The following narrative investigates the intersection of state power, local political dynamics, and issues of justice, power, and capital in the coal-rich regions of the Black Sea coast in the years leading up to the 1908 Young Turk Revolution. The source for this essay, one I stumbled across during my earlier pursuit of the coal miners’ world,Footnote ¹ is a court case, one that lasted between 1905 and 1907, involving a prominent Ottoman official in the region. At the heart of the file for this case lay an investigation (istintakname) of the official, the district governor (kaymakam) of Ereğli kaza, Emin Muhlis, conducted in late August 1907. These investigations are a newly uncovered genre of sources in Ottoman history and reach down to the level of the individual subject/citizen.Footnote ² Typically, an investigating official from the central state authority interviewed persons, in a more or less formal setting, to explore complaints or incidents upsetting public order. For an Ottomanist, these investigatory documents are quite astonishing because of the intimate, first-person accounts they provide of daily life. On completion of the investigation, the official forwarded his report to a higher body for action. In this case, the report went all the way to the Council of State (Şura-yı Devlet), which reported directly to the grand vizier. The investigatory procedure was infected by a fear that critiques of a particular official's moral duplicities could become a wider questioning from below of the legitimacy of rule. In pages of testimonies acquired by the investigator, community leaders in Ereğli expressed their concern about the collapse of public morality, discipline, and order that might follow from the failings of a public official.

* * *

In the early summer of 1907, Emin Muhlis, following the investigation recounted here and his consequent dismissal as the kaymakam of Ereğli, a district on the Black Sea coast, reluctantly began planning a move to his new post in Uşak, carpetmaking capital of the late Ottoman Empire.Footnote ³ Contemporary observers—though likely not the new appointee—might have expressed surprise over his appointment as district supervisor of Uşak.Footnote ⁴ After all, the kaymakam had just been dismissed from an equivalent position under clouds of suspicion, accusation, and complaint. A centrally appointed investigator (tahkik memuru) from the sub-province (sancak), one level above that of district, had formally interrogated members of the local working, middle, and official classes about the kaymakam's public and private morality and behavior. The result of the investigation had revealed fairly concrete evidence of poor conduct during his long tenure as Ereğli's district governor.

HOW THE INVESTIGATOR CAME TO EREĞLI

By the time of the 1905 investigation, complaints about the kaymakam had been circulating within local society for at least several years. Residents of the district's numerous villages had been remonstrating to their headmen, who had sought redress through proper, routine, administrative channels. In this case, however, their observance of procedure meant they were complaining to the source of their woes—Emin Muhlis, who was the ranking official in the district, and his network of close associates, who occupied most of the district's top posts. The villagers were hardly alone in their discontent, which reached into the commercial, religious, and official circles of the town and the surrounding region. The miseries wrought by the kaymakam continued to ferment within the district's villages and its administrative center, provoking comment, complaint, resistance, and protest but no action from the state. Finally, in May 1905, a local tax farmer wrote—on his own initiative, he later would say—to the provincial governor complaining about Emin Muhlis. Emboldened, various officials and merchants made their own overtures through assorted channels. Although each person reportedly acted independently and without encouragement from the others at the outset, the various complainants then communicated among themselves about the next step. Thus, on 30 June 1905, six weeks after the tax farmer's original communiqué, a newly formed local coalition wrote a collective telegram to the grand vizier, prepared under the leadership of the notable Hacı İsmail. This petition finally prompted state action, the appointment of an investigative official. Not unlike special prosecutors of our day, such investigators were charged to learn the truth and make a recommendation to the government. In this sequence, complaints from below were repeated, amplified, compiled, and sent beyond the local source of the problems directly to the center. By then, however, the various complaints leveled by nonelite actors had been muted and filtered, as elites, whether officials or members of prominent local families, reformulated or rephrased their distress in general and formulaic terms.

The investigator, Ali Namik bin Salim, visited Ereğli for a full month. In a space of ten days, from 21 to 31 August 1905, he questioned nineteen persons about specific actions of the kaymakam.Footnote ⁵ Why he selected these nineteen individuals is not entirely clear. The inclusion of those who had written to the grand vizier seems self-evident but that of others less so. Drawn from a cross-section of Ottoman society, the nineteen formed a diverse group ranging from the rich and powerful to the very poor and weak. At the end of the 19th century, the district of Ereğli, including the town, held a total population of about 43,000 persons living in 5,400 households. Official statistics showed a large Muslim majority with a minority of about 1,000 Christians.Footnote ⁶ The town itself was more heterogeneous than the district, with higher proportions of Ottoman Christians and foreigners, attracted by the general commerce of this coastal port, which featured the only safe harbor for considerable distances in both directions, and by its coal mining industry. The presence of one Christian among the nineteen persons called upon by the investigator is proportionate to the number of Christians in the district but underrepresents their place in the economy of the town. None of the nineteen was female; whether this was typical of such investigations remains unknown. Those queried included several transport workers, three members of a powerful merchant/mining family, another local notable, several imams, a tax farmer, a café owner (gazino), a grocer, a timber merchant, and three residents of a mining village not far from Ereğli town. Some of these had prospered mightily, often thanks to the booming coal industry; others were declining in both status and wealth; and some continued to eke out meager livings from the digging or transport of coal.

Over the course of ten days, the nineteen appeared individually before the investigator, who asked each for his own account of specific events. A few fearfully feigned ignorance, but most spoke openly and poorly of Emin Muhlis. Some detailed his land grabs and plundering of public treasuries; others told how his underlings brutally mistreated and seized the taxes of the mine workers (mostly rotational laborers drawn from nearby villages) then whipped and jailed petitioning representatives of the miner-villagers. The testimonials of the nineteen fall into three groups: (1) accusations of abuse of office, embezzling funds, and brutality toward those under Muhlis’ protection; (2) accusations of personal immorality in the form of drinking and gambling; and (3) claims of ignorance regarding the actions of the kaymakam. Those providing testimonies to the investigator told the same basic story of Emin Muhlis’ misdeeds. Even those demurring were not offering a different version but rather ignorance of events. The personages of the nineteen testifiers are held here to depict Ottoman society at large, even though Ereğli was not a typical community and even though the nineteen hardly represent all or even the majority of the various elements constituting Ottoman society. (But if we do not allow ourselves the conceit of representativeness, then how can we ever build an image of the typical?)

