Provincial regimes

Local studies have confirmed the resilient character of Ottoman provincial regimes during the nineteenth century. For instance, Donald Quataert and Michael Palairet documented the experience of Anatolian and Bulgarian textile manufacturers, who survived the challenge of European imports by cutting costs and using non-guild labour.Footnote ⁴ In a similar fashion, Reşat Kasaba and Jens Hanssen argued that it was domestic merchants who controlled long-distance trade networks in western Anatolia and Beirut.Footnote ⁵ In other places, such as Syria, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and northern Iraq, Ottoman landholding patterns and regional markets were as important as the impact of the world economy.Footnote ⁶

Provincial regimes also negotiated successfully with central authority. In a path-breaking study, Beshara Doumani demonstrated the bargaining power of the Nablusi administrative council, which was able to keep a significant share of the agricultural surplus in Palestine.Footnote ⁷ In other cases, local actors simply bypassed the central Ottoman state. Isa Blumi brought to the fore the story of Albanian merchants who evaded paying taxes, an experience shared by their counterparts in other border provinces, such as Yemen and Eastern Anatolia at the beginning of the twentieth century.Footnote ⁸

Provincial economic interests received a further boost through taxation mechanisms. Extraterritoriality gave tax immunity to a significant number of non-Muslim merchants on the eastern Mediterranean coast. At the same time, tax-farming practices delegated tax collection rights to the ruling Muslim bloc in inland regions. The historical outcome was limited direct taxation by the central state. The ratio of tax revenues to total GDP stayed at around 11% before the First World War, and only one third of state income came from trade between 1887 and 1907.Footnote ⁹ Thus, despite changing circumstances, Ottoman provincial regimes survived the fiscal priorities of a centralizing state and the profit agendas of foreign capitalists during the nineteenth century.

Long-term elite rule depended on political power in the localities. In Anatolia, Syria, and Palestine, this required a stable position in the Ottoman bureaucracy. Hence, the more the late Ottoman state became bureaucratic, the more it was taken over by provincial interests at the local level. As numerous local studies have shown, the number of influential families that dominated political life in Ankara, Aleppo, Damascus, Hama, and Jerusalem never exceeded a dozen in the post-1860 period. In coastal regions, merchants and professionals were integrated into the bureaucratic machinery. Mahmoud Yazbak portrayed a picture of this sort for Haifa, where Muslim and non-Muslim elite families alike competed for bureaucratic posts.Footnote ¹⁰ In a similar fashion, Jewish moneyed interests and Muslim notables were influential in the local government of Salonica (Thessaloniki).Footnote ¹¹

Not all local leaders relied exclusively on the Ottoman state for political power. In frontier regions, religious credentials certainly helped. In a moving account, Hasan Kayalı discussed the various local capabilities of the Sharif of Mecca in western Arabia when dealing with the inexperienced Young Turk government.Footnote ¹² Local interests were once again the key in the Albanian Catholic north, as opposed to ‘Albanian solidarity or Ottoman loyalty’.Footnote ¹³ Similarly, Albanian, Macedonian, and Bosnian Muslims mobilized their religious identity to oppose Great Power intervention and Christian nationalisms in the Balkans.Footnote ¹⁴ Generally speaking, then, studies on the borderland provinces have made it clear that local leaders enjoyed specific ideological and cultural resources.Footnote ¹⁵

The intriguing question is how provincial regimes prevailed against powerful rivals, such as the state and global actors. Simply put, local horizontal networks mattered. On the economic front, Haris Exertzoglou underlined the ‘ethnic banking connection’ that Greek merchants enjoyed in Istanbul to run commercial operations in western Anatolia.Footnote ¹⁶ Roger Owen showed how domestically owned silk-reeling factories in Mount Lebanon relied on familial networks and migrant home-town connections.Footnote ¹⁷ In the political field, Philip Khoury documented the strength of Muslim intermediaries in Damascus, who consolidated their power through marriage and other means.Footnote ¹⁸ For the very same reason, the moral agenda of the imperial state did not have a major impact on the frontiers, where religious entrepreneurs and provincial leaders were strongly embedded in local contexts.

Local studies have been instrumental in the rediscovery of provincial regimes that had been vilified by modernization theorists. Portraying the local elite as pragmatic agents, who successfully adjusted to Ottoman centralization and European expansion, these works unveil the power of centrifugal forces in the late Ottoman Empire.Footnote ¹⁹ They also document the brokered nature of Ottoman state formation, which neither followed the West European transition from indirect to direct rule, nor repeated the decentralized politics of the eighteenth century.Footnote ²⁰ The larger conclusion that one can draw from this literature is that there was negotiated rule in the Ottoman territories during the nineteenth century.

