Ceyda Karamursel

"The Sack and the Bowstring" places Ottoman freedom in its global context with the primary aim of understanding how Ottoman ideas and practices of this highly elusive concept collided, interacted with, and ultimately reconfigured larger developments taking place in the so-called age of freedom. It traces how ideas of abolitionism and religious freedoms, both of which had their origins in the same political and legal developments of the nineteenth century, were translated into actual practices. In doing so, it offers a new lens through which to explore liberalism’s internal mechanisms that produced novel legal, illegal and extralegal practices that consequently determined the social and economic relations in the late Ottoman Empire in particular and the global liberal order in general.