In 1835, the Ottoman Empire was struck by two rebellions, one in Dibra, today a Macedonian town bordering Albania, and the other in Hazro, a town in the northeast of Diyarbakır province. In the former case, Hakkı Pasha of Dibra was defeated and consequently exiled to Istanbul.Footnote 1 Meanwhile, in Hazro, the increasing discontent of the Zirki emirs due to taxation and conscription turned into open rebellion. As a part of the greater reform scheme in Ottoman Kurdistan, Mehmed Reşid Pasha defeated the forces of the emirs, banishing them to Edirne.Footnote 2 What made these otherwise ordinary rebellions remarkable was that their suppression terminated hereditary rule in both Dibra and Hazro. In other words, the Hoxholli beys in Dibra and the Zirki emirs in Hazro, who had ruled their provinces for centuries, were uprooted from their homelands and exiled to the opposite ends of the empire.
The survival of the provincial notables into the 19th century is a phenomenon the systematic description of which still suffers from conflicting interpretations of state and society. Two seminal works by Halil Inalcık and Albert Hourani have stimulated a large volume of studies on provincial notables, yet the resulting scholarship has been marked by an almost insurmountable opposition between those who focus on the “central” and those who emphasize the “local.”Footnote 3 Notwithstanding the edgy positions and politically charged claims of the opposing sides, the two approaches to historiography in fact share a common infrastructure. In addition to a framework of curiously rich binary differences, Inalcık- and Hourani-led historiographies have in common an extreme grounding in modernization theory. The two historiographies have concomitantly confined discussions of the Tanzimat (1839–76) reform project to a spectrum of success and failure in which modernization, used at times interchangeably with centralization, becomes primarily an affair of institutions, conducive to positive change only in concert with modernization by the state.Footnote 4
Questioning the historicity of the very dichotomies attributed to the transformation of 19th-century Ottoman provincial administration, the present study deals with the career trajectories of the hereditary dynasts of Dibra and Hazro in the aftermath of their exiles. The employment patterns of some of the Hoxholli beys in Dibra and the Zirki emirs in Hazro complicate the dynamics of 19th-century provincial politics, which is often overwhelmed in the literature by the insistence of scholars on viewing them through the lens of either institutional frameworks or localism. By demonstrating the frequent shifts and fluidity between local notables and central officials, this study is a historiographical intervention. Akin to Marc Aymes’ approach, it puts to the test the identification of a “periphery” and “vision of the state centre.”Footnote 5 By examining the comparative employment patterns of provincial notables, I argue that the making of the modern Ottoman state was the result of flexible centralization relying on a partnership, the terms of which were negotiated between the government and provincial notables. This flexible centralization is not a unidirectional standard per se, but rather close to Olivier Bouquet's articulation of transformation: “a liberated, synthetic and integrative notion” that frees the historical analysis of societal change from retrospective interpretations based on “final acts,” that is, modernization.Footnote 6 In this transformation, it was employment of provincial notables as a result of negotiation with the government rather than co-optation that rendered the government the active, if not the unilateral, party in a bilateral interaction. This study aims to revise our understanding of Ottoman modernization, which, as a result of “doing history backward,” has heretofore primarily been evaluated through the prism of a priori theories by 20th-century historians. I argue instead that the making of the modern Ottoman state was a synthesis that emerged out of a partnership that became visible only when released from the shackles of the oft-cited dichotomies of traditional vs. modern and local vs. central.Footnote 7
Until the last decade or so, Ottoman historiography has for the most part portrayed the provincial notables as members of a coherent institution who distorted the state power in favor of the local, acting as prominent foes of the central government.Footnote 8 Scholars inspired by the Hourani framework, however, sought the origins of proto-national Arab notables by highlighting their local power in interaction and confrontation with the central authorities.Footnote 9 Provincial councils, one of the novelties introduced in the Tanzimat era, are a notable site of this difference in approach: whereas the center-oriented studies entertain notions of the efficacy and control of these institutions, local-oriented studies instead underline the options that councils offered to the notables.Footnote 10
Up until the last decade or so, the number of studies on Ottoman provinces in the Balkans and Anatolia (i.e., the “core” provinces) has fallen behind the proliferating studies on the Ottoman Arab provinces. Even though Hourani himself developed an approach integrating notables with the Ottoman state, most of the studies on the Arab provinces have developed an interest in “ethnic, religious and other differences,” framing the relation as an implicit confrontation between indigenous Arab elites and imposed Turkish elites.Footnote 11 The immediate result was a preference for indigenous sources at the expense of the Ottoman archives; another consequence was an increasing preoccupation with ways to tackle the state–society divide.Footnote 12 The literature has generated new conceptualizations to render the divide less oppositional, to say the least. Whereas Ottomanization hints at the eventual merger of imperial officials with local power holders, Ottomanization-localization, concerned with the former's one-sidedness, underlines the dual, interactive, and multidimensional nature of the interaction.Footnote 13 Notwithstanding the evolution in curbing the divide between state and society, the literature has, to a certain extent, maintained its binary framework, except for the term bilateral factionalism, which at least evaded the ethnic dichotomy.Footnote 14
Despite the emphasis in recent pre-Tanzimat studies on notables’ fluid identities and the give-and-take nature of the relationships they established with the Ottoman government, restoration by historians of the notables into the Tanzimat proper still reflects a reified dichotomy between a centralizing state and local notables in different guises.Footnote 15 The neo-Weberian approach, for instance, with its teleological narrative of centralization, does not give much space to provincial notables, since “rational settlements, uniform rules and regulations, and universal legal principles” were to replace the flexible forms of integration.Footnote 16 To be sure, given the ultimate outcome of centralization, the narrative of modernization has been keen on annihilating these local intermediaries from the provincial political landscape.Footnote 17 No matter how much negotiation took place between the provincial notables and the government, the success of centralization would lie with the integration of the notables into the provincial administration, which is narrated as a deliberate and unilateral act of the central state.Footnote 18 In this context, the roles attributed to the notables in this transformation are primarily depicted as transitional, whereas the telos associated with modernization is articulated in terms of “arrival points” that move toward centralization of the state.Footnote 19