Centre–periphery alliances

Institutional readings of the late Ottoman Empire hinge upon the idea that there was an alliance between the imperial centre and the periphery.Footnote ²¹ The most developed argument in this vein has been about tax-farming. This was an arrangement through which the Ottoman state rented out its right to collect taxes to third parties, in return for a payment in advance. Obtaining tax farms required political connections at different levels, and created a chain of powerful subcontracting interests, amounting to five thousand people during the eighteenth century.Footnote ²² Discussing tax-farming relations in Diyarbakır, on the Upper Tigris River, Ariel Salzmann portrayed a city that was well run by the local elite, who supported regional interests and yet had strong fiscal links to the imperial centre.Footnote ²³

Karen Barkey took the same argument one step further, and associated tax-farming interests with burgeoning provincial civil society in the Ottoman Empire.Footnote ²⁴ As major beneficiaries of tax-farming at the local level, the Karaosmanoğulları family in western Anatolia, notables (ayan) owning large estates (çiftlik) in the Balkans, and influential Sunni households in the Arab provinces established close ties with foreign merchants, provided protection to local groups, and were transformed into influential community leaders.Footnote ²⁵ According to this approach, tax-farming fostered civil society in the Balkans, Anatolia, and the Arab provinces, and sustained the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire during the decentralized eighteenth century.

Late Ottoman institutions were transformed into a policy instrument by Sultan Abdulhamid II during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This sultan ‘put Islam into action’ to integrate the local elite more firmly into the modernizing Ottoman state, and to produce legitimacy in the eyes of his Muslim subjects. Selim Deringil, in an often-cited book, discussed various ‘imperial-legitimation’ mechanisms. The Ottoman sultan bestowed honorary medals on local elite figures, sent material gifts to tribal leaders, and promoted a Sunni version of Islam.Footnote ²⁶ This line of argument approached pan-Islamic ideology in the late Ottoman Empire as part of a state-building project that mobilized a confessional agenda for the political survival of the state.

The other aspect of regime strength during the reign of Abdulhamid II concerned bureaucratic stability in the higher ranks. Abdülhamit Kırmızı documented that the sultan appointed only ninety-five governors to administer twenty-nine provinces in the period 1895–1908, each governor serving for an average term of five years.Footnote ²⁷ Long years of tenure in the bureaucracy, and the desire of the sultan to control each appointment, served two main purposes. First, the Ottoman administration was able to penetrate to the local level better than in the past, and, second, the sultan pre-empted the rise of autonomous governors with distinct interests and alternative visions.Footnote ²⁸ The political outcome was the growing prestige of the Ottoman sultan on the one hand, and stronger interactions between localities and the centre on the other.

Imperial schooling accelerated Ottomanization, with its Islamic credentials and prospects for social mobility.Footnote ²⁹ As of 1900, the Ottoman bureaucracy became the primary means through which younger generations in the Muslim local elite kept their privileged position and men from modest backgrounds obtained access to upward social mobility. The former group preferred to go to law school and the school of administration to take up positions in the civil bureaucracy, whereas the latter tended to choose military careers in the Ottoman army.Footnote ³⁰ Thus, the Ottoman state became more credible in the eyes of most of its subjects before the First World War (at least, those who were Muslims) because of its relatively stable, politically effective, and culturally inclusive institutions.Footnote ³¹

At the same time, economic institutionalist scholars explored the position of the Ottoman Empire vis-à-vis the West in varying terms. According to Timur Kuran, the centrality of the state and Islamic legal institutions were the main reasons why the Muslim world could not cope with the European world economy.Footnote ³² A more balanced and empirically substantiated view, advocated by Şevket Pamuk, underlined the success of Ottoman economic principles in the early modern era, and yet documented the rising economic disparity between the Ottomans and the West during the nineteenth century.Footnote ³³ The balance sheet of late Ottoman institutions is certainly mixed: while their gradual consolidation and increasingly Islamic character kept the empire politically intact, they did not foster economic efficiency in the long run.

This historical trend was partially reversed in the Balkans. Here, there was a stronger economic performance, especially in Bulgaria, and yet no effective integration of local interests into the imperial framework at political and social levels. Fikret Adanır demonstrated the latter point with great detail in the context of Macedonia. He showed how educated Christian elites, Slavic churches, Balkan states, and Great Powers were engaged in a fierce struggle to establish control over the region.Footnote ³⁴ Frantic revolutionary activity was based on the notion that late Ottoman rule in the Balkans was alien and its days were numbered. Even an account sympathetic to Ottoman rule in the region did not hesitate to conclude that ‘in practically all spheres … the break [from the Ottoman world] came almost immediately after political independence’.Footnote ³⁵

In sum, the main issue for the institutional explanation has been to demonstrate the centre–periphery alliance as the defining feature of modern Ottoman state formation. While studies of the early modern period emphasize the centrality of tax-farming, writers focusing on the nineteenth century credit the moral agenda of the Ottoman sultan for sustaining a ‘tacit contract’ between the two units. However, the Balkans took a different historical route. Based on existing scholarship, one can conclude that strong institutional ties between local forces and the central state did not materialize in the Balkan territories of the Ottoman Empire.

