In European accounts of late 19th century Iran, the women’s quarter of Golestan Palace, where Nasser al-Din Shah’s many female relatives, wives, children, and differing classes of maids and servants resided is a popular trope. Within such accounts, much of the representation of this space, and the women that occupy it, has been seeped in orientalist language, which presented harems as idealized or barbaric domestic spaces, and as part of a timeless institution of Islamic culture. This paper counters such representations by examining the various forms of affective bonds and familial relationships which were a defining feature of the day-to-day lives of the residence of Nasser al-Din shah’s harem. This harem was structured around a set of extremely rigid social hierarchies, and the gender and familial norms that formed the social organization of this space are indeed associated with a pre-modernized Iran. This included the presence of four primary wives (as allowed in Shi’ite Islam), many “temporary wives” (referred to as sigehs in Shi’ite Islam), though many of these women were far from “temporary” inhabitants of this space, as well as other female relatives, children, teachers, cooks, maids, servants and so on. The rigid social hierarchy was however often undermined by the affective bonds, and in particular, homosocial ones, which cut across social and class lines and were rarely predicated on established hierarchies. While Nasser al-Din Shah’s close relationship to the young Malijak has often been touted in Iranian historiography as an exceptional relationship, a close examination of familial formations in the harem reveal that in fact, this form of affective bonding across social class was in no way an extraordinary occurrence in the harem. This paper uses primarily Persian narratives recounted by individuals who were a part of this institution (amongst them Taj Saltana, Forough Dowleh, Malijak), in order to examine the various forms of intimacies that defined the domestic lives of the harem’s residents.

This paper is part of a chapter in my dissertation on the formation of the Qajar state in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The dissertation argues that the Qajars established a government and consolidated their rule in Iran through political patronage, and were not simply a “tribal” power whose political ascendancy can be attributed, as the historiography often does, to military conquest. Although the Qajar state faced significant challenges in ruling over a vast territory, it nevertheless did manage to do so even in areas geographically distant from the capital. This paper focuses on the question of how Qajar rulers governed the provinces in the face of both domestic and international challenges. It uses the case of a local uprising in Fars in order to illustrate the political and diplomatic strategies that provincial leaders used to pacify social unrest and sustain relations with European powers – in this instance the British – while at the same time maintaining their own political authority. In February 1827 a local Arab shaykh in Bushehr staged an insurrection that threatened the safety and security of both the town and the British residency. The rebellion does not appear in Qajar chronicles, so this paper first re-creates the events that unfolded during the course of the uprising by drawing on correspondence between Qajar leaders and the British resident, as well as on the Bushehr residency reports. It then proceeds to use royal decrees (farmān) and political correspondence to examine relations between central and provincial rulers in early nineteenth Iran and gauge the extent to which provincial leaders were permitted to govern their own affairs and handle diplomatic matters. The response to the Bushehr uprising highlights the relative autonomy of Qajar provincial leaders, but importantly, it also demonstrates that Qajar administrators in Tehran had a keen interest in distant and local matters. By utilizing little or never used sources, this paper provides a micro-historical approach to understanding center-periphery relations and the nature of governance in the early Qajar state.

This paper is a study of the military history of the Second Russo-Iranian war (1826-1828). The second war was sparked after two years of provocative activities by the Russian side which included border incursions in northern parts of Khanate of Iravan (Yerevan), beginning in 1815, and attempt at forcing the Iranian side to accept Russian diktat. The war occurred in two phases in 1826 and 1827, resulting in Iranian capitulation in February 1828 (Treaty of Turkmanchay). The paper examines the state of preparedness of each side and explains the reasons behind initial Iranian victories. It will be demonstrated that initial Iranian victories had more to do with lack of preparedness on the Russian side rather than any new and superior Iranian military capability. In this context, the battles of Lankaran (July 1826) and fall of that city to Crown Prince Abbas Mirza Qajar’s forces, and Ganjeh (in the same month) and the fall of that city will be examined. Then a detailed examination of the Battle of Shamkhor (September 1826) and Ganjeh (October 1826) will be undertaken. These two battles turned the tide of the war as Russian General Paskovich (Iravansky) took command. The main conclusion of the paper is that while the Qajar state managed to improve its military performance against Russian aggression, Abbas Mirza’s army was not prepared for this war, and his was posturing prior to July 1826 had more to do with attempting to bluff the Russians to back off. In this context, the Iranian side misinterpreted the developments in Russia (the Decemberist Rebellion), and viewed the Russian side not to be prepared to have an all-out war with Iran. The study is based on original Persian, English and French sources. Sources include both historiographies and memoirs and observations by Iranian and non-Iranian observers.