An almost perfect mirror-image of the center-oriented studies, the recent works based on the Hourani framework reproduce the reification of the core and periphery structure. Albeit with a focus on the historical and cultural connections intricately intertwining the center and periphery, some scholars have argued that the local institutions of the Arab provinces remained in local hands “despite powerful Tanzimat centralization efforts and later Young Turk unification projects.”Footnote 20 Although Hourani's definition of notables is updated to include non-Muslims, most recent studies on the Ottoman Arab provinces maintain the pronounced localism.Footnote 21 Beirut, for instance, was a “city of its own making,” neither a result of world economic forces nor the “natural product of the Ottoman imperial fiat.”Footnote 22 Some other works blur the line between central and local by underlining the appointment of government officials from late-Ottoman Palestine to their home or neighboring districts; however, it was this very dichotomy with its constant fluctuation between cooperation and confrontation that was part of the provincial making of Jerusalem.Footnote 23
Apart from constituting the fringes of the empire for long centuries, Ottoman Albania and Kurdistan had several features in common. Geographically both regions were known for their mountains and their highlanders. Yet Dibra and Hazro, contrary to the overall features of the two regions, were situated on small plains surrounded by highlands.Footnote 24 Long before the advent of the theory of “martial races,” starting in the mid-18th century, both Ottoman Albanians and Kurds, thanks to their warlike ethos reinforced by the challenges of highlands, had become military laborers for the Ottoman army.Footnote 25 The dictates of geography were harsh in Dibra, as the economy, based on pastoralism, “almost invariably involved migrating from home.”Footnote 26 Sitting in the transitional zone near desert Mesopotamia, Hazro differed from Dibra in that its arid lands needed only irrigation to become a green oasis.Footnote 27
Both Albania and Kurdistan constituted a closed network organized around a tribal structure.Footnote 28 That is, agas and bajraktars (standard bearers) were the leaders of their respective communities at the two edges of the empire.Footnote 29 Dibra and Hazro had one more particular feature in common: despite the presence of tribal structure in the greater regions, both towns were free of tribal hierarchy. Rather than bajraktars and agas, there were prevailing beys and emirs, respectively.Footnote 30 Both the beys in northern Albania and the emirs in Ottoman Kurdistan were dynastic powerholders to be reckoned with, rather than tribal entities that emerged or evolved as a result of Ottoman state intervention.Footnote 31
In addition to these similarities related to geography and tribalism, the usefulness of the Dibra–Hazro comparison is suggested most strongly by the ways their hereditary notables interacted with the Ottoman sultan in the post-conquest period. During Hasan Pasha Hoxholli's participation in the campaigns against Hungary in the 16th century and the shift in allegiance of the Zirki emirs to the Ottomans in the 16th-century imperial rivalry with the Safavids, the Ottoman sultans and the government maintained local rule at the two ends of the empire. Despite differences in name and titles—bajraks in northern Albania and yurtluk-ocaklıks in Ottoman Kurdistan—the provincial administrations of Dibra and Hazro were both subject to a type of indirect rule in return for providing the Ottoman army with troops, a method similar to Maurus Reinkowski's “ethnic containment.”Footnote 32
The comparison of Dibra and Hazro, with their distinct yet commensurable autonomous trajectories prior to the 19th century, helps bridge the distance between core provinces studied from a central perspective and peripheral ones delineated with a local approach. Unlike studies of stand-alone provinces, intra-empire comparison with an “Ottoman provincial synthesis” helps to assess the validity of the terms local and central.Footnote 33 The cases of the Hoxholli beys and the Zirki emirs, who simultaneously maintained local rule and took part in the central administration, demonstrate that this synthesis contributes not only to decentering the state but also to delocalizing the notables.
Although they were not technically borderlands, the 19th-century Ottoman discourse on the provincial administrations of Dibra and Hazro, which had to take into account “familiarity with local conditions” and “customs and dispositions,” constituted one of the most important common denominators. Administration based on the discourse of difference was, however, laden with questions of whether it was possible to talk about indigenous Albanian and Kurdish notables, to say nothing of the overarching question of who was an Ottoman.Footnote 34 Regardless of whether they had been “Ottomanized” or not, the transregional employment patterns of the Hoxholli beys and Zirki emirs defied the polarized interpretations stemming from overattachment to a specific locality and rigidly formulated ethnic, religious, and political identities.Footnote 35 Rather, their changing roles—ranging from provincial notable in their home district, to “political exile” in a distant province subsisting on state allowances, to central administrator of another province—not only point to a gray area that defies politically charged normative attributions but also serve to broaden the field of analysis of who took part in the making of the modern Ottoman state.Footnote 36 In this gray area, what it took to be an Ottoman was not measured by the yardstick of codification. Furthermore, the appointment of a provincial notable did not impede his belonging to other institutions; rather, overlapping positions brought about a tension between different roles, unless the associated roles were harmonized into a coherent whole.Footnote 37 It was flexible centralization, with its gray area beyond binary oppositions, that transformed Ottoman provincial politics in the 19th century.
Exile and Employment of Notables
At the turn of the 19th century, the Ottoman government came to question its pragmatic and largely ad hoc cooperation with the provincial notables regarding tax collection and the military. In place of this cooperation, the government entered into a strategy to “reform” the Albanian and Kurdish lands by conscription of subjects in the newly established army and establishment of stricter financial control over the tax revenues of the notables.Footnote 38 The old imperial strategy of forced exile of provincial notables was still in force, and the government resorted to it to deal with the political turmoil that arose from conscription and taxation.Footnote 39 Exile, however, did not eliminate the notables from this complex structure. Contrary to the narrative of centralization, Ottoman officials were ambivalent about the prospective role of the provincial notables. The government either delegated power to provincial notables or discouraged the employment of local dynasts (mahalli hanedan), as conditions warranted. In short, despite the prevailing impulse to rationalize administration according to the telos of modernization, the imperial government did not pursue a coherent policy with regard to the provincial notables.
