Nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire Research Articles

Purifying Istanbul: The Greek Revolution, Population Surveillance, and Non-Muslim Religious Authorities in the Early Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Empire

Purifying Istanbul: The Greek Revolution, Population Surveillance, and Non-Muslim Religious Authorities in the Early Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Empire

Religious Alliances and Imperial Ambitions: The Jesuit Mission to Little Armenia (1881)

This paper investigates the Jesuit mission to Little Armenia, initiated in 1881, emphasizing the collaboration between the Holy See and France amidst escalating competition with Protestant powers within the Ottoman Empire. The study aims to scrutinize the Jesuits' endeavors to advance France's religious-cultural activities until the severance of relations between the Holy See and France. The Jesuits provided religious and educational assistance, thus promoting French influence among Ottoman Christians. This research contends that the partnership between the Holy See and France facilitated through the Jesuit mission, exemplifies the significant impact of religion on France's international policies during the Third Republic. Drawing on a diverse array of historical sources, including diplomatic records, missionary accounts, and scholarly works, this study offers a comprehensive understanding of the interplay between the Jesuits, the Holy See, and France within the intricate political and religious context of the late nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire.

The Novel and the Ottoman Institution of Slavery: Domesticity and Slave Labor in Namık Kemal's İntibah

Abstract This article makes a case for a critical engagement with the Ottoman institution of slavery and slave trade in its globalist rethinking of the rise of the novel. It argues that production of late Ottoman Turkish novelistic writing hinged on a domestic imagination to which the labor of enslaved women was indispensable. Placing Namık Kemal's İntibah in conversation with other novels contemporaneous with it, the article underscores the interlacement between the genre-conscious crafting of novelistic writing in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire and the ubiquitous presence of enslaved women in the fictions from the period. As such, it highlights the necessity of reframing the transnational history of the novel by expanding the interrogation of its gendered and racialized economy to hitherto neglected Ottoman contexts of enslavement.

A Neglected Fact of Armenian History and Culture in Constantinople in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century: Elpis Kesaratsian and the Magazine Guitar (1861–1863)

ABSTRACT This article focuses on Elpis Kesaratsian (1830–1913), the first Armenian female editor who founded and published the Guitar magazine (1861–63) but has been neglected in the field of Armenian history and culture studies for more than 160 years. This study sheds light on the geopolitical and historical contexts in Constantinople in the second half of the nineteenth century, the imperial censorship, the criticism regarding the magazine Guitar, the unbreakable will that the first Armenian female editor, who also acted as a writer, journalist, and translator, Elpis Kesaratsian was guided by throughout her life as a representative of a Christian national minority living in the nineteenth century Ottoman Empire. The many roles of Elpis Kesaratsian, including those of woman-editor, woman-publicist, woman-publisher, woman-book author, woman-translator, woman-lead nurse, woman-teacher that she fulfilled under the oppression and censorship of the Ottoman Empire, were revealed through investigative, biographical and comparative analyses. Our findings revealed that Elpis Kesaratsian’s main goal was the improvement of society.

Historical Writing in the Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Empire: Expansion, Islamization, and Nationalization (1839–1908)

Abstract The nineteenth century was a period of profound transformation in Ottoman historical writing, as in other avenues of Ottoman cultural, intellectual, and socio-political life. Aiming to establish a general framework for nineteenth-century Ottoman historiography, the present article traces the evolution of late Ottoman historical writing and explores the ways in which Ottoman historiographical practices changed over the century. The article first focuses on the Tanzimat period and examines the process of what can be called historiographical expansion, which took place with the emergence of a new understanding of history among the Ottomans. Then, the article considers Ottoman historiography during the Hamidian era and traces how it received a relatively Islamized and nationalized content as a result of the shift in the political context. Lastly, the article concludes with an epilogue on Ottoman/Turkish historiography after the 1908 Constitutional Revolution, which led to a decisive break from traditional patterns of historical writing.

Surveilling the Revolutionaries: Armenian Revolutionaries, Spatial Politics, and Intelligence Activities in the Late Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Empire

This paper, by focusing on a secret report delivered by the Ottoman High Commissioner in Egypt—Gazi Ahmed Muhtar Pasha—to the imperial center regarding the Armenian revolutionaries’ movements, aims to examine three important phenomena of the late Ottoman history. The first goal is to reveal the revolutionary mobilities in the late Ottoman Empire by tracking how said revolutionaries took advantage of the borderlands to mobilize themselves. Second, this particular research serves as an indicator of the spatial politics in the late nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire by exposing how the imperial center governed a multi-layered administrative borderland region of Egypt—a semi-autonomous Khedivate. Finally, this paper seeks to confront traditional historiography on the intelligence activities during the reign of Abdülhamid II (r. 1876–1909). By doing so, this paper demonstrates how the intelligence organization stretched from the administrative center to the frontiers and borderlands of the Ottoman Empire, contrary to the common assumptions in the existing literature.

