This article explores the social and political context of the Ottoman Armenian massacres that took place during the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II (1876–1908), with a focus on the empire's tax regime. Although important research has been done on the massacres of 1894–1897, little attention has been paid to the role played by the tax regime and collection practices in preparing the context for increased state and communal violence in the “six provinces” (vilayat-ı sitte)—Erzurum, Van, Bitlis, Mamretülaziz, Sivas, and Diyarbekir—where the majority of Ottoman Armenians lived. A significant literature does exist on the political consequences of an ill-administered tax system in the Balkan provinces during the early to mid-nineteenth century. In these provinces, where Greek, Serbian, and Bulgarian non-Muslims constituted a major segment of the population, a poorly functioning tax regime produced social discontent with a tendency to from time to time escalate towards political mobilization with nationalist overtones.Footnote 1 In contrast, the Ottoman state's administrative practices in Eastern Anatolia have as a whole received little attention from Ottoman political and social historians; tax collection, in particular, has rarely been presented as an important part of the larger context of the “Armenian Question.”Footnote 2
One is tempted to conclude that Ottoman economic and financial historians are reluctant to consider tax collection as politics. With their focus on international trade, agricultural production, and foreign debt, they have given little notice to the fiscal situation of the Hamidian era, particularly to taxation. Linkages between the tax regime and the social and political catastrophe it helped to create in the eastern provinces have been missed. The present study examines tax collection as politics in the everyday realm, and in doing so seeks to bridge two different fields of history: fiscal history, and social and political history. This approach offers a new window on the political disturbances in the six provinces of the empire that were populated mostly by Armenians and Kurds. I argue that considering the tax system as an instance of state administrative practices at the quotidian level, rather than as a mere legal and institutional apparatus, can illuminate the complicated realities of the late Ottoman state and society, and the “Armenian Question.”
My study draws from conceptualizations of state and politics developed within the anthropological literature on state formation. Since Philip Abrams first brought to light the “difficulty of studying the state” in 1977, a strong trend has emerged toward abandoning the state as a material object of study, either empirically or in the abstract.Footnote 3 Abrams took the problem of the state very seriously, and was clearly inclined to study it as practice. For him, “The state was not the reality which stands behind the mask of political practice. It is itself the mask which prevents our seeing political practice as it is.”Footnote 4 Abrams's contribution emerged from his concern to find alternative theoretical paths for demystifying the state's structural appearance as a collection of institutional consolidations.
Almost two decades later, Timothy Mitchell, elaborating on Abrams's propositions, maintained that we should examine the state “not as an actual structure, but as the powerful, apparently metaphysical effect of practices that make such structures appear to exist.”Footnote 5 Since the publication of Mitchell's articles, historians and anthropologists have usefully pressed the “state effect” into service as an analytical tool for studying societies both historical and contemporary. These scholars ultimately question the feasibility of conceiving of the state as a unified political actor. Abrams argued, “The state is the unified symbol of an actual disunity”Footnote 6; Mitchell went further to claim that it was “no longer to be taken as essentially an actor, with the coherence, agency and autonomy this term presumes.”Footnote 7
More recently, the state's time-honored manifestation as institutional consolidation and unified political actor has been further challenged by a group of anthropologists working on state formation.Footnote 8 A kind of consensus has emerged that states do, indeed—we could say phenomenologically—appear in particular institutional guises, but that much of this quality dissolves on close inspection.Footnote 9 These scholars have explored how various bureaucratic technologies, such as acts performed in standardized and impersonalized ways, are key to the monolithic appearance of states and their institutions. In one example, Iver Neumann analyzes a foreign minister's speeches to reveal that though they present a singular voice they in fact represent many separate working components of government with varying agendas. Neumann succinctly shows how, “It is the task of Norwegian Foreign Ministry, which by definition consists of widely different units, to join [them] together in a higher unity in such a way that the seams between them come to be as invisible as possible.”Footnote 10
These two anthropological insights serve as a theoretical inspiration for my analysis here of the “Armenian Question” in the context of the Ottoman tax regime: I treat the Ottoman state and its tax system not as a thing or an institution, but rather as administrative practices felt in the daily lives of state subjects. My intent is to demystify the state's appearance as a unified actor. I will argue that the Ottoman state during the Hamidian era can usefully be conceived not so much as an institutional structure but rather as practices in the realm of the everyday. Of these practices, tax collection offers a most compelling example due to its broad social and political implications.
An appreciation of the complex social and political life in the eastern provinces of the empire, with its almost dizzying diversity of social and political actors, makes it hard to sustain a picture of the state as a single-minded actor orchestrating events that culminated in the Armenian massacres. Abrams would say that the Hamidian state of this period should be seen as the unified symbol of an actual disunity, that the ostensibly omnipresent and omnipotent Hamidian state is a mask that disguises the full complexity of political practice in the Armenian provinces.
We need to lift an edge of this mask. I contend that when we do so we find that the tax regime, including new collecting methods introduced during the 1890s, as experienced in the everyday life of the peasantry, tells us much about the nature of the Ottoman state and the political society it represented. Doing so elucidates the Ottoman state by spotlighting the state presence, and also reveals critical weaknesses in its administrative infrastructure and the limited possibilities for effective political control that resulted. The state's material presence was felt everywhere in the eastern provinces, yet I will show that its instrumental power was far from hegemonic. In the late Ottoman context, government elites lacked, above all, the financial means to create their vision of a manageable apparatus; day-to-day tax collection remained a complex and hazardous site in which social and political actors negotiated relationships among themselves and with the government on a chronically ad hoc basis. These negotiations were not always peaceable—they were frequently accompanied by state terror and communal violence.
In seeking to explain these dynamics, it is not very helpful to draw a distinction between a government based on the rule of law and one often resorting to state terror in condoning communal violence as tool of government. That is because in the Armenian and Kurdish provinces these two propensities coexisted and intermingled. The Ottoman situation in these provinces reminds one of the intimate connections between chaos and order that Zygmunt Bauman so eloquently formulated: “Order-making tends to be … undertaken in the name of fighting the chaos. But there would be no chaos were there no ordering intention already in place…. Chaos is born as a non-value, an exception. Ordering … is its birthplace.”Footnote 11 In the present case, the Hamidian regime's very attempts to bring its order to the provinces as essential for systematic tax collection only exacerbated existing social and political antagonisms, state terror, abuses, and massacres.
Against the anthropological approaches to state formation just summarized, Ottoman historiography has a deeply rooted tendency to conceptualize the state as a concrete political body and unified public actor. Historians are reluctant to identify fracture lines among the political elite, or even within different social and political groups. They tend to overlook the fact that concepts like “the Ottoman political elite” and “the Ottoman bureaucracy” are abstractions that mask a multitude of opinions, and this blind spot is particularly apparent in studies of the history of eastern provinces and the “Armenian Question.” Historians have been inclined to take on faith a Hamidian state as a supreme and ever-present political actor that orchestrated in fine detail events that led to the Armenian massacres. They have tended to construct narratives using a simplified and abstract set of agents—the state, the Kurds, the Armenians, the European powers—which leave little room for either contingency or the variety of actual social and political motivations.