After the suppression of their rebellion, the Ottoman government forcefully settled Receb Bey, the emir of Hazro, along with the emirs of Hani and Lice, the neighboring districts of Hazro, and their families in Edirne in the spring of 1836.Footnote 40 After the exile of the Zirki emirs, the governors-general of Diyarbekir, who in the conventional historiography are generally depicted as a central feature in this provincial matrix, administered the greater Hazro region primarily by delegating the actual work to the local notables of Diyarbekir.Footnote 41
The elimination of Hoxholli rule in Dibra was not as decisive as the fall of the Zirki emirs. Following his part in a similar rebellion in Shkoder in 1835, the Ottoman government exiled Hakkı Pasha, the deputy governor of Dibra and Peshkopi, which was an administrative twin of Dibra, to Istanbul.Footnote 42 Just after Hakkı Pasha's removal, Süleyman Bey, Hakkı Pasha's nephew, secured the deputy governorships of Dibra and Peshkopi after winning out over Talib Bey, Hakkı Pasha's brother.Footnote 43 In 1836, however, the intra-dynastic struggle proved to be futile, as both parties were exiled to Istanbul.Footnote 44 Soon Hakkı Pasha and his brother along with their families were exiled to Bolu, a town in northwestern Anatolia, whereas Süleyman Bey was exiled to Larissa, a town in central Thessaly.Footnote 45
The case of Dibra, however, did not reflect the idealized version of the “politics of notables.” After Abdurrahman Pasha of Tetovo, a central figure with a local origin, replaced Süleyman Bey in 1836, Hacı Mahmud Ağa became the deputy governor of Dibra and Peshkopi in 1838.Footnote 46 The fact that Hacı Mahmud Ağa was not from the region, however, caused immediate strife. The hereditary notables of Peshkopi, Emin Bey and Kara Hasanoğlu Hasan Bey, in cooperation with some 100 armed men from Shupenza, a nearby village infamous for its banditry, surrounded the administrator. “We want a deputy governor among us,” the mob demanded, “not an outsider.”Footnote 47 Even though the nocturnal attack was repulsed, the notables of Peshkopi soothed the mob's demand with the immediate removal of the administrator and his replacement with either a local (yerlüden) one or an outsider (haricden).Footnote 48 According to the Ottoman investigation, it appeared that Hacı Mahmud Ağa, who “lacked familiarity with the circumstances of Albania,” employed only some of the bandit leaders of Peshkopi, which, in turn, agitated the unemployed ones.Footnote 49 In 1838, İbrahim Efendi replaced Hacı Mahmud, temporarily suspending the tension between local and outside administrators.Footnote 50
The discourses of customs and dispositions and “familiarity with local peculiarities” as the influential force behind this perennial tension became a locus of the negotiations over shifts in the provincial administration, contributing to the making of the modern Ottoman state. As in the case of the Shupenza inhabitants and their demands, provincial society “arrogated to itself a monopoly in the meanings of tradition—hence the position of interpreter of local realities,” strengthening its dealings with the central authorities.Footnote 51 As much as the discourse of tradition was a weapon in the hands of the locals against the proposed reforms, the Ottoman officials also employed the discourse to deal with the imperial priorities. The fact that the Ottomans yielded to local powers or took local conditions into account, however, does not mean that there was a “persistence of tradition” or a temporal or spatial fixation of difference.Footnote 52 Although Thomas Kuehn concedes that what constituted the “‘customs and dispositions’ of the local people [was] subject to conflict, contestation, and change,” he elaborates that "customs and dispositions" were parts of the Ottoman flexible imperial policies. The hybrid resolution he suggests, however, reifies an anachronistic binary of traditional and modern in understanding of the making of the Ottoman state.Footnote 53
The elimination of the hereditary households in Dibra and Hazro did not reflect most historians’ anachronistic expectations of centralization and, more importantly, their dichotomous understanding of modernization. Figures who came to be called by some scholars “lesser” notables continued to occupy an important position in accordance with their skills in mobilizing parts of society.Footnote 54 Although the fact that provincial political matrices increasingly became more participatory hints at the continuing agency of the provincial notables as part of the making of the modern Ottoman state, it also blurs the oft-cited markers attributed to the Ottoman state and its provincial society.Footnote 55 On the side of the state, the government replaced the local dynasty of Hazro with the local notables of Diyarbekir instead of appointing central administrators. On the side of society, notwithstanding their stern demand, the insistence by inhabitants of the greater Dibra region on a local administrator resulted in the rather curious appointment of an outsider by the provincial seat, Bitola.
Local vs. Outside Administrators
It was in the year 1846 that the Ottoman government introduced the Tanzimat reforms in Ottoman Kurdistan and Albania. Implicitly asserting itself as a monolithic, self-consistent, and rational entity, the word Tanzimat is a self-proclaiming rhetoric that has “clouded over the many and conscious shifts within the reforms.”Footnote 56 Contrary to the narrative of a standard and rigid system, Tanzimat policy was riven with ambiguities that yielded case-specific resolutions.Footnote 57 In terms of provincial reorganization, the reforms first established the province of Kurdistan along with the creation of three Albanian-inhabited provinces, Prizrin, Dukagin, and Skopje.Footnote 58 In principle, appointed central officials would fill the gaps in the administrative structures. However, centralization to a certain extent remained at the provincial level. The Ottoman authorities’ interest in establishing direct administration in some districts (kaza) soon faded, as local notables were employed in line with imperial priorities.