During his visit, the investigator recorded two fluid, changing coalitions of elite forces at Ereğli, arrayed against one another in a prolonged fight for domination of the local economy. On the one side were influential local families, some with roots dating back centuries; often bitter rivals in the past, they had become allies for the present time. Aligned against them were Emin Muhlis and his dense network of supporters. His opposition to local notables on one level is hardly surprising: earlier in the century, the Istanbul government had created the position of kaymakam as a counterweight to the power of notables across the empire. But the alignments in Ereğli were not along mere local versus outsider lines. Some of the kaymakam's allies were centrally appointed officials posted to Ereğli from outside the region, while others were local residents, a number of whom held central state appointments. Ragıp Paşa, however, easily occupied pride of place among Emin Muhlis’ allies and was his patron and protector. Head of the Istanbul-based Saricazadeler, Ragıp Paşa served as imperial chamberlain in Sultan Abdülhamit's court. Although not a local resident, this prominent capitalist played a central role in the politics and economy of Ereğli as the preeminent native-born Ottoman investor in the region's burgeoning coal mining industry. As will become clear later in this essay, the struggles between these elite groups would come to dominate the focus of the investigation, eclipsing the (arguably more visceral) concerns of the major nonelite groups arrayed against the kaymakam such as imams, villager-miners, and boatmen.

EMIN MUHLIS DEVELOPS A NETWORK IN EREĞLI

Emin Muhlis arrived in Ereğli in April 1894 at age thirty-six and quickly began constructing his web of wealth. At the time of his appointment, he was one of about 35,000 full-time career civil officials serving the state and the sultan.Footnote ⁷ Unusual for an Ottoman civil official of the era, this medium-level bureaucrat was born outside of the empire, in Circassia in October 1857.Footnote ⁸ His notable (ʿumera) family followed a pattern typical of its class and provided him with private tutoring. His personnel record notes, rather vaguely, that he received education in ʿulum, which perhaps meant only the religious sciences, as well as in the principles of the Persian language. It also indicates that he had obtained the skills to be a clerk/scribe and implies that he could not speak the Turkish language fluently. Indeed, during the 1905 investigation, some would accuse him of this very weakness. In April 1877, after moving into the Ottoman Empire, he obtained his first official appointment at the tender age of twenty. He began his official career by holding an astonishing six different posts—as a clerk at various hospitals in the Balkan provinces—within twenty-four months, at the same salary.Footnote ⁹ From there, he moved up the ranks steadily, though not brilliantly. In 1885, after serving in two auditing posts connected to hospitals for a total of six years, he passed official scrutiny and became eligible for appointment as a third-class kaymakam (üçüncü sınıf kaymakamlığına intihap edilmiş). Over the next nine years, until April 1894, Emin Muhlis moved through two such posts at the same rank, followed by two posts that accompanied a promotion to a higher grade of kaymakam third class along with a 40-percent salary raise. These four positions were clustered in a region located in the central Anatolian interior just inland from the Black Sea coast. His personnel record notes that he was active in building schools, bridges, and waterworks and in suppressing banditry. Several of the district councils wrote memos of gratitude, no doubt improving his prospects. His plodding progress continued, and he received the standard decorations and regular promotions. And so, on 15 April 1894, he became our district supervisor and received a promotion to the rank of second-class kaymakam of the second degree (rütbe-yi saniye sınıf-ı saniye).Footnote ¹⁰ While in this post, he received several decorations including the notable Order of Osman third class (üçüncü rütbeden Nişan-ı Ali-yi Osmani) in recognition of his “praiseworthy service” (hidamat-ı mamduhasına mebni). His initial salary of 1,750 piasters—about 188 Ottoman liras—exceeded the sum considered necessary to maintain a family in the more expensive imperial capital during those years and thus allowed him, in theory, a comfortable life.Footnote ¹¹

In reality, any hope the newly appointed kaymakam may have had about the stability of this generous salary was quickly put to rest. Three hijra calendar years after his appointment, the salary was reduced by 10 percent.Footnote ¹² This cut probably reflected the general decline in salaries for state officials between 1894 and 1897 in response to recurring fiscal crises of the late Ottoman state.Footnote ¹³ Moreover, it seems unlikely that Emin Muhlis received even the reduced amount. Bureaucrats’ salaries in the late empire chronically fell months and even years in arrears. An Istanbul newspaper from a decade earlier had opined that officials actually received only one-half to two-thirds of their nominal salaries.Footnote ¹⁴ We have no reason to assume the kaymakam escaped this dismal norm. Standard deductions further reduced officials’ wages; these included “voluntary” contributions to various causes—such as the construction of the Hijaz Railway, the maintenance of the Ottoman navy, and the relief of refugees—as well as to their own retirement accounts, which alone equaled 6 percent of the nominal salary. It is thus impossible to determine with any precision the amounts and the regularity of the kaymakam's salary payments. Yet financial stability was improving at the end of the century, and by Ereğli standards he was earning an impressive amount even at the reduced salary—at least three times more than the highest paid skilled aboveground coal worker and five times more than a coal hewer.Footnote ¹⁵ Overall, as Emin Muhlis began his Ereğli duties, he could boast of a career that was successful and at least nominally well paid but hardly distinguished.

After arriving in the Black Sea town, Emin Muhlis’ life soon settled into a pleasant rhythm, certainly easy and comfortable by any standard. He and a few of his cronies—a list that included a reserve lieutenant, Battal Ağa; the local military regiment paymaster (alay emini); and a judge—retired to the garden of the government house to wile away the days in games of backgammon.Footnote ¹⁶ He spent many evenings with a group of friends, mainly military officers, bureaucrats, and business elites, including Halil, the most important local-born mine entrepreneur in the coalfields, from the rich and powerful Karamahmudzade family.Footnote ¹⁷ The secondary school teacher (rüşdiye hocası) Nimet Efendi hosted these evening soirees. A clerk of a porter's guild, Huseyin Ustazade Nezif Effendi, who would relentlessly seek the supervisor's removal, attested that Emin Muhlis drank heavily. According to the testimony of a local timber merchant, the kaymakam's drinking companions included clerks from various government offices.Footnote ¹⁸ Two separate testimonies collected by the investigator further detailed Emin Muhlis’ penchant for merrymaking. One of these recounted evening rounds of high-stakes gambling in the seaside neighborhood where Emin Muhlis and several of his cronies had homes.Footnote ¹⁹ The other discussed an occasion in which Emin Muhlis and several intimates went out on four rowboats mounted with lights and floated side by side along the shoreline, listening to music.