In examining those policies of the Hamidian regime that contributed to social and political upheaval in the lives of ordinary peasant subjects, one cannot deny the logistical difficulty of studying the local and the everyday without relying, to some extent and by default, on an abbreviated view of the state as a more or less solid and integrated political actor. Still we must resist the temptation to view governmental institutions and organs such as the cabinet and ministries, and departments of state such as the police, gendarmerie, and tax agencies, as possessing agency integrated with and subsumed within the state. Prompted by the aforementioned anthropological insights, we can instead study the state through its particular concrete and material effects in people's lives. Tax collection lends itself well to this approach, and gives us a glimpse behind the state's structural facade.
In what follows, I will first briefly comment on the fiscal and military pressures under which the nineteenth-century government labored, pressures that resulted in an increased tax burden for peasant cultivators and made the already abuse-prone system of tax collection still more brutal and oppressive. After reflecting on the broad administrative reform scheme of 1894 and the new taxation apparatus it called for, I will turn to actual collections to explore the actual workings of this governmental institution. I will concentrate on daily encounters between the Armenian peasant taxpayers and the gamut of local actors ranging from the personnel of the new tax apparatus, to the gendarmerie, to the Kurdish tribal groups that were incorporated into the government's new domestic security forces.
TAX COLLECTION AND GENDARMERIE DURING THE TANZIMAT ERA, 1839–1876
From the late eighteenth century onward, the Ottoman central administration experienced considerable pressure from its neighbors the Habsburgs and Czarist Russia, and later from European nations, particularly Great Britain and France. Ottoman Governments were compelled to direct substantial expenditures at creating a new army based on universal conscription and equipped with contemporary war technologies, and at maintaining these forces in the field. This was in addition to its project of constructing a new administration and bureaucracy with the necessary ministries and departments. Prior to the nineteenth century, a large proportion of taxes levied in the provinces had tended to remain with the various intermediaries, especially urban notables. Indeed, the Ottoman state suffered a series of military defeats and the territorial dismemberment of the empire from the 1760s to the 1830s in large part because of the resulting fiscal shortfall. Short-term solutions introduced to overcome fiscal constraints included borrowing in domestic and international markets and resorting to paper money.Footnote 12
These instruments were useful for covering emergency war expenditures, in the short run, but events induced central government bureaucrats to undertake long-term structural reforms, particularly in the field of taxation.Footnote 13 The reforms, whose implementation began in the 1830s, were largely a response to these fiscal and military pressures. And the strengthening of the Ottoman central administration they brought about did lead to increased revenues over the nineteenth century. While revenue in the 1780s was only marginally higher than it had been as far back as the 1560s, between the 1780s and World War I it increased by more than fifteen-fold due to growth in the state's tax levying capacity.Footnote 14
However, expenditures rose faster than revenue, and with the Crimean War the Ottoman Government was borrowing ever-larger sums from abroad to meet its military costs. During the final quarter of the century these outlays increased to 50 percent of total revenue, and close to 40 percent of total government spending.Footnote 15 The default of 1875–1876 and the introduction of financial scrutiny by European creditors in 1881 put further pressure on the treasury. Under the terms of the government's 1881 agreement with its creditors, major revenue sources of the state were placed under European supervision, and throughout the reign of sultan Abdülhamid II it was expected to maintain large surpluses in order to guarantee continued orderly debt repayment. During this period, 25 to 30 percent of Ottoman expenditures were dedicated to the service of the public debt.Footnote 16
The treasury's ever-escalating fiscal difficulties inevitably led the central bureaucrats to turn to the peasant producers, who contributed by far the greatest portion of revenue, mainly through the agricultural tax (tithe), livestock tax, and other new taxes introduced in the final decades of the century.Footnote 17 During this era, though Ottoman administrators occasionally discussed aspirations for an equitable income tax, they could not realistically consider such a change because they were always desperate for funds to cover growing costs.Footnote 18 The enduring and deepening financial straits felt by governments brought devastating consequences for the rural population, small peasant producers, and tenant farmers. The very legitimacy of the political regime was put at risk when mass resistance to payment became the rule of the day, raising the specter of mobilization on tax issues spreading to all the provinces. Throughout the nineteenth century this double menace was accompanied by political turmoil in various regions of the empire, especially the Balkans and the Armenian and Kurdish provinces of the east, with different specifics in each region.
We have noted that the peasants of the empire suffered not only from an unjust taxation system, but also from the oppressive and corrupt manner in which taxes were collected, subject as this was to the unremitting greed of tax farmers and officials. In the Armenian and Kurdish provinces, records show numerous abuses of this sort. For one thing, the peasants there were now made responsible for a “special tax” (vergi-i mahsusa) paid to government agents, muhtars (village headmen), tax collectors, and the gendarmerie, while they continued to pay out customary taxes to local notables, mostly Kurdish tribal leaders, as well as the tithe to tax farmers. The tax farmer and the notable were often the same person. Accordingly, peasants were now subject to ill treatment at the hands of not only Kurdish notables and tribal leaders, as had long been true, but also Ottoman provincial administrators and security forces in the form of the gendarmerie or government tax collectors.
Some details on amounts of taxes paid by the peasantry and the methods of their collection will be useful. We can classify the taxes into roughly four groups, three of which lay under the authority of government tax officials. The first group consisted of mainly the special tax (that is, the house and property taxes) and military service exemption taxes. The second was tithes, and other taxes whose collection was granted by the government to private individuals. The third group was comprised of tithes and taxes which, when no “buyers” were found, were collected by government agents. The final group consisted of an excise tax on the manufacture of wine and spirits. It is important to notice that of these four groups three were collected directly by government agents who fell under the jurisdiction of gendarmerie or civilian tax collectors.
The vilayet (province) of Ankara will serve as an example of the proportions of total revenue brought in by each tax. For the fiscal year 1878–79, the first tax group (special tax and military exemptions) brought 131,874 piastres; the second (tithes whose collection was granted to private individuals), 49,540 piastres; the third (tithes collected by government agents), 114,351 piastres; and the fourth group (wine and spirits), brought in 11,299 piastres.Footnote 19 These figures for Ankara reveal that although the tax farming system remained, in principle, the system for tithe collecting, for this fiscal year government agents collected more than three-quarters of the total tax revenue.