Ottoman colonialism in question

The final thread in late Ottoman historiography is the postcolonial school, which combines post-structuralist approaches with recent discussions on coloniality.Footnote ³⁶ The key issue that drives the postcolonial research programme is that of the homogenization efforts of the late Ottoman state, which in turn created a major divide between the centre and the periphery. Postcolonialists have explored the elitist imprint on reformist ideology, and documented the disciplinary policies of the late Ottoman state in the second half of the nineteenth century. This section unpacks the new imperial ideology, introduces the centralization efforts of the late Ottoman state, and discusses the Young Turk era as a turning point in late Ottoman history.

The Ottoman state became committed to large-scale reform during the nineteenth century. The new imperial ideology found strong resonance among the educated members of the bureaucratic class, who envisioned a socially elitist, politically centralist, and culturally modernist project to transform the Ottoman Empire. Captured aptly by the term ‘civilizing mission’, domestic reform acquired a specific meaning on the frontiers. The Ottoman bureaucrat became a self-assigned modernizer, constructing the ‘backward’ in the process. Arabs, tribes, and non-Sunni versions of Islam were viewed with an ‘orientalizing’ contempt.Footnote ³⁷ Selim Deringil recently suggested that this vision was borrowed from European colonialism, and initiated a distinct modality of rule in borderland provinces.Footnote ³⁸

Balkan provinces largely escaped such outright orientalism. Despite the existence of internal orientalisms in the region, neither Europeans nor Ottomans viewed the region mainly in terms of orientalist categories. Surveying changing European views on the Ottoman Balkans, Maria Todorova detected a rupture in the second half of the nineteenth century. Shifting from a Turkophile position to a ‘pro-Christian bias’, Europeans embraced a moral agenda that imagined the Balkans as a Christian territory under the ‘Ottoman yoke’. If Enlightenment and evolutionary thinking shaped the rise of a new saviour ideology, the Balkans were considered to be the ‘the dark side within’ the European zone, with a transitional character between East and West.Footnote ³⁹

Another aspect of Ottoman reformist ideology was a tendency to conceive of local resistance in terms of communal identities. In an important study, Ussama Makdisi demonstrated that Ottoman statesmen (and Europeans) viewed the Druze–Maronite conflicts in Lebanon (1840–60) as an expression of communal conflict. The political solution to the crisis came with the creation of an autonomous Maronite state in Mount Lebanon.Footnote ⁴⁰ Sharing the legacy arguments of David Laitin on postcolonial Nigeria, and of Mahmood Mamdani on independent Africa, the author concluded that sectarianism in Lebanon was an Ottoman product of the post-1860 period.Footnote ⁴¹

The Ottomans employed disciplinary strategies to homogenize the empire. Military campaigns against autonomous local rulers, the settlement of refugees in sensitive regions, and the implementation of the Land Code in Iraq all demonstrated how coercion and modernity were intertwined in Ottoman reforming practice. Cultural politics were also an integral part of the homogenizing vision. The Ottoman state tried to impose the Sunni version of Islam and obtain religious conversions, albeit with limited success. This was especially the case in Eastern Anatolia, Iraq, and the Arabian Peninsula, where the Ottomans faced geopolitical competition and non-Sunni brands of Islam, including small unorthodox religious sects.

Postcolonial research redirected attention to the Young Turk era (1908–18). For instance, Şükrü Hanioğlu suggested that the Young Turk movement was more Turkish in terms of its actors and ideological orientation than was previously thought.Footnote ⁴² More broadly put, the postcolonial school raised two points. First, the late Ottoman state was more Turkish, elitist, and centralist than was previously assumed. Second, it was the social Darwinism of the Young Turks that initiated reactive Muslim nationalisms, a Christian exodus, and the eventual collapse of the Ottoman Empire.Footnote ⁴³

Postcolonialists view late Ottoman history as a series of efforts to dismantle imperial diversity in the name of modernity and the state.Footnote ⁴⁴ A dynamic Ottoman state is portrayed, which tried to transform imperial territories and Ottoman subjects around the discourse of reform and progress. Accordingly, postcolonial scholarship has approached the Tanzimat and Young Turk eras as episodes of ‘negative change’, in which the centre–periphery alliance and the common understanding between the Ottoman ruling class and imperial communities were terminated. The key event was the modernization of the late Ottoman state, which triggered the rise of a bureaucratic class with a top-down reformist ideology.

I would like to conclude the historiographical part by making several observations about the evolution of late Ottoman historiography. In terms of agendas, old-fashioned political history was replaced by postcolonial questions; social history gave a ‘from below’ approach to local history; and economic history leaned towards global comparisons. In terms of periodization, the older ‘designated’ eras of reform are losing ground to the late eighteenth century, the Abdulhamidian era, and the Young Turk period as fresh fields of study. In spatial terms, there is a growing body of scholarship on the Arab provinces, which is not yet matched by similar research on the Balkans.

Current historiography includes areas of consensus and dissension. Historians generally acknowledge the role played by the late Ottoman context in the making of the modern Middle East. There is also a common explanation of the demise of the empire in terms of collapsing bonds between centre and periphery. The major point of contention concerns the nature of the late Ottoman state. While local studies portray an imperial state with a low capacity to intervene, the institutional school gives more credit to Ottoman state power and to alliances between peripheral forces and the state. The postcolonial approach goes further, presenting the late Ottoman state as a powerful actor, practising exclusion towards frontiers and ‘unorthodox’ social groups.

