State, family and anticorruption practices in the late ottoman empire

This chapter employs the nexus of state and family as a lens for examining the question of anticorruption in the later Ottoman Empire. More specifically, the chapter focuses on how the government sought to prevent corruption in the department that handled property inherited by orphans-thereby shining a light on the involvement of the state in the private sphere of the family. While stressing the global nature of the modernization undergone by the Ottoman state in the nineteenth century, the author also demonstrates the unique features of a political culture that shaped these processes as well. On the one hand, she emphasizes how the reforms transformed the empire into a modern centralized state and that preventing corruption was a major issue on the reformers' agenda; but, on the other hand, she claims that anticorruption measures were also an important matter in earlier periods, albeit embedded in different historical circumstances.