The highest ranking bureaucrats in the district also accompanied the kaymakam for days of jollity and drinking. Perhaps most notable among these revelers were Arif Paşa and his sons. Since 1901, Arif had served as the superintendent of the Ereğli Imperial Coaldistrict (Ereğli Maden-i Hümayun)—a region that overlapped with the Ereğli district overseen by Emin Muhlis—and was responsible for running the mines.Footnote ²⁰ In all, Emin Muhlis’ circle of fellow drinkers and gamblers included a paşa, members of the Karamahmudzadeler family, and at least two of the four permanent members and at least one of the four appointed members of the district administrative council. The kaymakam served as the council's president, and thus he and his cronies comprised a formidable bloc in that powerful body. The schoolteacher Nimet Efendi, whose home played a central role in the social life of the kaymakam, also served on the education council of the district. As we will see, this council became an important channel of funds for the kaymakam. Thus, Emin Muhlis’ social circle was both powerful and diverse, with Ottoman Christian and Muslim members along with some foreigners. It also featured some ostensibly less economically and politically prominent members, including workers from the sensitive and important transport sector.Footnote ²¹

Emin Muhlis’ life in Ereğli was also surprisingly prosperous, especially given his monthly salary. When his daughter married, the proud father lavished more than 300 liras on the wedding, a sum that exceeded his annual salary by more than 50 percent. On another occasion, he purchased, for 500 liras, the mansion (konak) of the female mine owner Kara Fatma at the harbor promontory and spent another 500 to 600 liras renovating it. Around 1901, he bought a flat (apartıman) in the upscale and trendy Beyoğlu quarter of Istanbul for over 2,000 liras. And in April 1905, at the time of the investigation, he was planning to spend 600 to 700 liras to purchase a tavern (meyhane) in Ereğli in the seaside neighborhood of Bozhane.Footnote ²² Emin Muhlis neither earned nor inherited his wealth. His notable family's riches had rested in titles rather than cash. As Mahmud of the prominent Karamahmudzadeler family put it, “It's known that his wealth basically is not inherited. . . . I personally know that he could not afford it [the 300 liras for the wedding] on the salary he receives.”Footnote ²³ Extortion and corruption financed and supported the kaymakam's lifestyle and property acquisitions and reached deep into local Ottoman society, affecting the rich and the poor, the urban and the rural.

The town of Ereğli was experiencing a series of jarring dislocations that may have enabled the kaymakam's greed. Coal production boomed at the end of the century and wealth was pouring into the region. Between 1897 and 1899, the coal district's output had doubled to 258,000 tons, rising again in the next year to 388,000 tons, and to an average annual production of 458,000 tons between 1901 and 1905, the year of the interrogation.Footnote ²⁴ As new coal towns such as Zonguldak further east literally sprang out of the swamps, Ereğli also profited as the result of its natural harbor and its established commercial infrastructure, both of which placed it in a prime position to benefit from the boom. The sudden influx of wealth may have seemed irresistible to Emin Muhlis, especially if he was suffering from the empire's chronic problem of paying out salaries.

ABUSES OF POWER, ACCUMULATION OF WEALTH

The testimonies collected by the investigator, as well as other information contained within the case file, provide fascinating insight into the multifold ways in which Emin Muhlis abused his power while stationed in Ereğli. These documents also suggest that his misdeeds were, more often than not, undertaken with self-enrichment in mind. His abuses of power and his illicit sources of revenue were many and included dispossession, real-estate fraud, and embezzlement. It was the kaymakam's interventions into the region's coal economy that allowed him to tap into networks of wealth and influence centered well outside Ereğli. Meanwhile, his actions negatively impacted a broad cross-section of the local population, from villager-miners to members of the local coal mining elite. The resulting powerful (if very socially stratified) array of local forces that emerged against the kaymakam sheds important light on, among other things, questions regarding the intersection of state power and capital in the late Ottoman Empire.

Four testimonies provided to the investigator by residents of the Ereğli village of Bektaşlı dealt with the usurpation of land belonging to a local Sufi lodge by a few of Emin Muhlis’ protégés. Şeyh Alimşeyhzade Ahmed served as head of the lodge and held the land with the proper paperwork (ba-tapu) for the group.Footnote ²⁵ About three years before the investigator came to Ereğli, one Karakadıoğlu Ahmed and his brother Ali from the village of Ömerli seized control of the lodge's land. According to the şeyh's testimony, he and his fellow villagers petitioned the kaymakam, under whose authority the land lay, to seek redress for the suffering they faced at the hands of Ahmed and Ali. In response the usurpers torched the guesthouse of the lodge (used for sheltering the poor), stole the lodge's chickens, scattered its beehives, and drove away the families that had worked on its lands. The şeyh again petitioned Emin Muhlis, who, the former reported to the investigator, responded angrily. As a result of the kaymakam's rebuffs, the şeyh sought redress from a higher authority, traveling to Istanbul personally to submit petitions to the minister of interior and the grand vizier.Footnote ²⁶

The şeyh's journey to the capital speaks to an important sense of rights and to the webs of relationships binding Ottoman subjects/citizens to their rulers. Such examples of village headmen, members of village councils of elders, town notables, and even common villagers petitioning the center, and presenting their requests in person in the imperial capital, abound in the history of the late Ottoman Empire.Footnote ²⁷ In an affront to this sense of justice, Emin Muhlis mocked the şeyh upon his return home, telling him to take his complaints to the local courts—an avenue the şeyh claimed was unavailable to him, as he was too poor to bear the legal fees.Footnote ²⁸ A durable seventy-year-old farmhand (rençber) and member of the lodge also spoke of the petitions sent to the kaymakam, the Ministry of the Interior, and the Grand Vizierate, all without result. Furthermore, he corroborated the şeyh's account of the thugs’ attack on the lodge, an event that left him without work.Footnote ²⁹ Meanwhile, Bektaşlı's imam and schoolteacher, Hacıoğlu Recep, provided testimony claiming that Emin Muhlis stood by as the usurper Ahmed took over the fields of the lodge.Footnote ³⁰ In a departure from the three previous testimonies regarding this incident, the Bektaşlı's headman, whose position was based on a combination of villagers’ selection and state appointment, flatly denied that the several petitions presented by the village mentioned anything about Emin Muhlis’ involvement in the land seizure. When asked again, he asserted he had no information regarding the kaymakam, was ignorant of this official's connections with the affair, and reaffirmed that nothing had been written about it. If we accept the veracity of the three separate testimonies regarding Emin Muhlis’ direct involvement in this affair cited previously, the headman's denial is dumbfounding. Not only was he a resident of the village, but by nature of his position he was also the village's spokesman and its link to the state apparatus. In this case, however, rather than defend his fellow villagers, a clearly intimidated headman protected his superior, a pattern that was not typical in the region, as we shall see.

