The 'Moral Science' of Statistics and the Politics of Population in the Late Ottoman Empire and Early Republican Turkey

Deren Ertas, Harvard University

This paper investigates the interconnected emergence of statistical analysis, modern census efforts, and population politics in the late Ottoman Empire and the first decade of the Turkish Republic. How did advances in statistics, and Ottoman social scientists’ embrace of statistical methods, inform discussions surrounding population and census-taking? This paper is divided into two parts. In the first part, I study the the scholarly debates surrounding statistics, census, and population in the Ottoman and Turkish press. My sources include scientific journals, newspapers, books, and textbooks. The learned elite of the 1890s-1930s perceived the adoption of statistical methods and analysis as a step towards ‘modernity’. These were not only secular intellectuals, but also members of the ?ilmiyye, or religious scholars. Their works--which appeared in local as well as empire-wide publications--sought to normalize and legitimize the individual census in the eyes of a suspecting population. In the second part, I examine documents from the Ottoman and Turkish Republican state archives that follow census-takers to the countryside. My method of reading these sources is informed by a relational perspective that considers the interactions between subjects/objects of study and producers of knowledge as constitutive of the knowledge being produced. While it was common for families and communities to flee from the census in order to avoid the fiscal and military obligations it brought, I particularly look at those instances where rural inhabitants presented census-takers with a different logic of (ac)counting. To that end, I show that the production of the census, and statistical data--like most attempts of knowledge production--took place in a contested field. In making this argument, I put Foucault's conception of ‘population’ (in his lectures Security, Territory, Population) in question through Rancière’s conceptualization of ‘politics.’

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 Presented in Session 148. Making States and Statistics