ODIN · Ottoman Decision and Information Networks in the Russo-Ottoman War of 1768-1774

How do governments make decisions when faced with uncertainty, conflicting reports, and unreliable information? Ottoman Decision and Information Networks (ODIN) addresses this enduring question by examining the Russo-Ottoman War of 1768–1774, a conflict that reshaped international politics across Europe and Eurasia. The project shows how one of the world’s great empires coped with rumor, credibility, and limited knowledge at a time when choices could mean survival or collapse.Unlike European rivals with permanent embassies, the Ottoman Empire relied on overlapping channels—provincial governors, Balkan princes, translators, spies, and foreign envoys. Their reports were incomplete, contested, or manipulated, yet they determined how the Sultan and his ministers understood enemies, subjects, and allies. Decisions thus emerged not from fixed hierarchies but from networks where trust, rumor, and political stakes intersected. ODIN draws on archival sources in Ottoman Turkish, Greek, French, and English, and applies digital tools—network analysis, GIS mapping, and database visualisation—to reconstruct these fragile webs of information. In doing so, it fills a major gap in scholarship, moving beyond Eurocentric narratives and placing the Ottomans at the heart of eighteenth-century debates on intelligence and governance.ODIN reconstructs networks and shows how information shaped strategy, legitimacy, and imperial identity. It highlights how Muslim and Christian actors, men and women, insiders and outsiders, all played roles in sustaining or undermining the flow of intelligence. Using digital tools to map these networks, the project makes visible the fragile webs of trust and authority that held a vast empire together during crisis. ODIN speaks to more than Ottoman historians. In an era when misinformation and uncertainty again dominate public life, it offers historical perspective on how states manage risk, build legitimacy, and struggle to act on incomplete knowledge.