Numerous testimonies focused on Emin Muhlis’ fraudulent real-estate machinations. These were exceptionally complex transactions and involved the kaymakam's use of multiple front men. However intricate, the goal was straightforward enough: to line his pockets. In one instance, reported by Hacıismailağazade Hakki Bey, the kaymakam suggested to the local education council that it purchase a shop (dükkan) and a plot of land (arsa) that were the subject of a dispute between two parties of local merchants. According to Hakki, despite the concerns of several council members, the purchase was approved at a cost of 125 liras. The council soon learned, however, that one of the properties’ claimants had already, through a petition to the provincial court of appeals (istinaf mahkemesi) in Kastamonu, transferred ownership to the education council gratis (meccanen). Hakki claimed that by the time this news had reached council members, the sticky-fingered kaymakam had already transferred the 125 liras from the council's coffers to his own account.Footnote ³¹ Karamahmudzade Mahmud elaborated on Hakki's interpretation of this event, claiming that Emin Muhlis himself had received the deed for the properties intended for the education council at no cost. He then proceeded to defraud the council by insisting that the gratis properties had in fact been sold at a cost of 125 liras.Footnote ³² Emin Muhlis was also known to transfer real-estate titles in order to disguise his actual ownership of numerous properties throughout the district. A spinning-wheel maker (çıkrıkçı) offered testimony revealing the complexities of these moves. The fifty-year-old father and husband resided in the Sultan Orhan quarter of the town. He asserted that he been renting his shop from the kaymakam for four years, thus exposing Emin Muhlis’ otherwise invisible ownership of the land on which this shop and those of other tenants were located.Footnote ³³

Other testimonies detailed the sundry forms of embezzlement in which Emin Muhlis and his many cronies engaged. These statements reveal the degree to which the kaymakam was willing to resort to naked violence, whether through whippings or false imprisonment, in order to line his pockets. The fifty-one or fifty-two year-old Ahmed Dedeoğlu Nuri Efendi was a tax farmer—still a critical component of imperial revenue generation, despite many attempts by the central state throughout the 19th century to abolish the tax farming system—and thus part of a vast nexus linking the provinces to the imperial capital. Given his knowledge of the local economy and tax structures, the investigator first asked him about the accuracy of the figures previously given regarding the taxes and value of the kaymakam's properties. In response to another question regarding the involvement of local government offices in oppressing the people, he answered with a lengthy discussion of the corvee for road works. Between 1891 and 1900, local villagers had been required to maintain a careful register of those giving compulsory labor for highway work. Since 1901, however, villagers instead had the option of a cash payment (fifty-eight paras). But these Ereğli-area villagers had decided to work rather than pay cash. Their wishes notwithstanding, the kaymakam's crony, reserve lieutenant Battal Ağa, arrived with troops, forcibly extorted the substitute sums from the headmen, and turned the money over to the kaymakam for his personal use. Another testifier reported hearing that Battal Ağa had whipped the headmen to extract the monies.Footnote ³⁴ As the tax farmer reported, this was one of several times that Emin Muhlis used his connections to the military for personal enrichment. Another officer named Çerkesli Mustafa took military substitute monies—sums that Ottoman Muslims could pay to avoid conscription—from two villages and surreptitiously blended them with other funds of the kaymakam. In another case, the kaymakam imprisoned a village headman who legally sought to buy his son a military service exemption. Locked up for more than twenty days, the headman finally sold his livestock and paid off the kaymakam.Footnote ³⁵

The imam of the Akarca quarter in Ereğli town offered an account of local villagers who also suffered at the hands of the kaymakam in his quest for self-enrichment. During the previous year (1904), the imam said, a local drought had caused severe shortages of food. Conditions became so dire that villagers sold their provisions and tools and stopped paying the cash taxes they owed. In such situations of extreme distress, state assistance in the late Ottoman Empire was theoretically available and came in one of two forms. Villagers could apply directly to the offices of the district supervisor, in this case Emin Muhlis, or they could seek assistance from local branches of the Agricultural Bank, a solution that still required the kaymakam's support.Footnote ³⁶ Established in 1888, the bank—the number of whose branches approached 500 by 1905—aimed to provide an empire-wide alternative to moneylenders by offering low-interest loans to cultivators. At the district level, loans generally were for three years, but special provisions existed to help victims of natural disasters receive relief loans.Footnote ³⁷ In a vivid example of how the bank sometimes failed in its responsibilities, we read that destitute villagers fruitlessly stood outside the kaymakam's home for days to obtain his support for a relief loan.

According to the imam's testimony, the villagers managed to secure other financial assistance via the bank. Among the bank's many non-agricultural functions were to receive the proceeds from a special education surtax (maʿarif iʿane hissesi) and to forward these to the Education Ministry to support educational projects.Footnote ³⁸ The nearby Zonguldak bank branch had allocated over 100 liras from this education fund to be used for villagers’ drought aid, certainly a worthy cause, if one inconsistent with the purpose of the education surtax. But, according to the imam, yet another crony of Emin Muhlis, one Mustafa Efendi, instead funneled the money to his patron. The Zonguldak municipal council, which had forwarded the money, unsuccessfully protested in court. When challenged, the kaymakam acted with characteristic brutality. Using legal means, he imprisoned, for nine days, a servant who had witnessed Mustafa Efendi's illegal action.Footnote ³⁹ Worse yet, according to another testimony, the kaymakam seized the goods and even the homes of those who had fallen behind in their taxes as a result of the drought.Footnote ⁴⁰

As noted previously, Emin Muhlis’ wealth and power were rooted primarily in the Ereğli district's burgeoning coal economy. And it was in the labor- and capital-intensive sectors of coal extraction and transportation where power, greed, and violence were felt most strongly. In Kestaneci village, near the town of Ereğli, legend has it that a returned soldier discovered coal in the 1820s, triggering a slow expansion of regional coal production over the century. While there is considerable mythology surrounding the actual discovery, the time certainly was ripe. The Ottoman fleet and factories—and those of large chunks of the world—were converting to steam, and the age of coal was evidently at hand. In the Ereğli region, coal in loose form and seams lay scattered about, requiring only the demand for an official discovery. By 1914, a region stretching about 180 kilometers along the Black Sea shores from Ereğli to the town of Amasra had become the most important source of mineral production in the Ottoman Empire. Thousands of workers laboring in several hundred mines extracted up to one million tons of coal annually, in a system that Emin Muhlis was learning to manipulate for his personal profit.

