Migration, Settlement, and the Environment: Initiatives to Create New Settlements in the Province of Hudavendigar in the Late Ottoman Period

Abstract This article explores the historical and institutional origins of military coups in Türkiye, tracing their roots well before the republican era, to the late Ottoman Empire. Between 1839 and 1914, the empire undertook military reform, political experimentation, and bureaucratic modernization, which shaped the later republic's civil‐military dynamics. Using a historical‐institutional and comparative framework, the study employs qualitative and narrative‐analysis methods based on Ottoman and republican archival materials, scholarly works related to civil‐military relations in general and in Türkiye, and contemporary studies. The analysis argues that the ideological and institutional patterns of military intervention established during the early period continue to shape the logic, methods, and legitimacy of relations between civilians and the armed services in contemporary Türkiye. It shows that the military's self‐ascribed role as the guardian of the state—and the normalization of coups as instruments of national salvation—originated not solely through the foundation and practices of the Turkish Republic but from developments in political culture and institutional practices created long before.

Late Ottoman Origins of Modern Islamic Thought

In 1908, the constitutional revolution led by the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) brought an end to Sultan Abdülhamid II’s autocratic rule. The restoration of constitutional life created a political vacuum into which multiple elite groups attempted to reassert themselves. Among them was the Kıbrıslızade family – descendants of Grand Vizier Mehmed Emin Pasha – who represented the Istanbul-based ancien régime. This article analyzes the conflict between the Kıbrıslızades, as an example of the traditional elite, and the CUP, which emerged as a new political class composed primarily of organized and ideologically driven military and civil officers of Rumelian origin. Grounded in Gaetano Mosca’s theory of the ‘political class’ and Vilfredo Pareto’s concept of ‘elite circulation’, the study explores how the CUP refused to share state power and employed various instruments, including legal manipulation and political violence, to suppress opposition. The rivalry culminated in the Raid on the Sublime Porte on 23 January 1913, during which Tevfik Bey of the Kıbrıslızade family was killed. Drawing on archival documents, contemporary press, and memoirs, this article examines how elite transformation in the late Ottoman Empire was marked not by a peaceful transition but by a deeply contested and violent power struggle.

This article explores the extraordinary life and controversial exploits of John Joseph Nouri, a nineteenth-century figure who impersonated a Chaldean priest and traversed Europe, the United States, the Middle East and South Asia. Drawing upon newly examined Ottoman archival sources, Western newspapers and personal testimonies, it investigates how Nouri exploited Western fascination with biblical antiquity and orientalism. He fabricated titles, languages, and religious credentials, claiming descent from Nebuchadnezzar and discovery of Noah’s Ark, to gain patronage from western Protestant and local Christian communities. His actions prompted diplomatic concerns across Ottoman consulates, revealing the empire’s struggle with religious imposture amid modernization and Western missionary expansion. The study also examines Nouri’s eventual ordination by a faction of the Syro-Chaldean Church in Malabar, India, revealing his role in the hybrid religious-political landscapes of late Ottoman and colonial worlds. Nouri’s life is an example of global microhistory which demonstrates the intersections of faith, identity, and transregional networks during a time of global imperial flux.

ABSTRACT Originally founded through the waqf system to provide medical care for the poor, gureba hospitals gradually evolved into key institutions within the Ottoman modernization and social welfare policies. Focusing on the Mecca Gureba Hospital, this study argues that health institutions served as strategic instruments to sustain the Ottoman Empire’s social, administrative, and symbolic presence in the Hejaz. Located in Mecca—a city of profound religious and political significance—the hospital addressed the medical needs of both the local population and Muslim pilgrims. Drawing on Ottoman archival documents, this study examines the hospital’s financial resources, personnel structure, and daily operations, including its role during cholera outbreaks. It also analyzes the administrative organization, central oversight mechanisms, and procedures for appointing physicians and staff, illustrating processes of institutionalization within the Ottoman provincial health system. The study shows that gureba hospitals functioned both as charitable institutions rooted in waqf traditions and as instruments of modernization, enabling the central authority to project its legitimacy in the provinces amid Pan-Islamic policies.