There are school-specific weaknesses related to this research. First, there is the issue of scale: local historians rightly emphasize the resilience of provincial regimes in the late Ottoman context, and yet they underestimate the constitutive power of imperial and global factors. Meanwhile, postcolonial scholars associate the sociological imagination of the bureaucratic class with reality on the ground, projecting an Ottoman state with more extensive capabilities than it really had. Finally, institutional analysts credit tax-farming with positive political outcomes, overlooking its negative impact on state formation during the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁴⁵

As a final point, I believe that the most important issue at hand is the continuing hegemony of the centre–periphery framework. Despite changing waves and competing positions, historians still approach late Ottoman history in terms of the tensions or cooperation between local units and the central state. This perspective creates a dualistic understanding of imperial history, and sustains state-centred narratives. Analytical dualities have been kept intact, such as centre and periphery, macro and micro, and global and domestic. The late Ottoman experience is thus viewed through the lens of local actors or the central state.

The coast

The historical origins of the coastal path go back to the second half of the eighteenth century, when the Ottoman Empire was progressively incorporated into the expanding European world economy. Benefiting from political decentralization and inflation, governors of coastal cities, powerful notables, and private estate owners from the Balkans responded to rising demand from Europe.Footnote ⁴⁶ They channelled peasant surplus to foreign markets, and provided protection services to long-distance trade. However, this integration into world markets, built around alliances between European merchants and tax-farming landlords, proved to be temporary.Footnote ⁴⁷

After the 1820s, when foreign trade began to exceed levels reached before the Napoleonic Wars, the trade framework was radically altered in the eastern Mediterranean. The major change was the meteoric rise of local capitalists, who expanded their intermediary positions in Ottoman–European trade relations. Located predominantly in flourishing ports, such as Izmir and Salonica, non-Muslim entrepreneurs enjoyed two major advantages: they possessed the necessary human capital and they were perfectly embedded in local networks.Footnote ⁴⁸ While the former was a necessary skill to bypass local Muslim groups, the latter gave them a distinct advantage over Europeans.

The economic shift from subsistence agriculture to cash crops sealed the dominant status of non-Muslim merchants on the coast. The strength of the middle peasantry, high land-to-labour ratios, and the inability of European capitalists to extend credit to small producers were structural factors behind the rise of this domestic bourgeoisie.Footnote ⁴⁹ Local merchants injected credit into the hinterland, and the existence of a vast trade network, ranging from trading houses to purchasing agents, guaranteed domestic control over markets. Non-Muslim entrepreneurs thus dominated silk exports in Lebanon and Bursa, controlled the tobacco business in Salonica, and dealt in a variety of cash crops in western Anatolia.Footnote ⁵⁰

The rising economic fortunes of domestic merchants coincided with the burgeoning hegemony of a professional middle class in port cities. Mostly of non-Muslim origins, journalists, lawyers, doctors, and literary figures expanded the public sphere and created middle class networks. Rejecting excessive Westernization and orientalist categories, the port-city intellectual was receptive to modernization in a locally embedded way. This elite was cosmopolitan yet local, and favoured reform without opposing the state or the local community.Footnote ⁵¹ As rooted cosmopolitans, in Sydney Tarrow's phrase, ‘Tanzimat men’ became opinion leaders, cultural mediators, and enthusiastic reformers. The professional careers of Butrus al-Bustani and Khalil al-Khuri in nineteenth-century Beirut were powerful testimonies to this development.Footnote ⁵²

A major venue for middle-class politics was the municipality. Documented by Jens Hanssen for Beirut, the municipality was controlled by merchants and reformist intellectuals, who closed the doors of city governance to rural notables and religious dignitaries.Footnote ⁵³ Professional groups were also interested in the social question, seeking to bring about social justice in the city. They aimed at reconciling private interest with the public good, and were sceptical about the idea that religion could foster a harmonious society.Footnote ⁵⁴ Instead, public charity, donations, and modern education were seen as major ways of helping the unprivileged, the poor, and the community as a whole.

The middle class promoted an urban agenda in the press, local clubs, and municipalities. Faced with rapid social transformation and urban renewal, professional groups demanded increasing control over the city space. The call was to set up a moral order, which would be disrupted neither by seasonal migrants, newcomers, and vagabonds on the one hand, nor by disease, crime, and prostitution on the other. For instance, part of the middle-class solution in Salonica and Istanbul was to eliminate single immigrant men and to repress juvenile delinquency in the name of modernity and progress. As such, domestic expert rule was in the making in the port cities of the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the twentieth century.Footnote ⁵⁵

The merchant–professional coalition created a cosmopolitan middle-class culture in the eastern Mediterranean, exemplified by the Cercle de Salonique, which had 159 members in 1887.Footnote ⁵⁶ The common ground that united merchants and professionals was the need to carve out a social space that would transcend communal lives and state boundaries. This vision was evident in the discourse of administrative autonomy, and in bitter fights within non-Muslim communities over education. Thus, despite the resilience of ethnic and religious identities, port cities were run by a middle-class alliance that established strong ties between communities.Footnote ⁵⁷

The interior

Inland regions evolved according to a distinct historical trajectory in the second half of the nineteenth century. With no foreign intervention from outside and a limited presence of global markets, the interior fostered political coalitions, which increasingly participated in the modernizing Ottoman state, and secured Muslim domination in the regional economy and local politics. Accordingly, Ottoman imperial modernization initiated two long-term trends in the interior: state-led transformation and consensual rule, which extended Ottoman authority inland while confirming the privileged status of urban intermediaries.

