in academia, in the private sector, in government work. It’s okay to get scolded—not okay to get repeatedly abused, that’s a different thing. But I think if you do have friends outside academia, or you have work experience, then you realize that getting scolded by clients, by bosses, by the auntie who stocks the pantry even (because you didn’t put back the cups the way she likes), it’s a common thing. Take the experience as an ethnographic exercise to learn about the field, or your colleagues.
During the pandemic I worked as a communications intern at a tech investment firm before I found an adjunct teaching position. I was basically supposed to interview these CEOs of deep tech startups and do short write-ups about them. I unintentionally offended one of these CEOs, who got his head of legal to call me up and give me a great big scolding. I apologized profusely and had to report the incident to my boss (who then had to appease that CEO). It was difficult! I mean, I was a 30+ year-old PhD-holding intern (my boss and colleagues were mystified by the PhD part) and here I was making rookie mistakes and pissing off one of the startups that the company had invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in.
To sum it all up, I assume from the outset that all advice is meant to be helpful, and then take a lot of time in processing that advice and deciding what I will incorporate. Over time I also form a more detailed understanding of my colleagues’ strengths and feedback-giving styles, what I can learn from whom, and whom I want to continue learning from.
CSSH: Well said. Since you’re sharing advice, perhaps you can give us some. Believe it or not, we do nothing special at CSSH to produce the impressive stream of Ottomanist, Turkish, Kurdish, and Armenian studies essays we publish. But it’s been one of our strong areas for decades now. We don’t really know how or when this started! We just sift through the excellent scholarship that comes our way. Are we like Ottoman bureaucrats, not understanding the system we oversee and reproduce? We’re not asking you to solve this trend as if it were a crime, but given your sleuthing and interpretive powers, how would you assess this abundance?
Koh: My hypothesis on the volume of submissions you are receiving at CSSH is that there have simply been more people entering the world of Ottoman studies, partly coinciding with the opening of the Ottoman archives, partly coinciding with the rise of the AKP and Erdoğan and funding for the field within Türkiye.
Now, the next question is: why CSSH and not other journals? I think here I’d need some concrete numbers to really get a sense of what we’re talking about. How many submissions a year is typical for CSSH, and what proportion of that would you categorize as Ottoman-related?
CSSH: You’re going into master sleuth mode. Let’s just say “hundreds” for the submissions and “good” for the proportion.
Koh: And then I’d need to think about other peer journals and how many submissions they’re receiving. It is an interesting question.
CSSH: It is indeed. There are quantity factors, of how much we can take on. And there are quality factors. We emphasize comparative analysis, and the Ottoman world is filled with cultural and historical connective tissue, transregional ties of all kinds. These attract comparative analysis, comparative thinking. It might sound like flattery, but it’s not: making sense of these high levels of transregional articulation – whether in Ottoman contexts or in other imperial formations – requires the kind of subtle, complex analytical treatment we like to see in manuscripts. Your article is a perfect example of this.
Koh: I don’t think the Ottoman world is unique in this respect. China is “filled with cultural and historical connective tissue, transregional ties” of all kinds too. Same with South Asia. Both fields also attract very high-level comparative analyses and comparative thinking.
CSSH: Oh, certainly. We get excellent papers from those time/places as well. The South Asian papers are always ample and impressive. Over the lifetime of the journal, we’ve published more on Chinese than Ottoman topics. This year, two of our most popular papers deal with Hindu and Han identities, so we asked those authors to comment on each other’s papers for our website.
Koh: Truschke and Tam are both wonderful scholars. I really enjoyed their CSSH articles. The Han question is something I’ve been curious about for a long time. Reading their correspondence, it made me wonder what an Ottoman-India-China conversation would look like.
CSSH: Mission accomplished.
Koh: But anyway, would you say that in recent times CSSH receives disproportionately more submissions pertaining to the Ottoman/Middle East world than those pertaining to East and South Asia? Or is that an industry secret you cannot reveal?
CSSH: In raw numbers, we get more South and East Asia than Ottoman and Middle East, but a lot of our papers work across regions, or across historical periods. A single paper might be Russian and Ottoman, or South Asian and East African. Middle East is a big term. Add Muslim, or Islamicate, and all kinds of things start coming together. Same with Indic, and Chinese. The proportions vary from year to year. We try to make sure things don’t get lopsided. But we do get a lot of excellent material on Ottoman topics; it stands out.
You’re making us realize how impressionistic all of this sounds, Inspector Koh.
Koh: Sorry, I’ll stop my “sleuthing” there.
CSSH: Don’t apologize. Thinking about how different categorizations of time/space affect comparison, within and across regions, is essential for us. Since you know Ottomanist scholarship well, are there any promising trends you think CSSH should keep its eye on?
Koh: Instead of anointing certain trends as “promising,” let me share a few articles I’ve enjoyed reading and re-reading.
- Hülya Canbakal’s “Vows as Contract in Ottoman Public Life (17th-18th centuries)” Islamic Law and Society (2011)
- Sevinç Küçükoğlu’s “New fiscal actors to control provincial expenditures at the end of 18th century” Osmanlı araştırmaları (2019)
- Takamatsu Yoichi’s “Formation and Custody of the Ottoman Archives During the Pre-Tanzimat Period” Memoirs of the Research Department of the Toyo Bunko (2006)
Each article addresses a different topic – and I realize they weren’t written with a CSSH audience in mind – but I appreciate how rigorously they examine their empirical material, and how they develop a granular picture of concrete historical processes. I am attracted to concreteness. I like standing on firm ground. These authors build on solid foundations.
In my view, you should keep your eye on this sort of rigorous work rather than trying to game or pre-select for “trends.” I think CSSH should simply give us (Ottoman scholars working on whatever topic) the training we need to be better thinkers and writers. You have good processes, and we could all benefit from them.
CSSH: That’s very kind of you.
Koh: Seriously. I think CSSH is a wonderful institution. I’m very curious about your history, about what it takes to sustain an institution like that.
CSSH: In our 50th anniversary issue, the former editors – Grew, Trautmann, and Shryock – talk about what it’s like to run the journal. What works and what doesn’t. They give away the store.
Koh: I’d actually read all of them before as a graduate student. Have I exposed myself as a fan yet?
CSSH: A sleuth and a fan!
Koh: But I just re-read them and have a new appreciation for some of the points raised.
CSSH: Final question. What’s next for you? Are you conjuring up new projects? We imagine your work on the Ottoman postal system is evolving into a book.
Koh: Yes. I am working on the book manuscript as we speak. I am also at the meandering, open-ended stage of a new research project. I have big historiographical questions but no concrete pathway yet.
CSSH: When you find it, or build it, please send us another manuscript. We’ve really enjoyed working with you.
Koh Choon Hwee is Assistant Professor of History at UCLA. She studies the Ottoman empire through the lens of the postal system and is especially interested in infrastructure, early modern fiscal administration, economic and social history. During her research, she learned how to ride a horse and how to play the darbouka (goblet drum). Although she is not very good at either activity, she is very enthusiastic. Koh is a proud member of the UCLA Ottoman music ensemble. In 2020, she was awarded the Malcolm Kerr Dissertation Prize (Social Sciences) by the Middle East Studies Association (MESA). She (re)tweets at @OttomanChoon.