One reason for the Ottoman government to retain the notables in place was financial. For instance, an imperial decree in 1845 concluded that the most prominent of the ancient dynasties should administer the towns of northern Albania. Instead of regular salaries, they were to receive one-quarter of the tithe revenues of the town for the expenses associated with town administration.Footnote 59 Although not so explicitly pronounced, the case was no different in Hazro. In March 1848, a certain Hacı Hüseyin Ağa, an appointed official (müdir), administered Hazro for six months. His principal duty was to uncover potential tax revenues that the Ottoman finance departments had so far not been able to collect.Footnote 60 Once he uncovered the newtaxable resources in the town and completed the auction of the district's tax-farm contracts for the year, his services were no longer required. In the end, Abdülkerim Ağa, who was a local, replaced him without being granted any salary.Footnote 61
The prevalence of the local over the outsider was not entirely a unilateral imposition of the Ottoman state. By the same token, it did not merely serve the financial concerns of the imperial treasury. First, the appointment of locals without granting them a salary, as M. Safa Saraçoğlu describes for the province of Vidin, was presumably valuable for the notables in terms of symbolic power, as well as financial leverage.Footnote 62 Second, as the tension between the inhabitants of Dibra and Peshkopi demonstrates, the locals used the card of customs and dispositions as a weapon against the Ottoman government, prompting the officials to resort to rather flexible provincial administration.Footnote 63
Dibra
In 1847, the inhabitants of Dibra petitioned the government, complaining about the rule of Hüseyin Ağa, who happened to be a local notable from Bitola, the seat of the provincial council, on the grounds that he could not accommodate himself to the populace (ahalisiyle imtizac edememesi). Parallel to the locals’ interpretation of tradition, the Ottoman government commonly used the rhetoric of adaptation (hüsn-i imtizac) as a pretext for replacing administrators who failed to work harmoniously with the local populace.Footnote 64 In this case, the government replaced Hüseyin Ağa with another outside notable from Bitola. He was, however, familiar with the customs and dispositions of the town, with a proven record of adaptation when he had held the office two years before.Footnote 65 Even though one outsider replaced another, the case is noteworthy as it demonstrates that the shift between local and outside administrators was itself subject to various circumstances, the demands of the local populace constituting just one.
The provincial administration by local and outside administrators also was a simultaneous process. By 1849, Kara Hasanoğlu Hasan Bey, one of the hereditary notables of Peshkopi who survived the wave of exiles, had been administering both Dibra and Peshkopi for some time. Although he was a local in the eyes of the Ottoman government, this evidently was not the case for the inhabitants of Dibra, who made administration hard for the bey with their increasing complaints of misadministration. These complaints prompted the Ottoman administration to appoint an outside administrator, Osman Efendi, who was a member of the Imperial Council (Divan-ı Hümayun) and was deemed “familiar with the peculiarities of the region.” While a central official occupied the post of Dibra, Kara Hasanoğlu Hasan Bey retained his local administration of Peshkopi without a salary.Footnote 66
Even though the Ottoman officials were hopeful that administration by an outsider would ensure public order in the towns, local discontent with the administration did not come to an end. In April 1850, when Osman Efendi died, the inhabitants of Dibra and Peshkopi petitioned the Sublime Porte, complaining that the administrators appointed by the governor of Rumelia province always harassed and frightened them, presumably in the process of tax collection.Footnote 67 In another petition penned in March 1850, in a call that perfectly fits the narrative of centralization, the inhabitants of Dibra asked for the appointment of administrators directly from Istanbul.Footnote 68 Although the latter petition was a maneuver to counter any possible triumph of either the Peshkopi party or the provincial seat in Bitola, the whole ordeal was interesting because one party, in the end, called for direct administration instead of varying degrees of local rule. To the chagrin of the petitioners, however, the governor-general of Rumelia, Hurşid Pasha, appointed Abdurrahman Bey, another local notable from the provincial council in Bitola.Footnote 69
As much as the employment of local over central administrators was a concurrent mechanism, the coexistence of the two methods did not translate into a generic opposition between the local and the central. Rather, the occasionally abrupt shifts with regard to the nature of the rule followed an unpredictable pattern depending on the circumstances of northern Albania and Diyarbekir. There is, for instance, the puzzling question of whether Celal Bey, a local notable from Mat, a town close to Dibra and Peshkopi, was considered a local or an outsider by the inhabitants of the two districts. His administration seemed to have pleased the inhabitants, and in 1851, after serving as the deputy administrator for some time, he secured the post in person due to their satisfaction.Footnote 70
Hazro
IOne of the sons of the Zirki emir of Lice who had been exiled in 1835, Sadullah Bey, survived the exile from his homeland by going into hiding.Footnote 71 Thanks to the details mentioned in a petition, it appears that he had succeeded in serving in different posts around Diyarbekir since 1845.Footnote 72 Despite the eradication of hereditary rule in the region, Sadullah Bey was the very local administrator of Lice in 1849, until the public debt associated with the tithe collection for the years 1847 and 1848 led to his dismissal.Footnote 73 An outside administrator was appointed to Lice in 1849, but Sadullah Bey managed to secure the administration of Lice once again in 1850. Embezzlement by one of his men, coupled with increasing dislike from the locals, however, removed him from the post once again.Footnote 74
Despite the lack of local popular support, Sadullah Bey held administrative power in Lice through 1859, with occasional interruptions. According to the inhabitants’ petitions, he did not pay the peasants of Lice for the provisions he appropriated for the imperial army in Erzurum.Footnote 75 Coming after years of violent rule, this final instance of fraud was the last straw, resulting in his dismissal from the post in the summer of 1859. As soon as he settled the debts payable to the peasants, however, Sadullah Bey petitioned the government asking to become administrator of Lice again.Footnote 76 Although his request was denied, Sadullah Bey secured the administration of Hazro, another homeland of the emirs. His success owed much to his relations with Gevranzade Ömer Pasha, who was Sadullah Bey's father-in-law and a member of one of the prominent dynasties of Diyarbekir.Footnote 77
Despite their wrongdoings, the employment of the less prominent notables was not contradictory to centralization. In a similar vein, the use of local notables in provincial administration by Ottoman officials did not operate within the framework of an ideological opposition between meritocracy and nepotism.Footnote 78 The dynamics of provincial administration in Dibra and Hazro were not confined to the domination of either the local or the central. In an apparently incoherent manner according to the narrative of centralization, the Ottoman government, taking into account the scarcity of financial and human resources, often preferred to employ members of once-rebellious households on condition of their rehabilitation.Footnote 79 At the same time, provincial notables interacted with the government authorities in a rather ambivalent—and at times flagrantly antagonistic—way, following their own political agendas. It was this fluctuating partnership between the government and the notables that transformed Ottoman provincial politics.Footnote 80
Factionalism in Provincial Politics
Provincial societies of the 19th-century Ottoman Empire often invoked the threat of factionalism as they put forward demands for local administration.Footnote 81 As in the case of Jerusalem, where factions exerted more robust action than the mediation of intermediaries, the local notables connected factionalism to the political struggles in which they engaged at regional and imperial levels.Footnote 82 Factionalism served as a means of empowering the local component in both Dibra and Hazro, as in the Ottoman provinces. The consequences of factionalism in the two districts were more effectively transformative than, as articulated by shortsighted scholars, a process confined to the local challenge against the imperial forces.