This article examines the transformation of educational institutions in the Ottoman district of Mardin during the 19th century and early 20th century, with a particular focus on the Tanzimat and Hamidian periods. Drawing upon archival records, provincial yearbooks, and surviving architectural examples, the study explores how education became a strategic tool in the Ottoman Empire’s effort to centralise authority and cultivate loyalty among its diverse provincial populations. The establishment of modern state schools such as ibtidâî, rüşdiye, and idâdî, alongside teacher training colleges, reflected the central government’s intention to standardise education and produce a new class of civil servants. At the same time, traditional institutions such as madrasas and sıbyan mektebs continued to operate, illustrating a layered educational landscape where classical Islamic learning coexisted with modern bureaucratic goals. The article also considers the role of minority and missionary schools, particularly those of the Armenian, Chaldean and Syriac communities, as well as the Capuchin Catholic and American Protestant missionaries, and their interactions with state policy. The article highlights how education functioned as both a political instrument and a contested cultural field in the late Ottoman Empire through the lens of Mardin.

ABSTRACT This study examines Kavurzade Huseyin Celal Bey of Crete, a notable example of meritocratically appointed officials in the late Ottoman bureaucracy. The son of a farmer, Huseyin Celal Bey began his education in Chania and continued it in Istanbul, graduating from the The School of Political Science (Mekteb-i Mülkiye) before ascending the ranks of the civil service. Initially appointed as a teacher in Bursa in 1889, he subsequently held positions such as school principal, director of education (maarif müdürü), district governor (kaymakam), and ultimately achieved the rank of provincial governor. Despite his modest origins, his advanced education enabled his upward mobility in the bureaucracy. For years, he served in remote and challenging regions and was rewarded by the Ottoman central administration for his diligence and discipline. This study aims to sketch a portrait of this late Ottoman bureaucrat. While framed as a biographical essay, it primarily focuses on the professional career of an official who rose through education and competence alone, without patronage or aristocratic lineage, a success story that was rare in the late Ottoman Empire.

This study examines the members of the ilmiye class, including muftis, mudarris and kadıs, who were educated and served in the Kosovo Province during the late Ottoman period. The primary source of the analysis is the ulema records found in the Sicill-i Ahval Registers, which were initiated during the reign of Abdulhamid II. The research explores the career-building process of provincial ulema through various aspects, such as their family backgrounds, early and madrasa education, institutions’ curriculums, icazetnames, connections with the center (Istanbul), educational experiences in Istanbul madrasas, and their ties to modern schools established during the late Ottoman era. The professional lives of these scholars are evaluated in terms of the fields in which they were employed, the regions where they served, and their linguistic proficiency. Focusing on central districts such as Skopje, Prizren, and Pristina, as well as other districts and sub-districts in the Kosovo Province, the study provides a detailed analysis of educational conditions, the socio-economic structure of the provincial ilmiye class, and their contributions to the Ottoman scholarly tradition. The inquiry aims to provide a biographical and prosopographical analysis of the late Ottoman period to understand the position of provincial ulema within the Ottoman ilmiye class.

Spies who investigated individuals on behalf of the state, gathered information and reported the demands and complaints of citizens to the palace emerged during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Informant reports were collected from every corner of the state for the purpose of monitoring the empire, eliminating administrative irregularities, and measuring the satisfaction of the public. Starting with the reign of Abdülhamid II, spying deviated from its original purpose and turned into a controlling organization aimed at ensuring internal security. After a while, it became a tool for power struggles among those who wanted to be influential in the state and its administrative structures. Reports were compiled on everyone from ordinary citizens to bureaucrats. The spy organization, which had ceased to be a mere intelligence organization, began to be seen as a source of fear and distrust in society. The organization, which was one of the obstacles to the healthy functioning of the state, continued to increase its negative impacts in the social and political spheres until it was closed in 1908. This study aims to uncover the reflection of the ‘sleuthing’ phenomenon in literary works of the Late Ottoman Modernization Literature and contribute to the understanding of this period from political, sociological and cultural perspectives.