The Muslim coalitions of the interior (or the politics of notables, as Albert Hourani put itFootnote ⁵⁸), were fully consolidated after 1860 with the expansion of a modernizing Ottoman state. The centralization drive in Syria reflected the general historical pattern:Footnote ⁵⁹ the Ottoman state eliminated powerful rural interests in the north, settled nomads and unorthodox religious groups in central areas, and reorganized the whole region in administrative terms by creating the province of Syria in 1865.Footnote ⁶⁰ Subsequently, the Ottomans overcame the resistance of the masses to taxation and conscription, protected long-distance trade and cities from rural racketeers, and reconnected politically with urban leaders.

Merged into a single bloc, the Muslim coalitions of the interior were attached to the state.Footnote ⁶¹ Office-holding was the major mechanism through which the provincial elite accumulated economic wealth, boosted political power, and reproduced community leadership positions. On the economic front, a bureaucratic post was the key to receiving tax farms and to buying large tracts of land, especially in the Arab provinces.Footnote ⁶² In political life, administrative councils – with their powers over conscription, tax collection, and social services – served as sites of elite coordination and provided social recognition to horizontally networked Sunni households.Footnote ⁶³ In terms of religion, Sunni dominance was guaranteed by the state. Moreover, the ulema (religious dignitaries) needed the support of provincial bureaucrats to obtain judicial positions in sharia courts and for the protection of pious foundations.

The inland economy was based on bulk agricultural goods, notably cereals, and livestock. The demographic expansion of cities, high agricultural prices on domestic markets, and faster modes of transportation in the last quarter of the nineteenth century initiated the emergence of a ‘grain belt’ in interior regions.Footnote ⁶⁴ Located in inland market towns and allies of the nationalist project in the long run, domestic grain merchants expanded their position in a dramatic fashion. They had important connections in Jabal Hawran in Syria,Footnote ⁶⁵ and a powerful presence in central AnatoliaFootnote ⁶⁶ and Lebanon.Footnote ⁶⁷ They also accumulated substantial economic wealth in Baghdad and Aleppo.Footnote ⁶⁸

The other major economic activity in the interior was the revival of manufacturing during the ‘Great Depression’ of the late nineteenth century. Despite pressures coming from the world economy and coastal regions, domestic manufacturers were especially strong in east-central Anatolia and the urban centres of Syria.Footnote ⁶⁹ They operated on a low-cost basis, benefited from an intimate knowledge of customer tastes, and targeted the lower end of the market. Textile merchants used extensive chains of subcontracting, fragmented the production process, and benefited from unorganized labour. For instance, to produce one piece of alaja-type silk/cotton mixture, the ‘input of fourteen specialists was needed’.Footnote ⁷⁰

The commercialization of the economy strengthened the position of middling market towns in particular. They emerged as regional textile centres, sold manufactured products to the hinterland, traded with large caravan cities, and established connections with port cities. For instance, while Konya merchants used Mersin as an outlet for grain exports, Homs relied on Tripoli to connect to foreign markets. Hama turned into a regional textile centre that produced cheap cotton fabrics. Mosul specialized in pastoral products for northern Iraq and south-eastern Anatolia. Aleppo, Damascus, and Baghdad reigned over the ‘Arab interior’, as they forged economic ties and functioned as regional distribution centres.Footnote ⁷¹

Social conflict in the interior was first and foremost about elite rule. The local Muslim elite resented egalitarian measures embodied in Tanzimat reforms, and challenged free-trade policies. Driven by the fear of a new social order, Muslim interests fought against the intrusion of European capital and the rise of non-Muslim groups. The Ottoman state was invited, as ‘the protector of Muslim privilege’, to tell non-Muslims where their hudud (limits) were.Footnote ⁷² In less than a decade, mass mobilization turned violent, especially in major inland centres such as Aleppo (1850), Mosul (1854), Nablus (1856), and Damascus (1860).

Collective violence in the 1850s served as a turning point for the inland regions. It helped to shape the interior trajectory by securing the long-term victory of Muslim urban coalitions. As influential non-Muslim families migrated to the coast, the Muslim domination of the interior evolved in two related ways. First, local notables monopolized bureaucratic posts, despite the egalitarian Tanzimat discourse. Second, the urban Muslim bloc enjoyed the spoils of market integration in the succeeding decades, when the Ottoman state eliminated rural interests and provided public security, especially in urban spaces.

