This paper explores the afterlife of the Ottoman Islamic endowment (Awqaf/Evkaf) as a transimperial institution in its successor nation-states. I analyze how the negotiations between Ottoman, Egyptian, and European statesmen, in the period following the 1878 Berlin treaty, introduced new international values of minority rights and freedom of religious expression into the administration of Islamic endowments in first quarter of the twentieth century. By way of providing a case-study, I focus on the legal battles between Ottoman, Egyptian, Greek, Bulgarian, and Great Power representatives over the endowments belonging to the Khedival family of Egypt in the Greek Island of Thasos and the town of Kavala. Scholarship on Waqf in the era of European colonial encroachment focuses primarily on the period of the nineteenth century, when various Muslim state reformers - Ottoman, Egypt, and Indian - were influenced by Western European notions of a dichotomy between a public, secular realm and its private, religious counterpart. Under this dichotomy, according to this historiography, the administration of Waqf property was delegated to the private, religious realm of personal status or family law. I build on this literature to show, on the one hand, how this dichotomy was incorporated into the language of minority rights and freedom of religious expression in the treaty of Athens in 1913, which ceded Kavala and Thasos to the Greek government after the 1912-13 Balkan War. I argue that Greek and Ottoman diplomats, in their negotiation with their European and Egyptian counterparts, attempted to redefine the Egyptian endowments in Kavala and Thasos as 'private' Waqf (Wakf Ghayr Sahih), in order to contain Khedival sovereignty, which already overlapped with Greek and Ottoman sovereignties over the site of the Waqf. On the other hand, I also also look at the everyday administration of the Khedival waqfs in Kavala and Thasos, using the collection of Khedive Abbas Hilmi's (r.1892-1914) papers, which contain letters, reports, and petitions from agents and beneficiaries of the waqf. These documents show how the administrators of the endowment, in their attempt to maintain the waqf’s financial integrity in the face of mass deportation and relocation of population groups, borrowed the language of treaty regimes to reclassify the beneficiaries into refugees and clients.

In 1874, the British vice-consul in the Ottoman port-city of Kavala declared that local tobacco cultivators had become “indifferent to the success of their crops.” Indeed, the statement reflected the manner in which cultivators in the region related to the fruits of their labor with increasing apprehension. As others have clearly demonstrated, investments in the tobacco industry in the Eastern Mediterranean and especially in the Aegean region significantly altered the fabric of local society. Studies of the Ottoman tobacco industry have indicated that turbulent shop-floor relations emerged in the late-nineteenth century as the most telling evidence for social conflict between a nascent working class and the capitalists who employed them. This emphasis on the industrial workforce has not been limited to tobacco alone, but applies to other industries as well. The historical importance of industrial production is indisputable. However, because of this historiographical emphasis on urban labor, an unfortunate chasm has emerged between histories of urban labor in the Ottoman Aegean and our understanding of the livelihood and political agency of the regional peasantry. This paper aims to correct that discrepancy by shedding light on the many acts of sophisticated violence pursued by peasants and rebels in the Macedonian and Thracian countryside. By burning the villas of large land-holders, sabotaging fields, and kidnapping high-profile merchants and investors, rural people expressed their grievances with the wealthy urbanites who had profited most from their labor, specialized knowledge, and skill in the fields. Although these acts were not part of a coherent political program, they were far from aimless. By attacking the farmlands (çiftlikat) of the Abbott family or holding members of that family (or others) hostage for ransom, peasants targeted the most crucial players in regional economic ‘development.’ In doing so, they challenged the notion that development was an inherently noble process or one that benefitted working people. By looking at a few cases of persistent violence which wealthy merchant families faced in the Ottoman province of Selânik, this paper will highlight the importance of analyzing the activities of urban capitalists with an eye to the rural communities they depended on.

In this paper, I examine the figure of Ali Pasha of Yannina through the lens of Western travellers and dramatists. I argue that Ali Pasha’s powerful political, larger-than-life persona challenges the ways in which his Western audience has constantly tried to contain, organize and domesticate him. I also problematize Said’s notion of the representation of the Orient, as I suggest that Ali Pasha responds to popular depictions and representations of him through the manipulation and mimicry of his image. I bring attention to travel accounts and dramas such as William Davenport’s Historical Portraiture of leading events in the Life of Ali Pacha and Mordecai Noah’s The Grecian Captive, and read them as ‘cultural texts’ that ultimately reflect more the anxieties and fears of Romantic culture in the wave of Philhellenism than the Despotic figure portrayed by Ali. Moreover, I suggest that the questions of Orientalism in Ali Pasha are more a matter of mimicry, to borrow Homi Bhabha’s term. Ali stages himself as the West sees him, thereby exposing the superficiality and arbitrariness of the manner in which he is defined. When reading diplomatic and travel narratives of Ottoman Greece, I argue in this paper that we encounter two experiences of Ali Pasha and Greece – the diplomatic and the cultural – at odds with one another. On the one hand, European diplomatic knowledge of Greece was bound up with qualms about Ali’s political and economic strength, and his geographically strategic position: “he is a remorseless tyrant, guilty of the most horrible cruelties, very brave & so good a general, they call him the Mahometan Bonaparte” (Byron BLJ I 228). On the other hand, the cultural impulses of Philhellenism and Orientalism cast him as weak, depraved, pathetic and even inconsequential. Despite the fact that many travellers were hospitably entertained in the Pasha’s court, they nevertheless published wildly popular travel accounts, many of which provided sensational portrayals of the cruel and sensuous Ali, and tragic depictions of an enslaved and oppressed Greece. I suggest that European travellers who visited his lands were greatly invested in seeing him in the most alien terms possible. Ali had to be weak and inconsequential, and he had to be other, and only in seeing him as such could Europeans fully feel their imagined affinity with Greece; ultimately, mocking the Pasha became a form of support for the Philhellenic Wars and the Hellenic cause.

The withdrawal of the imperial Russian army from the Ottoman Balkans following the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878 left the region in a state of insecurity and destruction. The lack of immediate protection by the Ottoman military exposed Ottoman citizens to new threats from independent Balkan states whose encroachment in the region included paramilitary activity and local violence. Current scholarship has focused upon the aftermath of the Treaty of Berlin, refugee movements into other Ottoman domains, and the dynamics of resettlement. However, little attention has been paid to the challenges of those migrants who sought to return to their homelands located in the region of Eastern Rumelia. This paper sheds light on how Ottoman authorities, migrants, and locals in Eastern Rumelia interacted to ensure security for their own livelihood and for the integrity of the empire following the Russo-Turkish War. I shall elaborate on three measures that were taken to reestablish Ottoman imperial authority in Eastern Rumelia: the resettlement of migrants, the establishment of local militias, and the militarizing and arming of these groups with weapons such as the Martini-Henry. Although these plans were meant to secure Ottoman interests in the Balkans, I contend that increasing Ottoman influence in Eastern Rumelia set off a local arms race and migratory scramble in the region. As the authority of other neighboring Balkan states increased, generative forces of security comprising locals, migrants, and officers were key players in maintaining the Ottoman state’s integrity and interests on the ground.