The bilateral factionalism due to the historical competition between Dibra and Peshkopi was the prominent means by which the inhabitants of the two towns furthered their political demands. In 1853, the council members of Rumelia noted that the inhabitants of Peshkopi were divided between the current administrator, Yusuf Bey, and Kara Hasanoğlu Hasan Bey, his predecessor. To calm the local factionalism, the governor of Rumelia appointed Cafer Ağa, an outside administrator from Bitola.Footnote 83 When he proved a failure at conscripting reserve soldiers, the need to muster troops overruled the potential upheavals associated with the factions.Footnote 84 After a few months, the governor-general of the imperial army in Rumelia, in complete harmony with the provincial governor of Rumelia, turned back to Hasan Bey, who, they believed, would be beneficial to the local administration.Footnote 85
Although fully cognizant of the strategic employment of customs and dispositions, Ottoman officials yielded to local power because of the notables’ abilities to mobilize and conscript troops. “Everyone on this side [of the provincial seat] is well aware,” the governor of Rumelia noted, “that the said folks [of Dibra and Peshkopi] force the administrators appointed from outside (haricden taʿyin olunan müdirlerin) to resign by disturbing [them] in one way or another.”Footnote 86 Such pragmatism remained even though the members of the provincial council were aware that “[some] seditious men among the inhabitants of Dibra and Peshkopi regard anyone not from them as repellent and attempt to remove and replace them by splitting into factions.”Footnote 87
As one of the customs and dispositions of the greater Dibra region, the habit of creating political factionalism, which the Ottoman officials tolerated as a lesser evil, served to further Kara Hasanoğlu Hasan Bey's local rule beyond his hometown. In December 1854, Hasan Bey, as the local administrator of Peshkopi, encouraged his supporters to work against the administrator of Dibra, Hasan Bey of Euboea.Footnote 88 Although there were no complaints about the latter, the pressure of factionalism could not save the outsider administration. Conceding that Kara Hasanoğlu Hasan Bey's administration would not be better than the current one, yet reiterating that he would better serve local conscription, the provincial council members granted him the district of Dibra in the first weeks of 1855.Footnote 89
However, even after Hasan Bey had secured the posts of both Dibra and Peshkopi, the political factionalism did not cease. In the spring of 1855, the inhabitants of Dibra stood against Hasan Bey, complaining about his corrupt administration.Footnote 90 Just as his supporters had mobilized, the opposition in Dibra formed an armed mob, encircling and intimidating Hasan Bey by firing shots at him.Footnote 91 Conceding, after a few eruptions of factionalism in the region, that he had a connection to most of the incidents, the provincial council of Bitola, in correspondence with the Supreme Council, finally replaced him with an outside administrator, `Ali Bey of Bitola, in May 1855.Footnote 92 After a few clashes between factions over the course of two years, the dismissal of Hasan Bey soon turned into a violent affair. After some defiance and further episodes of violence, in 1855 the governor of Rumelia ordered Hasan Bey exiled to Anatolia, which he considered the ultimate solution to the maintenance of public order in the greater Dibra region.Footnote 93
The factions in the greater Hazro region also prompted the Ottoman government to shift the employment patterns in provincial administration. Although Sadullah Bey was the local administrator of Hazro in 1859, it did not prevent him from engaging in local politics in Lice. His intact networks in the region were valuable, allowing him to command and mobilize his factions at will. With motivations similar to those of Hasan Bey of Peshkopi, Sadullah Bey, through his retinue in Lice, harassed the council members, particularly the deputy judge (naib) and the imam of Lice.Footnote 94 As the bey did not refrain from running Hazro as he did Lice, his intimidation of the newly appointed administrator of Lice, Musa Bey, was not surprising.
In a collective petition signed by the administrator of Hazro and nearly forty leaders of surrounding villages, Sadullah Bey was said to have established a personal administration using his retinue, which amounted to 150 men. By buying off the local judges, the petitioners complained, Sadullah Bey had found ways of getting rid of anyone who was not from his faction. In other words, his smooth relations with the judges facilitated the suppression of his opponents, since he could easily make a member of his retinue file a charge against them.Footnote 95 Once Sadullah Bey made one of his men shoot at and wound Musa Bey; this, however, was the moment the Supreme Council got involved in the investigation.Footnote 96 In 1860, as a result of the investigation, Sadullah Bey was replaced with Mustafa Efendi, the former administrator of Beşiri, a town in the far southeast of Hazro.Footnote 97
Even though his faction was removed from power several times in the mid-19th century, Sadullah Bey did not lose his local power entirely. In 1862, he was once again the local administrator of Lice. Just as his temporary fall from power resembled the episodes involving Hasan Bey, Sadullah Bey's return to power followed Hasan Bey's trajectory. The skill of notables in mustering conscripts or irregular troops forced imperial officials to be tactful in their dealings with the notables. As a part of this tactful approach, the governor of Kurdistan, considering the delicate political situation of the province in 1862, conceded that the local powers (yerlüden muktedirlerinin) would be better at policing the province.Footnote 98 Regardless of his past wrongdoings, Sadullah Bey was nominated as a prospective administrator since “he was powerful enough to be immediately present at the location when ordered with the provision of a few hundred men at arms (nefer-i ‘amm).”Footnote 99
The commensurable trajectory of provincial administration in the greater regions of both Dibra and Hazro suggests, in actuality, a more complex, more fluid, and at times more controversial portrait of provincial politics than the straightforward one suggested by the narrative of centralization. By the same token, the rhetoric of local and outsider used by different actors shows how fluid the dynamics of provincial administration were. By arming themselves with the weapon of tradition, the inhabitants struggled for a local administration, as they interpreted it. Nevertheless, this was not an entrenched opposition. Instead of an undesirable local notable, the inhabitants of Dibra opted for direct administration. In a comparable example, the inhabitants of Hazro and Lice defied the rule of the last representative of the local dynasty that had ruled the region for almost three centuries. The Ottoman government's occasional employment of Kara Hasanoğlu Hasan Bey and Sadullah Bey despite their politically hazardous factionalism is at odds with the oft-cited assumption of local resistance against central intervention. It was not opposition but mutual interaction between the Ottoman government (with its selective employment of notables depending on financial and military concerns) and the provincial notables (with their maneuvers to further their own political agendas) that constituted an indispensable part of the flexible centralization in the Ottoman provinces.
