Census-making as A Social Process in Ottoman Kurdistan, 1840-1850 The nineteenth century can be described as an “era of censuses” for the Ottoman world. The Ottoman state set out to conduct its first modern population census in 1831 within the context of increasing centralization and modernization of the state apparatus. Echoing the efforts of its contemporaries, counting individual human beings within its vast imperial domains turned out to be a novel and yet urgent policy for the Ottoman bureaucracy. The census counted the able-bodied, tax-paying adult male population for ostensibly military and fiscal purposes. Despite being a manifestation of the state’s aims of standardization and centralization, the early census of the 1830s was conducted “successfully” only in provinces geographically close to the capital. In the far remoter provinces, especially those on the borderlines, the application of census appeared to be a more challenging and convoluted task than it was at the center. Kurdistan, which stood on a border area at the crossroads of three long-lived empires and inhabited and controlled by ancient Kurdish chiefdoms and tribes, was one of these places where the application of the first modern Ottoman census remained as a challenging task for over four decades. This paper explores the implementation of these earliest Ottoman censuses in the Kurdistan region in the mid-nineteenth century. Conducting a census was seen as the first step towards the “re-conquest,” of this region, which was characterized mostly as unruly, tribal, and even primitive by Ottoman administrators and remained on the margins of Ottoman politico-administrative system for the most part of the Ottoman imperial history. I approach Ottoman census enterprise in Kurdistan in light of the Bourdieusian notion of the statist capital (capital étatique). The making of the state entails the concurrent concentration of, what Bourdieu calls, “different species of capital,” namely, the capital of physical force, economic capital, informational capital and symbolic capital. Using Ottoman archival sources, this paper argues that census making stood at the juncture of the governmental efforts to concentrate these four types of capital towards the making of modern stateness in Kurdistan. As such, together with building a fiscal, military, and administrative infrastructure, the Ottoman administrators sought to construct a “language of stateness” in this hitherto peripheral border area.

Processes of the formation of Kurdish identity from the late 19th century onwards have long been the subject of scholarly interest. Sources on the history of the prominent Ottoman-Kurdish Bedirhani family have come to play a significant part in the study of such processes. Rightly so, as the material available on the family is indeed rich, including self-narratives and an abundance of documentation in the Ottoman state archives. However, a lack of attention for the impact of different mnemopolitical agendas in shaping and transmitting narratives of the Bedirhani family history gave rise to misleading assumptions and false circular arguments : The trajectories of family members are often treated as case studies for the emergence of Kurdish national identity. Meanwhile, family members themselves and later historiographers have constantly re-interpreted accounts of the family’s past, tailoring it to narratives of Kurdish nationalist history. Tracing the history of the Bedirhani family in the eventful transition period between imperial and post-imperial contexts, I work with ego-documents to follow the trajectories of individual family members. In addition, I apply a qualitative network perspective to map out opportunity structures as well as patterns of loyalty and support family members relied on over time. I am particularly interested in biographical trajectories that are at odds with the standard historiographical account of the emergence of Kurdish national identity: First, I zoom in on the Ottoman dimension of the family’s history. It tends to be overlooked that for more than half a century, after being exiled from their homeland in Eastern Anatolia in 1847, family members were active practitioners of empire, employed in the administration throughout the Ottoman lands. Second, I include the self-narrative of a female family member who settled down in Istanbul in the early years of the Turkish Republic. In a third step, I revisit comparatively well-researched trajectories of more prominent family members, asking how the transmission of their biographical accounts is shaped by a variety of later discourses and concerns. An inclusive perspective on the Bedirhani family history enriches our understanding of the complex Ottoman-Kurdish opportunity structures and life worlds prevalent over the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Comparing and situating different narratives on the history of the family also provides an opportunity to trace and critically examine shifting discourses in Kurdish historiography.

Attempts to form a modern border between Ottoman and Qajar lands started with the Treaties of Erzurum [1828-1848]. One thing that triggered disagreements between two empires was the application of Tabiiyet-i Osmaniye Kanunnamesi (The Law of Ottoman Nationality, 1869) in majority Kurdish regions near the Persian borderlands to define a common Ottoman citizenship irrespective of religious or ethnic divisions. The gap between plural realities of Kurdish locality and its singular image in the minds of Ottoman bureaucrats complicated the picture even more dramatically: It would not be easy to define who was Ottoman and who was not through reforms and measures produced in Istanbul or Tehran. This paper focuses on the cartographic and discursive formation of Ottoman-Persian boundary and the imposition of Osmanlilik (Ottomanness) upon the nomadic and semi-nomadic Kurdish subjects in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I argue that frontier region between two empires is one of the best exemplary points for laying out the contours of the newly emerging modern central state in Ottoman lands. Rather than treating the Ottoman state’s power as already constituted in the mostly Kurdish borderlands, I attempt to look at the production and establishment of state authority in the frontier zone through newly introduced institutions and governmental practices. In this way, the paper explores the ways in which the formation of well-defined border inevitably gained a dynamic feature in relation to the production of external distinction and internal homogeneity as the state actors treated borders as discursive and real barriers within which an ideal Osmanlilik could be spread. Therefore, through close readings of cartographic and discursive meanings attached to the concept of border, this paper provide a discussion for the dialogical relationship among the reification of the Ottoman state on borderlands, the construction of Osmanlilik and the formation of the Ottoman-Persian border in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.