In April 1909, a series of events in the Ottoman Empire unraveled the newfound optimism held by many Kurdish and Syriac Christian leaders following the Young Turk Revolution. This paper focuses on how Kurdish and Syriac Christian intellectuals discussed three of the month’s major events: the Adana Massacres in which upwards of 30,000 Armenian and Syriac Christians were killed, the murder of Hasan Fehmi, chief editor of the anti-CUP periodical Serbestî, and the Ottoman Countercoup, intervention by the Army of Action and subsequent deposition of Sultan Abdul Hamid II. This paper explores the respective impacts of these events on the nascent Kurdish and Syriac Christian nationalist movements by examining the following questions: How these events were comparatively reported both by these communities’ members in Istanbul and in overlapping areas of their central homelands such as Diyarbakir, Mardin and Tur Abdin. How these events were understood regarding the status of Kurds or Syriac Christians within the Ottoman Empire, particularly how Syriac Christians related the Adana Massacres to recent catastrophes. How they exposed attitudes towards the concept of Ottomanism and influenced the trajectories of these nationalist movements in the years between 1909 and 1914. In order to illuminate this period, this paper utilizes the following sources: Ottoman archival documents, contemporary Kurdish and Syriac Christian periodicals, memoirs and correspondence of contemporary Kurdish intellectuals, and correspondence from the archives of the Syriac Orthodox Patriarchate. Preliminary research indicates certain trends that are discussed in light of these events, such as increased concern by Kurdish intellectuals regarding marginalization within a deeply entrenched CUP government, or by Syriac Christian lay intellectuals who discuss the need for inter-denominational solidarity for serving victims of the Adana massacres and for preventing subsequent violence. However, through these sources, this paper will delve further into these topics, showing how both purveyors of these nationalist movements understood these events, how they communicated them, as well as how these events and their interpretations were understood by their respective audiences. By comparing the Syriac Christian and Kurdish communities, it will offer a lens to better understand the history of Late Ottoman Southeast Anatolia through how events occurring elsewhere in the empire were related to local conditions and communal history, and will additionally shed light on relations between the Syriac Christian and Kurdish communities during this period.

This paper reassesses the objectives and reach of Mahmud II’s landmark 1826-29 dress reforms. Drawing on archives of contemporary portraiture, official documentation and memoir, it argues that these measures must be understood within the longer history of dress and textiles’ central role in ordering the Ottoman state, and in the particular social context of early 19th century Istanbul. The sweeping changes to official and public dress introduced by the 1829 laws especially, were not just a question of updating the state’s appearance, but signaled a deep and conscious break w?th a whole set of inherited ideals and institutions of statecraft. Showing the failure of repeated efforts in preceding decades to reassert certain aspects of traditional sumptuary demarcation, the paper suggests that these reforms constituted a long-overdue acknowledgement of the changed social and economic structures of the capital, as much as any deliberate Westernization. Many elements of the new official dress, far from being alien imports, were already well-established in the wardrobes of Istanbul’s consuming classes, while there are also considerable continuities of stylistic and ceremonial norms around male dress into the 1830s and beyond. Moreover, fixation with the fez has often obscured these reforms’ other political and economic dimensions. By replacing the existing sartorial vocabulary with a new system of badges, insignia and subtle decorative gradations, Mahmud sought to decisively reassert centralized, sultanic control over the symbols and markers of social status. Clamping down on expensive imported cloth and the perceived blight of recklessly excessive consumption in the capital were also major considerations on these laws’ formation.

Ubiquitously called the “Gypsies” by the societies they were a part of, the understudied Roma communities have historically been stereotyped, discriminated against, and excluded from normative patterns of belonging. The same held true for the late Ottoman Empire, during which the popular saying “half nation” (buçuk millet) epitomized the ethno-religiously liminal status assigned to them. In turn, the Roma negotiated their place in society through petitions to the sultan or the imperial parliament. This paper is concerned with the making and unmaking of identity and belonging, and the governance and negotiation of difference in the late Ottoman Empire. It centralizes the production of Romani ethnic and religious difference––a difference produced and implemented by the Ottoman administration, and resisted and negotiated by the Muslim Roma. In doing so, it aims to, first, demystify the production of Ottoman Romani identity and, second, further reveal the violent process of ethnic and religious boundary-making in the late empire. It also questions the limits of Ottoman confessional demarcation as well as of Ottomanism: the case of the Muslim Roma shows that neither a clear demarcation nor an attempt at unification resolved the confusion of state officials when it came to the question of how to classify the Roma and that this precarity increasingly became a matter of contention beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. The late Ottoman government’s ambivalent treatment of the Muslim Roma and the subsequent Romani demands and complaints have revolved around three major issues: categorization in censuses and description in identity documents; sedentarization and domestic resettlement; and immigration and repatriation. This paper draws especially on the petitions of the Roma and the rulings of the Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of Police found in the Ottoman archives, dated between the 1850s and 1920. It also consults Ottoman parliamentary minutes and proposed legislation such as the 1918 Draft Law of Tribes and Refugees. The debates and decisions these sources involve reveal that the tension between ethnic and confessional identity makes up the precarious space in which the Muslim Roma negotiated their belonging with the state.

The Ottoman territories had been inundated by the waves of mass migration from as early as the 1850s on. Post-settlement environment reveals a volatile local scene in which the newcomers were settled next to the ‘established’ order of inhabitants and wandering nomads, creating a duality between migrants and indigenous communities. This paper, therefore, ventures to examine the above-mentioned volatile environment from the perspective of the refugee slave conundrum. I will try to answer the questions of how and to what extent the Ottoman state was able to cope with the ongoing refugee crisis along with the abolitionary course that they seemed to embark. What would be the social outcomes of the slave refugee crisis in the Ottoman Empire? How did the worsening conditions of the Muslim refugees hamper the abolitionary motives of the Ottomans? Specifically, this paper will be seeking to reveal the conditions of the Muslim refugees, who were enslaved by other Muslims of the empire. On the one hand, the second half of the nineteenth century witnessed various abolitionist movements against slavery and the slave trade. The abolitionist movements did also affect the already declining institution of slave trade and slavery in the Ottoman Empire. The Crimean War and the exodus of the Muslim communities from Caucasia, on the other hand, caused many Muslim refugees dispossessed and displaced, that is, render them vulnerable targets of ill-mannered activities. Captivity and kidnapping of these refugees, therefore, has been more than likely in the chaotic environment of the post-settlement Empire. Amongst the Muslim refugees, widowed women, and orphans, more often than the others, were the targets of the slave trade in the Empire. The Ottoman state and its institutions, however, were trying to deal with the illicit slave trade during the era. With the impetus caused by the population mobilities and wars from the 1850s onwards, the infamous Black Sea slave trade poured into the empire more often than before. The refugee groups from Caucasia, particularly, has a far-famed customs of enslavement. This paper, by using archival from the Ottoman Archive, will be an attempt to tell the story of refugee slaves with an emphasis on their gender, age and perceived customs of the refugee groups.