Transregional Networks: Employment of Notables in Exile
The employment of the less prominent notables was not confined to the provinces from which hereditary dynasties were banished. On the contrary, the members of these households followed similar career trajectories in their exiles. Despite forced exile, which made it evident that the political traces left behind by most of the provincial households amounted to almost nothing, they were not stripped entirely of their political power. Rather, benefiting from several options the Tanzimat transformation brought about, the notables in exile capitalized on their once-mighty military prowess and provincial legitimacy. Not unlike the notables who rose in their absences, they took part in the flexible centralization of the Ottoman provincial administration, again thwarting any sharp dichotomy between local notables and central officials.
Unlike the Zirki emirs, who were exiled permanently to Edirne, the Hoxholli dynasty, particularly Hakkı Pasha and Talib Bey, lived in several towns in Anatolia. Between 1836 and 1838, the Hoxholli brothers were in Bolu and, after a request to be relocated to Istanbul, were exiled to Trabzon, where they lived until 1840.Footnote 100 When the Sultan pardoned them in February 1840, they were deemed eligible to move to Istanbul.Footnote 101 Even though it is not clear what kind of political networks the two brothers established in the imperial capital, they proved quite fortunate, as they were employed a few years after their exile. For instance, in 1844, the Ottoman government entrusted Hakkı Pasha with the suppression of the great rebellion in northern Albania.
The commission rendered Hakkı Pasha's exile null and void, making him once again an imperial employee. This demonstrated the Ottoman government's flexibility in terms of employing agents who had recently defied its authority. The provision and command of 6,000 Albanian irregulars secured Hakkı Pasha the deputy-governorship of his hometown and helped Talib Bey become the deputy governor of Tetovo, a town in Macedonia.Footnote 102 Despite his service to the imperial government, however, the two beys were once again banished to Istanbul on 28 October 1844.Footnote 103 In the spring of 1845, the Ottoman government removed the titles of Hakkı Pasha and Talib Bey, forcefully settling them in Ödemiş, an Aegean town, in 1846.Footnote 104 This final exile, unlike the one in 1835, brought about a change in the rhetoric of Ottoman correspondence addressing the provincial notables of Dibra. That is, from 1846 onward, it was bey rather than pasha the Ottoman officials opted to use in documents when referring to Hakkı Pasha.Footnote 105
The exile, employment, and subsequent exile of Hakkı Bey stands in stark contrast to the preoccupation of Tanzimat historiography with formal and legal institutions. His case, however, is not exceptional: the empire-wide circulation of officials blurred the distinction between central and local. Before 1908, Arabs, according to Joseph Szyliowicz, made up 34 percent of the provincial and 7 percent of the central Ottoman administration.Footnote 106 Leaving aside the question of what it meant to be an Arab in the 19th century, one cannot deny that the politics the provincial notables pursued were beyond mere participation in the provincial councils. Provincial notables like Hakkı Bey were busy establishing transregional households, which proved to be adaptable to the shifting realities of the Ottoman polity. Transregionality allowed the provincial notables to actively take part in state formation in the Ottoman provinces.
Hakkı Bey's different residences in Anatolia are a shining example of how provincial notables came to be a part of the participatory politics in the provinces to which they were exiled. In 1848, after spending two years in Ödemiş, Hakkı Bey petitioned the government to be relocated to Bursa, protesting that his son had recently died due to local weather conditions in Ödemiş.Footnote 107 Obtaining permission to reside in Bursa, the Hoxholli brothers started seeking ways to secure a post in the imperial administration. In 1847, complaining about his financial distress, Hakkı Bey asked for a governorship (kaymakamlık) in Anatolia.Footnote 108 Noting his own insufficient income in 1849, Talib Bey followed his brother's path by asking either to be granted a salary or to be appointed to any district in Anatolia.Footnote 109 After an imperial disagreement, the members of the Supreme Council acknowledged Talib Bey's financial distress and considered appointing him to a vacant post in the province of Hüdavendigar, today Bursa, a province in northwestern Anatolia. Finally, in 1849, Talib Bey was appointed to the district of Harmancık, but he died right after the appointment.Footnote 110
In the summer of 1850, Hakkı Bey once again rendered his exile null and void by becoming an Ottoman official, securing an appointment to Bolu, one of his former places of exile.Footnote 111 Aside from reclimbing the ladder of official positions in a different province, Hakkı Bey also was seeking to perfect his acceptance and advance into the imperial administration. “As the province of Bolu has been run by the imperial servants who were decorated with titles (rütbe eshabından),” petitioned Hakkı Bey in March 1851, he was asking for a promotion to match his post.Footnote 112 After a few months, the imperial government accepted the bey's request, restoring the title of pasha he had lost nearly two decades ago.Footnote 113 As a central official with a local background, Hakkı Pasha was removed from the office in November 1852 following local complaints.Footnote 114 He remained a possible candidate for offices, however, and successfully became the governor of İçel, a Mediterranean province.Footnote 115
Whereas the Hoxholli beys were successful at restoring their old titles and status, this was not the case for the Zirki emirs. Some of the emirs’ sons, however, followed career trajectories similar to those of the Hoxholli beys. One of the scions of the emirs in Hazro, Bedirhan Bey's son Mehmed Faris Bey, from mid-century onward sought employment by proclaiming his financial distress. In 1850, after filing numerous petitions, Faris Bey secured a job in the service of Kamil Pasha in the province of Bosnia.Footnote 116 Having administered a district in Bosnia, Faris Bey petitioned the government at the end of his term in December 1851, asking for another office.Footnote 117
