Marc Aymes (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris)
Archive Trouble: Documentary Currencies Counterfeited in the 19th-Century Ottoman Empire
In the 19th-century longue durée, the Eastern Mediterranean world appears to have intertwined the trajectories of multiple empires and nation-states, all of which underwent processes later called “centralisation”, “bureaucratisation” or “politisation”. These notions point to a rephrasing of political legitimacy, to the emergence of new bureaucratic formalities in the state’s paper universe, and to a recasting of hierarchies, jurisdictions and competences along which polities defined their own status. What remains to ascertain, yet, is the way these processes took place (or not) in a variety of contexts, local and social, far away from the state’s normative centre. Deep-down in such anarchival recesses, is history the same as what surfaced on the desks of ministers and diplomats?
The focal point adopted in the present paper is to study the archive trouble brought about by forgery issues in the nineteenth-century Ottoman world.
In that period, the Ottoman state ever-growingly engaged in a paper economy of its own, through the large-scale fabrication and circulation of pre-printed documents of many kinds. This mechanical reproducibility of state works, which came as a supplement to the so far mostly privileged calligraphic mode, allowed rulers keen to a renewed notion of state centralisation to multiply and disembody the signs testifying to their authority. Yet it also undermined the legitimacy of administration as a reified and naturalised presence, by pointing to its artefactual wheelwork. Which is where forgers entered the scene.
On the face of it, forgeries are often conceived of in opposition to the realms of political authority and legitimacy: they appear as counter-productive performances by outcasts eager to challenge the efficiency of statecraft procedures from ‘the outside’ (if not ‘from below’). Certainly, when confronted to such misdeeds, what would raison d’Etat recommend if not to prevent these fakes from percolating through the regular routines of administration? Yet there could be another way of looking into the matter: let us consider forging not as a counter-production of administrative practice, but as part and parcel of it.
I therefore aim to put to the test one main hypothesis: namely, that there could exist a symbiotic relationship between a state’s documentary economy and its parasitic counterfeiters—a relationship quite similar to the one that riddles the worlds of scholars or art experts.
The focal point adopted in the present paper is to study the archive trouble brought about by forgery issues in the nineteenth-century Ottoman world.
In that period, the Ottoman state ever-growingly engaged in a paper economy of its own, through the large-scale fabrication and circulation of pre-printed documents of many kinds. This mechanical reproducibility of state works, which came as a supplement to the so far mostly privileged calligraphic mode, allowed rulers keen to a renewed notion of state centralisation to multiply and disembody the signs testifying to their authority. Yet it also undermined the legitimacy of administration as a reified and naturalised presence, by pointing to its artefactual wheelwork. Which is where forgers entered the scene.
On the face of it, forgeries are often conceived of in opposition to the realms of political authority and legitimacy: they appear as counter-productive performances by outcasts eager to challenge the efficiency of statecraft procedures from ‘the outside’ (if not ‘from below’). Certainly, when confronted to such misdeeds, what would raison d’Etat recommend if not to prevent these fakes from percolating through the regular routines of administration? Yet there could be another way of looking into the matter: let us consider forging not as a counter-production of administrative practice, but as part and parcel of it.
I therefore aim to put to the test one main hypothesis: namely, that there could exist a symbiotic relationship between a state’s documentary economy and its parasitic counterfeiters—a relationship quite similar to the one that riddles the worlds of scholars or art experts.
Marc Aymes (b. 1974) has been a research fellow at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, as a member of the “Turkish and Ottoman Studies” research team, since October 2008. In the past few years he conducted research and teaching in Cyprus, Germany, Greece, France, Turkey and the United States. He actively takes part in the editorial boards of Labyrinthe. Atelier interdisciplinaire, the European Journal of Turkish Studies and sans papier.
Aymes’s research revolves around a study of the modern Mediterranean from the vantage point of its Turkish-, Greek- and Cypriot-speaking provinces. As exemplified by his forthcoming book (“Un Grand Progrès ? sur le papier”. Histoire provinciale des réformes ottomanes à Chypre au XIXe siècle, Leuven: Peeters Publishers, 2009), his recent work has put forward the notion of the province as a way to engage in a critical history of the projects of “modernity” that took place in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman worlds.
Aymes’s research revolves around a study of the modern Mediterranean from the vantage point of its Turkish-, Greek- and Cypriot-speaking provinces. As exemplified by his forthcoming book (“Un Grand Progrès ? sur le papier”. Histoire provinciale des réformes ottomanes à Chypre au XIXe siècle, Leuven: Peeters Publishers, 2009), his recent work has put forward the notion of the province as a way to engage in a critical history of the projects of “modernity” that took place in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman worlds.
