Several peasant rebellions took place in the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century. Many of these rebellions included a collective refusal to pay taxes to the state and/or local magnates. In the literature, the revolts have mostly been considered either as nationalist uprisings (those in the Balkans) or conservative reactions to the Tanzimat reform program (those in Anatolia). This paper will discuss these cases of peasant protest as well as the preceding and subsequent actions of the state as part of state formation in the sense that Corrigan and Sayer use. Contrary to the assumption that the insurgent peasants reacted against the Tanzimat, the rebels in some of the major revolts, such as those in Vidin in 1849-50 and Kisrawan in 1858-61 rather endorsed the prose of reform, often referring to the promises of equality and protection of the well-being of subjects. In the 1840s and 1850s, peasants in the Canik area rebelled not to halt the reforms but to preempt a particular way of understanding them which would lead to double taxation. Evidently, the immediate goal of insurgent peasants was to prevent practices that jeopardized their livelihood (Scott's 'subsistence ethics'). Yet, the petitions they submitted to the officials and their radical methods of protest indicate that the cultivators comprehended the transformation the reforms entailed, and that the revolts were part of their endeavors to reinterpret the Tanzimat. Another wave of tax revolts took place in the eve of the Revolution of 1908. From 1906, there were important tax revolts in several Anatolian towns as well as Macedonia and Mosul, largely in response to attempts to introduce two new taxes. These revolts, some of which brought about local disintegration of state authority, were organized by urban middle classes with subsequent peasant participation. While the mid-century tax revolts aimed to radicalize the reform agenda, the 1906-08 revolts took place amid intense agitation by political opposition towards the end of the reign of Abdulhamid II. The earlier peasant revolts had revealed the inherent contradictions of the Tanzimat reform program by pushing it to its limits. The later revolts shook an increasingly oppressive regime and significantly contributed to its demise. Thus, the paper will argue that both the mid-century peasant revolts and the state's response in the form of legal and moral regulation, and the pre-1908 tax revolts and the regime's failure to respond were crucial moments of Ottoman modern state formation.

During the mid-19th century, the Egyptian and Ottoman governments began borrowing on the international debt market to finance ambitious modernization projects, administrative reforms and war. A spiraling debt-deficit cycle ensued and after credit dried up worldwide in the "Great Depression" of 1873, the Ottoman and Egyptian treasuries struggled to meet payments on coupons due. By 1876, they were bankrupt. After several years and multiple rounds of negotiations, two international debt regimes -- the Egyptian Caisse de la Dette Publique and the Ottoman Public Debt Administration -- were charged with securing the arrears and restoring the states' credit. A comparison of the states' finances shows that despite being in worse financial shape, the Ottoman Empire secured far better terms for settling its bankruptcy than did Egypt. Despite the attention historians have paid to the bankruptcies, this riddle has yet to be explained. Although the bankruptcies were contemporaneous and shared much in common, they have not been compared. Meanwhile, those who have studied the bankruptcies separately, have drawn similar conclusions: the two debt regimes are depicted as archetypes of late-19th century economic imperialism, fashioned according to the geostrategic interests of the Great Powers. Based on archival sources in London, Paris and Berlin these studies take for granted and reinforce the notion that factors at the core of the world economy dictate events at its periphery. But an entirely new picture emerges when the stories of the bankruptcies are told together and from the perspective of the periphery. Drawing on research in the Egyptian National Archives (Dar al-Wathaiq) and the Ottoman archives (Osmanl Basbakanlik Arsivi), this paper argues that the administrative, financial, and diplomatic resources that Ottoman and Egyptian officials brought to bear on the negotiations were critical to shaping their outcomes. By drawing from the theoretical work on organization, public management and bureaucracy, I explain how Ottoman negotiators were better positioned to resist initial European demands, secure concessions from their creditors, and lay a more secure foundation for future economic growth than their Egyptian counterparts.

In 1843, four years after the Edict of Gulhane, with which the Ottoman Empire entered its long nineteenth century, an unsigned piece appeared in the official newspaper of the empire. This piece, after evaluating the empire's position within the rapidly changing world, ascribed its politico-economic weakness directly to a sole reason: the laziness of the 'Ottoman nation.' In this paper, I discuss how body and time was reconfigured at a period when a series of modern binaries, such as productivity/laziness work time/leisure time, were becoming hegemonic in late Ottoman society(1839-1920). The focus of this paper is based on the ethic books of the period, which display an 'elective affinity' between the mobilization for productivity, modern conceptualizations of body and time, and nation formation. Transformation of the use of terbiye (self-discipline) was one way in which this new awareness became visible at a discursive level. The ethics books, an old genre that had new incarnations in the late nineteenth century, offered emergent discourses on work, body and time, self-discipline, and self-monitoring. These ethics books illustrate how productivity was articulated in normative terms and how religious idioms played a role in establishing modern concepts of work ethic. The ethics books, in their multilayered formulations about notions of work and productivity countering laziness and idleness, not only became an arena in which a new self was debated, but also a sketching ground of an ideal citizen and ideal society. Unlike the state orders that specifically targeted the bureaucrats in the governmental offices as 'bodies at work,' the authors of ethics books, most of whom were bureaucrats themselves, addressed the entire Ottoman 'nation.' As the building block of a nation, the human body became the site where laziness and indolence ought to be defeated in order to establish a 'productive nation.' Body became a topos where the forces of work and productivity fought the contagious virus of laziness. The Ottoman body, deemed as 'accustomed to slacking,' and far from an idealized 'machine-like' discipline, became a culprit of many social vices, and even military defeats. Interestingly, what was 'national' had to be filtered based on their contribution to productivity of the nation, and productiveness proved to be a very volatile term. Emphasizing social practices of the Tanzimat reforms that these new configurations were rooted, in this paper I attempt to place the discourses on body, time and productivity at the center of an Ottoman modernity.

This paper will explore the reconstruction process of the Trabzon-Erzurum road in northeastern Anatolia in the late 19th century with regards to its implications concerning the so-called modernization process of the Ottoman Empire. Starting in mid-1850s, the Ottoman state engaged in an effort to reform its existing road network throughout the empire and also added some new routes to the already existing ones. One of the major goals of the Ottoman state was to increase its security with a better road network and make far away provinces more accessible to the imperial center. The state was also willing to facilitate agriculture and commerce and thus obtain a more advantageous position in response to growing foreign economic competition. Based on these official concerns, the existing literature identifies the Ottoman state's renewed interest in roads as a part of the Ottoman modernization efforts. In contrast, my paper will argue that the Ottoman state's policies concerning road haulage were not necessarily shaped by elitist "modernizing" ideals but also by local and social demands. This emphasis on the productive capacity of local and social demands may help us to reconsider the modernization paradigm -which dominates the existing literature on the 19th century Ottoman Empire- by highlighting the dynamic and social aspects of modern states. Moreover, a social history of roads may also shed a new light on the Ottoman state-society relations in which the "masses" did not necessarily play a passive or negative role by either obeying or resisting governmental policies, but also by shaping them.