This panel’s participants draw on largely underutilized sources on the Asian and African provinces of the Ottoman Empire to address two imbalances in Ottomanist historiography: first, recent revisionist models of early modern Ottoman statecraft have overgeneralized from case studies of Istanbul, Anatolia, and the Balkans; second, the Cultural Turn in Ottoman studies, while generating invaluable insights and methodologies, has drawn scholars away from the study of local particularities in the early modern period and toward sources produced by urban elites in the decades after the westernizing Tanzimat reforms (1839-76).
This panel expands our knowledge of provincial governance as an ongoing process of accommodation with an unexpectedly diverse cast of local actors. Ottoman Kurds in northern Syria, recent Muslim converts from Judaism, and merchants in Egyptian port cities all commanded access to economic, political, and spiritual capital that came into the view of bureaucrats and lawmakers seeking sources of provincial revenue and manpower.
This panel showcases critically informed approaches to sources from the “margins” of the empire to explore the boundaries of current scholarship on Ottoman sovereignty in the provinces. Paper 1 explores Jewish-Muslim intercommunal and commercial relations in the Egyptian port of Damietta through Ottoman-era documents preserved in the Cairo Geniza. Paper 2 uses more “conventional” fiscal, administrative, and legal documents in unconventional ways to trace the Ottoman state’s accommodations with and reliance on rural Kurdish notables in provincial administration in northern Syria from the sixteenth century through the Tanzimat period. Paper 3 provides a complementary analysis of Kurdish urban notables in Aleppo, using a combination of imperial and local archival and narrative sources. The final paper analyzes Ottoman responses to environmental and political crises in Egypt through the lens of intermediary groups and institutions in Alexandria around the turn of the nineteenth century. The panel’s discussant places these papers within a trans-imperial context.
Ottoman rule in Africa and western Asia transformed the nature of the empire from the sixteenth century onward, linking the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean, bringing new ethnic and religious groups under Ottoman authority, and extending imperial frontiers deep into the heartlands of the Islamicate world. Yet Ottoman historiography has treated the Asiatic and African provinces as particular, fissiparous, and of limited explanatory value. This panel embraces diverse experiences and local particularities to show how Kurdish confederations, regional ports, and shifting religious practices and identities shaped Ottoman efforts to command legitimacy and resources.
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Dr. Jane Hathaway
This presentation explores the possibility of using documents from the Cairo Geniza as sources for the social and economic history of Egypt during the Ottoman period (1517-1882 C.E.). The Geniza is a collection of documents that accumulated in Cairo’s Ben Ezra synagogue between roughly 1025 and 1896, when they were removed to various libraries in Europe and North America. Papers bearing the name of God were discarded in a special storage room inside the synagogue; they included everything from unique manuscripts of books of the Hebrew Bible to court cases, business letters, shipping lists, and rolls of impoverished people seeking charity. While much of the literary material, such as religious texts, is composed in Hebrew, the documentary material tends to be in Judeo-Arabic, that is, Arabic written in Hebrew letters.
Most Geniza research to date focuses on the copious documents from the 11th through the early 13th centuries, when the Ben Ezra synagogue was a vibrant community center frequented by the likes of the great Jewish philosopher Maimonides (1138-1204). The much smaller Ottoman-era corpus has received scant attention. Yet these documents – in Hebrew and Ladino, as well as Judeo-Arabic and a tiny number of Ottoman Turkish texts – can shed valuable light on the socio-economic changes that Ottoman rule brought to Egypt. The information that these materials yield pertains not only to Egypt’s Jewish population but also to the majority Muslim population and the sizable Christian populations with whom the Jews routinely interacted.
The presentation focuses on two Arabic documents from the Mediterranean port of Damietta. One, an inheritance case from 1538, reveals a multi-generation business partnership between a Jewish family that converted to Islam and another that retained its Judaism. The other, a business letter from 1708, centers on a Jewish convert to Islam who became one of Egypt’s grandees and was appointed Damietta’s customs director as part of a fiscal reform by the Ottoman governor of Egypt. Together, these two documents offer remarkable insights into the way converts from Judaism to Islam were perceived and received by Egypt’s Jewish community, on commercial priorities that bound the Jewish and Muslim communities, and on Ottoman efforts to revive Damietta as a commercial hub. They serve as examples of the way that Ottoman-era Geniza documents can serve as supplements to better-known archival and narrative sources on Ottoman Egypt.
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Prof. Stefan Winter
The modern-day 'Afrin District (Mintaqat 'Afrin) in the northwestern corner of Aleppo province is among the oldest areas of Kurdish settlement in Syria. Named for the 'Afrin River (the Aprê or Oinoparas of antiquity) and the new town of 'Afrin built as a local administrative centre under the French Mandate in the 1920s, the district encompasses the southern portion of the inland massif colloquially known as the "Kurd Dagh" (from Turkish Kürd Dağı; "Mountain of the Kurds") or Çiyayê Kurmenc, and formally associated with a Kurdish tribal population since at least the region's incorporation into the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century. The object of this contribution will be to trace the political-administrative history of the ʿAfrin district from this time through the late nineteenth century on the basis of Ottoman archival records, in order to show that the Ottoman government consistently recognized and sought to extend the local Kurdish population a high degree of autonomy as such.
