Chloe Bordewich History and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University
Empire of Suspicion: Intelligence, Power, and Social Trust in the Ottoman Arab World, 1865-1930

What kinds of information should the public demand from those in power? Conversely, what kinds of information should the public be entitled to keep secret from those in power? How these questions were asked and answered in the late Ottoman Empire and the immediate aftermath of its dissolution is at the center of Bordewich’s dissertation project. Prodding at the dual imperative of states to root out secrets and to keep them, her work seeks to demonstrate how the rise of mass politics at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the 20th paralleled and motivated the extension of state secrecy. This brought a need for new means of controlling the circulation of information. The advent of the new category of “political crimes,” moreover, undergirded the employment of more complex networks of informers. This project is particularly concerned with how such debates and practices played out in the Ottoman Arab provinces and among Arab subjects, both reflecting and further fomenting the deterioration of trust. Focusing on links between Istanbul and Cairo, parallel hubs of subversive politics, it investigates how the changing landscape of secrecy and social trust at the end of empire affected people’s private lives, their social relationships, and their understanding of their relationship to the state. Bordewich’s work draws heavily on memoirs, diaries, and private letters alongside trial records and government correspondence to probe the lives and afterlives of secrets during a period of momentous change in the Middle East.