To provide a closer picture of taxes levied on peasants at the village level, we may consider two villages from the province of Diyarbekir, in 1905. Khoan, a village of 300 houses, was Kurdish, while Baghin, with 120 houses, was Armenian. Kurdish peasants from Khoan paid 15,000 piastres in tithes, 7,000 in property taxes, 3,000 in earnings/income taxes, and 4,000 in sheep and cattle taxes. The Armenian peasants of Baghin paid 5,600 piastres in tithes, 3,940 in property and earnings taxes, 3,250 in sheep and cattle taxes, and 16,183 in military exemption taxes.Footnote 20 These figures reflect only the official record of taxes paid, and do not reflect any sums powerful Kurdish tribal leaders collected, mostly by coercion or brute force.
With such an oppressive regime of extraction, it is no surprise that tax delinquency became not the exception but the rule, making frequent intervention by security forces inevitable. Given the government's dependence on these tools for revenue collection, we can presume that the state came to be equated with a heavy-handed approach. The gendarmerie, which the Ottomans had initially named asâkir-i zaptiye, had been regularly employed to collect taxes since its creation in the mid-1840s.Footnote 21 The limited infrastructural capacity of the Ottoman state, reflected in its dependency on security forces for tax collection, also found expression in legal documents. One of these is an 1869 regulation that defined the functions and organizational schema of the gendarmerie. It stipulated a double mission for them: to maintain law and order, and to ensure tax collection.Footnote 22 The regulation did no more than bring the gendarmerie under the command of local administrators, and authorized the latter to employ regiments in tax collection when necessary. It seems that, for the government, establishing law and order in the countryside primarily meant securing the extraction of revenue from the peasantry.
Even with this continued dependence on the police, one should not underestimate the government's attempts to establish a new civil system. Ottoman archival sources suggest that, starting in the early 1860s, central government bureaucrats tried to separate the two functions of the gendarmerie and create a new corps—interestingly named “police” (polis)—dedicated to tax collection alone.Footnote 23 This program was first implemented in the Balkan provinces, where political disturbances could on occasion escalate into open riots with nationalist and separatist implications. In these provinces, the absence of a civil tax collection interface and the frequent resort to the gendarmerie for collections had the potential to turn the course of events in an undesirable direction.Footnote 24
The first attempts to implement the new system, in the province of Niş in 1863, made it obvious that the central government lacked the financial resources it would require. The plan was pushed ahead anyway, which had the effect of limiting provincial administrators’ options. For example, the governor of Niş had to transfer a number of men from the gendarmerie to tax collection, which could only result in a weaker security condition and was hardly advisable given the chaotic political situation.Footnote 25
These early experiments with new tax collecting apparatuses eventually found legal expression in the Provincial Administration Law of 1864.Footnote 26 It reclassified functions previously assigned to the zaptiye corps under three headings, and required separate institutions for each: an urban police force, a gendarmerie, and a tax collection division. The goal, again, was to end the gendarmerie's involvement in tax collecting and thus do away with the militaristic approach to it.Footnote 27 However, it is one thing to propose such a scheme and quite another to put it into practice. That the treasury lacked the funds necessary for a new collection service is illustrated by the case of Aleppo province under the governorship of Cevdet Pasha, a particularly influential individual of the Tanzimat era. Lacking financial support from the capital, Cevdet Pasha followed a path similar to that of the governor of Niş; he restructured the zaptiye corps in order to produce savings that he then used to finance a separate tax collection corps.Footnote 28
In sum, despite all of these efforts in the 1860s, achievements on the ground were extremely limited. Nonetheless, the objectives behind these efforts remained on government agendas through the 1870s and beyond. To this end, in 1871 the government increased the scope of the regulation that Cevdet Pasha had prepared for the province of Aleppo in 1866.Footnote 29 Four years later, in 1875, the government issued yet another regulation that demonstrated again its firm resolve in the matter.Footnote 30 This would not be the end of the story, however.
Throughout the final quarter of the century, the Ottoman Government published successive regulations and directives on tax collection—in 1879, 1886, 1894, 1896, and finally 1902—all of them attempts to revise tax apportionment and collection methods.Footnote 31 In the eastern provinces, these were intended to be part of a reform process aimed at alleviating the social and political problems of the Armenian population, though the Hamidian government was careful to give the process a broad scope and generality so it would not appear to be locally oriented or targeted at Armenians.
Examination of the successive regulations reveals a government earnestly trying to resolve the dilemma between its desire for a civil tax collection system and the financial challenges it faced.Footnote 32 For example, the regulation of 1879, issued just after the Treaty of Berlin, had ambitious content, and stressed the need for a separate civilian tax collection corps. With the regulations of 1886 and 1894, though, the government took a step backward when it again became possible to employ the gendarmerie as collectors. Two years later, the 1896 directive was issued to resolve the problem once and for all, and the 1902 regulation went further still, calling for new apportioning and collection methods that it was hoped would make tax collection the basis for a new, more amicable relationship between the state and the people.
Of course, issuing regulations and directives is no guarantee of their enforceability. Real steps toward a civilian tax collection system had to wait until administrative reforms were put into place in 1896, and even after that the government's achievements were far from impressive. During this era, provincial governors continued to resort to having the gendarmerie and even regular army units collect taxes. Tanzimat bureaucrats were aware that their failure to create a more humane system threatened to erode taxpaying subjects’ loyalty to the government. In the eastern provinces during the post-Berlin Congress era these fiscal and administrative problems entwined with broader social and economic issues, and gave birth to the “Armenian Question.”
ADMINISTRATIVE REFORM AND THE NEW TAX COLLECTION APPARATUS, 1895–1902
Following the Treaty of Berlin of 1878, the issue of administrative reform in the eastern provinces, particularly those that employed the gendarmerie as tax collectors, began to attract international attention. The European powers had embarked on a new strategy of exploiting the leverage offered by these issues to further their various interests vis-à-vis the Ottoman Government. Despite these pressures, the Ottoman Government, starting with the Treaty of Berlin and lasting into the early 1890s, did its best to deflect any possibility of the eastern provinces being awarded a special status, since that might lead to demands for Armenian political autonomy or even independence. This is why the government consistently played down any regional aspects of the reform program and insisted that it had an empire-wide content and structure.Footnote 33
Following the Sason massacre of 1894, and the Zeytun uprising and other massacres that occurred in various provinces in 1895–1896, the European powers increased pressure on the Ottomans to act in accordance with the Treaty of Berlin. In response, the Hamidian government announced a reform scheme (ıslahat layihası) for the six provinces of Eastern Anatolia.Footnote 34 On 27 June 1895, Ahmet Şakir Pasha was appointed inspector general and made responsible for implementing the reforms. On 22 September 1896, the government prepared another reform package to be carried out across the empire, with the exception of Hejaz. However, these efforts failed to divert the European powers’ attentions from the social and political problems of the eastern provinces.
