This paper examines elite families’ use of the institution of waqf to consolidate control over irrigation infrastructure in the northern Egyptian Delta in the late-eighteenth century. I argue that this process underpinned the thorny relationship between the Ottoman state and Egypt’s Mamluk households during the critical period from 1760-1810. Shari’a court records from Egypt demonstrate that Janissary and Mamluk officials in the coastal Delta cities of Rashid (Rosetta) and Dimyat (Damietta) established charitable and family waqfs that gave them alienable and heritable rights to agricultural land and the vital system of wells, water-wheels, and ditches necessary for intensive cultivation. Meanwhile, statesmen in Istanbul remained actively invested in maintaining imperial access to the produce of irrigated agriculture in Egypt through the turn of the nineteenth-century, despite repeated threats from war, natural disasters, and political challenges on the ground. This paper offers a ground-level view of one such challenge to Ottoman sovereignty in Egypt: the legal institution of waqf constituted an important mechanism by which provincial elites within the Ottoman system rooted their power in Egyptian soil. While most lands in the Egyptian Delta were governed remotely as tax-farms, the irrigated urban hinterlands of Rashid and Dimyat were within reach of the Janissary- and Mamluk-affiliated families who controlled them via waqf. Scholars are increasingly drawn to the study of waqf as a means to explore family history, urban development, and the legal establishment of private property in Ottoman history. By highlighting the role of waqf in governing ownership of and access to irrigation infrastructure, this paper contributes to a growing literature on the rise of new legal and administrative categories of property that restructured state-society relations in the Ottoman Empire. At the same time, such attention to waqf, an institution pervasive throughout the Ottoman lands and governed under the auspices of Ottoman law, challenges the common notion that the case of late-eighteenth-century Egypt falls outside the scope of Ottoman history. This study combines the Shari’a court records from Rashid and Dimyat with an imperial view offered by provisioning records and official correspondence from the Ottoman center in Istanbul. These sources together offer an alternative perspective on the critical decades from 1760-1810, a turbulent time in Ottoman Egypt that is usually reduced to the study of high politics in Cairo.

Stable political order in Iraq has always hinged on the successful management of the Tigris and Euphrates’ water supplies to meet the demands of states and settlers for irrigation and transportation. This paper focuses on the Ottoman period in Iraq between 1638-1750 and analyzes how Ottoman policymakers in Baghdad and Istanbul worked closely with local kin groups to manage the rivers flowing in the empire’s easternmost frontier to cement the sultan’s political authority over the region’s subjects. The paper argues that Ottoman hydraulic management was a key to cement the sultan’s political authority over the region’s subjects via a condominium system of joint rule between the Ottoman imperial center and provincial society. In some instances, Ottoman authorities even included the Safavid Empire into this arrangement to ensure the successful execution of waterworks in its distant province. In the Ottoman system of shared authority over water, the imperial center placed the management of irrigation largely in the hands of local kin groups without an overall plan and centralized bureaucracy. Kin groups operated as irrigation units, co-operating in digging canals and branches and in building dams to achieve their common goals. Nevertheless, the Ottoman provincial administration in Baghdad, with financial, technical, and military support from Istanbul, periodically undertook enormous water control projects that local communities alone were ill equipped to carry out. These projects had multiple purposes, such as channeling water to the shrine cities of Karbala and Najaf, clearing oversized canals from accumulating silt, and damming and shutting river channels supplying water to rebellious tribes. Ottoman scholars have been interested in financial, political, and social instruments the Ottoman Empire deployed to consolidate its authority in the provinces. Ottoman archival sources reveal episodes of cooperation and political challenge between local kin groups and imperial officials in the Tigris-Euphrates region that allow us to build upon this rich literature and examines the less-explored role of water in tying the fates of the smallest Iraqi villages to Istanbul in ways often overlooked.

