This paper focuses on two complicated legal disputes among the yörüks [Turcoman nomads], refugees from Balkans and Caucasus, and Muslim and Armenian peasants in Bursa over the sharing of common pastures. Using Ottoman archival sources, I examine two historical cases from 1891 that triggered armed conflicts, and resulted in numerous injuries and a few deaths. These incidents indicate that the yörüks in the province of Hüdâvendigâr, who were forced to settle in the region in the 1860s were still struggling with difficulties caused by their forceful sedentarization, including cultural disputes with the local villagers and dispossession. Once the yörüks had lost their usufruct rights over common pastures on their winter camping sites on the Bursa plain due to the Land Law of 1858, they had to encounter the calamity of the turning into landless peasants. Sharing common pastures must have been already a matter of tension between the local villagers after the Land Law of 1858, because these cases show that after this law the villagers claimed and took the possession of common pastures. However this tension could grow into armed conflicts when the central bureaucracy attempted to settle immigrants from the Balkans and Caucasus on already disputed lands in the aftermath of Russo-Ottoman War of 1877-78. When these settlements occurred on the pastures encircled by non-Muslim communities, armed conflicts for pastures might have laid the seeds more violent sectarian conflicts of the First World War years.

This paper explores the way the Arab tribal confederation known as the Shammar moved in the Jazira region between Baghdad, Mosul, and Diyarbak?r in the late nineteenth century. It foregrounds how the group’s seasonal motion proved to be a resilient strategy for exploiting the arid regions between Tigris and the Euphrates in response to recurring challenges such as drought and locusts alike. It moreover shows how motion served the group well with respect to the state, allowing them to at times collaborate with state officials and at other times use state structures for their own ends, most notably in the case of provincial borders. It was in part the changing of these borders in the wake of the Vilayet Law of 1864 – most notably the establishment of the special district of Dayr al-Zor – that prompted a portion of the Shammar to revolt in 1871. While famous reformers such as Baghdad governor Midhat Pasha hailed his eventual execution of the Shammar shaykh ?Abd al-Karim as a triumph of civilization over savagery, this paper suggests a more attenuated vision of the governor’s power. Ottoman troops spent much of the summer exhausted on the Tigris, not daring to venture into the scorching desert, and they only succeeded in capturing ?Abd al-Karim thanks to the collusion of another group of nomads. Ultimately the vision of using Dayr al-Zor to catalyze tribal settlement failed, too, as Midhat Pasha left Baghdad and the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877-1878 siphoned away troops and resources. The Shammar may have been divided into branches based in Dayr al-Zor and Mosul, but their motion did not end. Indeed, they continued to utilize motion across borders. In this way, the Shammar manipulated the margins, but were in no way marginal to the history of the late nineteenth century Ottoman world. Relying on archival materials in Ottoman, Arabic, and French, the paper builds on Deringil’s claim that the late Ottoman state engaged in “White man’s burden wearing a fez.” While many officials’ descriptions of nomads do indeed reveal essentialism if not racism, to focus on representation alone renders nomads, ironically, motionless. By emphasizing space alongside the rhetoric of state officials, the paper ultimately emphasizes how the Shammar exploited state structures intended to stop them.

During the famines of 1878-81 that spread across the Ottoman East, from Erzurum to Mosul, inhabitants had “nothing left to do but fly or starve,” the British Consul at Diyarbakir wrote. This paper examines how, during these famines, aid and arms flowed unevenly to farmers and nomads, radicalizing relations between the two and transforming the development of sectarian politics in the region. Recent work has explored the history of Ottoman nomads and sedentarization projects during the Tanzimat reforms (1839-76) and reign of Abdülhamid II (1876-1908). Re?at Kasaba and Janet Klein describe the state’s efforts to break or co-opt the power of predominantly Kurdish nomadic tribes, while Richard Antramanian and Dzovinar Derderian show how the Armenian Patriarchate’s constitutional regime became a junior partner in centralization and sedentarization efforts. This paper shifts the focus from Istanbul-based institutions like the Ottoman state and the Armenian Patriarchate to local politics between nomads and farmers, which hinged on uneven allocations of food and arms. In the wake of the 1877-8 Russo-Turkish War, stocks of food and flocks collapsed, endangering farmers and nomads alike. Aid institutions, however, shared an idea of progress that favored cultivation over pastoralism. Drawing on data from humanitarian aid organizations, British and French consular reports, American missionary accounts, and internal correspondence among Armenian and Ottoman officials in the region, I argue that nomads were not included in the humanity that aid organizations sought to protect. Famine aid, consisting primarily of cereals, seed, and farming implements, focused on replanting fields rather than repopulating herds. While farmers benefitted from uneven aid flows, nomads benefitted from uneven arms flows, thanks to Ottoman policies to arm tribes during the previous year’s war. As Ottoman officials tried to settle them and aid efforts neglected them, many tribes pillaged settlements to survive. In addition, nomads brandished the power of their modern rifles to forge their own coalitions of local notables and state officials, people who could shield them from sedentarization efforts. Reading this history through uneven aid and arms allocations, I argue, allows us to account for the circulations of arms, food, and capital that radicalized farmer/nomad relations and shaped the Ottoman-Russian borderlands’ developing sectarian politics.

This paper addresses the legal status of lands used for grazing under rapidly changing Ottoman land law in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the 1890’s, Ottoman land officials in Syria attempted to declare large swaths of unregistered cultivable land at the desert’s edge, land used mainly by nomads, as abandoned (mahlul). When they tried to claim the land for the state treasury and auction it off to wealthy investors, the provincial governor intervened, questioning the land’s legal status and arguing that it should be used to settle refugees and nomads. Using this little-known debate as a starting point, the paper uses the texts of laws, imperial decrees and fatwa collections to investigate the status of grazing grounds from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. While Ottoman land law undoubtedly privileged cultivation, the government’s and especially the military’s need for livestock necessitated legal protections for grazing grounds. In the late nineteenth century, however, the increasing value of cultivable land and the need to settle refugee communities raised the stakes of determining the legal status of grazing lands. Further, the debate brought the rights of nomadic communities who used the land into question: could they, like cultivating villagers, claim prescriptive rights for the land they had used historically in order to gain ownership under the Land Code? The paper argues that by claiming unregistered land at the desert’s edge mahlul, a claim with questionable legal basis, land officials aimed to enact the state’s right to confiscate vast grazing lands, ignoring the potential land rights of nomadic communities. Even when they aimed to return some of the lands to nomads through settlement agreements, state officials would retain the right to choose which land went to which community through land grants rather than recognition of historical right. The paper uses archival material to show that this policy led to violent clashes between nomads and refugees granted lands the nomads regarded as their own. However, the paper also reviews court and land registers showing that nomads were sometimes able to take advantage of the questionable legal status of grazing ground by arguing for prescription rights on the same basis as cultivating villagers. It therefore argues for a mixed Ottoman legacy in terms of maintaining nomads' legal rights to land.