Since the Armenian peasants considered the gendarmes principle agents of their oppression, the 1896 reforms gave prominence to reorganizing the gendarmerie and detaching it from taxation, and Article 30 forbade once and for all using them as collectors. In order to sever that relationship, three arrangements were proposed: First, funds for tax collection currently in the gendarmerie budget were to be transferred to the Ministry of Finance. Second, whereas in the previous system new collectors had been placed under local gendarmerie commanders, now provincial civil administrators would supervise them. Third, the reforms forbade new tax collectors from using badges, uniforms, or titles that might evoke the collection's previous military character. For instance, whereas in the old system district tax collectors had been titled “tax collector sergeants” (tahsildar çavuşu) they would now be called “chief tax collectors” (tahsildarbaşı).Footnote 35 Nonetheless, even the new regulation classified collectors as part of the gendarmerie, which seems to contradict the spirit of the reform. Ahmet Şakir Pasha prepared amendments, including thirteen articles, meant to rectify the problematic aspects of the 1894 regulation.Footnote 36
The civil system that the Reform Commission under Ahmet Şakir Pasha sought to put in place in the eastern provinces appears modest in terms of scope and budget. The total number of men to be employed in the six provinces was 567, with 88 each in Erzurum and Mamuretülaziz, 87 in Diyarbekir, 81 in Bitlis, 155 in Sivas, and 68 in Van.Footnote 37 Funding for the new organization totaled 1.670.520 piastres. The previous allocation for gendarmerie collectors had been only 503.416 piastres.Footnote 38 However, the Şakir Pasha Commission faced an important problem regarding the monthly salaries for collectors, who traveled either on foot and on horseback. The salary schedule allocated 150 piastres for the former and 250 for the latter; the Reform Inspection Commission (Islahat Teftiş Komisyonu) of the Ministry of the Interior in Istanbul found this inadequate and raised their salaries to 200 and 300 piastres, respectively. Yet the Ministry of Finance had already allocated funds according to Şakir Pasha's schedule, and was reluctant to give more. One solution discussed was to decrease the number of collectors to match the smaller budget, an option that would handicap effective tax collection on the ground.
The Reform Commission and provincial governors encountered many difficulties in their attempts to implement the reform. The cases of Erzurum, Mamuretülaziz, and Sivas are indicative. The governor of Erzurum reported by telegram on 28 March 1897 that with the funds provided they were able to hire only seventy-eight collectors.Footnote 39 Şakir Pasha had envisioned eighty-eight men for Erzurum, but the governor argued that, given the size of the province, ninety-six collectors were needed—he asked for money to hire eighteen more. As might be expected, the central government failed to produce the necessary funds and so the governor proposed the transfer of eighteen gendarmes into the collection team as an interim solution. This flagrantly contradicted both the letter and the spirit of the reform, and the government rejected his proposal. So the governor instead reduced the salaries to 155 and 260 piastres, which enabled him to hire ten more men for the unit.
The governor of Sivas struggled with similar problems, and complained to Şakir Pasha about the size of his team. He, too, said the prescribed 155 men would be insufficient for effective collection in his vast province. Following the Erzurum governor's example, he proposed to reduce salaries to allow him to hire additional collectors. The same situation was repeated in the province of Mamuretülaziz, where eighty-eight men had been hired. Additional funds were needed to increase collectors' salaries as required by the Ministry of the Interior. The governor and provincial administrative council complained bitterly that the collectors' workload far exceeded their capacity—in one example, a single collector was responsible for the taxes of more than forty villages. Such an undermanned crew could hardly be expected to collect properly. The governor requested fifteen more collectors and funding for their expenses.
While the situations in Diyarbekir and Bitlis resembled that of the three provinces just mentioned, Van was quite different. In this province Kurdish tribes located in the border region with Iran had maintained an ad hoc autonomous status. In this and other provinces with similar characteristics it was difficult, if not impossible, to carry out modern censuses of populations and wealth and collect taxes accordingly.Footnote 40 When the reform program was launched in Van, a dispute arose over the number of collectors to be hired and their salaries. As in other provinces, the central government called for an increase in salaries but failed to send additional funds, at which point provincial administrators either reduced salaries to allow hiring more collectors or requested assistance from gendarmerie and regular military regiments. The latter occurred in districts of Van where Kurdish tribes were powerful.Footnote 41 The Inspection Commission (Tesri-i Muamelat Komisyonu) in Istanbul initially opposed this option, but after an exchange of reports a compromise was reached and the temporary use of military units was allowed, though only in those districts where the tribes were relatively powerful.Footnote 42 The case of Van, where the Ottoman Government was incapable of collecting taxes without the military, sheds light on its limited capacity. There was little doubt that, with its meager budget and insufficient personnel, the new tax collection apparatus launched in the six provinces would find it hard to fulfill its allotted task.
The ill treatment of Armenian peasant farmers in the eastern provinces by Ottoman tax collectors, whether they were gendarmes or the new civilian collectors, was only one piece of a larger story. As we have seen, government collectors were mainly responsible for collecting the “special tax,” which included the property and the military exemption taxes, and they also handled tithe-collecting positions that failed to find private buyers. Yet an important portion of the tithe was still being farmed out to private individuals, in addition to which powerful Kurdish tribal leaders and notables continued to impose their own customary taxes upon peasants in villages under their control. Therefore, any serious attempt to alleviate peasant oppression was going to require special attention to the problems caused by a system in which the tax farmers were mostly Kurdish notables, and after 1890, often leaders of Hamidian Light Cavalry regiments. In his many reports from the region, Ahmet Şakir Pasha cited problems caused by tithe farming and drafted various schemes to solve them. He argued strongly that improprieties in tithe collection not only cut into treasury revenues but also and more importantly blighted the relationship between the government and the peasants—systematic tax farming reform was essential to restore the government's legitimacy in the eyes of peasants.Footnote 43
With this understanding, Ahmet Şakir Pasha encouraged peasants to seek tax-farming rights within their own villages. This was an important proposition, particularly for the eastern provinces where bringing the system under control faced such great challenges. His approach brought promising results in villages of the Merzifon and Gümüşhacıköy subdistricts, even attracting the attention of peasants in nearby villages who requested similar arrangements.Footnote 44 Significantly, Şakir Pasha's experiments in the eastern provinces would inspire and influence the content of the 1902 tax regulation, which brought a long-awaited breath of fresh air to the Ottoman tax regime.
Although creating a civil system and eliminating the military approach to tax collection seems to have been Ahmet Şakir Pasha's major concern, he took other steps as well. For example, he tried to improve methods of tax assessment and apportionment within village communities and to reduce the role of village muhtars, who were often responsible for unjust tax levying. In the system Şakir Pasha proposed and partially tested in some districts, local branches of the treasury, rather than muhtars, were responsible for apportioning tax within villages. Each taxpayer was given a certificate prepared by the local treasury offices, and they would be liable only to the state, not to any intermediary agent.