A complex state-organized labor network had evolved over the 19th century to provide mine workers. Some proletarianized labor—both Ottoman and foreign—worked in the mines. But, since 1867, the overwhelming majority of workers had not been proletarianized; they came from more than 200 villages in a specifically circumscribed region (the coal district) and worked on a rotational basis in which they remained tied to the land for much of their subsistence. Arif Paşa, the mine superintendent, presided over this district. Its residents had a legal monopoly on mine work, and villages within its borders were required to provide labor for the mines, receiving a daily wage. The workers of each village in a sense “belonged” to a certain mine and were obliged to perform a particular kind of task there. Village headmen selected villagers for the work and maintained elaborate rosters that recorded the names and days worked by the various individuals in a village. The headmen's decisions could be a life or death matter, because mine workers were exempted from Ottoman military service. The selection process was often simple, consisting of a test to see if the villager could lift a forty-six-pound stone from the ground, but favoritism played a role as well. By the time of the investigation, this system was reaching the end of its fourth decade, and yet workers remained in chronically short supply.Footnote ⁴¹

In the Ottoman chain of command, Emin Muhlis, as Ereğli district official, oversaw the mining villages and their labor supplies. His task was to distribute the various forms of labor provided to him by the headman in the quantities needed by Arif Paşa, the mine superintendent. According to the testimonies, the kaymakam sought to pervert the system. He entered into an illegal and undisclosed arrangement to divert workers from their usual mines by ordering the headman of four villages to send mineworkers under their control to several labor-short mines of Ragıp Paşa, the most important native-born Ottoman mine operator in the region.Footnote ⁴² In particular, he told the headmen to stop sending them to the mine of Karamahmudzade Halil, the scion of the most important local mining family, one with deep roots in the region. Thus, the kaymakam was pitting the fortunes of the locally important Karamahmudzade family, with whom he had previously cultivated close relations, against those of Ragıp Paşa, whose power derived from outside the region (Istanbul). But the four headmen (unlike the one in the Sufi village who protected the kaymakam at the expense of his co-villagers) refused the kaymakam's order; each of them prepared a written response asserting his own final authority in providing workers to mines. Emin Muhlis had the headmen locked in a strong room and kept them there for weeks. In an action that spoke of an arrogant assurance in his own power, the kaymakam wrote to the jailed headmen and promised that they would remain there until they obeyed him and ordered the workers to Ragıp Paşa's mines. For his part, mine operator Karamahmudzade Halil told the investigator that the kaymakam was neglecting his own duties and merely acting as an advocate for Ragıp Paşa.Footnote ⁴³

Although not among those giving testimony in 1905, one of the more noteworthy complaints in the case file against Emin Muhlis came from Eregli's boatmen. Their April 1907 petition to the Council of State (sent less than a month before the kaymakam's transfer) chronicled Emin Muhlis’ efforts to impinge upon their privileges and co-opt the power of the boatmen's guild over the transportation sector, which was integral to the smooth functioning of the district's coal economy.

In some respects, the handling of coal along the coast had undergone a rigorous mechanization, thanks to substantial investments on the part of entrepreneurs such as the French-financed Ereğli Company and Ragıp Paşa. Coal scrubbers and, especially, the new Zonguldak port with its sheltering breakwater, greatly facilitated coal processing and transport. Despite the mechanization that is often, if often incorrectly, assumed only to take away jobs, the vast expansion of production also meant more work for the boatmen whose small twenty- to thirty-ton ships worked all along the coal coast. In highly labor-intensive operations, boatmen loaded coal from docks and piers on the shore, bringing it either to larger ships waiting offshore or to the sheltered ports of Zonguldak and Ereğli. They received higher rates per ton in winter than in summer, the precise sum varying according to whether the destination was a port or a ship. In addition, they obtained a year-round fixed daily sum for provisions (nan bedeli). These boatmen belonged to a cohesive guild that sought to monopolize the work and guard against exploitation seeping in from every quarter, including from their own officers and Ottoman officials. The Ereğli boatmen were doubly unfortunate since they had to struggle against both their guild warden, nominally there to protect them, and Emin Muhlis, whose duties similarly should have been protective in nature.

The abuses they endured were real enough. Their 1907 petition described collusion between the guild warden (kethüda) Sulu Kadir and Emin Muhlis that resulted in lost boats and wages and control of the workplace. They had seven years’ worth of registers showing how they paid extortionate prices at a store and suffered physical violence at the hands of their warden, who threw one complaining boatman through a door. They recounted how they worked a coal ship without pay because the warden kept their wages for himself and how, for three years, he pocketed other monies rightfully theirs. In the seven years since his appointment as guild warden in 1900, Sulu Kadir had become a wealthy man in office, much like the kaymakam, his rival-ally in extortion. The boatmen asserted that Sulu Kadir had been a mere porter and obtained his warden's post through the intervention of an unnamed patron in the Maritime Ministry. (It seems overly coincidental that the year of his appointment, 1900, coincides with the rise of Ragıp Paşa to prominence as a coalfield entrepreneur.) The boatmen noted that Kadir had possessed no prior wealth except for the house of his ancestors. As legal compensation for his duties, during his first four years in office, they said, he annually received 20 percent of the boatmen's wages, a share cut to 10 percent in 1903 and 1904. Nonetheless, the wealth piled up and by 1907 comprised a total of 4,000 to 5,000 liras, a truly vast sum for such a position. His salary depended on the boatmen's wages, but his wealth, they charged, drew from other, less legitimate, sources.

As the coal business expanded sharply around the turn of the century, so did the stakes over control of moving coal over the water. A merchant named Pavlaki, the boatmen, the warden, and Emin Muhlis—to name just those uncovered by this research—each sought to gain a monopoly. The boatmen fended off Pavlaki with relative ease, appealing successfully to the kaymakam and the Ministry of Mines to deny the needed permissions. But when they submitted their grievances against the warden Sulu Kadir, Emin Muhlis concealed these from the provincial governor. Indeed, the kaymakam and the warden, while each seeking to dominate the transport trade, worked together here. The warden, for his part, paid off the kaymakam to gain the use of certain boats and gained control of other boats with the latter's acquiescence. Otherwise rivals, the warden and Emin Muhlis worked closely to assure the necessary boats for Ragıp Paşa's mines, in which the kaymakam had a share. In the process, the warden enriched himself and de facto took ownership of a number of boats. Their connections had become social as well as financial. The warden's mother (valide) and her family frequently visited Emin Muhlis’ home, actions that must have raised the warden's social status. And when the provincial governor visited Ereğli, the warden and his family must have been deeply honored to host this important official in their home. This visit is suggestive of the wider nexus of social relations that connected the kaymakam and his network to the powerful Ragıp Paşa. Recall that the paşa had been able to overturn nearly forty years of practice that restricted much coalfield work to coalfield residents and that he did so thanks to the intervention of the provincial governor, who enjoyed the hospitality of the guild warden. The governor's stay at the warden's home was no coincidence but was rather reflective of the warden's ties to Emin Muhlis and in turn to the paşa. Thus, the boatmen were struggling not only against Emin Muhlis but also against their own warden, whose power and wealth were intimately linked to his connections to the kaymakam and, through him, to the most powerful Ottoman capitalist in the coalfields, Ragıp Paşa.Footnote ⁴⁴

LOCAL NOTABLES, STATE CAPITALISTS, AND THE PRICE OF “PROGRESS” IN THE EREĞLİ COALFIELDS

Emin Muhlis’ actions directly affected the lives of local elites and nonelites alike, albeit with degrees of severity inversely proportional to class status and political influence. His self-identified victims ranged from farmhands and boatmen to some of the region's most powerful and influential families. Yet, the attention this case received—generating a case file consisting of hundreds of documents—reflects the fact that Emin Muhlis’ actions played out within an even broader historical tableaux that was dominated by conflicts around power, wealth, and control over the region's bountiful and increasingly profitable coal deposits. Initially, these struggles had primarily involved local notable families, but over the course of the 19th century they began to involve actors at the imperial and global levels.