This paper focuses on key administrative aspects of the Ottoman/Polish-Lithuanian frontier in the 16th and 17th centuries. In a frontier where the southern borderlands were governed mainly through the Ottoman vassal polities, the Porte continued to find ways to exert direct control through the ordering of space and forging relationships with emerging local powers. Employing a range of Ottoman, Polish, Ukrainian, Russian and Romanian sources, this study explicates two strategies employed by the Sublime Porte in response to new challenges to Ottoman rule in the northern frontier: first, the creation of directly administered eyalets of Özü/Silistre (1621) and Kameniçe (1672), an act that was accompanied by the repeated mutual demarcation of borders with Poland-Lithuania, and second, the co-opting of clients from both sides of the frontier. These projects repeatedly led to ambiguous episodes of co-dominium. By examining the results of these processes, I engage established studies of Ottoman frontier zones and contribute to our understanding of Ottoman administrative practice and sovereignty in the periphery. In the early 17th century, external conflicts and the rise of the Budjak Horde and Zaporozhian Cossacks upset the balance between Ottoman Sultans, Polish-Lithuanian Kings, Crimean Khans and the Voyevodes of Moldavia. The acute upheavals that ensued on both sides of the frontier included “rogue” Ottoman beylerbeyis such as Abaza Mehmed Pasha carrying out private wars, the emergence of the Cossack Hetmanate (which briefly submitted to Ottoman rule) and several attempts by Tatar leaders to submit to Polish-Lithuanian monarchs. Both Ottoman and Polish-Lithuanian sovereigns were therefore forced to incorporate these emerging power brokers in their efforts to establish direct and indirect rule in a rapidly changing frontier. Studies employing sources from both sides of this 1,200 kilometer-long frontier have begun to emerge in Ottoman historiography. There remain, however, lingering questions regarding the administrative practices of republic and sultanate vis-à-vis competing notions of sovereignty rooted in multiple traditions of patronage and jurisprudence. By engaging sources from both sides of the Ottoman/Polish-Lithuanian frontier, it is possible to better understand how Ottoman vassals and directly appointed administrators maintained relationships of economy, political alliance and consanguinity with the sovereign powers and local frontier notables of neighboring Poland-Lithuania. In critical cases, these relations predated and continued to develop parallel to legal states of clientage to the Padishah. By establishing patterns of inter-imperial connectivity, we can better understand what appear to be top-down administrative projects in this under-studied frontier context.

Who has the right to build a fortress? In this presentation, I examine how Tepedelenli Ali Pasha, the notorious provincial governor from Ottoman Epirus (r. 1784-1820), provoked this question by launching an ambitious building program of military works that included the repair and construction of no less than eleven fortifications along the Ionian coast (what is now Albania and northern Greece). In the late-18th and early-19th centuries, the collapse of the Venetian Republic as well as Napoleon’s voracious expansionist policy transformed the eastern Ionian Sea into a contested space where Ottoman, British, French and Russian forces clashed for control. While it was standard practice in the early modern period for local administrators and notables to contribute their own resources for the defense of the imperial border, the central authorities in Istanbul still maintained direct oversight in the form of sending construction supervisors to the provinces and keeping official building registers. However, with the notable exception of Lepanto (İnebahtı), where Istanbul worked with Ali Pasha and his sons to maintain the pair of fortresses defending the Gulf of Corinth, it seems that this provincial governor commenced the construction of defensive works in his territory on his own initiative and with personal funding. This paper addresses broader questions about political authority in the provinces by investigating both the internal and trans-imperial disputes that erupted over the construction of these fortresses, which in some cases transgressed the terms of international treaties. In order to elucidate the multiple sides of these disputes, I bring together a variety of archival sources, including building registers from the State Ottoman Archives, British diplomatic reports, Ali Pasha’s personal papers and a hitherto-unexamined manuscript by a French engineer responsible for designing several of these constructions. This study of Ali Pasha’s fortifications not only joins a growing scholarly literature interested in Ottoman military technology and the defense of the imperial frontier, but also offers a view to the ground-level negotiations contingent upon the scramble for political space on the periphery.