Though most of Ahmet Şakir Pasha's efforts to restructure tax collection were stipulated by the 1896 reforms, others reached beyond it and aimed to alleviate the distress of Armenian and Kurdish peasants by stopping their mistreatment by tax farmers and collectors and the gendarmerie. In so doing, he sought to create face-to-face relationships between the state and the peasants and thus earn the government legitimacy.Footnote 45 Yet the government's priority of security concerns, its financial constraints, and the need to increase revenue at all costs together conspired to hobble attempts at developing the sort of peaceful relationship Şakir Pasha envisioned. In incorporating Kurdish tribal forces within the Hamidiye Light Cavalry regiments, the Hamidian regime appears to have approached the problem from a narrow domestic security perspective.Footnote 46
The government also looked to the Circassian immigrant communities recently settled in the region as a source of manpower for gendarmerie regiments. There is much archival evidence of atrocities committed by regiments manned mostly by these immigrants, in the eastern provinces and other parts of the empire. What is more, Hamidian governments generally shut their ears to the grievances of the local people, and answered protests and riots that were often tax-related with blunt repression. Through such actions the regime lost legitimacy in the eyes of the peasant masses.
During the 1890s, events in the region spiraled toward increasing state terror and communal violence. In this context, Ahmet Şakir Pasha's reforms seemed to present the regime with a more pacific alternative, but as I will detail below, in practice even the shift from gendarmerie to civil collection failed to bring significant changes to the lives of poor Armenian and Kurdish peasants. During this period the government's overriding security concerns colored most of their policy choices, which increasingly led the region toward political chaos and instability.
TAX COLLECTION IN THE EASTERN PROVINCES AND THE “ARMENIAN QUESTION”
In the years following the Treaty of Berlin of 1878, grievances over taxation, for so long a cause of unhappiness among both Kurdish and Armenian peasant communities, only increased as terror and injustice were visited upon the population by an assortment of public and civilian actors, government tax collectors, private tax farmers, and Kurdish notables. Ahmet Şakir Pasha's new tax collecting system, far from providing relief, produced more oppression and abuse. If we examine the practices of government taxation agents after the 1896 reforms, we find the government made little effort to win the hearts of its subjects.
Even with the new non-gendarmerie personnel in charge of collections, peasants continued to suffer injustice, and many archival documents reveal a growing callousness and worse among collectors. In one case, an Armenian woman from Hamzaşeyh, a village in the subdistrict of Bulanık in the province of Bitlis, died after a severe beating by tax collectors. Ironically, the government in Istanbul learned of this incident through the British Embassy, which telegraphed the news from the British consul in Bitlis. The Interior Ministry responded with a ciphered telegram to the governor of Bitlis ordering an immediate investigation.Footnote 47
It appears that deaths caused by tax collector brutality were not rare. One document reports that another Armenian woman, Elmas, from the village of Komes in the Muş district of Bitlis province, died after a brutal beating by collector Abdullah the Arab and his acquaintances. Armenian villagers' complaints about this cruelty were brought to the government's attention on 10 April 1902 in a petition of the Armenian Patriarchate, which detailed Elmas's case. The government established a commission in Muş to investigate, but even this failed to curb abuses by collectors and their gendarmerie escorts, and so the complaints continued.
The Istanbul government, particularly the Prime Ministry, appeared to take this matter seriously indeed, and ordered the Interior Ministry to request immediate intervention, prevent ill-treatment of peasant taxpayers at all cost, and punish offenders. The ministry responded with a telegram to the governor of Bitlis on 23 April 1902 that reminded him of the new regulation prohibiting the use of the gendarmerie in tax collection, and stressed that the poor treatment of taxpayers was unacceptable. Then, however, the Inspection Commission in Istanbul forwarded to the prime minister's office a district governor's telegram that explained that the allegations against Corporal Abdullah had not been verified. The district governor had sent a medical inspection committee to the village and its report stated that the cause of Elmas's death was not assault but pneumonia. The report further said that the governor later sent a second investigative committee that once again refuted the allegations. Despite the government's initial actions, one cannot fail to notice that its responses to Armenian complaints were ultimately passive. It sent no commission of its own, but rather left investigations to the very local administrators who had been accused of abusing peasant taxpayers. One is hardly surprised that the inspection committee exonerated the culprits.Footnote 48
Archival documents show that even in the Eastern Anatolian provinces where reforms were implemented the peasantry found little relief from cruelties perpetrated by government tax collectors. One file in the prime ministry archive holds Turkish translations of telegrams sent by local British consuls after the massacres of 1895; dated between 8 August 1895 and 5 September 1896, they graphically describe atrocities carried out in villages of Harput subdistrict in Mamuretülaziz province.Footnote 49
For example, a telegram of 8 August 1895 reported that in the villages of Sason and Muş gendarmerie regiments were collecting taxes as they had before the reform, and were subjecting men, women, and even children to various mistreatments. Tax collectors forcibly entered peasant homes, and to extract restitution for unpaid taxes they would seize household items and have them sold cheaply in local markets. Another telegram of 19 August said the situation was continuing to deteriorate in the villages of Muş and on the plains of Havran, where peasants were turned out of their beds in the middle of the night, dragged through muddy streets, and otherwise maltreated. The report blamed these atrocities on Lieutenant Reşit Efendi of the province's gendarmerie regiment. A week later, another telegram from the region reported that after villagers had filed complaints against the collectors the latter became agitated and tried to exact revenge. It seems that in this case the government heeded the peasants' pleas, since the British consul in Erzurum reported on 2 September that Lieutenant Reşit Efendi and his collaborators had been dismissed.
We learn from the British consuls' telegrams that brutalities in Harput continued even after the disturbances of 1895–1896 had been brought under control. They show that villager complaints most often concerned violence they had suffered at the hands of collectors. In one example of 6 May 1896, government agents were reported to be demanding back taxes from villages where massacres had recently taken place and the people were said to be in desperate need of relief. In Çemişkezek, collectors confiscated the 3.000 piastres of relief money the central government had sent to help the victims of the massacres.
When these allegations were verified, the central government took steps to ensure that the victims did receive the relief. Still, the collectors' cruelties did not stop and a number of Armenian villagers, accompanied by the British consul, traveled to the governor to express their grievances and request immediate aid and a resolution—namely, a postponement of their taxes until they had brought in their harvests. Local bureaucrats read their request as merely a tactic to avoid payment, and the provincial governor rejected it. Correspondence between various ministries and departments of state regarding the simple demands of the villagers reveals an ongoing and strenuous tug of war between provincial government agents and the peasant taxpayers.Footnote 50
The correspondence concerning these incidents makes plain the attitude of the central government. First of all, the Interior Ministry's communications with the Foreign Ministry and the prime minister tended to deny allegations made against its local agents. They appear to have taken little notice of regional governors' reports, and tried instead to show how orderly local officers were in carrying out collections and how rigorous they were in fulfilling the provisions of the reform and related regulations. Yet when these same Interior Ministry bureaucrats corresponded with provincial governors, their message was very different. For instance, they firmly reminded them how important the reform was and that local officers should strictly avoid antagonizing Armenian subjects.Footnote 51 This double talk was not necessarily disingenuous, and it may simply indicate the limited capacity of Ottoman state to execute its own regulations in the provinces, or to establish the sort of just administrative system that would have helped secure the loyalty of its subjects.
