Murder in the family: Law, order, and criminal justice in the nineteenth century Ottoman society

This study deals with the murders committed within the family in the Ottoman provinces in the second half of the nineteenth century. Based on Ottoman archive documents, it focuses on the conflicts of various family members with each other and various reckonings both within the nuclear and extended family, from a socio-legal point of view and without any regional restrictions. The study claims that the ties that held the family together were extremely sensitive and fragile and that the family had both compassion and brutality in itself, with various paradoxes. The fact that we were able to obtain detailed information about the Ottoman provincial family and the word-for-word statements of family members from their mouths was a result of the judicial reforms that took place in the second half of the nineteenth century. Since this study, which presents a multi-layered portrait of the Ottoman provincial family through the nizamiye court records, is shaped on various family anomalies, the portrait presented is far from the claim of a full-scale family portrait. This study also tries to understand and make sense of ordinary people's mentality regarding their roles in both the domestic and public spheres. The way ordinary people customize the events in their minds, and the sub-judicial solutions they develop constitute the main axis of this study. Finally, this study reveals how the two courts operate in murder cases that fall into the common domain of both sharia and nizamiye courts in the new judicial order.