Social rationality of lower class criminal practices in the late nineteenth century İstanbul

Abstract

The late nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of a new mentality about work, society and crime among the Ottoman elites. As work became the central principle on which society was based, the unemployed and poor began to be perceived as serious threats to the social order and all socially unapproved behaviours and values were attributed to this group. They were located outside the bounds of respectable society and legal measures also contributed to the construction of a new criminal class image. This thesis focuses on both property and violent crimes committed by lower-class individuals in the late nineteenth century İstanbul to analyze the social rationality of these crimes. These cases show that property crimes largely were not committed by members of a professional criminal class who were experts in their branch and that violent crimes were not the senseless, meaningless and barbaric acts of essentially aggressive and degenerate social groups. Rather, most of the criminal practices were an integral feature of lower class life and it was impossible to find a criminal class socially and morally separated from the honest laboring class of İstanbul.