The collectors' well-documented ruthlessness toward Armenian peasants obviously had something to do with ethnicity or religion. But at times the excessive conduct of collectors, gendarmes, and troops had more structural causes. The financial realities of the empire meant that much of the time the collectors received little or no regular compensation; when traveling or stationed in the countryside while on duty they quartered with locals and were generally housed and fed at villagers' expense. As required by law, they more or less regularly supplied receipts for what they received, though these generally recorded much less than what was actually provided and consumed. “The officers and men demand the best of everything,” reported one observer, “and sometimes force the people even to give them money, and beat and otherwise ill-treat them if their demands are not complied with.”Footnote 52 On one occasion, reported the British consul from Diyarbekir, it took a tax collector and four gendarmes several days to collect 1,180 piastres of tax in the village of Kasil. Over this period the villagers had to feed the men and their horses, which cost them not less than 30 piastres a day, and they were also beaten. The consul reported that since beatings so regularly accompanied tax collection, the peasants “feared by tradition that if they pay without being beaten one year, the government will ask more from them the next.”Footnote 53 The onerous costs villagers incurred from so often hosting parties of tax collecting officials, soldiers, and gendarmes was, it appears, an integral part of the Ottoman tax collection system.Footnote 54
The situation of the peasants in all six provinces was further aggravated by a serious loss of population from emigration, the massacres, and related causes during the 1890s. When local officials calculated taxes for villages, they often ignored decreases in the numbers of households and taxpayers. For instance, in 1901 the village of Arkevank in the Muş plain consisted of twenty households, a third of its former size, but taxes were still demanded for the original sixty residences, in essence tripling the inhabitants' tax bills.Footnote 55 This same situation was found in many districts, with sums exacted remaining the same, sometimes for years, despite taxpayers being fewer.Footnote 56
Grievous abuses were also reported in the apportionment and collection of the special tax (vergi) mentioned earlier, which was a combination of property and income/earnings taxes. Property assessments of land and dwellings could swing far above or below their real value, and it was known that influential persons often falsified records.Footnote 57 The over-taxation that resulted from such irregularities devastated the peasants since they were also liable for the substantial military exemption tax. And even that tax was sometimes assessed for far too many people because, as I have said, population losses were left out of calculations.Footnote 58
Among the causes of the ever-more-oppressive tax burden on the peasantry one should also mention the havale (preference order) system, an instrument used by the Ottoman treasury. Regional British consuls reporting on financial matters frequently highlighted the havale system as one of the clumsiest they had ever encountered, and it was surely detrimental to provincial financial administration and proper governance.Footnote 59 According to this system, the finance minister in Istanbul could issue “preference orders” that allowed a province to spend its revenue before it had been collected. Moreover, these were often issued even though a province already had significant budget deficits—in most provinces, deficits were allowed to grow too far in excess of tax revenues. The only way for local officials to cover expenditures incurred by such preference orders was to increase local taxes by any means available.
So far, we have seen the many ways in which tax collection provoked confrontation between government agents and the taxpaying peasantry. In these confrontations Armenian peasants used various tactics, some closer to passive resistance, others more active. It seems that in many cases peasants chose not to pay the taxes demanded, presumably since they considered them unjust. As documented in one British consular report, every demand met passive resistance, which was often successful, resulting each year in considerable tax delinquency.Footnote 60 Yet we should be cautious about such explanations for delinquent or unpaid taxes; one reason for their ubiquity was surely that the taxes levied upon peasants were far higher than they could reasonably be expected to pay.
Besides the passive resistance of refusing to remit taxes, there was a high incidence of petitioning, and peasants also resorted to secret meetings and street demonstrations. In a telegram that Aleppo's commander in chief, Ferik Edhem Pasha, sent to Istanbul on 8 October 1895, he reported that Armenian peasants of Süveydiye and Ermeni villages in the Antakya district of the province had organized a clandestine meeting at which it was decided not to comply with the tax collectors' demands.Footnote 61 According to Pasha's telegram, local members of the Armenian revolutionary organization Hnchak had played a role in this meeting. He believed that their aim was to provoke an incident that would increase European pressure on the Ottoman Government. According to intelligence gathered, a majority of the villagers expressed loyalty to the government, but also agreed to resist tax collection outright. About two hundred decided to take a still more aggressive stance toward Major Mehmet Ali Bey. Peasant tax revolts had been frequent in the region even before revolutionary organizations such as Hnchak had come into being and formed relationships with the villagers. For example, in 1893 Armenian peasants in Sason stood up to a gendarmerie regiment that had arrived to put down a revolt and the standoff was broken only when the regiment was reinforced with Kurdish tribal units.Footnote 62
The Ottoman Government's inability to provide a workable alternative to police involvement in tax collections, together with over-taxation and the brutality of collectors, certainly contributed to peasants' alienation from the state. Even after the reform program was put into practice, the government remained unable to protect peasants from abuse at the hands of the very government institutions the program was supposed to have reformed. Yet they were also oppressed by other institutions. The social and political situations in the eastern provinces during this period were so complex that it is often hard to distinguish the administrative actions of government agents from those of local and non-government actors, tax farmers, notables, and Kurdish tribal chiefs, especially since they often collaborated with them.
We need to look more closely at these complex relationships and the blurred lines between public and private. To begin with, the tax farming system was an important source of wealth and power, and Kurdish tribal forces, particularly those belonging to the Hamidiye Light Cavalry regiments, were energetic in obtaining and defending their shares in the system. Many documents describe these regiments' brutality as tax farmers. A case in point is the many complaints against one Mir Ali Bey, commander of a Hamidiye Regiment in the province of Sivas. This regiment was formed from members of the Karapapak tribe that had migrated from the Caucasus and settled in Sivas. The government had decreed that the regiments' chiefs could serve as tax farmers only in villages inhabited by the Karapapak tribe.
