Faculty Spotlight

A Conversation with Dr. Melis Hafez on the Ottoman Empire

Associate Professor, Department of History

Written by KT Shively, Associate Professor, Department of History

As the VCU community wrestles with ongoing violence in the Middle East, we are extremely fortunate to have Melis Hafez as a member of the history department. Melis is a specialist on the Ottoman Empire—a multi-ethnic polity that stretched across what is today called the Middle East and the Balkans—in the long nineteenth century. Her deeply-researched first book, Inventing Laziness: The Culture of Productivity in Late Ottoman Society (Cambridge University Press, 2021), is an incisive look at how laziness came to be viewed as a social problem that grew in tandem with new conceptions of nationhood, citizenship, and morality. For those of us who wonder, “Why must we relentlessly work?” this book is essential reading.

Melis brings a rigorous commitment to supporting our community through both her teaching and service. A member of the history department’s Equity, Inclusion, and Diversity Committee for the past 3 years, Melis has helped make the history department a more welcoming and equitable environment for all students, faculty, and staff.

In her twelfth year on faculty at VCU, Melis continues to be decorated with numerous grants and fellowships, from such institutions as the National Endowment for the Humanities and VCU’s own Humanities Research Center, and regularly presents her research around the world, from Turkey to the UK. I sat down with Melis to learn a little more about her important work.

How did you become interested in the topic of laziness in the Ottoman Empire? How does your second book project relate to your first book?

Perhaps I was always obsessed with laziness! There is a certain anxiety associated with being lazy, and I am sure most of us have felt that anxiety at one point in our lives. But that anxiety has a particular history in the modern times—one that directly ties with the capitalist system and its unequal relations, as well as the new practices of state and nationhood in the last 200 years. Looking at the anxiety of laziness in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire allowed me to tell a history that situates the Ottomans at the center of these processes and explore a cultural transformation with all its variegated aspects, without privileging Europe or rendering the experiences of the Ottomans as a completely sui generis phenomenon.

In my first book, I had a chance to explore the work of Ottoman moralists as they popularized, what I call, the moralization of industriousness and stigmatization of laziness as a social disease. But I think the entanglement of morality with modern systems is a much wider and significant phenomenon. In my second book, I look at these moralists and their work with a more comprehensive perspective and focus on the development of morality as a modern form of social intervention.

Where have you conducted your research outside of the United States? Do you have any interesting stories or finds from the archives?

I conducted most of my research at the archives and libraries of Istanbul and Ankara, Turkey. Istanbul houses the Ottoman imperial center’s main archive, an archive that contains historical documents of today’s 30+ nation-states.

I loved reading petitions. When I started researching for a chapter, I had no idea I would find so much information on individual bureaucrats, even the minor clerks from remote parts of the empire. As I was tracing the expansion of bureaucratic systems and the spread of new work practices, I almost felt the disbelief that the new state employees must have experienced when officials accused them of laziness. I remember reading about clerks who did not show up on time, probably not even thinking that it mattered, but then they were chased by inspectors, reported on, fined, and, sometimes, even fired. I could feel their utter shock and anger in their petitions. One state document, for example, ordered that clerks who came to work late should have their salaries reduced. It also ordered that the amount cut should be distributed to their colleagues who worked harder. These are not very strange scenarios for us, already accustomed to modern work concepts, but when you consider that this was the first generation to experience these regulations, you understand the magnitude of these changes. It makes you question the naturality of things that seem like second nature to us today.

What is something you wish Americans better understood about the history of the Ottoman Empire that could inform their knowledge of present day events?

The Ottoman Empire, often mistakenly called the Turkish Empire, was spread over three continents bringing together the most diverse regions of the world, both ethno-confessionally and linguistically. Today, we mostly associate this empire with the Middle East (though it was much larger than today’s territories conventionally labeled as the Middle East), and we associate the Middle East with violence and sectarian conflict. Unfortunately, these conflicts are usually presented to us in the United States as “age-old conflicts.” But they are not. Most of the conflicts of the region have origins not in time immemorial, but in the last hundred or so years, and they can be understood only if we situate them in their real historical contexts and global processes, such as colonialism, ethno-nationalism, developmentalism, politics of oil, the Cold War, or the so-called global war on terror.

There is also an untold history of these regions. People with different ethnic and religious identities shared ideas, cities, neighborhoods, councils, parliaments, trade routes, books, music, food, poetry, political movements, and labor associations, all the while preserving their differences. In my modern period classes, I love exploring with my students these often-untold histories—the existence, for example, of constitutionalist movements, and the demands for equal citizenship, regardless of ethnicity, religion, language, class, or gender. This history, which has its successful moments, as well as bloody failures, is highly relevant to our experiences here in the United States, because today we are still struggling with these issues. As we see in today’s ongoing conflicts, such as the current bloodshed in Israel/Palestine, the assumption of superiority of one ethnicity or religious identity over others is not a viable model, neither in the Middle East nor in the larger world. Hopefully, having a historical perspective allows us to imagine a different future, one in which equal citizenship is the norm and superiority of any particular group over others is seen as unacceptable.

Select Publications

Inventing Laziness: Culture of Productivity in Late Ottoman Society 1830-1922 (Cambridge University Press, 2021)
“And the Awakening Came as a Result of the Balkan War: The Changing Conceptualization of the Body in Late Ottoman Society,” in War and Nationalism: The Lasting Socio-Political Impacts of the Balkan Wars, eds., Isa Blumi and Hakan Yavuz (University of Utah Press, 2013)
Mourid Barghouti, Sairin Filistini (I Saw Ramallah), translated and introduced by Melis Hafez (Istanbul: Kure Yayinlari, April 2023)