This dissertation studies specific features of the Ottoman administration of justice in Anatolia during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In particular, it examines the functions and responsibilities of Islamic courts within the framework of the Ottoman provincial administration, and explores the processes of adjudication and dispute resolution through a detailed juxtaposition of court records from two Anatolian towns, Çankırı and Kastamonu. This latter task is achieved through a historical-anthropological analysis of legal practices, which focuses primarily on the micropolitics of adjudication and dispute resolution.
In various chapters, this study identifies the socioeconomic backgrounds of the court clients in Çankırı and Kastamonu, the kinds of issues that they brought to the courts, their strategies of litigation, and how disputes were resolved in the courts. It also sheds light on the costs of court usage and reveals alternative sites for dispute resolution that existed independently of the courts. In very general terms, these chapters demonstrate that the operations of the courts reflected the socioeconomic divisions within the localities in which they operated, and ensured the communal domination over the individual.In addition to the court records (sijills), this study uses as primary sources official reports and correspondence transmitted between the central government and the provinces, fiscal and land surveys (tapu-tahrir defterleri)carried out by the Ottoman state in the sixteenth century, and contemporary accounts by Western observers of Ottoman justice.