Nearly a century before the investigation of the kaymakam, two notable families of the region were battling over the new coal resources that held such a promising future. The winners went on to prosperity and influence, and the losers slipped into a genteel cocoon of soft power. During the 1820s, the ultimate victors of our local contest, the family of the sons of Kara Mahmud (Karamahmudzadeler), appeared to be the weaker party. Their rivals, the family of the sons of Hacı İsmail (Hacıismailoğulları), were local officials of real influence and seemed to be better placed to take advantage of the new era. Indeed, one version of the discovery story credits a Hacı İsmail family member with the original discovery, one that led nowhere. As luck would have it, readily accessible deposits were located in a particular Ereğli-area village controlled by the Karamahmudzade family. And so, when that discovery was announced and bore results, the Hacı İsmail clan, angered by the sudden enrichment of their rivals, allegedly murdered the discoverer. Subsequently, the Karamahmudzade family became the most influential family in the Ereğli region, based on its possession of many of the richest and most accessible mines. In the late 1870s, for example, Halil of the Karamahmudzade family held the prestigious duty of buying sheep for the Ramadan celebrations in the coalfield.Footnote ⁴⁵ By the end of the 19th century, one brother was a member of the Ereğli district council while another sat on the Ereğli city council. The Hacı İsmail family is less visible in the record, but it also prospered in the trade, providing timber for the mines.Footnote ⁴⁶

Eight decades after their initial struggle over access to the riches of the coalfields, the two families again were intertwined but this time in alliance against Emin Muhlis. Three members of the Karamahmudzade family appeared before the investigator, a measure of their power and influence, while only one Hacı İsmailoğlu member was questioned. Their combined testimonies provided the greatest volume of detail regarding the kaymakam's illicit activities, financial and otherwise. Furthermore, their words did not hide the deep disregard in which they held Emin Muhlis. Hacıismailağazade Hakki Bey, whose testimony was perhaps the longest of those provided to the investigator, purported to speak on behalf of the entire community, Christian and Muslim alike. His knowledge of a host of arcane fiscal issues and his intimate awareness of the kaymakam's abuses of power indicated his family's still considerable prestige and deep involvement in community affairs.

As mentioned previously, Hakki had drafted the 30 June 1905 telegram to the grand vizier that finally triggered the interrogation proceedings about the kaymakam. In his own testimony, Hakki categorically condemned Emin Muhlis, from all sides—fiscal, administrative, and moral. He excoriated the kaymakam for his wanton use of the sources of local wealth for personal enrichment and enumerated the many properties illegally acquired.Footnote ⁴⁷ His and other statements demonstrate the kaymakam's meticulous and painstaking use of the smallest revenue sources to accumulate wealth. Hakki also sympathetically detailed the imprisonment of the village headmen who continued to insist that their villages owed mine labor to Karamahmudzade Halil and not Ragıp Paşa. He even pointed out the jailing of Halil's shepherd. By defending the rights of his once and future enemy of the Karamahmudzade family, Hakki was allying with him against this new threat from outside and asserting a claim to leadership of the local community. Indeed, he called for justice for all of the “wretched and oppressed people of Ereğli.”Footnote ⁴⁸

Three members of the Karamahmudzade family appeared before the investigator, each offering information of a very specific nature, unlike Hakki's wide-ranging remarks. The first was a junior member of the clan, twenty-year-old Mehmet from Ereğli. His striking testimony detailed the shame and humiliation that he had brought upon himself, a member of the leading local family, through his participation in bouts of jollity, drinking, and gambling. He revealed the identities of many of Emin Muhlis’ cronies and provided extensive detail regarding their and the kaymakam's carousing behavior.Footnote ⁴⁹ Another member of the Karamahmudzadeler clan, Mahmud Bey, offered testimony that began with an assault on Emin Muhlis’ character and ended with arcane financial details. He contemptuously dismissed the kaymakam's professional training as inadequate and claimed that Emin Muhlis had mishandled his earlier assignments and had risen through incompetence. Settling in Ereğli, he had become uncontrolled and abusive, acquiring a wealth well beyond that which could be justified by his salary or family wealth. Mahmud proceeded to provide meticulously detailed testimony regarding Emin Muhlis’ many alleged misdeeds. In his recounting of the affair involving the kaymakam's illegal redirecting of mine labor, Mahmud explicitly linked Emin Muhlis and his actions to Ragıp Paşa, claiming that the kaymakam's primary allegiance was to the paşa and not to his responsibilities as the district's chief official. Finally, Karamahmudzadeler Halil, whose testimony was among the shortest collected by the investigator, provided a reminder of the kaymakam's notorious cruelty by telling the account of Emin Muhlis’ mistreatment of the headmen who chose to defy his orders regarding the provisioning of labor to the mines of Ragıp Paşa.

Despite the variety in the language and structure of the four testimonies, their content reflects the shared disdain for Emin Muhlis and his behavior among these erstwhile rival families. However, the kaymakam was not the primary source of their anxieties, which is unmentioned in these statements. Rather, the increasing enmeshing of state power and outside (non-local) capital, both foreign and Ottoman, posed the greatest challenge to these local elite families’ sources of livelihood. Reflecting on these interrogations and the events they uncover, I was surprised that the most powerful actor and influence in this drama was hardly visible in the case file. Emin Muhlis certainly is the central visible figure, and the uproar occasioned by his behavior motivated both the investigator's visit and the broader case of which the testimonies he collected are but a part. The kaymakam’s role in what is arguably the most important storyline in our drama, the conflict over the region's coal economy, however, is that of a subordinate acting at the beck and call of the true central character—Ragıp Paşa. The paşa is scarcely present in the archival documentation used for this article and is usually mentioned in a factual manner when the specific issue of his mines is discussed. Invisible, yes, but he is the actor around whom the drama turned, the force driving the actions of the kaymakam. More important, his background, connections to power, and immense wealth embodied the forces driving the upheavals transforming the economy and society of the district and the conflicts they helped to bring about.

This late Ottoman capitalist truly was a powerful personage. Born into a family from the island of Euboea, he received one of the best educations available, graduating from the Galatasarayı School and then the School of Civil Service (Mülkiye Mektebi), two Istanbul institutions responsible for training much of the late Ottoman elite. He reached a position very near the apex of power in the Ottoman world, serving as a chamberlain of the sultan for nearly three decades.Footnote ⁵⁰ In the years around 1900, some 17,000 military and civil personnel rotated in and out of service at the Yildiz Palace of Sultan Abdülhamit,Footnote ⁵¹ and fewer than ten of these were chamberlains (kurena), persons in the very inner circle of the monarch, his advisors, and confidants. During the reign of Abdülhamit II, the sultan personally chose the chamberlains and, at some date before 1880, selected Ragıp Paşa, then known only as Ragıp Bey.Footnote ⁵² Over the years he served the sultan in countless ways large and small; for example, on one occasion, he co-led (with the well-known Izzet Paşa) an investigation into a fire that had wracked the palace.Footnote ⁵³ Benefiting from his place at the very center of political power and influence, he enjoyed successes in business and actively participated in the major commercial centers of the capital; among other enterprises, he founded the Umurca Rakı Factory in Tekirdağ. He owned countless farms and apartments. His ability to pay 105,000 gold liras for a home in an emerging elite and fashionable suburb (Caddebostan), where his neighbors included Ottoman and international financial and political leaders, indicates the depth of his wealth.Footnote ⁵⁴

In 1900, Ragıp Paşa dramatically entered the coal mining business, purchasing the rights to seventeen mines and obtaining control over a number of vacant mines. The timing, immediately following the entry of the French-financed Ereğli Company into the coalfields and a very sharp rise in the production of coal, was no coincidence. Given the sultan's deep concerns over European capital investments in the empire, one can readily imagine the monarch urging on his chamberlain. Ragıp Paşa's Sarıcazadeler Company quickly became a major mining force and technological leader. Within a short time, it was the second largest operation in the coal district, surpassed only by the much larger French-owned Ereğli Company. Ragıp Paşa's use of personal connections may appear to the present-day reader as corruption (as it did to some of his European contemporaries), but it actually conformed to the standard behavior of the age, when government and private capital acted more openly in tandem. Consider the example of the Wilhelmine state and the financing of the Anatolian and Baghdad railways or, closer to our story, the go-for-broke French support for the Credit Lyonnais’ Ottoman coal mine venture. It seems clear, however, that Ragıp Paşa's economic successes were closely tied to a more brittle political regime than those of his European capitalist counterparts, and his fate was bound to that of the sultan.

While in power, Ragıp Paşa constructed a coalfield network of allies and protégés to promote his economic interests that may have eventually reached as high as the governor of Kastamonu province, Nazim Paşa.Footnote ⁵⁵ It is not known when Emin Muhlis fell under his sway, but, as seen, the kaymakam proved to be an effective instrument in aiding the expansion of the paşa's coal mining operations given the former's key political position in the coalfield. Even with the kaymakam's reassignment to Uşak in May 1907, and the eventual exit of Ragıp Paşa from the coalfields shortly after the Young Turk Revolution, no one really won final victory or suffered permanent defeat in this battle between local and imperial contenders for wealth. The Karamahmudzade and Hacıismailoğlu families continued to face the power of outside capital.Footnote ⁵⁶ And the deck remained stacked in the favor of outsiders even after Emin Muhlis’ departure. Recall Emin Muhlis’ attempt to siphon workers away from their legally designated mines to those of Ragıp Paşa and his sons. That effort marked the entrepreneur's desperate search for labor for his expanding mine operations. In the months following the investigator's visit in summer 1905, Ragıp Paşa lobbied intensively within the imperial and provincial governments for a loosening of the labor regulations to allow the use of mine workers from outside the coalfield district. He won that battle, but despite access to the new sources of mine workers, labor scarcities continued to plague his operations and those of others seeking to exploit the wealth of the coal district's vast reserves.Footnote ⁵⁷

The conflict between the interests of local notables such as the Hacı İsmail and Karamahmudzade families and those of Emin Muhlis and Ragıp Paşa was but a microcosm of a much broader, empire-wide struggle over wealth. The imperial government as well as local and foreign investors separately and together were introducing impressive technological and institutional improvements, producing a steadily more rational state administration and an improving and expanding economic infrastructure. Opportunities for wealth were arising on every side. For Ottoman society as a whole the basic question emerged of who would profit and control the ongoing accumulation. And the testimonies offer a picture of a profoundly corrupted system in which public monies and posts were turned to private profit, a system in which few seemed to do their jobs without recourse to rake-offs and extortion or skimming.Footnote ⁵⁸

Within this context, Emin Muhlis’ willingness to so flagrantly use the powers of his office to the benefit of Ragıp Paşa helped drive a diverse array of actors in Ereğli into an alliance of voices clamoring to the central state for justice and protection. The presence of the locally prominent Hacı İsmail and Karamahmudzade families, among other elite groups in the coalition of forces aligning against the kaymakam, no doubt explains why the state took this case seriously enough to conduct an investigation that lasted almost two years. In the eyes of these local elites, Emin Muhlis’ primary sin was to ally with Ragıp Paşa against the local power brokers and capitalists. Yet, such a view was hardly representative of the entire coalition of complainants that helped to initiate the case against Emin Muhlis. Before concluding, it is important to remember that the testimonies collected by the investigator dispatched by Istanbul drew from a diverse, if not completely representative, subsection of Ereğli society. Hacı İsmail's pleas on behalf of the “wretched and oppressed people of Ereğli” notwithstanding, the complaints and testimonies proffered by nonelite groups demonstrate the gap that separated their experiences of Emin Muhlis’ misdeeds, and of the economic and political forces of which his actions were a part, from those of their elite counterparts. For these accusers—dislocated Sufi agriculturalists, merchants, villagers and their headmen, miners, boatmen—the kaymkam’s corrupt behavior was a force that interfered with and even prevented the flow of their everyday lives. The type of justice and protection they sought in giving their statements and complaints was no doubt informed by their own class positions as the rapidly changing political economy of the coalfield impinged on their livelihoods in a manner unfathomable to the Hacıismailoğlu and Karamahmudzade families.

EPILOGUE

The inconclusive conclusion of this sordid and messy affair illustrates the profound ambiguities wracking Ottoman society and state in their final years. The investigatory process, as best as can be seen from our vantage point, was thorough and objective. Indeed, in the proceedings themselves, the investigator (seemingly impartially) embedded questions about his own presence and connections to the accused that placed him in a questionable light. He formally asked, for example, when “the investigator came from the sub-province, what measures were taken for him, what hospitality did he receive?” The respondent candidly stated that the official traveled with his family and stayed for two nights in Emin Muhlis’ mansion (konak). He enjoyed his company, and he and his family also were guests of one of the kaymakam’s leading cronies and the head secretary (tahrirat katibi) for two nights.Footnote ⁵⁹ Despite such seemingly dubious behavior, when the investigator asked Karamahmudzade Mahmud to speak on the subject, the notable praised the investigator, saying he had worked tirelessly: he came to investigate tyranny and worked day and night, not eating or drinking while carrying out his investigations; he was known in every corner of the district.

Overall, the testimonies gathered were condemnatory of Emin Muhlis, his cronies, and the evils they were bringing upon the inhabitants of the wider Ereğli region as well as the town residents. As a direct result of the investigations, the kaymakam's superiors in Istanbul arranged for his transfer, to an equivalent post, in the district of Uşak, an exchange that brought the Uşak district official to Ereğli.Footnote ⁶⁰ Hardly a punitive measure, the exchange appears from this vantage point as a moral compromise, a refusal to intervene decisively but an action that involved some punishment for the misconduct. In one reading, it seems consistent with the policies of the late Ottoman state that often merely slapped miscreant members of the elite on their wrists. Thus, the local forces and their allies were able to remove Emin Muhlis, while Ragıp Paşa's family lost its advocate and local instrument. The exchange would have given the kaymakam a new life and open future. The price, however, would have been steep: separation from his cronies and his patron's mineral wealth and his carefully cultivated sources of extra-official income, including the rake-offs, thefts, embezzlements, and land frauds.

* * *

To Donald Quataert, the eyewitness and expert testimonies made Emin Muhlis’ guilt eminently clear. After the investigator's visit ended (with a testy exchange with the kaymakam) the case went forward, generating many hundreds of pages as correspondence flowed among many state agencies. On 6 April 1906Footnote ⁶¹ and again on 2 September 1907,Footnote ⁶² the Council of State presented the case to the grand vizier. The first document, encapsulating two summaries dating to 1905, reviews thirteen particulars, detailing them in a more or less neutral manner. Overall, the review makes clear that the verdict was still out and that Emin Muhlis was facing a variety of allegations.

Just over a year later, in September 1907, the Council of State again presented the case, this time offering its own conclusions to the grand vizier in series of lengthy statements. The council deferred to provincial authorities on seven of the forty-two accusations and turned to the remaining thirty-five. In point after point, the council addressed the allegations—including Emin Muhlis’ embezzlement of miners’ wages, his acceptance of bribes from the general populace, and the use of Agricultural Bank monies intended for drought relief. Other accusations discussed his drinking and the behavior of his front man, Eftim Efendi, in siphoning off public funds intended for a public watering system and in using educational funds to buy land for the kaymakam. Similarly, one allegation reported his demand for bribes when appointing village headmen and another spoke of the now-familiar henchman Battal Ağa's collection of military substitute monies for the kaymakam. Sometimes, vignettes are presented that offer rare glimpses of provincial life. Thus we read that local authorities disregarded general imperial policies and destroyed a Muslim cemetery during road building; they then used the stones to reinforce a pier that had been damaged by heavy seas. Or, consider the seventy to eighty Muslims who boarded a ship at Kozlu to be with their families at Ereğli during one of the holy days and drowned when the “Galata” sank while under tow.

The content of this second Council of State report is quite astonishing. In allegation after allegation, the council summarized the charges against Emin Muhlis, reporting accurately as best as can be determined. And upon reviewing each allegation, the council again and again concluded with the judgment that either additional information was lacking or the kaymakam could not be held responsible for the event that had transpired. In its final paragraph of the report to the grand vizier, the council concluded that either the charges were unconnected to the kaymakam or could not be proven, and thus that responsibility could not be established and brought before a court. And so, Emin Muhlis was found innocent.Footnote ⁶³

Donald Quataert found the conclusion preposterous and fully contradictory of the evidence offered during the ten-day interrogations. None of the facts gathered during the investigation were denied in the council's review. Rather, he continued, it glossed over, ignored, or explained them away. Moreover, the council sidestepped the issue that the kaymakam, as the chief state official in the district, was responsible and accountable for the actions of many of the individuals named in the allegations. Clearly, Ragıp Paşa was intervening to protect his protégé. And, remarkably, he could cause even the Council of State to ignore the abundant evidence and produce a conclusion that violated the prevailing sense of morality and justice.Footnote ⁶⁴ Ragıp Paşa would soon find his ability to influence imperial politics severely curtailed, however. He immediately felt the impact of the Young Turk Revolution that ended the autocratic rule of his patron, Sultan Abdülhamit II. Although a number of chamberlains retained their posts, Ragıp Paşa was dismissed within a few months of the revolution.Footnote ⁶⁵ Bereft of his official ties to the sultan and court, he promptly withdrew from the mining business.Footnote ⁶⁶

This story about the kaymakam and his unjust and corrupt behavior was originally intended to be part of a larger work examining the social and political context of the Young Turk Revolution. It was Quataert's hope to challenge the long-standing tendency within Ottoman historical writing to place primary agency for the overthrow of Abdülhamit II with the small cadre of military officers, intellectuals, and bureaucrats most often associated with the Young Turk movement. Rather, he hoped to show how dynamics operating outside of the centers of Ottoman political and economic power contributed to the ancien regime's loss of legitimacy among (especially) nonelite and provincial populations. Although he gradually moved away from this focus, new work on the period surrounding the 1908 revolution points to the validity of his earlier thinking.Footnote ⁶⁷ Donald Quataert's historical inclinations were to believe that it was not so coincidental that the regime of Abdülhamit would be swept away just a year after Emin Muhlis' acquittal.

On a final note, it is perhaps a touching irony that Quataert passed away on the night before Husni Mubarak relinquished power, unleashing waves of unrestrained jubilation in Cairo's Tahrir Square. Indeed, the strengthening nexus between state power and capital in the modern era, and the perversion of justice that often resulted from this process (demonstrated so clearly in the story of Emin Muhlis and his time in the coal-rich district of Ereğli), could no longer be borne by the people of Egypt and their counterparts in Tunisia, Bahrain, Yemen, and elsewhere. From the little corner of Eregli in the Ottoman Empire at the turn of the 20th century to the world of the 21st century, we see the power of greed and the needs of capital trumping the power of justice and the needs of human beings. Perhaps the story of Ereğli kaymakam can serve as a parable regarding the follies of such an unequal and unjust system.