Since Martin van Bruinessen’s seminal book on Kurdistan from 1992, no book has been published that provides an overarching history of Kurds and Kurdistan under Ottoman rule, in addition to a detailed picture of the socio-economic and political structures in the region. Nilay Özok-Gündoğan’s book The Kurdish Nobility in the Ottoman Empire: Loyalty, Autonomy and Privilege is a much-awaited and needed work that not only provides a chronological history of Ottoman rule in Kurdistan, but also challenges assumptions about Kurds and Ottoman rule that scholars have held for decades. Özok-Gündoğan focuses on the Ottoman eastern provinces that are little studied in comparison to the Balkans, central Anatolia, and Arab regions. In particular, she brings her meticulous study of the Kurdish nobility in conversation with governance in the Balkans, central Anatolia, and the Levant, along with a detailed study of Ottoman centralization efforts in Palu, a region east of Harput. The existing studies on the eastern provinces have remained in the margins of Ottoman historiography. This book will hopefully be among those that foreground the importance of studying the eastern provinces in building a better understanding of Ottoman rule and Tanzimat reforms of the mid-nineteenth century.

Özok-Gündoğan narrates how the focus of Ottoman historians on the Balkans and Anatolia has shaped the meta-narrative of the Ottoman state’s treatment of indigenous elites. She points out that the regional focus and perception that hereditary nobility was an exclusively European phenomenon have hitherto ignored the existence of hereditary nobility in the Ottoman Empire, a paradigm that she turns on its head by providing a micro-history of the transformations of the hereditary nobility in Palu, more specifically, the Kurdish begs.

Almost two-thirds of the book and Özok-Gündoğan’s main archival research focus on the Tanzimat era and end with the massacres of Armenians in 1895. The author, however, dedicates the first two chapters of the book to the period between the sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries to unsettle the centrality of the Tanzimat in the narrative of Ottoman modernization and modern state-making. The book presents the various ways in which the Ottoman central state established and sustained its legitimacy through the Kurdish nobility, by permitting them to retain hereditary titles and privileges in land ownership and tax collection. By focusing on Palu the author presents a comprehensive narrative of the ways in which the nobility and privilege of the Kurdish begs were transformed from the sixteenth century (when Palu was incorporated into the Ottoman Empire) to the nineteenth century. While in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the privilege that the Kurdish nobility would receive from the state relied on the military help that the begs would in turn provide to the state, in the late seventeenth and much of the eighteenth centuries, their influence lay largely in their economic power related to local mines and agricultural lands. The changes, the author insists, challenge the narrative that Ottoman Kurdistan was in stagnancy and decline from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Although it is a paradigm that has been undone for the empire at large, this narrative remains persistent for the region of her focus, partly because of the lack of granular historical work on the region preceding the mid-nineteenth century. Tracing the Kurdish begs’ negotiations and ties of loyalty with the Ottoman state, Özok-Gündoğan also challenges Kurdish nationalist narratives that present the begs as exemplars of Kurdish autonomy in the region.

As the book demonstrates, over time Ottoman governance in Palu became more complicated and began to include a multiplicity of actors. In the first part of the book, extending from the sixteenth century to the 1830s, the reader gets a complicated picture of the various systems and types of nobility in Palu. The story of state-building and state control is largely presented as a center-periphery dynamic, with the clear message that the center’s orientation toward the periphery was very much shaped by the socio-economic and political dynamics in the specific locale. The second and third parts of the book that deal with the 1830s to the 1890s depict the functions of the state becoming increasingly multi-vectored, as locals involved bureaucrats of nearby provinces, like the governor of Baghdad Reşid Paşa (191), or as Armenian financiers in Istanbul would petition to the central state to effect change in the province.

This narrative leaves the reader with a clear understanding of how the local natural environment (i.e., the mines and forests) shaped the socio-economic and political dynamics and structures of Palu, and how the way humans changed the environment (mainly through deforestation) affected the livelihood and conditions of the local population over the long run. In the early 1890s, a drought followed by famine contributed to the socio-economic disruptions in the region (252).

