From Calligrapher-Typesetter to Financial Clerk: Mehmed Râcih Efendi and Occupational Boundaries at the Ottoman Imperial Press in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Scholarship on the Ottoman Imperial Press has largely emphasized legal regulations, technologies and publishing policies, offering limited insight into occu-pational structures and the everyday negotiation of authority within its institutional practice. Yet the Imperial Press was an eclectic workplace where bureaucrats employed in state offices, practitioners of manuscript culture, and print artisans operated within an evolving division of labor whose boundaries were not fully settled in advance. Fo-cusing on ta‘liq typesetting as a distinct occupational domain, this article traces how calligraphic expertise was translated into typographic production and how such ex-pertise could at times support claims to broader authority. At its core is a dispute file from 1848 that juxtaposes Mehmed Râcih Efendi’s report (layiha), in which a ta‘liq compositor seeks appointment to ruznamçecilik (financial record-keeping), with the counter-assessment (mütalaa) of the Director of the Imperial Press. Reading these two texts against the shifting institutional space of ruznamçecilik, the study shows how occupational boundaries were articulated through competing notions of expertise, hierarchy, and fiscal legitimacy and how the ruling of the Meclis-i Vâlâ temporarily sealed these boundaries without rendering them timeless or immutable.