The Sublime Post
Choon Hwee Koh is assistant professor of Ottoman history at the University of California
In the 1840s information traveled at roughly the same speed as it had in 840 BCE. Before the telegraph and the steamship, relay postal systems were the premier technology for long-distance communication. Powered by horses, these overland relays were more reliable than boats, more secure than carrier pigeons, and they could transmit messages more complex than the most elaborate smoke signals. After all, boats could capsize, pigeons could be devoured, and smoke signals could be ruined by rain or the slightest shift in wind direction. Hence, for over three millennia, the empires of the Assyrians and the Romans, the Mongols and the Russians, the Manchus and the Ottomans, all converged on a common solution to long-distance communication.
While the core motor of horse power barely changed, the forms of human organisation that harnessed it varied across space and transformed over time. Different communities adapted the same technology in different ways to accommodate regional geographies, political values, and other factors.
For centuries, bureaucrats in the “Sublime Porte” – a term used by contemporary European powers to refer to the Ottoman government – coordinated with local officials from Belgrade to Baghdad, Crimea to Cairo, to manage a vast network of over two hundred official post stations. These stations served government correspondence exclusively and, in principle, functioned as ever-ready nodes across the empire’s assorted landscapes – mountain, desert, coast, and forest. Through rain, sun, or snow, mounted couriers galloped from station to station, delivering everything from imperial decrees and appointment letters to bills of exchange and petitions. Villagers provisioned these stations with food, water, and, most importantly, fresh horses to substitute tired ones as part of their tax obligations. Postmasters used those resources to serve couriers with coffee and food while stabling, feeding, and shoeing their horses. In the eighteenth century, postmasters began to record the names of these couriers, including their ranks, entourage sizes, number of horses taken, dates of arrival and departure, and final destinations. They compiled this information into registers and submitted them at regular intervals to bookkeepers based in the imperial capital. In turn, bookkeepers used these registers to calculate the annual expenditures of every post station in the empire. This series of connected efforts across the social hierarchy powered the everyday processes of administration – this was empire, in microcosm.
Unlike the Mongols and the Romans, the Ottomans left behind voluminous documentation that detailed these postal operations. Read carefully, these records yield a rich repository of stories. There are stories of bookkeepers puzzling over the cost of a horseshoe, of ambitious postmasters who competed for contracts, of neighboring villages embroiled in disputes over post station responsibilities, of imposters masquerading as official couriers by donning their uniforms in order to obtain post horses for personal use, of widows petitioning the state for financial assistance after their courier-husbands were murdered by highway robbers. There is a story of a bereaved mother learning that her courier-son froze to death with his horse in a snowstorm.
Complementing the official archive of the Ottoman bureaucracy is the unofficial archive of travelogues, chronicles, and memoirs. There are stories of swimming with horses across rivers using inflated goat skins, of singing loudly in the deep of the night to intimidate lurking bandits, of drunken nights in post stations that end in rashly drawn sabres and displays of machismo. These are stories, above all, about life in the Ottoman lands.
The Sublime Post: How the Ottoman Imperial Post Became a Public Service, a new book by historian Koh Choon Hwee, traces the history of this vast system using the perspectives of eight small-scale actors, animate and inanimate. Collectively, the Courier, the Tatar, the Imperial Decrees, the Bookkeeper, the Postmaster, the Villager, Money, and Horses enabled the postal system’s expansion during the eighteenth century and participated in its transformation from an exclusive government network into a public postal service open to all subjects in 1840. Previously, only Ottoman officials had the status required to access post stations, while common subjects were forbidden due to their low tax-paying status. After 1840, tax-paying subjects became legitimate customers who could legally pay to use post horses with money.
The postal system, by offering a rare view of the whole empire as one coherent analytical unit, is a suitable proxy to examine these twinned processes. Spatially, the postal system cut across the Ottoman Empire’s bewildering diversity and imposed a relatively uniform and circumscribed bureaucratic context. Language, faith, climate, and diet, as well as legal and tax arrangements, varied from province to province, as was the case in other Eurasian empires. Yet the Ottoman postal system was, by design, operationally standardised. It had to be. The system’s raison d’être was speed, and the speed of a courier depended on the ease with which he could flow through each post station and reach his destination. Predictability and simplicity were key. In other words, it didn’t matter which language you spoke, which faith you practiced, or which food you ate. Each post station had to work the same way as the next in order for the whole system to work at all.
Temporally, the horse-run relay system endured as an important medium of communication from the early days of the empire in the fourteenth century until after the arrival of the telegraph. The earliest sources used in this book date to the 1380s, when whole villages were granted special tax statuses in exchange for providing horses to imperial couriers. In 1902, almost half a century after the advent of the telegraph, the deputy judge in a small town near Amman (modern Jordan) still requested confirmation of the official end of Ramadan by horse-run post, rejecting the telegram notification. The postal system thus offers historians a practical lens with which to contemplate the entirety of empire over a very long time.
Three centuries ago, it took eleven days for a horse rider to send a message from Aleppo to Istanbul, and another seven days for a rider to go from Istanbul to Belgrade. Today, the distance has been alchemised into a click. The average person rarely experiences the friction of distance in their everyday communications. Enabling this user experience of seamless communications is a densely industrial, resource-intensive material infrastructure that has been tucked out of sight and rebranded in disembodied, ethereal terms like “cloud,” “cyberspace,” or “metaverse.”
The Sublime Post reaches across the yawning gap separating the pre-industrial world from the post-industrial present. It reconstructs the friction of distance and the organisational solutions that humans had once collectively undertaken to make long-distance communication possible.
The opinions expressed are those of the contributor, not necessarily of the RSAA.
The Sublime Post: How the Ottoman Imperial Post Became a Public Service
By weaving together chronicles, sharia court records, fiscal registers, collective petitions, appointment contracts, and imperial decrees from the Ottoman archive, this study of a large-scale communications infrastructure reveals the interdependence of an empire and its diverse imperial subjects. Koh traces this evolving interdependence between 1500 and 1840 to tell the history of the Ottoman Empire and its changing social order.
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