The author is also careful to note that Palu is not representative of the entire region of Kurdistan, as the location of Palu (i.e., its distance from the borderland and proximity to Istanbul) and local resources shaped Ottoman policy toward it. In chapter three, the author demonstrates how, as part of the Tanizmat policies, the Ottoman state cracked down on hereditary land rights in Palu but not in borderland areas like Van, where there was a concentration of Kurdish nobility. Palu was a safer place for the state to implement drastic reform policies that would undermine the hereditary privileges of the Kurdish begs. The rest of the chapters four to eight goes into detail about the different actors (Armenian notables, villagers, Kurdish begs and aghas, local administrators, etc.) and government offices (Meclis-i Vâlâ [The Supreme Council of Judicial Ordinances], local councils, courts, Mine Administration, etc.) that took part in the realignment of tax-collection, conscription, land reforms, and local administrative positions – all aspects that had to be reconfigured with the end of the central state’s recognition of the Kurdish begs’ hereditary rule in Palu. Against the dominant perception in the field, however, Özok-Gündoğan argues that the state’s crackdown did not completely squelch the power of the begs. Instead, she demonstrates how they competed to maintain their political power – by occupying the new administrative positions that were opened in the provinces as part of the Tanzimat reforms – and their economic power – by acquiring title to land through bureaucratic loopholes that they worked to their benefit. The begs regained their economic power more definitively through violence against Armenians, particularly during the 1895 massacres.

Radical changes in Ottoman governance occurred in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Whereas in the 1840-60s the state’s method of centralizing power relied on transformative reforms, by the 1880s and particularly 1890s, the state shifted its focus to controlling the movements of Armenians, their political activities, and reprimanding and suppressing complaints by Armenians against local socio-economic injustices. Özok-Gündoğan relates this policy transformation largely to the internationalization of the “Armenian Question” through the 1878 Treaty of Berlin and the increased political activities of Armenians, which drew the suspicious eye of the state. This was exacerbated by the already existing socio-economic tensions and conflicts among the Kurdish begs, whose social and economic power had dwindled, and Armenians, who had gained greater land ownership and economic power between the 1840s and 1870s. Partly since the bureaucracy surrounding land ownership had not entirely formalized in the mid-nineteenth century, this led to incessant disputes surrounding land ownership between the Kurdish begs and Armenians.

The author’s treatment of Kurds and Armenians is outstanding, as she does not present either group as a monolith. While in the last decade, works have been produced that challenge the homogenization of either group, rarely has such work been done when both ethnic groups are considered together. Despite the centuries-old coexistence of Kurds and Armenians, we still lack a comprehensive understanding of how they lived with each other in lands that both groups’ national narratives treat as their own ancient homelands. Most scholarly works tend to focus on eruptions of violence between Kurds and Armenians, and still fall into the pitfalls of essentializations.

Özok-Gündoğan’s book pushes against these paradigms. However, the book leaves its reader with the sense that until the Tanzimat, it was largely class difference that mattered (i.e., begs, sarrafs [moneylenders], sharecroppers). It is after the 1850s that religious differences begin to surface, eventually culminating into the massacres of Armenians in 1895 in Palu. On this interethnic transformation, however, multiple questions arise that are left unanswered. We learn that, for most of the eighteenth century until the mid-nineteenth century, sarrafs were mostly Armenian. When sarrafs did not get back in cash or in kind the debt that they had given out with high interest to Kurdish begs, they would apply to the central state for intervention, or they would turn to the local şer’i courts (143-144). The question arises, however, that prior to the 1850s, when Armenians were legally considered inferior to Muslims, how could they win a case in a şer’i court when their testimony carried less weight than that of a Muslim man? Were there particular kinds of cross-religious networks that Armenian sarrafs were embedded in that provided the legal and coercive capabilities to recover unpaid debts?

We also learn that Armenians “made up the great majority of the sharecropping population” (90), and that there were disputes between the agrarian population and the begs before the Tanzimat era, but that the complaints of the former rarely reached the center. This of course, would result in the scarcity of evidence regarding how religious differences impacted the relations between cultivators and begs. Özok-Gündoğan notes that “The conflict between begs and cultivators had gone on for quite a while in Palu, but up to this point [1853], the religious difference had never been brought up as a parameter” (189) by the Meclis-i Vâlâ. Some reflection on the absence of evidence on religious differences in state archives prior to the 1850s would have provided a better understanding as to the role that religion played or did not play toward the power of the Kurdish begs. What should we do with the fact that religious and ethnic distinctions seem to have become more pronounced in the socio-economic relations of Palu after 1856, when the Ottoman Reform Decree announced equality across religions? Did the decree have an impact on the appearance of religious distinctions in archival documents? While answering many questions, this book also inspires the reader with many questions that will hopefully be answered by future scholarship.

This book is enriched by the author’s impeccable efforts to link social, economic, environmental, military, domestic, and foreign political factors. It is a must-read for anyone working on the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire, on Ottoman imperial rule, the Tanzimat, privatization of property, and Kurdish and Armenian history.