Filed: How Paperwork, Files, and Forms Remade the Ottoman Empire

How did paperwork change an empire?In FILED, Murat Yilmaz traces the forms, files, registers, petitions, passports, personnel records, provincial yearbooks, and relief lists through which the Ottoman Empire sought to understand, govern, and reorganize its provinces during the long nineteenth century.This illustrated historical study follows the paper world of Ottoman administration from the age of reform to the empire's final decades. Provincial yearbooks made distant territories legible. Population registers and tax surveys turned households into administrative facts. Personnel files transformed careers into records. Petitions and telegrams gave subjects new ways to address authority, while surveillance files, passports, photographs, and exile orders showed the coercive power of the archive.Yet the book also shows the limits of paperwork. Roads, land surveys, wartime relief systems, and official regulations often collided with local realities. Subjects wrote back, challenged official calculations, and used the language of administration for their own claims.Drawing on scholarly research and reproduced archival documents, FILED offers a clear and richly illustrated account of how paperwork remade the Ottoman state, shaped everyday life, and survived the empire that produced it.