Having pacified its Christian, European, and rural rivals early in the game, the Muslim urban bloc was divided by internal competition in the second half of the nineteenth century. Provincial bureaucracy turned into the key site of contention because it practically determined who had access to political power, economic resources, and religious authority. Urban politics then took the form of alliances, bargaining, and rivalries between the influential local households. Furthermore, the rise of a state class with modern education added a new layer of loyalty to the Ottoman state. Judging from the cultural influence of Istanbul on Damascus, it is clear that the Ottomans were building diffused legitimacy in interior regions.Footnote ⁷³

The frontier

The frontier trajectory was distinct in the Ottoman Middle East. It not only encapsulated the most politically volatile and fiscally troublesome provinces but also hosted the least economically developed, most demographically sparse, and most pastorally oriented regions. The Ottoman frontiers were primarily ruled by culturally distinct and politically autonomous leaders, drawn from non-Sunni heterodox groups. Thus, Eastern Anatolia, Iraq, Hawran, Transjordan, the Arabian Peninsula, and Yemen shared a common borderland experience, which set them apart from the rest of the empire during the late Ottoman period.

Ottoman state-making followed a different track on the frontier. Centred upon the idea of the ‘politics of emergency’, Ottoman frontier governance combined efforts for increasing direct rule with negotiation and bargaining. Accordingly, the Ottoman frontier policy operated with two guiding principles at the beginning of the twentieth century: first, to penetrate further into networks of trust and introduce imperial modernization, and second, to bargain with local leaders through the leverage of Islam. As Maurus Reinkowski put it, Ottoman policy clearly reflected the ‘dilemma between the exigency of realpolitik and the ambitious Tanzimat reform policy’.Footnote ⁷⁴

Despite much progressive rhetoric, the success of the modernizing package in frontier zones was at best meagre. It dropped dramatically as the state progressed from military operations to bureaucratic consolidation, and from bureaucratization to market integration and ideological operations. The reformist Ottoman bureaucrat soon found out that he had limited technologies of control to govern Arabia, for example, facing strong challenges from domestic groups in Yemen, ‘Asir, and Hawran. Military mutinies in the Hijaz, economic discontent in urban eastern Arabia, tribal revolts in western Arabia and Yemen, and fiscal difficulties encountered in implementing domestic reforms in Eastern Anatolia all reminded the Ottomans of the significant gap between their resource base and their state-building discourse.

When the modernizing Tanzimat package failed, negotiation gained ascendancy on the frontier. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, this operated through the innovative pan-Islamic framework of Sultan Abdulhamid II, who was convinced of the foreign threat on the frontier. The sultan's pan-Islamist project was supranational but statist, and deeply religious but confessional. Using Sunni Islam for legitimacy, bargaining, and regulation, the sultan's intention was to buy trust from the outlying provinces on the frontier, where power and information asymmetries haunted the Ottomans.

The negotiation model suggested piecemeal change rather than radical transformation, and was more interested in keeping local leadership structures intact, rather than destabilizing them. In fact, this inclusivist agenda was the complementary path to securing the survival of the Ottoman state against foreign powers, their domestic allies, and non-orthodox leaders. Divide and rule, taking hostages, political exile, and imperial rewards were typical policy tools. Generally speaking, the nature and method of negotiation between the frontier elites and the central government were determined by the relative strength of both parties on the ground, the perceived immediacy of any foreign threat, and the confessional composition of the region.

Economic and fiscal structures on the frontier were in close affinity with ‘thin rule’ in such regions. The fiscal base of the state was limited, tax collection was costly, and high military expenditure, due to insurgency, caused a major drain on the central treasury.Footnote ⁷⁵ With no monopolization of internal violence by the state, markets remained undeveloped and the quality of life changed little compared to the rest of the empire. Hence, overland trade, smuggling, and the collection of protection money remained major sources of revenue for frontier economies.

Historically speaking, long-distance trade and the fate of the hajj (pilgrimage) caravan depended on transit dues extracted by the Bedouin for safe passage in the desert. In Iraq, tribes obstructed river transport between Baghdad and Basra, collecting fees from merchandise and human traffic.Footnote ⁷⁶ In Eastern Anatolia, stealing livestock occupied the number one spot on the racketeers’ agenda. Like the Kurdish landlords of Eastern Anatolia, the Wahhabi clans of Najd expected protection money from commercial centres and the peasantry in eastern Arabia. Even the Ottoman authorities paid the tribes of lower Iraq and western Arabia for the upkeep of telegraph lines and railroad tracks respectively.

