Chapter 2 explores how the anxiety of productivity played out in the bureaucratic system, by focusing on how laziness and inefficiency were criminalized in the Ottoman bureaucracy from the late nineteenth century until the end of World War I. This chapter considers the daily practices of the Ottoman reform period as central to the construction of a culture of productivity, rather than attributing causality to an emulation of certain idealized notions of the “West.” A plethora of documents (personnel records, bills, memorandums, and petitions, along with accounts by and about officeholders) show how in these empire-wide offices Ottoman citizens, bureaucrats and laypeople alike, experienced the anxiety of efficiency and modern practices of work. The personnel files document the severe responses meted out to those deemed lazy, slow, and careless. In turn, bureaucrats disputed these accusations through legal means. These processes reveal a contested realm over the expectations and actual performance of duties from the perspective of both the state and its employees.

Chapter 1 examines the moralization of work and stigmatization of laziness in the works of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ottoman moralists between the first and the second constitutional period (the 1870s to 1908). At the center of this chapter are Ottoman morality texts, a genre, yet to be fully explored, reconfigured in the nineteenth century. These texts articulated many emerging discourses and anxieties of the Ottoman reform period on a normative level. After an overview of the question of laziness in Ottoman thinking, attention is drawn to how a novel kind of knowledge was produced in the field of morality, expressing a new subjectivity in relation to modern citizenship; the normative nature of morality texts and the way these texts moralized, nationalized, and even Islamized productivity is then studied. Ottoman moralists identified certain beliefs and practices as handicaps for productivity and declared them un-Islamic and antithetical to progress. This chapter rethinks the construction of morality and Islamic knowledge in modern times, by examining deontological discourses on work that later produced the neologism of the “Islamic work ethic.”