Local bureaucrats—district and province governors, military units or gendarmerie regiment commanders, and new tax collection personnel—often formed working partnerships with influential local power blocs, including chiefs of various tribal units, immigrant community leaders, cavalry regiment commanders, and tax farmers. One such relationship, between İzzet Pasha, chief commander of the Diyarbakir gendarmerie unit, and Bedo Ağa, an influential figure from the İzolu tribe of Karacadağ, exemplifies shared responsibility for the mistreatment of the peasants. According to complaints filed, the two used violence to extract large sums from the villagers. Bedo Ağa was reported to have provided his men with Hamidiye Light Cavalry uniforms and directed them to plunder Armenian communities.Footnote 63
From such examples, it is plain that tithe collection was an important source of wealth for notables. In addition to purchasing tithe collection rights from the government, notables and influential individuals, including village headmen (muhtar) and also imams and other religious leaders (sheiks), took every opportunity to gain wealth and power at the expense of both Armenian and Kurdish peasants, and unpaid or delinquent taxes presented one such opportunity. A British consular report details incidences of robbery, bribery, and corruption in the collection of late taxes. Sometimes the sum demanded had already been paid over to the headman of a village several times, but instead of crediting these payments to the government, the official had kept the money for himself or given it to a supporter or influential person. In other cases, a notable would agree to pay a village's taxes on the understanding that he would reap some advantage, such as high interest rates (pushing peasants deeper into debt), or a monopoly on a locally produced or traded product.Footnote 64 Another consular report recounts the story of “a certain Sheikh Mehmed, a tithe-farmer of a small village named Khambelchur, in Bitlis, who had been allowed an entirely free hand in enriching himself through the customary methods so long as he contributed the necessary quotas to the treasury.” The village presented five successive petitions to the governor asking for protection against this Sheik, all to no avail.Footnote 65
Armenian villagers (and others) also suffered plunder and embezzlement in realms other than taxation.Footnote 66 During the final quarter of the century, the region, with other parts of the empire, witnessed what has been called a “commercialization” of the economy. With the Land Law of 1858, land increasingly became a major source of wealth, and property rights disputes and attempts by some to concentrate their land holdings became the focus of power struggles. In struggles for land, Kurdish tribes of the Hamidiye Light Cavalry regiments once again played a central role.
Historians have recently emphasized the role of land appropriation in the unfolding of the “Armenian Question.”Footnote 67 Here I want to highlight linkages between taxation, land ownership, and the role of Kurdish tribes, in the person of the aforementioned Sheikh Mehmed from Bitlis. According to a telegram sent by the British consul in Diyarbakir, on 25 August 1896, as villagers fell into tax indebtedness they were forced to sell their land to wealthy and powerful men. One such man was Sheikh Mehmed, who accumulated large tracts of land by exploiting peasants unable to pay their back taxes.Footnote 68
Needless to say, the issue of land appropriation was very complex. For example, while a good part of the land in Palu appeared to belong to pious foundations, Kurdish tribal chiefs in the region sought to claim it and tried to expel Armenian peasants from lands they had customarily cultivated. In some cases tribal chiefs even demanded rent from Armenian villagers retroactively, for years past.Footnote 69 While disputes over land rights were spiraling toward violence, the government in Istanbul did not sit idly by; there is evidence, though only a little, that it tried to check land expropriation by the Hamidiye Light Cavalry and the immigrant communities.Footnote 70
Yet while the Istanbul government may have seemed eager to suppress such abuses, this was not the case in the eastern provinces, where there were many cases of officials and Kurdish notables joining forces to take control of local administrative bodies. During this period, Kurdish tribal leaders became large landowners and notables, and sought political power. They obtained title deeds for enormous tracts of land and pushed both Armenian and Kurdish peasant producers into tenancy relationships. As members of local administrative bodies, their public positions, when combined with their personal prestige, led government officers and particularly provincial governors to become their willing or unwilling instruments, or even partners in their misdeeds.Footnote 71
The notables had access to tax farming rights, and they used these to provided tax and other forms of credit to tenant producers, thereby drawing them into debt relationships. They then claimed the villagers' lands as their own and took whatever they liked from them in kind as rent.Footnote 72 Furthermore, Kurdish tribal leaders demanded from the peasants a kind of protection tax in the form of an annual remittance of crops, cattle, agricultural implements, or textiles.Footnote 73 Christopher Walker wrote, “With the spread of government authority to the country areas, which always meant first and foremost government taxation, these local exactions had not disappeared, so in many places the Armenians were being forced to pay double taxes.”Footnote 74
Kurdish nomadic tribes directed their aggression at not only the settled Armenian population but also other Kurdish communities, both settled and nomadic. Some historians have doubted that Kurds were so victimized,Footnote 75 but the archives furnish considerable evidence that settled Kurdish peasants, too, were saddled with double taxation. It is also well known that intertribal rivalries and feuds were endemic to the region, and the Kurdish masses were not spared their effects.
Almost all tribes at some point engaged in petty warfare internally or with neighbors,Footnote 76 and there are many documented examples of nomadic tribes destroying Armenian and Kurdish villages.Footnote 77 For example, British consuls reported that Mustafa Pasha of Botan seemed to be oppressing both Muslim and Christians without distinction.Footnote 78 Kurdish tribal chiefs' aggression towards Armenian villages was not due only or even mainly to their Armenian ethnicity. Most Armenian villages were under the de facto suzerainty of one of the tribal leaders, who were themselves in more or less continual conflict and attacked and plundered each other's villages, whether their residents were Armenians or Kurds.Footnote 79 It is important, however, to avoid gross generalizations about Kurdish notables' relations with Armenian peasants; there are examples of their granting them protection for a small tribute, after which the peasants were, as one consul observed, “kept free from all the petty persecutions of the tax-gatherers and the billeting of soldiers and zaptiehs.”Footnote 80
Besides Kurdish tribal elements, another factor contributing to disorder and anarchy in the region was, as mentioned earlier, the Circassian immigrant communities that had been settled among the Armenian and Kurdish populations. The situation of these immigrant communities in respect to the political problems in eastern provinces was more complex than is reflected in existing historiography. Circassians are generally portrayed as a group controlled by the government and employed to perform unpleasant or dishonest tasks from within the gendarmerie or as irregulars supporting the regular security forces against the Armenian population. Though there is some truth to this, the actual state of things was more complicated. Government circles often tried to use these groups to check disorder among the Kurdish tribal forces. Circassian immigrants were also subject to abuse by government officials. It is also true that, when some of these men were incorporated into the gendarmerie, mostly in flying battalions or as semi-military forces without proper supervision, they availed themselves of their position to rob and oppress both Armenians and Kurds.Footnote 81
Reflecting on the particularities of the situation in the eastern provinces means taking into account the varied preferences, attitudes, and behaviors of state officials, particularly those in the localities. One can get the impression from central government policy choices that an omnipotent and omnipresent Hamidian state was orchestrating events, according to detailed plans and strategies. This plan apparently called for the annihilation of the Armenian population, and included the use of Kurdish tribal forces and Circassian immigrants against them. However, the closer one gets to the true picture of everyday life in the region the more the “Hamidian state” takes on the qualities of a reification, one less helpful toward understanding the “Armenian Question” and its relation to the late Ottoman tax regime.
