The Kernel OfRepresentative Practice: Legal Representatives in the Ottoman Empire and Russia
Before it developed philosophical dimensions and matured into a language of rights shaping politics, representation had simpler, practical origins in everyday legal practice, enhanced by the Roman principle of plenipotentiary powers, as we have seen.
Parts I and II showed thatPetitions, Collective Responsibility, and Representative Practice 279 English representatives had full powers that ensured that decisions made at the center with the king were binding in represented localities. Further, decisions were enforced because of state capacity. The legal practice of representation thus helped shape political representation. Yet it was known and practiced in both the Ottoman and especially the Russian empires, as I show below.
In fact, as Weber has pointed out, the idea of representation, of one agent standing in for many, is already embodied in the theory of rule - hardly a Western exclusivity.[1393] The idea of “representation from above,” of the ruler being represented by his agents, existed before the people came to be represented.[1394] The question is what triggers the extension of the principle to the broader population. Despite common stereotypes, no ideational impediment existed for the extension to broader groups in the non-Western cases. I show this by examining first the Ottoman, then the Russian case.
The legal kernel of representation as a judicial form was theorized and practiced in Islamic law.[1395] Legal representatives, the vekils, were bound by an articulated set of rules, which distinguished between the principal (muwakkil) and the agent himself (vekil).[1396] For instance, vekils were in some cases not permitted to testify on behalf of their clients, when judges believed that the litigant “would be more likely to reveal the truth.”[1397] The Muslim law of partnerships recognized each partner as the vekil of the other.[1398]
Group representation was also known in the Ottoman Empire, primarÂily through religious groups.
Jewish communities have left extensive documentation of group representation and bargaining collectively with the sultan over taxation.25 Courts treated them occasionally as having legal personhood when it suited state interests.26 A key form of social organization in major centers like Istanbul were guilds, though they were fragmented: no unified organization of Jewish communities (and hence representation) was able to emerge.27 They did not have “traditional centers or established hierarchy on which the Ottomans could rely as a basis for an administrative system or on which the subjects could rely as a basis for countering and resisting the Ottoman regime.”28 Neither did the Ottoman state create one.In Christian communities in the Balkans and the Aegean, community leaders also assumed responsibility for common obligations and actions and acted as representatives in court and central government. Christian monasteries bargained aggressively with the sultan. The monks of Mount Athos stridently opposed the repossession of their monasteries by Selim II in 1568: “if you do not order an imperial document of confirmation, we will sell our possessions and pay back the gold we borrowed and we will scatter all around the world; it is certain that our monasteries will be deserted and our taxes, which we customarily pay in a lump sum (maktu') each year, will be lost.”[1399] The monks bargained hard; no institution followed, however. The sultan just complied.
Center-periphery relations with Muslim communities were similarly not collectively harnessed at the center by the Ottoman administration. Nothing peculiar to Islamic doctrine has been claimed to proscribe colÂlective organization on an equal basis. Egalitarianism permeated Islam no less than it did Christianity,[1400] feeding the incipient notions of popular sovereignty described in Chapter 11. The Hadith states, after all, that “All people are equal, as equal as the teeth of a comb.”[1401] A doctrinal origin of the political divergence thus cannot be sustained.[1402] Instead, organizaÂtional, institutional factors appear more salient.
As seen, representation is attested first in the Catholic Church, the most hierarchical Christian denomination (as the obligatory nature of representation would predict).[1403] In Islam, ecclesiastical organization was looser and did not foster such practices nor did any alternative political actor.Political representation is directly observed in Russia, as discussed in Chapter 12. Representatives were also used in court, as Russian medieval law codes attest albeit fleetingly, with special provisions posited.[1404] Plenipotentiary powers were defined in the Novgorod Judicial Charter.35 Legal representatives appear in court records even among the peasantry. For instance, a judgment charter in 1501 mentions three peasants representing “all the peasants of the Likurzhskaia canton” against two of “the metropolitan’s petty noblemen,” and such instances were common.36 Representatives were also used in the Russian criminal system, though it is unclear how formalized and binding their terms of action were.37 In other words, the legal foundation for representation was present in Russia just as much as in England, although “neither notaries
Petitions, Collective Responsibility, and Representative Practice 281 nor lawyers existed as a formal profession until the Great Reforms of the 1860s”[1405] - a point that would be central to any full explanation of this divergence. Little evidence exists, however, on whether Russian repreÂsentatives had full powers to bind local communities, though in law that was observed.[1406]
The principle of representation was presumably also available to the Christian monasteries and churches, as in the Ottoman Empire. These did secure, especially after the sixteenth century, tax and other immunities,[1407] and negotiations likely involved a representative. But these exchanges have not been tied to the political representation that did emerge.[1408] The synodal organization and conciliar ecclesiology of the Orthodox Church, which held meetings called sobors, possibly influenced assemblies in the political realm.[1409] Ultimately, although representation was practiced for about a century, it did not shape the regime in an enduring way. Christianity per se does not sufficiently explain polityÂwide representation. It’s certainly not, however, that the concept or cultural template of representation were unavailable in these cases. Might differential demands for justice explain why?
13.2