The Library of Aḥmad Pasha al-Jazzār. Book Culture in Late Ottoman Palestine, by Aljoumani, Said, Guy Burak, Konrad Hirschler (eds.)

Conventional histories portray the Ottoman Darülfünun as a belated, derivative transplant of the European university. Drawing on historical contextualism and discourse analysis, this article reads the reform decrees, ministerial speeches, and by-laws that punctuated the school’s stop-start career as argumentative interventions—windows onto the problems late-Ottoman statesmen believed higher learning could solve and the futures they hoped to inhabit. Three intertwined logics surface: moralised expertise (science valid only when yoked to virtue), linguistic standardisation (Ottoman Turkish as the civic idiom of rule), and territorial patriotism (vatan re-imagined as dynastic homeland). Following the first proposal in 1845 to the Hamidian statute of 1900, these logics reveal how higher education shifted from a pragmatic method of crisis management to a durable methodology of governance, displaying an instance of a nationalizing empire. The Darülfünun endured until 1933, when it was recast as Istanbul University, carrying its imperial-national synthesis straight into the republican era. Its longevity shows that both late Ottoman and Kemalist regimes turned to higher learning to fuse technology, faith, and shared belonging into a single, durable strategy of state-building.

ABSTRACT Jerusalem has been a site of Sufi pilgrimage and worship since at least the Middle Ages. During the Umayyad period, Jerusalem was a part of the Hajj circuit for many Muslim pilgrims, including West Africans Muslims, whose presence in the Holy City can be traced back to the thirteenth century. This article examines the interwoven connections between the performance of the Hajj, and Sufi affiliation among West Africans who arrived in Jerusalem and settled there in the late Ottoman period (mid-nineteenth century to 1917) and through the British Mandate (1917–1948), a period during which they numbered several thousands. As their story has not yet attracted much research attention, by examining their Sufi affiliation, this article contributes to the body of knowledge of that community and adds another layer to our understanding of the role of Sufi affiliation in creating the Diaspora of West African Muslims from the late Ottoman period to Mandatory Jerusalem. At the same time, this study integrates the story of West African Muslims within the history of Sufi life in Jerusalem during this period. As such, this article also reveals little known chapters of the history of the diasporic community of West African Sufis during colonial times, and of the broader history of the vivid Sufi life in Jerusalem during the late Ottoman rule and into the British Mandate period.

On Universals: Building the Late Ottoman Body Politic

Until the mid-19th century, Albanians were among the groups with whom the Ottoman Empire experienced the least conflict. However, nationalism—intensified by the French Revolution—began to influence non-Muslim communities in the Empire from the early 19th century onwards. As the Empire faced growing economic, military, and administrative challenges, alongside increasing demands for autonomy and independence across the Balkans, the idea of nationalism also began to take root among Albanians, particularly through the Albanian elites. In this atmosphere of rising nationalism, the demand for education in the Albanian language evolved into a major point of contention between the Ottoman administration and Albanian nationalists. While the Ottoman authorities opposed Albanian-language education on the grounds that it would undermine the ideal of "Ottoman unity," Albanian nationalists—believing the Empire’s days in the Balkans were numbered—saw it as an essential step toward establishing "national unity." This article explores the emergence of Albanian nationalism in the late 19th century as both a reaction to other Balkan nationalisms and a challenge to Ottoman central authority, with a particular focus on the struggle over Albanian-language education.

This article examines the life and career of Mustafa Adil (1871-1904), a pioneering Ottoman veterinary physician, bacteriologist, and educator whose contributions significantly shaped the modernisation of public health and veterinary science in the late Ottoman Empire. Educated at the Alfort School of Veterinary Medicine in France, Adil played a leading role in developing diphtheria serotherapy and collaborated extensively with Maurice Nicolle on research into rinderpest, malaria, and the vaccinia virus. His laboratory achievements, combined with his leadership roles at the Imperial Veterinary Bacteriology Institute and the Civil Veterinary School, positioned him at the forefront of the professionalisation of veterinary medicine in the Empire. By tracing Adil's education, scientific work, and institutional influence, this study highlights his pivotal yet largely overlooked role in the transnational circulation of medical knowledge between Europe and the Ottoman world.

