Penal institutions, nation -state construction, and modernity in the late Ottoman Empire, 1908--1919

The topic of this dissertation concerns the development of modern penal institutions, particularly prisons, and their rote in state formation during the late Ottoman Empire (1908-1919). I am attempting to test and apply what social scientists call the 'modernist' approach to nation-state construction to a non-Western region, namely the Ottoman Empire. The central argument of my dissertation is that the Committee of Union and Progress utilized prisons as laboratories of modernity for nation-state construction in order to bring progress, reason, and civilization to the Ottoman Empire and "raise its population to the level of a scientific society" during the Second Constitutional Period. The role of penal institutions in the late Ottoman Empire went far beyond attempts at social control and discipline. It was within the walls of Ottoman prisons that many of the important questions of modernity were worked out, such as administrative reform and centralization, the role of punishment in the rehabilitation of prisoners, economic development and industrialization, issues of gender and childhood, the implementation of modern concepts of time and space, nationalist identity, social control and discipline, secularization through circumscribing the authority of Islamic legal institutions, and the role of the state in caring for its population in terms of public health and hygiene. The prison became a site of development, implementation, and contestation of these issues not only within penal institutions, but also on an imperial level as well. Therefore, prisons and other penal institutions act as important windows into Ottoman society and culture during the first decades of the twentieth century and help to substantiate further the existence of a specific and unique Ottoman modernity distinct from its Western contemporaries.