For the imperial government, such requests represented an ordinary practice that was beneficial to filling vacant spots in the provincial administration. For the notables, the prospects of employment, aside from offering immediate remedy to financial distress, coalesced into a new means of bargaining in provincial politics. One example of this was bargaining to return to their hometowns. Arguing that he had been unemployed for a year, Faris Bey petitioned the government in 1852, asking to be appointed to the district of Dimetoka, a town in western Thrace.Footnote 118 An official annotation on the back of another of his petitions, however, noted that the petitioner “does not want any grant (teveccüh) this year but rather to be favored (kayırılmak) with the administration of Hazro, in the province of Diyarbekir.”Footnote 119 No matter how flexible the imperial officials were in incorporating the once-hereditary rulers into the matrices of the provincial administration, the prospect of returning to their hometowns was not subject to negotiation. Denied the appointment to Hazro, Faris Bey asked for employment in the imperial service, first in Cairo, then in Damascus.Footnote 120 The Ottoman officials made it clear that it was possible for him to be employed only in the Balkans, evidently a measure aimed at preventing him from setting foot on the same continent as his hometown.Footnote 121
After spending two years in Istanbul for an opportunity that would serve his political ends, Faris Bey turned down the offer of an office in Bosnia in 1853, complaining that he could not afford to travel there. In return, he petitioned the Supreme Council asking for employment in a district of Smyrna where he would once again be in the service of Kamil Pasha, then governor of the province.Footnote 122 His request was rejected, presumably due to the imperial decree which barred him from the Asian provinces. In 1853, deciding to return to Edirne after wasting two years in the capital, Faris Bey asked for an office in a district in the province of Edirne, which also was denied, probably because it was the town where his family members lived in exile.Footnote 123
No matter how episodic their employment, Hakkı Pasha and Faris Bey were no longer members of the local dynasties enjoying political-cum-financial power thanks to their command of the political networks in their respective hometowns in the early 1830s. Despite being barred from their provinces, most of the notables in exile operated in a transregional setting, seeking new means of entry into participatory provincial politics. When one considers that this transregional operation existed simultaneously with pragmatic imperial strategies of co-optation, it becomes clear just how provincial the central administration really was.
The immediate military threats the Ottoman government faced distorted the terms of employment in favor of the notables, blurring further what it meant to be local and central. The Crimean War of 1853–56 prompted imperial officials to take advantage of the services of once-hereditary rulers of the empire. In 1852, the rising crisis with the Russian Empire rendered Hakkı Pasha's military skills more beneficial than his administrative ones. As a part of the general mobilization prior to the Crimean War, the Ottoman government charged the pasha with the muster and command of 5,000 Albanian irregulars to be deployed in Sofia.Footnote 124 Even though Hakkı Pasha had to leave the command to settle a pressing unsettled debt in Istanbul in 1853—and was to die in 1857—he became one of the provincial notables who survived into the mid-19th century.Footnote 125
As in the case of Hakkı Pasha, the military priorities entailed by the Crimean War provided Faris Bey with new prospects. After his consecutive failures, he succeeded in obtaining administrative and military offices under an Ottoman pasha between 1854 and 1858, thanks to the fortunes of war.Footnote 126 At the end of his term, Faris Bey returned to his ordinary job hunt. In 1861, for instance, he was asking for an office in accordance with his experience.Footnote 127 Furthermore, he still sought to subvert his employment terms to further his political ends. As late as 1868, he petitioned the government to be granted the grain provision contract for refugees settled in Resülayn, one of Hazro's villages.Footnote 128
Back from Exile
In the telos of empire to nation, the integration of provincial notables, whether residing in their provinces or in exile, is mostly regarded as ambiguous and irreconcilable with centralization. From Hakkı Pasha's mustering of Albanian troops to Faris Bey's service in the imperial army in the mid-19th century, it becomes clear that a provincial resolution emerged from imperial incorporation practices that went hand-in-hand with the centralization reforms. In this scheme, the imperial effort to keep the notables in exile away from their hometowns became less strictly imposed from the mid-century onward. As long as exile remained a common punishment, provincial notables subjected to this sanction faced the daunting task of reasserting their position in local politics following their displacement. Evident in this mutuality was how the imperial government and the provincial notables had steered toward partnership, the terms of which were constantly being rearranged. This partnership was what it was. It need not be associated with adjectives such as ambivalent or contingent, which stem from the systematizing expectations of the narrative of centralization, a narrative that remains keen to marginalize arrangements that contrast with the supposedly clear-cut stages of centralization.
Given the prospects of this partnership, the restoration of the notables to their homelands should not be seen as contradictory. The Ottoman amnesty (followed by amnesia) reinforced the partnership by erasing both the unruly acts of the notables and the consequent punishment of exile.Footnote 129 According to a report that the governor of Prizren, a town in modern Kosovo, penned in May 1871, it appears that Sadık Bey, Talib Bey's son, succeeded in securing an imperial pardon and permission to reside in Ohrid after his father's death in 1850.Footnote 130 Similarly, the Hazro faction of the Zirki emirs succeeded in returning to their homelands in 1864. Receb Bey's son, Yusuf Bey, restored the dynastic property confiscated three decades before and got involved with the tax farm contractsof the district.Footnote 131 Even though the individuals in question were exiled to the opposite ends of the empire, the two beys reaped the benefits of their respective prestigious patronyms.
