Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of contributors
- State Power and Social Forces
- Introduction: developing a state-in-society perspective
- PART I THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS
- PART II STATES: EMBEDDED IN SOCIETY
- PART III SOCIAL FORCES: ENGAGED WITH STATE POWER
- 6 Labor divided: sources of state formation in modern China
- 7 Business conflict, collaboration, and privilege in interwar Egypt
- 8 A time and a place for the nonstate: social change in the Ottoman Empire during the “long nineteenth century”
- 9 Peasant–state relations in postcolonial Africa: patterns of engagement and disengagement
- 10 Engaging the state: associational life in sub-Saharan Africa
- PART IV CONCLUSION
- Index
8 - A time and a place for the nonstate: social change in the Ottoman Empire during the “long nineteenth century”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of contributors
- State Power and Social Forces
- Introduction: developing a state-in-society perspective
- PART I THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS
- PART II STATES: EMBEDDED IN SOCIETY
- PART III SOCIAL FORCES: ENGAGED WITH STATE POWER
- 6 Labor divided: sources of state formation in modern China
- 7 Business conflict, collaboration, and privilege in interwar Egypt
- 8 A time and a place for the nonstate: social change in the Ottoman Empire during the “long nineteenth century”
- 9 Peasant–state relations in postcolonial Africa: patterns of engagement and disengagement
- 10 Engaging the state: associational life in sub-Saharan Africa
- PART IV CONCLUSION
- Index
Summary
INTRODUCTION
The following quotation is from a book written at the close of the eighteenth century and published in London in 1820. This book chronicles in three volumes the adventures of Anastasius, a Greek sailor, around the Mediterranean provinces of the Ottoman Empire. It is unlikely that it was actually written by the sailor himself, but it is obviously based on firsthand observation. The passage is from a conversation Anastasius is having with his friend Spiridion as they sail off the coast of Rhodes:
“Far as that society has spread its snares, has it so much as left a single small spot on earth, where those yet unborn who should dislike its partial regulations may find room to retire to the enjoyment of their birthright? Or, if there be any such asylum remaining in the wilds of Tartary or the wastes of America, has not society, at any rate, so monopolized all the means of disentangling oneself from its mazes, as to render the gaining these blissful abodes next to impossible? Must we not possess caravans, or vessels, licenses and passports, even to fly to the loneliness of the desert, together with a strength of body and of mind, of which the social institutions take care to deprive us ere we suspect their dangerous power? They cut our claws, they clip our wings, and then they cry out with a smile of derision, “poor pinioned eagle, fly if thou list!” The man who is not wealthy can only escape from society through the gates of death. […]
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- State Power and Social ForcesDomination and Transformation in the Third World, pp. 207 - 230Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994
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