The 1858 tax reform and the ‘other nomads’ in Ottoman Asia

Abstract

The Ottoman state governed its mobile subjects with various policies. While the Ottoman historiography is pretty illuminating on state-pastoralist relations, studies on the other nomads, peripatetics, are still rare. Existing studies are almost exclusively Roma-centred and focused mainly on the empire’s European territories. Moreover, the gap in the literature is more profound regarding nineteenth-century modernisation policies and their effects on the relevant groups. The present article, adopting micro-history and historical anthropology approaches, focuses on non-Roma peripatetic groups, such as Teber s, Doms, Loms, and Tahtacı s inhabiting Ottoman Asia, and investigates how the post-Crimean war administrative endeavours to end tax farming affected those groups. The systematic analysis of archival and ethnographic records reveals that the Ottoman administration had collected cizye from different ethnies registered as Gypsy in Kastamonu, Çankırı-Tosya, Ankara, Malatya, Harput, and Aleppo. They expanded the scope of the Gypsy poll tax after 1858 in Teke and Aydın by incorporating intersectional peripatetics, historically attached with another revenue item and tribal organisation, the Zulkadriyye spin-offs.