As a provincial notable who was exiled due to his father's sentence yet managed to get back to his homeland thanks to the still-thriving prestige of the dynasty, Sadık Bey was vocally grateful to the imperial government for his appointment to the governorship of Skopje, the capital of Macedonia, in August 1856.Footnote 132 Despite the distance, he seems to have been involved in the local politics of his hometown. His service on a reform commission in 1869, along with other notables from Dibra and Peshkopi, exhibits the extent of collaboration between the notables and the government.Footnote 133
In 1870, thanks to his useful service on the commission, Sadık Bey received a promotion to the governorship of Elbasan, today a town in central Albania.Footnote 134 The skill which proved invaluable for his promotion, however, was simultaneously a hazard to be reckoned with. The governor of Prizren noted in 1871 that the bey “has many relatives and followers in Dibra and is up to a grand scheme there.”Footnote 135 “Once he completed his task of counting sheep and goats (taʿdad-ı ağnam),” the pasha added, “he should be appointed to a vacant district post in the provinces of Skopje or Prizren.”Footnote 136
When the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877–78 began, Sadık Bey was the governor of Peshkopi. According to a commission report, the bey was involved in a sort of treason when he marched to Shkoder with the irregulars under his command. Declared a traitor by the commission members, he was soon removed from office.Footnote 137 Just three years later, however, the very same bey was awarded the title of pasha following his contribution to the suppression of the League of Prizren.Footnote 138
Regardless of the preferential treatment of certain ethnic groups of the empire, which is beyond the scope of this study, the Albanian dynasty can be said to have had a higher degree of incorporation into Ottoman provincial administration than Ottoman Kurdistan. Even though descendants of the Zirki emirs reclaimed the family property they had lost in 1835, their skill in retaining the local administration was limited compared to the members of the Hoxholli dynasty. As late as 1887, Mehmed Bedri Bey, Receb Bey's grandson, was the vice-administrator (kaza muavini) of Hazro. His attempt to secure the post of administrator after the death of the previous incumbent proved ill-fated. The Ministry of Interior, in collaboration with the Commission for the Selection of Officials, ruled out the bey's appointment, claiming that he was not eligible as he was not one of the elected (müntehib) officials.Footnote 139
No matter how much the Hoxholli beys and the Zirki emirs differed in obtaining promotions within the echelons of provincial administration, both cases exhibited the extent of flexible centralization of the Ottoman provinces. A series of reforms that started as early as 1858 continued with the Provincial Reform of 1864 and became formalized with the establishment of the Commission for the Selection of Officials in 1871, formed to standardize the eligibility criteria for provincial administration.Footnote 140 Aside from the standardization, the reforms also demonstrated that employment of provincial notables by Ottoman officials depended on the circumstances in each province. They were simultaneously open to a central rule in Hazro and maintaining a local rule in the greater Dibra region. However, as the central appointment preference of the Ottoman government was not a point of no return, it did not abruptly alter the terms of employment between the provincial notables and the imperial government. Whereas Sadık Pasha was exiled to Anatolia in 1890, Seyfeddin Pasha, who was Receb Bey's son, was briefly banished from Hazro to Aleppo in 1879. At the turn of the century, however, he was a provincial pasha in his hometown.Footnote 141
The aftermath of the Russo–Ottoman Turkish war, however, severely changed the rules of the game. In addition to Albanian and Kurdish nationalisms, the triumph of the nation–states in the Balkans, particularly that of Montenegro, and the revolutionary movements of the Armenians in the Ottoman East fueled the nationalist fervors that rendered Dibra and Hazro “the shatterzones of the empire.”Footnote 142 Nationalism did not emerge out of the blue in 1878, however; its contribution to the gradual disintegration of the empire was pervasive. Notwithstanding the oft-cited fact that the Hamidian regime exploited Kurds and to a certain extent Albanians to maintain a local balance with non-Muslim subjects, the increasing ethnic and clientelist considerations also shattered the partnership that had developed between the provincial notables and the imperial government.
Conclusion
In search of the making of the modern Middle East, the current literature, with a few exceptions, relies heavily on province-level dynamics. However, there are at least two disadvantages to taking the province as a unit of analysis. First, notwithstanding the increasing emphasis on the imperial context, entertaining the notion of the province in its singularity runs the risk of a retrospective projection of nation–states onto Ottoman history. Second, the emphasis on province clouds the complicated terms of administration and transformation that took place at the lower levels.
This comparative account of Dibra and Hazro, entertaining the notion of provincial administration below the level of province, paves the way for more extensive inquiries into the transformation of 19th-century Ottoman provincial administration. The full story of Dibra and Hazro serves as a reminder that this transformation was not as straightforward as that outlined by historiographies shadowed by the narrative of centralization. The latter histories have explained the survival of provincial notables into the 19th century as an extraordinary, if not controversial, phenomenon. Evident in this understanding of the phenomenon is the presumed difference between empire and nation–state. As Steinmetz notes, however, “states are never ‘formed’ once and for all.”Footnote 143 In this ongoing formation, the provincial politics of the Ottoman Empire originated simultaneously from accommodationist practices of early modern sovereignty, rational mentalities of modern bureaucracy, and nationalist fervors. The pattern of provincial administration in Dibra and Hazro before, during, and after the Tanzimat edict highlights a flexible centralization forged by a volatile partnership between the provincial notables and the Ottoman Empire.
In addition to participation of lesser provincial notables in administration, the transregional networks established by the Hoxholli beys and the Zirki emirs banished to distant provinces of the empire conjure another form of provincial politics and force us to reconsider the prevalence of binary oppositions attributed to the making of the modern Ottoman state. As recounted in this study, the career trajectories of the Hoxholli beys and the Zirki emirs defy the generic and yet oft-cited divisions between local/provincial and central/imperial. Rather than succumbing to the myopic narrative of overrating the local nature of provincial notables or ascribing agency to the central officials, this study has shown that the transregional connections forged by notables in exile along with those they had in their homelands gave rise to a transformation in Ottoman provincial politics.
By investigating the 19th-century provincial administrations in Dibra and Hazro and the provincial power the Hoxholli beys and the Zirki emirs enjoyed in the distant provinces, this study has demonstrated the making of the modern Ottoman state while avoiding the trap of mutually exclusive interpretations. In light of the overwhelming emphasis on centralization or locality, the question of whether these arguments constitute an empire-wide phenomenon invites careful studies of other, similar dynasties and other provinces. These investigations will lead to reconsideration of the commensurability of the 19th-century transformation of Ottoman provinces, free of the shadows cast retrospectively by modernization and nationalism.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Cengiz Kırlı, Maurus Reinkowski, M. Safa Saraçoğlu, and Yaşar Tolga Cora for their valuable comments on an earlier draft of this paper. I also thank the anonymous referees and the editors of IJMES, who offered excellent criticism and suggestions.
