Census-making as A Social Process in Ottoman Kurdistan, 1840-1850 The nineteenth century can be described as an “era of censuses” for the Ottoman world. The Ottoman state set out to conduct its first modern population census in 1831 within the context of increasing centralization and modernization of the state apparatus. Echoing the efforts of its contemporaries, counting individual human beings within its vast imperial domains turned out to be a novel and yet urgent policy for the Ottoman bureaucracy. The census counted the able-bodied, tax-paying adult male population for ostensibly military and fiscal purposes. Despite being a manifestation of the state’s aims of standardization and centralization, the early census of the 1830s was conducted “successfully” only in provinces geographically close to the capital. In the far remoter provinces, especially those on the borderlines, the application of census appeared to be a more challenging and convoluted task than it was at the center. Kurdistan, which stood on a border area at the crossroads of three long-lived empires and inhabited and controlled by ancient Kurdish chiefdoms and tribes, was one of these places where the application of the first modern Ottoman census remained as a challenging task for over four decades. This paper explores the implementation of these earliest Ottoman censuses in the Kurdistan region in the mid-nineteenth century. Conducting a census was seen as the first step towards the “re-conquest,” of this region, which was characterized mostly as unruly, tribal, and even primitive by Ottoman administrators and remained on the margins of Ottoman politico-administrative system for the most part of the Ottoman imperial history. I approach Ottoman census enterprise in Kurdistan in light of the Bourdieusian notion of the statist capital (capital étatique). The making of the state entails the concurrent concentration of, what Bourdieu calls, “different species of capital,” namely, the capital of physical force, economic capital, informational capital and symbolic capital. Using Ottoman archival sources, this paper argues that census making stood at the juncture of the governmental efforts to concentrate these four types of capital towards the making of modern stateness in Kurdistan. As such, together with building a fiscal, military, and administrative infrastructure, the Ottoman administrators sought to construct a “language of stateness” in this hitherto peripheral border area.