Luigi Mongeri: A reformist and expert on "Oriental Insanity" in the Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Empire

This article focuses on the early career of Luigi Mongeri, who was appointed as the chief physician to the Süleymaniye Mental Asylum in 1856 to treat mental illness and improve the living conditions of mentally ill patients in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire. It focuses on Mongeri's early career in Italy, investigates his involvement in Ottoman imperial patronage networks and their subsequent effects on his career, and finally explores the reform program he implemented at Süleymaniye. While in the Ottoman Empire, Mongeri appeared as a reformist who claimed to improve the living conditions and treatment of patients by the use medical statistics, abolishing the use of shackles, etc. At the same time in Europe—and especially in France, which was one of the important centers of alienist medicine at the time— he presented himself as an expert on "oriental insanity,” a claim which gained him access to international medical circles and organizations.

Imperial Landed Endowments (Vakıf Çiftliks) in the Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Empire: The Case of Pertevniyal Valide Sultan’s Endowments in Thessaly

Abstract This article takes Pertevniyal Valide Sultan’s endowments as a case study and proposes an original contribution to the literature by discussing the transformation of Ottoman endowment management throughout the nineteenth century. The account books of landed estates (çiftliks), other endowment documents, and the Ottoman imperial archives constitute the basis of explaining different phases of estate management practices for endowments in the Thessaly region of northern Greece. The main argument is that, in contrastto the administration of earlier endowments in the region, the central administration of Pertevniyal Valide Sultan’s endowments expanded its control over its provincial revenue sources. This transformation became possible with the help of negotiations and alliances with several imperial and provincial institutions. This article also contributes to understanding social and economic life in Ottoman çiftliks by analysing land, production, and taxation relations in Thessaly.

In Writing and in Sound

Abstract Copies of Dalāʾil al-Khayrāt (Proofs of Good Deeds) by the Moroccan Sufi saint Muḥammad b. Sulaymān al-Jazūlī (d. 870/1465) were in high demand in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire. This required producing manuscripts in large numbers and, later, printing the text. These mostly lithographic copies and corpora of the Dalāʾil al-Khayrāt, when combined with references to biographical dictionaries, inheritance records, inventories, library catalogues, and endowment deeds, reveal a great deal of information about the public and private prevalence of the text, within and beyond the empire. The Dalāʾil al-Khayrāt appealed to many individuals, from Ottoman sultans to royal women, and from madrasa students to members of the learned class. Its copies were endowed to mosques and libraries, held in different book collections of the Topkapi palace, and were available from booksellers. Be it silently or aloud, the Dalāʾil al-Khayrāt could be read in private homes and in mosques from Istanbul to Medina, a feature of pious soundscapes across the empire.

Nigâr Hanım’ın Günlüklerinde Benlik İnşası: Geç Osmanlı Dönemi’nde Kadın Özneyi Yazmak

As an important woman writer, Nigâr binti Osman (1862–1918) contributed to social and cultural change in the nineteenth century Ottoman Empire through her intellect and her writings. From her early work onward, Nigâr Hanım cared about the issue of “writing herself.” Her diaries, kept from 1887 to 1918 evidence this: the diaries are constantly cited but have not been transliterated into the Latin alphabet. From an upper-class woman’s perspective, her writings convey firsthand impressions of the Ottoman Empire’s rapid political and social changes during the nineteenth century. Her diaries reveal her position, daily life, emotions, literary preferences, writing adventures, and quests. From these texts, Nigâr Hanım’s experience of life can be discussed as memory, experience, and testimony. In this study specifically, her diaries will be examined in detail as to construction of the self through this daily written genre, through writing by the female subject, and subsequent inclusion in public literature.

Timber smuggling and forestry politics in late nineteenth-century Western Taurus

The nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire witnessed a gradual change in the forestry regime. In response to the intensifying struggle over forest resources in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Ottoman government introduced a series of reforms aimed at exerting more direct control over forests. In the implementation of these reforms not only did opposing interests clash at the central level but local interest groups involved in regional trade networks also appeared as influential actors. Focusing on a lawsuit related to forest crimes committed in the Teke region in the beginning of the 1890s, this paper discusses how modern, bureaucratized forestry practices were negotiated at the local level. By uncovering a complicated interaction among forest officials at the center and in the provinces, as well as timber merchants, this paper considers smuggling an integral component of politics over natural resources.

