In his challenging new book, Thomas Kuehn studies the Ottoman administration of Yemen (1872–1919) for the purposes of both engaging, for comparative effect, other research on Ottoman governance “of the periphery” and expanding the scholarship on modern imperialism. What proves unique to Kuehn's story is that factors of Ottoman imperial rule – as opposed to Ottoman imperialism – are best understood as the product of some administrators’ attempts to impose au-courant concepts of social (civilizational) hierarchy – a politics of “difference” – on Yemen. In this respect, the author constructs a rich “history of the concepts and practices of Ottoman imperial rule [reflecting] … the disagreement among … bureaucrats as to whether there was [a need for] … an Ottoman colonialism of Yemen”. He does this by closely reading government reports, provincial gazettes and other forms of “colonial knowledge”, all extensions of administrative practices which, “under the banner of Ottomanism … [created a] hybrid form of imperial rule” unique to Ottoman Yemen (p. 2).
By inspecting what Kuehn calls a “hybrid form” of government – colonial or not – the reader is rewarded with an excellent, labour-intensive exposition of Ottoman governmental practices in Yemen spread across six well-written chapters. This includes an interesting – albeit decontextualized – reading of attempts by early authorities in Yemen, such as Ahmed Rashid, to position the enterprise in a larger Ottoman framework (pp. 62–8). This is where Kuehn's strengths are best demonstrated, as he analyses the policies of those locally-based officials who occasionally moved beyond their main task of integrating Yemen into the larger empire. For instance, Kuehn laboriously scans reports composed by Mustafa Shevket and Namik Efendi, who both urged the central government to move away from a policy that had, until 1891, sought to integrate local allies by granting them important positions in the local courts and within the gendarmerie (pp. 152–66).
While it would have helped if Kuehn had put these important temporary policy shifts in the broader Ottoman political and economic context (the study does not consider Ottoman financial insolvency or the coups in 1876 and 1908 as possible sources of change in administrative personnel or practice) the reader still benefits from the particularly close reading of reports written between 1891–98 and 1909–14. Kuehn shines when reading closely these ideologically-charged documents on how local “Zaydi” leaders – imams and sheikhs – mobilized their constituencies to challenge Ottoman authority. In response, the authorities resorted to typical colonialist epistemologies whereby the “Zaydi rebellion” was spurred on by a “savage” set of “customs and dispositions” (ʿadat ve emzice) that needed to be either harnessed or condemned depending on local conditions (pp. 91–145). This is highlighted by reformers such as Ahmed Feyzi Pasha (pp. 165–84) who sought to insert policies that elaborated the differences between the rulers and the ruled, in what Kuehn calls “colonial Ottomanism”, a reflection of periodic moves towards differentiation that programmed government officials so ideologically inclined to identify locals as subordinate to a superior Ottoman core and thus needed civilizing by way of Ottoman patronage rather than partnership (pp. 53–89).
As much as Kuehn offers a seemingly exhaustive supply of evidence to support his larger claims, the careful reader would be forgiven for asking what exactly is “colonial” about this Ottoman enterprise. To many, colonialism implies economic expropriation that transforms local economies to service a larger extractive enterprise. Kuehn's depiction of Ottoman Yemen, however, does not offer such tell-tale signs of economic exploitation; rather, a discourse of “difference” – cultural, racial and sectarian – is meant to qualify as a comparable indicator of modern colonialism. It is at this crucial point that the author may have benefitted from broadening his survey of the scholarship on comparative empire to include the works of Robert Young, Ann Stoler and Talal Asad. It is their critiques of scholarly tendencies to read interactions between the “local” and “administrator” as inevitable reflections of imperial hierarchy that help us better to appreciate the actual power dynamic at play in places like Ottoman Yemen. In this regard, by neglecting to theorize more thoroughly how he positions such a relationship between “signifier” and the “signified” through “a politics of difference”, Kuehn needlessly invites criticism for ignoring the larger theoretical debates which have long animated postcolonial studies.
This missed opportunity to embrace other ways of writing the “local” into the history of modern empire is perhaps most significant considering the scholarship on Yemen which the author did not cite. Kuehn tends to reduce Yemen to the sectarian orientations of tribal highlanders whose relations with Sunni Ottomans are determined by the conflicting ambitions of their imams and sheikhs. But as Gabriele von Brock and Martha Mundy's ethnographic interventions suggest, no fixed set of social relations can be assumed, even in such confined arenas as “tribal Zaydi areas” of highland Yemen supposedly dominated by community leaders. Specific to the role of the presumed leader of all Zaydis – Imam Yahya – whose career is charted in the context of confrontations that led to the signing of the Da ʿan agreement in October 1911 between the Ottomans and their once rebellious subject (pp. 226–45), Kuehn does not consider the findings of, for instance, Anne Bang and myself. Our work suggest that the lines of distinction in northern Yemen cannot be read as sectarian or tribal but are informed by contingencies that often benefitted rivals such as the Sufi Muhammad al-Idrisi who secured the loyalties of people across sectarian, tribal and regional lines.
That said, Kuehn's reading of selective documents does reinforce his fundamental claims. For this reason, Kuehn's meticulous empiricism offers scholars a rare opportunity to appreciate the complexity of Ottoman Yemen, reason enough to use this book as a teaching tool in graduate seminars. As such, it will invariably incite valuable discussion on the best methods for telling a quintessential Ottoman story.