Urban interests, sedentarized populations, and social groups with little access to protection schemes tried various methods to cease paying protection money, especially on the ‘near frontier’. The urban notables of Diyarbakır informed the Sultan about possible invasions of the city by tribal forces. Armenian delegates from twenty-four towns met with state officials in the capital to call for a stop to raiding and plunder.Footnote ⁷⁷ In Süleymaniye, in northern Iraq, the peasants fled their villages in 1859 to avoid plunder.Footnote ⁷⁸ Armenian peasants of Eastern Anatolia complained bitterly about Kurdish chiefs who took their lands through semi-legal means, and demanded unpaid labour and arbitrary taxes.Footnote ⁷⁹

Another key dynamic in the making of the frontier trajectory was armed collective action. Frontier mobilization benefited from inaccessible terrain and the superior local information of insurgents, combined with access to local powerbrokers and third-party support on the ground. Inhabiting rough terrain, frontier leaders had historically remained detached from the imperial centre. Mountains, highlands, deserts, strategic passes, and narrow tracks were the topographical features that made Arabia, Yemen, Jabal Druze, and Eastern Anatolia nearly impenetrable.Footnote ⁸⁰ Even at the beginning of the twentieth century, geographical constraints made long-term military campaigns extremely costly, and for no apparent gain.

Frontier mobilization utilized communal units such as clans, tribes, and religious networks to organize patron–client movements. Local leaders shared fictive kinship bonds, a cultural-linguistic world, economic ties, and a common historical memory with other community members. However, communities suffered from internal divisions, and what turned them into a unified opposition force was often the efforts of religious figures. Negotiating among tribes, clans, and chiefs, religious entrepreneurs followed the mystic-esoteric way in the Druze mountains and Eastern Anatolia, and promoted a puritan agenda in ‘Asir, central Arabia, and Yemen.

In contrast to its political articulation in the interior zones, religion was used as an ideological tool for mobilization on the frontier.Footnote ⁸¹ One important reason was confessional. The Wahhabi amirs of Najd, the Druze chiefs of Hawran, and the Zaydi imams of Yemen represented non-Sunni brands of Islam, which historically underlay a mobilization approach. Despite some ‘orthodox’ Sunni misgivings about mysticism, the Ottomans favoured the widespread Naqshbandi Sufi network in Eastern Anatolia to counter Christian missionary influences, since the call for pure Islam had been a trademark of frontier, rural, and tribal Islam for centuries.Footnote ⁸² Inspired by North African neo-Sufism, the Idrisi movement in ‘Asir was a perfect illustration of the perpetuation of this tradition, albeit one even more in conflict with Sunni ‘orthodoxy’ than the Naqshbandi version.Footnote ⁸³

Collective action on the Ottoman frontier was motivated by hopes of local autonomy. Mobilized against the threat of state expansion, the hereditary frontier leaders expected to lose their customary rights if they did not act.Footnote ⁸⁴ Along with others, Imam Yahya of Yemen and the Sharif of Mecca insisted on dispensing tribal and group-based sharia justice, and collecting taxes to protect local autonomy. At this point, arbitrary tax collection, the fear of conscription, and the dislike of an imposed Ottoman confessional identity united the populace with local leaders, creating exceptional moments of mobilization.

Limited state capacity turned contentious mobilization into an effective tool for bargaining. On the distant frontier, there were massive rebellions for local autonomy. As the Yemeni example shows, frontier elites were successful in their bargains with the central state. In the intermediate zone of lower Iraq and Hawran, where neither the state nor local leaders fully controlled the situation, smaller revolts targeted the local elite and the Ottoman state to regain customary rights. On the ‘near frontier’, relative tranquillity was the norm, since the Ottoman state was stronger, had similar interests to those of elites, and shared a confessional affinity with local leaders. What made Eastern Anatolia a unique case during the 1890s was the mobilization of rival communal networks by skilful political brokers on the ground.

In sum, the late Ottoman Empire was characterized by socially and materially distinct political geographies. ‘Thin rule’ defined the arid frontiers, where rural religious networks collecting protection rents clashed with the Ottoman state over centralization. There was ‘contested rule’ on the coast, where non-Muslim middle classes enjoyed the spoils of foreign trade and European services, but had limited political bargains with the Ottoman state. ‘Consensual rule’ characterized the interior, as the hegemony of the state was backed by an urban Sunni bloc, a stress on domestic markets, and functioning bureaucratic institutions.

Comparing empires

Late Ottoman history was part of a broader historical experience. Other Eurasian land-based empires – notably Russia, China, and Iran – resisted West European polities, kept the capitalist world economy at arm's length, and implemented domestic reforms during the nineteenth century. In addition to these factors of political survival, economic resilience, and defensive modernization, I would suggest that these empires should be classified as a distinct regime typology because of the regional trajectories that they had in common. This section demonstrates the relevance and the patterned nature of the frontier, interior, and coastal paths across Eurasian land-based empires, and concludes with broad comparisons that can be employed to write non-Eurocentric global histories.

The frontier trajectory emerged at the junction points of historic empires. Characterized by distinct forms of leadership, economic organization, and social hierarchy,Footnote ⁸⁵ frontiers became hot spots for geopolitical competition during the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁸⁶ As a response, empires redeployed traditional methods of governance, and developed modern tools to secure frontiers against foreign intervention. The construction of the Trans-Siberian and Hijaz Railways were two grandiose projects in this vein.Footnote ⁸⁷ Broadly speaking, imperial frontier policy followed a certain pattern. It emphasized bargain-based strategies when geopolitical threats and strong local leaders were present, and transformed frontier zones in line with the colonial model in the absence of interstate conflicts, and if imperial capacities were sufficient.