Yonca Köksal. The Ottoman Empire in the Tanzimat Era: Provincial Perspectives from Ankara to Edirne

Reviewed by: The Ottoman Empire in the Tanzimat Era: Provincial Perspectives from Ankara to Edirne by Yonca Köksal Uğur B. Bayraktar Yonca Köksal. The Ottoman Empire in the Tanzimat Era: Provincial Perspectives from Ankara to Edirne. London: Routledge, 2019. xiii + 194 pp. Cloth, $124.00. ISBN: 978-1138335738. Köksal’s The Ottoman Empire in the Tanzimat Era: Provincial Perspectives from Ankara to Edirne offers a novel and revisionist perspective on the interaction between the provincial notables and the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century. In this comparative work, Köksal does not merely bring back the notables of the prior century into the nineteenth-century politics, but also underlines that it was the interaction between the empire and the notables that set the course of reforms during the period. In the introduction, the author challenges the structuralist perspectives of Ottoman modernization, mostly confined to a zero-sum game in which the notables’ accumulation of economic and social capital challenged the power of the imperial center. Contrary to a rather uninterrupted transformation from indirect rule to a direct one, Köksal emphasizes the existence of “previous administrative practices which conditioned how the state conceived and experimented with reform” (p. 14). In Chapter Two, the author introduces the provinces of Ankara and Edirne. Noting the political, geographical, and economic differences between the two provinces, the author argues that “Tanzimat strategies of rule and their outcomes varied on the basis of divergent paths in the provinces” (p. 30). While the state followed the coercion-intensive path in Ankara (the extractive state policy), it followed an integrationist policy (capital-intensive path) in Edirne due to the concerns of social and economic development of the region. In Chapter Three, focusing on local administration and reforms in Ankara, Köksal demonstrates that the ayan families of the previous century assumed administrative responsibilities as state officials of local origin. Underlining the disconnected local structure, she argues that the Tanzimat reforms brought about gradual changes in Ankara, which were rather slow compared to the Balkan provinces. In Chapter Four, the author deals with the province of Edirne. She demonstrates that the densely connected local networks, severe competition among many intermediaries leading to coalition formations, and [End Page 249] collective action based on formal ties and market relations in addition to the gradual elimination of state officials of local origin led the Tanzimat reforms to accomplish a lot in the province (p. 125). In Chapter Five, Köksal applies Social Network Analysis (SNA) to the local intermediaries of the two provinces. By the analysis, she substantiates the arguments she makes in the previous chapters. Finally in the conclusion, Köksal sums her argument that the differences in terms of local political structures, geopolitical location, and economic development led to varying outcomes of the Tanzimat reforms in the provinces of Ankara and Edirne. She skillfully shows that the incorporation of local intermediaries into its administration was “important to understanding the emergence or the absence of local support organized by the local elite in both provinces” (p. 158). Köksal’s study is a brilliant challenge against the rather standardized and top-down representation of the Tanzimat. Framing the rich archival material with the sociological methods, the author shows that it was not just the state but the societal actors who actually set the course of the reforms. Given the still infant state of provincial and comparative histories of the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, Köksal’s study delivers a fresh perspective on conceptualizing different regional transformations. Her argument that Tanzimat was a transition period in which the imperial government continued benefitting from notables is important not only in terms of bridging the two distant periods of the empire (i.e., age of ayans and the Tanzimat) but also demonstrating the path-dependent trajectory of the reforms, results of which were based on negotiation between the state and societal actors. Considering the Ottoman historiography’s preoccupation with annihilation of local intermediaries from the provincial political landscape, Köksal meticulously shows that albeit with the gradual elimination “a considerable number of müdürs of local origin continued to exist in the system throughout the reform...

