Bedouin Bureaucrats: Mobility and Property in the Ottoman Empire by Nora Elizabeth Barakat (review)

Османи на трьох континентах, пер. з турецьк. О. Кульчинського

Throughout its modern history, Russia was more frequently at war with the Ottoman Empire than with any other power. Russo-Ottoman wars took place between the late 17th and the late 19th centuries and were paralleled by other forms of contact, including captivity, religious pilgrimages, diplomacy, and later tourism and scientific exploration. (1) The intensity of this interaction is reflected in the voluminous literature about the Ottoman Empire that was published in Russian before 1917. (2) Russian and translated Western accounts of captivity, religious and secular travelogues, memoirs, and statistical descriptions are noteworthy not only because they were numerous, but because before the (remarkably late) appearance of osmanistika as a separate branch of Orientalist science devoted to Ottoman Turkey, these nonscholarly writings contained the quasi-totality of Russian knowledge about the rival empire. (3) Aimed at a wide audience, these materials can plausibly be taken as evidence of more or less widespread assumptions that educated Russians held about Ottoman Turkey at least until the 1840s, when there appeared the first general descriptions written by professional Orientalists for nonspecialists. (4) By virtue of their sheer number, these publications constituted the basic horizon for those who engaged in highbrow intellectual discussions as well as for those who limited themselves to the passive reading of thick journals and newspapers. Through them, the Ottoman Empire emerged as an element of the mental background against which Russian intellectuals later discussed their country's relation to and Europe. (5) An analysis of these sources is timely for at least two reasons. First, contacts with Ottoman Turkey constitute an aspect of of the that remains unappreciated in the modern historiography of Russian Orientalism. In the wake of the important work that has been done on Russia's own in the last 15 years, it might be worthwhile to turn to the Orient beyond the empire's borders in order to describe its function in the Russian imperial imagination. (6) Second, discussions of Russian views of Europe and Asia are sometimes too quick to subsume actual political entities under these rather problematic categories. Before the Orient became a space of European colonial dominance (in which Russia had its own share), it bore the concrete name of Ottoman (Persian, Manchu) Empire and constituted a formidable, if diminishing, military challenge. The problem to be addressed is precisely how Orientalist discourse came to structure the perception of one continental empire by the elite of another. (7) This article examines the Orientalization of the Ottoman Empire in Russian literature before the middle of the 19th century and its role in the articulation of modern Russian identity. The symbolic construction of a rival empire as the Orient served to sustain the representation of Russia as part of Europe against claims to the contrary. This perception of the Other did not emerge overnight. Instead, it crystallized gradually in the context of the Russian elite's conscious and systematic search for models that resulted in Westernization. Launched by Peter the Great, this process led to the discovery of differences between the empire of the sultans and other powers. These differences, in turn, served as the basis for the Orientalization of Ottoman Turkey that occurred under the combined impact of the Russo-Ottoman wars and of the Russian elite's growing familiarity with Western accounts of the Ottoman Empire. The wars demonstrated the superiority of the European military models adopted by Peter and his successors, while translations of French and British Orientalist texts provided the language to articulate this new sense of superiority. At some point, Russian accounts of the Ottoman Empire started to follow closely the Western model of Orientalist description. …

Spanish and Ottoman empires had more similarities that could be found at first glance. Both experienced the take-off as leading force in Europe and Asia respectively, being for a while the most fearful and powerful states during XVI, faced economic and political blunders in XVII century and slightly ended with stagnation in XVIII century (as conventional wisdom says). Using comparative method and cultural analysis, article tries to answer a question – how unique or regular was that issues which stroke Spain and Ottoman Empires, how deeply they were engaged in so called decline narrative, created in XIX century European historiography and is it possible to create common trend for empire`s stagnation using not only historical sociology method (sociology of revolution used by Jack Goldstone and Teda Skocpole) and world-system analysis provided by Immanuel Wallerstein, with emphasis on history of ideas or begriffsgeschichte by Reinhardt Kosseleck. Main results are going to provide a more correct view on the status of Spanish and Turkish Empires during the XVIII century. Despite that Ottomans and Spaniards had obvious differences in political distribution, economic capabilities, warfare tactics and external actions, almost simultaneous decline was based on clear and exact reasons: lack of industrialization (production with high surplus value), hush incorporation of Ottoman and Spanish Empires into World-Economy, lack of defending tariffs, ineffective fiscal system and policy, devastating and lasting wars, decreasing price for agricultural products, down warding Kondratieff cycle, rigid political and social units, which constrain strict political actions. These gaps made the Empire’s decline possible notwithstanding those problems which they had previously. Oppositely, major European states (England, France, Prussia) had made reversed actions, which took a long time, but made European “take-off” inevitable, assured their economical breakaway to further domination over the Ottomans and Spaniards as well.

Spaces of Entanglement Andreas Kappeler (bio) The imperial turn, which for the past 25 years has directed the attention of historians toward empires, may have lost its first impetus, but as the journals Ab Imperio and Kritika as well as recent collective volumes and research projects have shown, it is by no means spent. The collapse of the Soviet Union initially revived interest in Edward Gibbon's question about "the decline and fall" of empires, but "imperiology" has since passed from explaining the breakdown of empires to asking not why they collapsed but how they survived for centuries, how they were organized and structured, and how imperial rule was established and maintained. Scholars have abandoned the metaphor of the "prison of peoples" for a more affirmative position that stresses the relatively peaceful coexistence of diverse peoples and societies under the rule of one dynasty, in contrast to the murderous history of the nation-state. This has led to various comparative projects, monographs, and collective volumes. Studies that examine the Romanov and Ottoman empires include Dominic Lieven's pioneering book as well as comparative projects and collective volumes edited by Alexei Miller, Alfred Rieber, and Kimitaka Matsuzato.1 These and other studies are mostly not comparative in the strict sense, however, but instead juxtapose chapters or articles on each of two or more empires and attempt a comparison only in the introduction and conclusion. Thus the potential of comparative history is far from exhausted. The most recent comparative study is the ambitious and stimulating Empires in World History by Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper. It encompasses a very long period from the ancient Roman and Chinese empires to the 20th century, including the Ottoman and Romanov empires, and places world history into an imperial framework: "Empires in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as in [End Page 477] the sixteenth, existed in relation to each other." Questions of "imperial intersections," competition, and imitation are thus included.2 By adopting this orientation, the work reflects a new trend in "imperiology" that asks about contacts and interactions between empires. This new direction is connected with a trend in historical sciences toward cultural transfers, transnational history, histoire croisée, and shared or entangled history. The first such studies concerned the interactions between the Western maritime empires and between France and Germany; later ones examined those between Germany and Poland and between Germany and Russia (for example, the special issue of Kritika on Germany and Russia in the first half of the 20th century).3 The histoire croisée of the Russians and Ottomans has been neglected so far, despite its importance for both empires. It lasted at least five centuries, longer than the relations Russia had with any other empire. Their interactions were shaped initially by a competition for the heritage of the Byzantine and Mongol empires and by a military, political, and cultural preponderance of the Ottomans. During the 18th century, the balance of power was reversed and the relationship was characterized by numerous wars, most of them ending with Russian victories. One recent publication includes six contributions on the Ottoman Empire, six on the Russian Empire, and one (by Marsha Siefert) comparing communications in both empires. Although the book's title is Comparing Empires, the subtitle is about "encounters and transfers." The interactions concern, however, mainly transfers from Western Europe to the Ottoman and Romanov empires; direct Russo-Ottoman entanglements are treated only sporadically.4 In 2010, the first collective volume devoted to the entangled history of the Russian Empire with other empires was published. It is focused on cultural transfers from the West European empires to Russia, considered here as a European "imperium inter pares." Only two articles touch on the Ottoman dimension. Vladimir Bobrovnikov compares the experiences of Russia in the Caucasus and of France in Algeria—two regions, parts of which had formerly been under Ottoman rule—and looks for interactions between the two colonial powers as well as borrowings from the Ottomans. A case study on Bessarabia [End Page 478] by Andrei Kushko and Victor Taki deals directly with the Russo-Ottoman entanglement in the border region of Bessarabia.5 Whether the Ottoman Empire, too, was an "imperium inter...

Empire by Law: Ottoman Sovereignty and the British Occupation of Egypt, 1882-1923 Aimee M. Genell This dissertation is an analysis of the Ottoman-European legal contest over Egypt. I explore the relationship between international law, imperial expansion and state formation in the late Ottoman Empire against the joint reconfiguration of ideas of sovereignty and imperial control during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The British occupation of Egypt (1882-1914) was a novel experiment in quasi-colonial administration, where legal justifications for the occupation demanded the retention of Ottoman institutions and shaped administrative practices. My research examines the significance and consequences of maintaining Ottoman sovereignty in Egypt during the British occupation in an effort to explain the formation of a distinctive model of sovereignty, both for late empires and for successor states in the post-Ottoman Middle East. I argue that a new model of client-state sovereignty, produced during the course of the occupation, emerged out of the intense imperial rivalry between the Ottoman and Europe Empires in Egypt. This model had lasting significance more generally for how we define states and sovereignty today. These findings recast the Ottoman Empire as a major, albeit weak, actor in European diplomacy. Though Ottoman and European history have developed as separate fields of academic inquiry, my research shows that nineteenth and early twentieth century European and Ottoman political practices and ideas were inextricably intertwined. The Ottoman Empire contributed to and was perhaps the key testing ground for enduring political and administrative experiments in the post-imperial international order.

The point of origin in the comparison of the Ottoman Empire and the Russian Empire were not as different from each other unlike the similarities. Both empires has chosen to shape with their own internal dynamics and enclosed social life over the years. In addition, they have taken samples the West as their model for modernization. These Empires have been described as “other” by Western because of “Islam” in Ottoman Empire and “Orthodoxy” in Russian Empire. Similar social patterns, political unrest and modernization moves has been the starting point of the study. The study referred to in the title of “comparison” did not include the concept of the just determination of similarity. Although both empires have many similarities, there were many striking differences each other. The most obvious differences in etymologic, Ottoman bureaucracy designate modernization as “Westernization”, other side Russian administrators named modernization as “Europeanism”. Another notable element was observed in various economic lives. The transition to capitalism in the Ottoman Empire directed by external forces on the other hand, Russia gave direction to this transformation of its own volition. The purpose of study is to show the similarities and differences in the Ottoman and Russian modernization with using the comparative historical sociological method.Keywords: ottoman empire, russian empire, modernization, westernization, political life

The point of origin in the comparison of the Ottoman Empire and the Russian Empire were not as different from each other unlike the similarities. Both empires has chosen to shape with their own internal dynamics and enclosed social life over the years. In addition, they have taken samples the West as their model for modernization. These Empires have been described as “other” by Western because of “Islam” in Ottoman Empire and “Orthodoxy” in Russian Empire. Similar social patterns, political unrest and modernization moves has been the starting point of the study. The study referred to in the title of “comparison” did not include the concept of the just determination of similarity. Although both empires have many similarities, there were many striking differences each other. The most obvious differences in etymologic, Ottoman bureaucracy designate modernization as “Westernization”, other side Russian administrators named modernization as “Europeanism”. Another notable element was observed in various economic lives. The transition to capitalism in the Ottoman Empire directed by external forces on the other hand, Russia gave direction to this transformation of its own volition. The purpose of study is to show the similarities and differences in the Ottoman and Russian modernization with using the comparative historical sociological method. Keywords: ottoman empire, russian empire, modernization, westernization, political life

Reviewed by: Russian-Ottoman Borderlands: The Eastern Question Reconsidered ed. by Lucien J. Frary and Mara Kozelsky Sean Gillen (bio) Lucien J. Frary and Mara Kozelsky (Eds.), Russian-Ottoman Borderlands: The Eastern Question Reconsidered (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014). ix + 363 pp. Index. ISBN: 978-0-299-29804-3. The book under review is unexpectedly timely. As the book was going to press, the protests on Kyiv’s Independence Square culminated in a series of dramatic and still poorly understood events: Ukraine’s security services fired on and killed dozens of protesters under unknown orders; the Supreme Council impeached the sitting president, Viktor Yanukovych; and the Russian Federation invaded and annexed Crimea. In the months since, the varied aspirations and experiences of the vast majority of the population go underreported. The annexation of Crimea and the subsequent outbreak of violence in Eastern Ukraine understandably shocked the world. But the welter of sanctimonious government and media cant from Washington to Moscow – with precious few exceptions – is crude, uninformed, and baldly politicized. As the editors of Russian-Ottoman Borderlands, Lucien Frary and Mara Kozelsky, muse, “it is hard not to see the imprint of nineteenth-century diplomatic behaviors” on them (P. 341). Presentist considerations aside, this collection represents an impressive contribution to the literature on the imperial dimension of Russian history since Andreas Kappeler’s landmark 1992 synthesis, Russland als Vielvölkerreich. But the editors and contributors do not explicitly engage this work. Nor do they engage the literature of what Alfred Rieber calls “complex frontiers.” Complementing them, however, this volume shifts that literature’s geopolitical center of gravity from the metropole’s administration of ethnic and confessional minorities to the experience of peoples in the borderlands between the Ottoman and Russian empires themselves. Providing a coherent narrative to the history of this region presents the editors with an important historiographical problem laden with organizational, political, and moral concerns: how does one arrange a narrative of a region whose boundaries and peoples were often in flux and apparently dependent on great power whims. Answering this problem, the editors chose to organize their volume’s contributions around the so-called Eastern Question in order to demonstrate that it was “a much more complex phenomenon” than the old-fashioned diplomatic history would have it (P. 6). The primary historiographical target of the volume’s contributors is M. S. Anderson’s admirable 1966 synthesis on the Eastern [End Page 400] Question. That comprehensive but traditional diplomatic history of the Eastern Question related the story of great power negotiations over how to divide up the Ottoman “sick man of Europe” as codified in the treaties signed from Küçük Kainarca in 1774 to the treaty of Lausanne in 1923. In Anderson’s account – which V. A. Georgiev echoed in the standard Soviet version – the Ottoman Empire’s failure to enact effective social and political reforms justly provoked the great powers to intervene in Ottoman affairs to restore order and protect various ethnic and confessional groups. The volume’s contribution to the neglected field of diplomatic history is to be welcomed and complements Oleg Airapetov’s recent synthesis.1 Their principal aim is to complicate Anderson’s diplomatic history of the Eastern Question by looking at the social and cultural history of this fluid region. To do that, the contributors draw on a linguistically and geographically rich vein of government, voluntary association, and private materials from Russian, French, Turkish, Bulgarian, Crimean, Armenian, Austrian, Georgian, British, and Greek archival funds. These revelations alone are an impressive feat. To make sense of this wealth of material, the editors and contributors also draw inspiration from the Ottoman revisionist school of Kemal Karpat and Bernard Lewis, who recovered the vitality of Ottoman government and society. The thrust of that scholarship was directed against the standard assumption of diplomatic history that the Ottoman Empire was the main problem in great power relations because it was perceived to be decadent and degenerate by Soviet and non-Soviet historians alike. Their analytical decision is conceptually justified as an organizing principle in such a historiographically undefined region; organizing principles for collected volumes are also notoriously difficult to find. But the editors overstate the historiographical...

The point of origin in the comparison of the Ottoman Empire and the Russian Empire were not as different from each other unlike the similarities. Both empires has chosen to shape with their own internal dynamics and enclosed social life over the years. In addition, they have taken samples the West as their model for modernization. These Empires have been described as “other” by Western because of “Islam” in Ottoman Empire and “Orthodoxy” in Russian Empire. Similar social patterns, political unrest and modernization moves has been the starting point of the study. The study referred to in the title of “comparison” did not include the concept of the just determination of similarity. Although both empires have many similarities, there were many striking differences each other. The most obvious differences in etymologic, Ottoman bureaucracy designate modernization as “Westernization”, other side Russian administrators named modernization as “Europeanism”. Another notable element was observed in various economic lives. The transition to capitalism in the Ottoman Empire directed by external forces on the other hand, Russia gave direction to this transformation of its own volition. The purpose of study is to show the similarities and differences in the Ottoman and Russian modernization with using the comparative historical sociological method.Keywords: ottoman empire, russian empire, modernization, westernization, political life

The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Ottoman Attempts to Catch Up with Europe

Pan-Islamism, pan-Turkism, and nationalism in both the Ottoman and Russian Empires were the consequence of the interactions between modern education, the new social classes, and political liberalism, which operated within specific historical settings and preexisting relations that accounted for both the similarities and the differences between the two empires. This chapter proposes to study how new forces of change during the latter part of the nineteenth century not only helped engender Islamism (pan-Islamism) and nationalism in the Ottoman and Russian Empires but also to reveal how the different historical, cultural, and social circumstances and government policies prevailing in each county, produced a different type of Islamism and nationalism in each.

In this work, mathematical models for the growth of the Ottoman and Roman Empires are found. The time interval considered for both cases covers the time from the birth of the empire to the end of the fast expansion period. These empires are assumed to be nonlinearly growing and self-multiplying systems. This approach utilizes the concepts of chaos theory, and scaling. The area governed by the empire is taken as the measure of its growth. It was found that the expansion of each empire on lands, seas, and on both (i.e., lands+seas) can be expressed by power laws. In the Ottoman Empire, the nonlinear growth power of total area is approximately equal to the golden ratio, and the nonlinear growth power of the expansion on lands is approximately equal to the square root of 2. In the case of the Romans, some numbers associated with the golden ratio, or the square root of 2, appear as the power of the nonlinear growth term. The appearance of both the golden ratio and the square root of 2 show that both empires had intention on achieving stability during their growth.

Abstract:Focusing on Cengiz Mehmed Geray, an idiosyncratic member of the ruling house of the Crimean Khanate, this article examines how a Crimean Prince became an active participant in the stormy politics of the Ottoman Empire and later of Europe, as a result of his distinguished Chinghisid pedigree, in the age of revolutions. The first section of this article discusses the place of the Geray and Chinghisid lineage within Ottoman imperial politics. The second section focuses on the period following the Gerays’ departure from Crimea. It illustrates how members of the family, although scattered throughout the Balkans, operated in the provincial and imperial politics of the Ottoman Empire in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The following section introduces Cengiz Geray and his turbulent life between the Ottoman and Russian Empires, and discusses how he became an actor in a revolutionary age. The last section is a short discussion on Chinghisid charisma in the early modern Europe, Russia and the Ottoman Empire.

ABSTRACTThis article examines the trajectories of the Spanish and Ottoman Empires, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when parallel circumstances led to coinciding policies of economic modernization and religious toleration, internal and mutual. Through commercial accords, diplomatic exchanges, and even military collaboration, the Ottoman and Spanish Empires in the Mediterranean attempted to develop an alliance in place of what had been holy war and territorial conflicts. This cooperative struggle to emerge from the shadow of more powerful European powers, while ending in failure, nonetheless reveals much about the history of these two empires and the evolution of their relationship. Confronted with the rising industrial and military power of Great Britain, France, and Russia, the Spanish and Ottoman parallel and collaborating efforts did not enable these empires to reclaim their previous status as great powers.

The mountain peoples of the North Caucasus were forced to relocate to the Ottoman Empire in the mid-19th century as a result of the Russian Empire's deliberate strategy. The High Porte was also highly interested in relocating the highlanders to its domain. The article examines the process of Chechen and Ingush return to their homeland from the Ottoman Empire. The author focuses on the difficulties encountered by the re-emigrants, describ-ing the ways the highlanders resettled back home. In spite of the fact that resettlement flows con-tinued throughout the 1860s. The active phase of Chechen and Ingush emigration took place in 1865. Statistical data shows that the process of Chechen and Ingush return to their homeland was not widespread because there were no organized activities on the part of the Ottoman and Russian empires. Overall, it was a rather piecemeal, chaotic and spontaneous process that lasted through-out the 19th century. Some highlanders still managed to return to their former places of residence; others were settled in remote regions of the Russian Empire. However, many were forbidden to return to their homeland. In addition, the position of the official authorities of the two countries was quite clear – their return was undesirable. Those who remained in the Ottoman Empire subse-quently formed the basis of today's Vainakh diasporas in Turkey, Syria, and Jordan. The study is based on materials from the Russian archives.