Frontiers produced mass collective action. Mobilization utilized religion as an ideological framework, and organized the masses against colonialism, imperial expansion, and confessional orthodoxy. The historical outcome was state building in the Arabian Peninsula, durable local autonomy in southern Iran, and recurring collective resistance in the Caucasus. These movements relied heavily on religious entrepreneurs’ ability to activate pre-existing social ties, and benefited from tribal power and rural leadership.Footnote ⁸⁸ Illustrated by the Imamate of Yemen, the best-case scenario in this regard was an overlap between social and religious forms of authority.

Frontiers evolved into a distinct regime type during the nineteenth century. Modernizing imperial centres and culturally distinct frontiers clashed over cultural schemas, and put culture into action.Footnote ⁸⁹ They mobilized religion, confessional identity, and imperial symbols for legitimacy and power. The competition for the frontier ended with the creation of ‘hybrid’ historical settings; the imperial state incorporated local practices into its bureaucratic machinery, the perfect example being the religious sphere.Footnote ⁹⁰ This was most apparent in imperial Russia. Thus, it was neither the civilizing vision of the empire nor the traditional order of local leaders that solely defined frontier zones.

The interior path was the symbolic expression of expanding imperial authority during the nineteenth century. The key was the institutionalization of the public sphere around the state by integrating economic, political, and moral orders into the imperial framework. The Russian Empire consolidated its interior trajectory through Orthodox Christianity, the Russian language, and the nationality principle, with the introduction of modern institutions helping to construct a diffused imperial identity. The Ottomans replicated this model by bringing Anatolia, Syria, and (to a lesser extent) Palestine, into their bureaucratic orbit. The Iranian empire made the least headway in this regard, since merchants and the lower ranks of the ulema depended less on the central state and became alienated from growing foreign influence. Both trends were aptly demonstrated in the Tobacco Protest of 1891–2.Footnote ⁹¹

The interior trajectory provided a panacea for land-based empires to survive, and the growing legitimacy of the state was critical in this regard. For instance, modern ideologies such as pan-Slavism, pan-Islamism, pan-Asianism, and neo-Confucianism helped to consolidate an interior moral order. Similarly, landed interests and religious orthodoxy attached interior elites firmly to the imperial state.Footnote ⁹² The final step in this direction was expanding state education and generalizing conscription, especially in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Both these imperial projects relied on the human resources of the interior and, in turn, strengthened state–society links in these regions.Footnote ⁹³

The coastal path was particularly prominent in the Ottoman and Chinese contexts. With the introduction of foreign trade, coastal towns such as Shanghai and Izmir were transformed into cosmopolitan urban centres with multiple interactions. Slipping away from imperial control, the coast experienced the dramatic expansion of the public sphere. Accordingly, the press, professional groups, and class mobilization constructed a novel historical setting. The Russian and Persian experiences diverged somewhat from this pattern, as spatial autonomy was limited in scope and the institutional elements of the coastal trajectory were limited. Nonetheless, the middle classes pursued a similar agenda in the municipal councils of urban Russia, only to be eliminated by the restrictive policies of the Tsar.

Imperial trajectories did not only create exclusive spaces, for there were transition zones where salient features of two or more trajectories coexisted or clashed with one another. Historically speaking, Eastern Anatolia was characterized by rival paths that represented alternative routes to market integration and state legitimacy. Likewise, the Kazan region of the Tatar people in imperial Russia was ‘neither metropole nor frontier’.Footnote ⁹⁴ After the Russian advance to the south, three historical paths emerged side by side in the eastern Black Sea provinces of the Ottoman Empire and the Caspian provinces of the Iranian state.Footnote ⁹⁵ In fact, Iranian Azerbaijan embodied them all: global links via trade and ideas, well-entrenched urban coalitions in Tabriz, and typical issues of a frontier region.Footnote ⁹⁶

Transition zones were prone to inter-communal conflict. Elites were divided, economic forms were multiple, and cultural identities were fractured. In the Ottoman realm, Macedonia and Eastern Anatolia were perfect examples of how mutual predation over resources, together with rival cultural schemas, could lead to violence.Footnote ⁹⁷ The tension between the Muslim Tatar and Christian Russian communities in the Kazan area, which crystallized around the issue of religious conversion, had similar dimensions. On a broader level, one can argue that the partial success of land empires in transforming geopolitically sensitive and culturally distinct frontiers through the ‘demographic solution’ of settlement created problems of this sort.Footnote ⁹⁸

Finally, Eurasian land-based empires, like their European counterparts, experienced the expansion of public spheres and intensifying state–society relations during the nineteenth century. The rise of the associational realm found its expression in private presses, clubs, and societies that dealt with the social question and promoted class interests along economic lines. The consolidation of the imperial state also meant integrating local elites into the ranks of provincial bureaucracies. These historical trends point to a need to revise the way we think about empires, namely the contrast between strong state and weak society that has shaped the interpretation of the Ottoman, Russian, Iranian, and Chinese empires for so long.Footnote ⁹⁹