Calendars of Exopraxis

In the nineteenth-century Ottoman empire, Cappadocia, in the heart of Anatolia, was one of the last regions where Rum Orthodox Christians cohabited with Muslims in rural areas. Among the main aspects of everyday coexistence were the beliefs and ritual practices that, shared by Muslim and Christian individuals, blurred religious belonging as it is traditionally defined. Anthropologists and ethnologists have studied exopraxis broadly, while historians have neglected the topic until recently. In the case of anthropologists, studies have mostly focused on the spatiality of sharing that is characteristic of exopraxis. This article, based largely on testimonies collected in the Oral Tradition Archives of the Center for Asia Minor Studies in Athens, analyzes the temporality of exopraxis and inquires into the different but shared calendars that ordered the ritual life of Muslims and Orthodox Christians in Cappadocia. These testimonies, taken from Orthodox Christians who lived in Turkey prior to the exchange of populations between Turkey and Greece in 1923, help us to understand how the sharing of religious calendars resulted in feelings of belonging to a single collectivity.

Tax Farming in the Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Empire: Institutional Backwardness or the Emergence of Modern Public Finance?

Although tax farming—the delegation of tax collection to private individuals for profit—was common in most European countries prior to the nineteenth century, this privatized form essentially disappeared from Europe with the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. In the Ottoman Empire of the nineteenth century, however, tax farming remained an important instrument for extracting revenue from customs transactions, domestic and international trade, and agricultural production. The Ottoman case is unique not only for retaining this mechanism within a larger revenue collection system, even beyond the end of the century, but also for deploying it to collect the tithe, a direct tax on agricultural production. This fiscal system, which made perfect sense within the Ottoman context, was hardly archaic and primitive when considered within a broader framework.

In the Shadow of Empire: States in an Ottoman System

What is the origin of the Middle Eastern state? Although social scientists have traditionally emphasized the role of the European colonial experience, especially the British and French mandates following World War I, the late Ottoman era from the Edict of Gülhane in 1839 that inaugurated the Tanzimat reforms until World War I represents a period at least as critical to understanding origins of the state in the region. Certain Ottoman provinces known as Eyalet-i Mümtaze or exceptional/special provinces developed under the aegis of the Ottoman Empire that acquired many statelike attributes without becoming independent polities. Moreover, the nature of the Ottoman Imperial center changed to become more similar to that of a territorially delimited state as opposed to the classic multifaceted polity that had been the earlier norm. These developments resulted in a blurring of lines that had traditionally defined state and empire during the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire. To illustrate this change, economic, administrative, and political examples are presented from Egypt and Turkey. This comparative analysis will identify ways the evolution of the two states was similar as well as critical differences such as the extent of foreign intervention and the role played by representative assemblies. The formation of imperial states within the empire as well as the transformation of the empire to become more statelike resulted in strong state institutions in places such as Egypt and Turkey that long preceded the main European colonial intervention in the region after World War I.

Inter-imperial Dimensions of Turkish Literary Modernity

Calling for a historiographical shift in literary criticism, this essay stresses the expansionist vision of the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, approaches its literature as a corpus of representation for imperial subjectivities, and thereby supplements the critique of the narrative of literary modernity identified with the orientalist E. J. W. Gibb. This essay argues that the tension between imperial expansionism and national indigenization constitutes a shaping force in Turkish literary modernity, urging scholars to investigate how the epistemology of the empire–influenced by the inter-imperial landscape of the nineteenth century–infiltrates the modern national literature and politics of Turkey.

One script, two languages: Garabed Panosian and his Armeno-Turkish newspapers in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire

ABSTRACTThis article focuses on the publications of Garabed Panosian and examines the extent of readership achieved by the Armeno-Turkish newspapers in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire. It specifically focuses on the linguistic, social, and political circumstances in which his newspapers were read. The readership of Panosian's newspapers was not only limited to Turkish monolingual Armenians but also extended to Armenian--Turkish bilingual Armenians. Moreover, his newspapers, along with other Armeno-Turkish materials, gained a non-Armenian readership. Thus, Panosian was able to use his newspapers to display the allegiance of Armenians to the Ottoman Empire, aiming at a favourable evaluation from government circles. Besides being a tool to reach out to Turkish monolinguals, Armeno-Turkish newspapers were also rich products of the culture of bilingualism and a medium shared by religiously diverse people. Thus, examining Armeno-Turkish materials elucidates the pluralistic society of the late Ottoman Empire.

Learned Patriots: Debating Science, State, and Society in the Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Empire

Learned Patriots: Debating Science, State, and Society in the Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Empire

Failed Proselytizers or Modernizers? Protestant Missionaries Among the Jews and Sabbateans/Dönmes in the Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Empire

Writing in 1929, Edward Mead Earle opens his article with a striking remark about American missionary activities in the Near East: ‘No other American activity in the Near East has been of such exte...

Learned patriots: debating science, state, and society in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire

Learned patriots: debating science, state, and society in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire