Inventing Laziness
The Culture of Productivity in Late Ottoman Society

A lively and original study tracing the development of 'laziness' as a way to understanding emerging civic culture in the Ottoman Empire.

Melis Hafez (Author)

9781108448215, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 4 July 2024

320 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.431 kg

'The book offers great insight into global discussions on capitalism, nationalism, Orientalism, and the modern state which anyone with or without an interest in Ottoman history would benefit from.' Şeyma Afacan, Eurasian Studies

Neither laziness nor its condemnation are new inventions, however, perceiving laziness as a social condition that afflicts a 'nation' is. In the early modern era, Ottoman political treatises did not regard the people as the source of the state's problems. Yet in the nineteenth century, as the imperial ideology of Ottomanism and modern discourses of citizenship spread, so did the understanding of laziness as a social disease that the 'Ottoman nation' needed to eradicate. Asking what we can learn about Ottoman history over the long nineteenth-century by looking closely into the contested and shifting boundaries of the laziness - productivity binary, Melis Hafez explores how 'laziness' can be used to understand emerging civic culture and its exclusionary practices in the Ottoman Empire. A polyphonic involvement of moralists, intellectuals, polemicists, novelists, bureaucrats, and, to an extent, the public reveals the complexities and ambiguities of this multifaceted cultural transformation. Using a wide variety of sources, this book explores the sustained anxiety about productivity that generated numerous reforms as well as new understandings of morality, subjectivity, citizenship, and nationhood among the Ottomans.

Introduction
1. Moralizing productivity in the age of reform
2. Criminalizing laziness: Punishment, reward, and negotiation in the Ottoman bureaus
3. Imagining Ottoman dandies and industrious effendis
4. Militarizing the productive body
5. Exclusionism at work: Politics, power, and productivity
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Population & demography [JHBD], Society & culture: general [JF], Social & political philosophy [HPS], Social & cultural history [HBTB], Middle Eastern history [HBJF1]