For instance, there are definitely cases in which provincial governors and subdistrict-level administrators did their best to prevent the ill treatment of Armenian peasants by local notables, Kurdish tribal chiefs, and tax farmers.Footnote 82 Yet it seems likely that such men formed a minority of government officers in the region. Even the central government at times fluctuated between moderation and contentiousness in its policies toward its Armenian subjects. The British consul in Trabzon reported, “The year 1899 marked a very perceptible improvement in the administrative affairs of the province.”Footnote 83 The consul had in mind the situation of the province's Armenian inhabitants and, no doubt, his hopes for the reform program. Again, in 1904, it seemed to another British consul that the Ottoman Government was “sincerely desirous to see an improvement in the state of affairs in Armenia, and during recent events acted with promptness and vigor.”Footnote 84 As general inspector of the reforms of 1895, Ahmed Şakir Pasha, to all appearances, genuinely believed in them and was hopeful that they would restore the government's legitimacy in the eyes of the peasants. By contrast, during the same period a more aggressive policy toward Armenians was pursued by Zeki Pasha, commander of the 4th army stationed in Erzurum and responsible for incorporating Kurdish tribes into the Hamidiye Light Cavalry units.
It seems from our examples that the Hamidian regime's incorporation of irregular Kurdish tribal units into domestic security forces produced only further chaos. The government created the cavalry forces in the pursuit of law and order, but they became a source of irritation and worse for the peasantry, and the government was ultimately forced to limit their activities. For all the reasons described earlier, even the introduction of a reformed tax collection apparatus did little to alter the ordinary Armenian peasant's relationship with or view of the government. The problem was compounded when government officers colluded with local power holders. Again, in such circumstances it becomes difficult to sharply distinguish the administrative practices of a government based on the rule of law from open terror and predation. In the eastern provinces of the late Ottoman Empire, order and chaos walked hand in hand.
CONCLUSION
This study of the late nineteenth-century Ottoman tax regime and collection apparatus helps us understand the Ottoman state and society during the Hamidian period. I have taken up the social and political context of the provinces in Eastern Anatolia, in which events of the century's final decades unraveled toward political turmoil, and I have given special attention to the role played by central government administrative practices. The practice of tax collection, in particular, tells us much about the nature of the Ottoman state and the political society it represented.
My perspective diverges from that of much of Ottoman historiography, which has tended to see the Hamidian state as an integrated and unified agent, an omnipresent and omnipotent political actor with the means and capacity to direct the course of events in the eastern provinces according to its designs. My approach of examining the state's quotidian administrative practices has allowed me to highlight the multiplicity and sometimes unexpected historical roles of political actors and to demonstrate that possibilities for the exercise of centralized political control were quite limited. The Hamidian regime and its reform administration in Eastern Anatolia found it especially difficult to create a civil tax system that eliminated the police and police methods from collection practices.
I have shown that police methods remained a distinctive feature of the Ottoman revenue extraction system throughout the nineteenth century; despite all efforts to the contrary, the gendarmerie continued to play an important role. Even after the administrative reform plan of 1895 strictly forbade using gendarmes as collectors, the government was unable to allocate sufficient funds for new civil collectors, and so the gendarmerie and regular army regiments continued to collect taxes. So long as the central government remained unable to exert its will over events in the region and curb local power holders, tax collection remained attractive to the latter. For example, Kurdish tribes in the region, once attached to the domestic security forces as Hamidiye Light Cavalry regiments, actively and sometimes brutally sought to extract a share of tax resources.
Given all of this, it became difficult if not impossible to establish what Yanni Kotsonis has called a “face-to-face” relationship between individual taxpayers and the Ottoman state, a relationship more transparent and pacific. As taxation further lost legitimacy, mass resistance to payment became the order of the day. A broader consequence of this was that quotidian tax collection, whether executed by local actors or governmental institutions, turned into a political contest involving terror and violence. This makes it hard to assign any clear-cut responsibility for the economy of plunder that emerged, though most of it is attributable to Kurdish tribal forces and other local power blocks, and to administrative practices of the central government. I have shown that the Hamidian regime's attempts to establish order and security generated only further terror and communal violence; the reform scheme did little to change life on the ground. Who exactly collected the tax made little real difference, since those representing state administrative institutions and local non-governmental actors frequently collaborated.
I have argued that the political catastrophe that unfolded in the eastern provinces had important social and economic dimensions. I have underscored the role played by Ottoman administrative practices in spawning this catastrophe, particularly the oppressive and inequitable tax system and the brutal methods employed by collectors. In the eastern provinces, the late Ottoman fiscal and political crisis ultimately took on an ethnic dimension. A recent study by Gerard Libaridian has sought to identify actors responsible for the “‘Armenization’ of the economic and political crisis.”Footnote 85 He argues, “The failure to implement reforms promised under the Tanzimat, Abdülhamid II, and the CUP [Committee of Union and Progress], had led to the internationalization, as well as the radicalization, of the Armenian problem.”Footnote 86 Libaridian asserts that for Hnchak and Dashnaktsutiun, loyalty to the state had been possible. Even during the Hamidian era with its failed programmatic goals, Armenian revolutionary parties were ready to endorse the state.Footnote 87 We have seen here that a more peaceable option was available in the reforms attempted by Ahmet Şakir Pasha. Yet that option was crippled by financial constraints on the Ottoman treasury, which prompted policies of extracting taxes from Armenian peasants at any cost, by any means. This difficulty was compounded by the sheer complexity of the situation in the region, with diverse social and political actors all struggling over resources.
The concept of an omnipotent Hamidian state masterminding events in the region only hampers understanding of this highly complex political situation. Although the state might appear on the surface to have been a unified political actor, it was rather, to refer back to Abrams, “the mask which prevents our seeing political practice as it is.”Footnote 88 Political practice in the Armenian and Kurdish provinces of the late nineteenth century sadly failed to offer alternatives to existing oppressive and brutal systems. Central government reforms introduced during the Tanzimat and the Hamidian periods were merely administrative technologies, one of which was the taxation system, focused narrowly on fiscal and security issues. The government's attempts to introduce order through taxation and a new legal and administrative system only exacerbated the bloodshed and oppression. The unfolding of events in the eastern provinces toward the “Armenization” of the social and political crisis was about more than the limited capacity of the Hamidian state. Returning to Zygmunt Bauman's perspective, one could argue, “There would be no chaos were there no ordering intention already in place.”Footnote 89 The efforts of the Hamidian regime, undertaken in the name of fighting chaos, produced only more chaos. This was a crucial piece of the social and political context within which the “Armenian Question” emerged and took shape.