The study draws on both central government sources (principally Tahrir tax cadastres, Mühimme executive decrees and Şikayet complaint decisions) and provincial shar’iyya court records from Aleppo, Antioch and Hama that provide clues on the fiscal organization, local leaderships, brigandage and police measures in the district (nominally divided into the cantons of Ravendan, Cûm and Amik) throughout the period of Ottoman rule. The first part reviews its official incorporation, in the sixteenth century, as the “province of the Kurds” (liva-ı Ekrad) and attribution, along with the governorship of Kilis, to the Kurdish Canpolat family. Following the end of the rebellion of ‘Ali Canpolat in 1607, however, these sources suggest that local authority was left largely in the hands of the Oqçî-Izzeddinlo and Qiliçlî confederations, the former likely derived from an originally Yezidi rival to the Canpolats, and the latter constituting a private fiscal reserve of the imperial Valide Sultan complex in Üsküdar, Istanbul. The study will conclude with an examination of attempts to reassert more centralized control over the region in the Tanzimat and Hamidian period, suggesting that the Ottoman government nevertheless continued actively to cultivate local Kurdish notables as state intermediaries in the district.
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Dr. Charles L. Wilkins
Scholarship on the history of the Kurds in the pre-Modern Middle East has predictably cast the spotlight on the storied political elite, such as the medieval Ayyubid dynasty, or on the disturbances of “restive” tribes in the countryside. Relatively little attention has been paid to the history of the Kurds in between, those townspeople whose ancestors had migrated from Kurdistan as early as late antiquity and made their homes in such cities as Damascus and Aleppo. The survival in these cities of residential quarters named after the Kurds suggests their social solidarity, if not insularity, as well as the ambiguous nature of their position relative to the larger urban population. A wide range of primary sources dating from the early Ottoman era (1500-1800) enables a more complete understanding of their assimilation and its limits.
This study examines the residential patterns, occupational pursuits, and personal histories of the Kurds of Aleppo from the Ottoman conquest (1516) until the late eighteenth century. It re-evaluates the still influential generalization, perhaps most famously advanced by French Orientalist Jean Sauvaget (1901-50), that as a whole the Kurds of Aleppo settled in the northeastern suburbs of the city, engaged in only a narrow set of crafts and services related to the caravan trade, and remained only imperfectly assimilated to urban life. The study employs a combination of documentary and literary evidence. Cadastral surveys (avarizhane tahrir defterleri), used in conjunction with court records (sijillat), yield significant information on the aggregate wealth of Kurdish-majority residential quarters and the average material wealth of households in the same quarters. Probate inventories (mukhallafat), administrative orders (ahkam), and biographical dictionaries (tarajim) enable the reconstruction of the lives of selected Kurdish notables. Among those featured are the long-distance trader Mustafa ibn Muhammad Mamuk al-Kurdi (fl. 1566); the Governor of Kilis, Janbulad Bek b. Qasim (d. ca. 1586); the sufi saint Ahmad ibn ‘Abdu al-Qusayri (d. 1570); the brothers and soldiers Salim Bek and Hajj Abu Bakr al-Bulukbashi Ibn Balat (fl. 1680); and perhaps not a Kurd, but a major patron of their learning, the judge and merchant Ahmad b. Tahazada (d. 1773).
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Zoe Griffith
The 1780s and 1790s remain critically understudied in Egyptian history. Narrative sources cast these decades as a period of unrelenting crisis and upheaval, as the grandees of the Qazdağlı household monopolized political and economic life leading to Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 and the rise of the centralizing governor, Mehmed Ali Pasha, by 1804. This paper posits that the Ottoman imperial framework continued to represent a source of status, wealth, and security to a range of commercial and political actors in Egypt through the turn of the nineteenth century, but that the nexus of Ottoman provincial administration shifted from Cairo to Egypt’s primary long-distance port of Alexandria from at least the 1780s onwards.
To illustrate Alexandria’s heightened political significance, this paper introduces and analyzes a previously unused source for the study of Ottoman imperial governance in Egypt: two surviving registers from the Municipal Council (divan) of Alexandria covering the critical years from 1788 until 1804, held in the Egyptian National Archives. The divan of Alexandria was formed from a cross-section of port officials around 1750. Its highest-ranking member was a judge appointed directly from Istanbul, one of the few imperial appointees remaining in Egypt by the second half of the eighteenth century. The divan registers are largely dedicated to recording the activities of local officials, merchants, and ship captains in Alexandria who performed vital duties of Ottoman governance in Egypt. Local grain merchants directed foodstuffs to sites of shortage in Egypt, Hijaz, Anatolia, and the Balkans; Mediterranean ship captains carried imperial orders (fermans) as they shipped cargoes to Izmir, Istanbul, and Salonika; and officials helped to provision the Ottoman navy with valuable materiel during wars with Russia. An empire-wide grain crisis in 1794-95 and the French invasion of Egypt in 1798 generated legers of local inhabitants and Mediterranean merchants who, willingly or under threat of force, mobilized their wealth and networks in the service of the state.
This paper uses the divan records, along with chronicles, sharī‘a court registers, and registers of sultanic decrees to Egypt’s administrators, to bring Alexandria out of Cairo’s shadow as an alternative locus of political and fiscal legitimacy at the end of the eighteenth century. Alexandria provides an alternative lens for understanding how provincial spaces, actors, and networks operated within an Ottoman imperial framework at a time when the traditionally dominant spaces and networks in Cairo presented unprecedented challenges to imperial rule.