This article examines Kantarcılar’s transformation in late Ottoman Istanbul as a microcosm of urban change. It argues that micro-urban modernity emerged not only through state reforms but also through the interactions of everyday practices, informal networks, and shared spaces. The article traces Kantarcılar’s shift from a manufacturing district to a commercially diversified, mixed-use area. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s production of space framework, it shows how the perceived (spatial practice), conceived (representations of space), and lived (representational spaces) intersect in shaping Kantarcılar’s dynamics. Using Ottoman archival records, maps, trade yearbooks and newspapers, the article demonstrates the mutual constitution of formal modernization and informal practices in producing Istanbul’s urban fabric at the grassroots, with Kantarcılar as a focal case. It also positions Kantarcılar as a comparative case for analyzing urban modernity across other late Ottoman and post-Ottoman cities, thereby enriching debates on space, society and modernity.

Abstract: This article traces the manuscripts of the Dajānī family in the "abandoned property" collection, currently housed in the National Library of Israel. During the Nakba in 1948, more than seven hundred manuscripts were appropriated from Palestinian homes in West Jerusalem. Since then, the manuscripts were hardly accessible and have only recently been digitised. Drawing on the paracontents of these manuscripts, this article demonstrates the vitality of Palestinian book culture in late Ottoman Palestine. In the two case studies presented in this article, libraries of Dajānī family members demonstrate different types of engagement with manuscripts in the same period. Ḥusayn Ṭaha al-Dajānī from Jerusalem represents a middle-class bibliophile, while ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Dajānī from Jaffa is portrayed as an active scholar. By identifying one hundred and three manuscripts from these two libraries and tracing their afterlives, this article reconstructs for the first time remnants of former private libraries within the understudied "abandoned property" manuscript collection.

Abstract: This article analyzes the status of the late Ottoman Empire in the European international order through an actor of both local and global historical dimensions, the Black Sea Lifesaving Service. This service was established by European powers in 1866 to provide assistance in the event of shipwrecks at the entrance to the Bosporus and was administered by an international organization from 1881 on. The article argues that this form of interimperial intervention by an international organization into local Ottoman lifesaving structures can be seen as an instance of Western interference in the sovereign affairs of the Ottoman Empire, justified on humanitarian grounds. Western actors interpreted the Ottoman Empire’s inability or unwillingness to provide adequate lifesaving services as evidence of its inferior “civilizational” status and the need for intervention and modernization, a logic understood and acted upon by Ottoman authorities.

Abstract The late nineteenth century marked a transformative period for diverse communities in the Muslim world, including the Sabbatian Ma’aminim of Ottoman Salonica, commonly known as the Dönme. This article examines the Ma’aminim’s spatial practices and temporal frameworks—focusing in particular on the Izmirli subgroup—to offer a nuanced account of their layered identity and modes of engagement during this era of change. By analyzing sites ranging from homes and schools to hidden venues of worship and marketplaces, alongside messianic rhythms, life cycle rituals, and daily practices, the study highlights how these dimensions shaped their communal life amid processes of integration into a modernizing Ottoman society. Drawing on accounts by European observers and Jewish writers, the article examines how aspects of the Ma’aminim’s covert communal world became visible during this period, emphasizing the interplay between secrecy, public performance, and social transformation. Through the lens of the Ma’aminim’s distinctive experience, the article challenges static or ahistorical portrayals of communal structures, showing how spatial and temporal practices reflected multifaceted intersections of tradition, modernity, and identity. More broadly, it suggests an approach for understanding how communities in the late Ottoman era navigated multiple spaces and temporalities.