This paper engages with recent literature in Ottoman history that has defined the late Ottoman legal environment as “pluralistic.” I argue that this description is insufficient for characterizing the conflicts experienced between different legal and administrative entities during the Hamidian period. Specifically, I will focus on conflicts between those branches of government defined in mid-19th century laws as “executive” (i.e., the office of the governor at different administrative levels) vs. “judicial” (i.e., the new nizamiye institutions and the Sharia courts). I will use these conflicts to show that the late Ottoman legal environment was not simply pluralistic, but highly contested at an institutional level. The paper will first introduce mid-19th century imperial legislation that aimed to separate the functions of executive vs. judicial governing entities throughout the empire. This was one step in the decades-long process of creating the nizamiye court system, and aimed to create an independent judiciary in Ottoman lands as well as a depoliticized practice of administration. To this end, the laws stated clearly that executives, most pointedly provincial, county and district governors as well as administrative councils and officials, were not to interfere in the workings of the new nizamiye judicial councils. The second part of my paper will examine the problems associated with the political process of implementing this separation of powers by parsing an investigation of a county governor carried out by nizamiye institutions in Ottoman Syria. The investigation reveals two dynamics at the provincial level: first, the historical involvement of newly defined “executive” institutions in “judicial” matters meant that governors and bureaucrats were loathe to surrender their decision-making powers to nizamiye councils. Second, the development of administrative and judicial councils at the district, county and provincial levels involved extensive overlap in personnel between entities later defined either as executive or judicial, especially with regard to the local notables serving on such councils. This overlap rendered the practicality of separating powers politically sensitive. Through the case study, I will also show that the main stakes of the battle to separate powers lay in control over land. In the Hamidian post-Land Code period, newly defined private land rights were becoming the most economically valuable resource available to local inhabitants and Ottoman administrators alike. Decision-making power regarding conflicts over land rights therefore became politically lucrative just as the attempt to separate judicial and executive powers got underway.

Drawing on a broad range of primary sources in Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, and English, such as governmental correspondence, travelogues, and local petitions this paper explores practices of the Ottoman central government and their local representatives to devolve power to elites in the Province of Yemen (Yemen vilayeti) between the establishment of this province in 1872 and the end of Ottoman rule in early 1919. Historians of this second period of Ottoman rule in Yemen have often argued that the four decades of the Ottoman presence in southwest Arabia after 1872 were characterized by government efforts to establish a more direct, centralized form of governance under the auspices of the Ottoman provincial law of 1871. Ottoman policy makers, so the argument, thus moved away from earlier arrangements that accorded significant degrees of autonomy to local leaders, such as the amir of ‘Asir. It was only with the Da’’an agreement, concluded by the imperial government and the Zaydi imam Yahya in 1911, that a form of autonomy was once again incorporated into the governance of Ottoman Yemen. Against this interpretation, I argue that a broad spectrum of autonomy arrangements was central to Ottoman governance in Yemen throughout the entire period under study, and thus prior to the Da’’an agreement. For instance, between 1872 and 1886, ‘Abdullah Pasha al-Dula’i, a prominent shaykh of the Bakil confederation, ruled most of the northern portion of the Yemen vilayeti on behalf of the Ottoman government. Moreover, a significant degree of day-to-day governance throughout Ottoman Yemen was in the hands of local lords (mashayikh) who exercised authority over areas that ranged in size from two villages to entire sub-districts. While governor-general Hüseyin Hilmi Pasha sought to eliminate the autonomy of the mashayikh around 1900, key Ottoman policy makers considered autonomy arrangements an essential element of good government in Yemen. Overall, not autonomy itself was subject to contestation among government officials and local elites but rather the question of how much power should be devolved to whom. In drawing attention to these practices, that were differentiating and particularistic in character, I demonstrate that key elements of Ottoman imperial rule retained their relevance at a time when Ottoman governance was – according to some historians – increasingly adopting the centralizing, standardizing and uniform trappings of a nation-state-in-the-making. In so doing, I complicate the “from empire to nation-state” teleology that still informs much of the scholarly work on the late Ottoman Empire.