Protest meetings are generally accepted as the ‘weapons of the weak’ against the authority because weaks have power to challenge power holders in extraordinary periods by upending the bureaucratic hierarchy. People from different ethnic, cultural and economic backgrounds come together and raise their voice when they feel a threat from authorities. During the protests/riots, the ordinary people can have different demands and different tactics but as the most crucial part of the event, mounting together opens a road for these people to gain their expectations. Ottoman Empire had faced many social protests in the beginning of the twentieth century after the announcement of two new taxes which were poll tax (sahsi verge) and domestic animal tax (hayvanat-i ehliye rusumu) and after the ordinary people faced with the trauvmatic results of drought in Anatolia. While the ordinary people were looking for the help of local governors for the results of famine and drought, the government’s attempt to collect new taxes resulted with the protests and uprisings of thousands of people. Erzurum and Bitlis uprisings between 1906 and 1908 were the well known examples of these kinds of social movements. This study aims to analyze how ordinary people in the Eastern part of the Ottoman Empire developed collective action to bargain with the state through focusing on the social movements such as protests, riots and tax uprisings in the beginning of the twentieth century. My main concern will be re-searching on the protests by focusing on the petitioning practices, symbolic power of killing of some officials, showing the corpses in the city centers, the incensing of the houses of some state officials, closing the shops, transforming of the sacred places to the meeting halls and chanting as long live the Sultan! Almost all of these rituals are the common practices of the ordinary people who joined the riots, it is my contention that, each of these rituals and symbols should be clarified carefully for two reasons. First, it helps us to understand the demands and the culture of ordinary people in the provinces. Secondly and more importantly, it is the only way to identify the masses as the real agencies in the creation of a collective action.

The Ottoman Empire witnessed the immigration of Muslim population in Crimea and Caucasia, dominated by the Russian Empire, into the Anatolian territories. Waves of immigration intensified especially during 1856-1857 and 1860-1865 and after the Ottoman-Russian War of 1877-8. Muslim immigrants of hundreds of thousands were settled in different parts of Anatolia by the Ottoman government. These immigrations not only transformed social, economic, demographic and ethnic structure of Anatolian territories but also faced serious difficulties and problems especially concerning newcomers’ integration into established local populations. The process of settlement mainly led to tensions between immigrants and local populations of newly settled regions because of the appropriation of lands by the government to immigrants and of the resistance of land owners or tribal communities amongst local population against this process. In other words, appearance of immigrants as a new actor and the dispute on land ownership both paved the way for struggles between immigrants, local population (landowners, tribal groups, etc.) and state officials and required redefinition of land ownership in all provinces of the empire. And it can be pointed out that such struggles concerning land disputes were one of sources of inter-communal clashes and violence in subsequent years. It is also possible to see tensions, struggles and sometimes armed clashes between immigrants and tribal groups in regions, where tribes were widespread and dominant, in the central and eastern Anatolia. The aim of this paper is to place tensions and struggles between Muslim immigrants –especially the Circassians from Caucasia– settled in the province of Sivas in the central Anatolia and tribal groups there within a perspective of land disputes and to discuss the Ottoman state’s policy of immigrants, and relations between the state and both immigrants and local population at the end of the 19th century. In Sivas, the appropriation of summer pastures, virtually used by tribal groups from time immemorial, to newcomers by the Ottoman government faced resistance of tribes and led to armed clashes. And the government attempted to enhance its own authority over rival power groups such as tribal chiefs and to create a more loyal population by settling immigrants in tribal-dominated regions, where it had limited control. Thus, the paper will try questioning the Ottoman state’s policy of immigrants and practices of resistance of different layers of the society by using the Ottoman archival documents and especially correspondences of the Commission of Immigrants (Muhacirin Komisyonu).

As an Armenian-Ottoman town, Zeitun had a peculiar place in the Empire’s Armenian Question. There were serious ethnic clashes in Zeitun, like the well-known 1895-1896 Rebellion. Despite its popularity in Ottoman historiography, the town’s history after the Young Turk Revolution is mostly ignored. This is probably because in that period no serious ethnic clash occurred in Zeitun. However, ethnic tension in the town also rose during the new regime. One example is the 1909 Counterrevolution: The nearby 1909 Adana/Cilicia Massacre was the cause of that tension, yet it did not turn into a serious conflict. How it was prevented deserves an explanation, which can also highlight many details about daily relations between post-revolutionary state and local Armenians. This paper is an attempt for such a contribution. It focuses on the Ottoman Archives documents on post-revolutionary Zeitun. Most of these documents’ discourses fit well into Rahajit Guha’s famous conception of “primary discourse” due to the writings between government officials and the central state. Yet as they include polemics about the state’s Armenian policy, some officials tend to provide detailed information about locals’ daily lives and relations between those locals and themselves. Polemics of Zeytun’s two sub-district governors come forward in this paper. The first one belongs to ?brahim Pasha. For him, it was himself who had prevented the 1909 Adana/Cilicia Massacre spread into Zeitun: Antioch Armenians’ and Antioch Court Martial’s appreciations in his next duty was also a proof. However, news that Marash Court Martial had convicted ?brahim Pasha for causing troubles in Zeitun came as a blow. How could the two court martials have different opinions about ?brahim Pasha? His objection to this inconsistency would highlight many facts about how state officials try to handle great ethnic tensions. Halil Bey, ?brahim Pasha’s successor, was the second one. He was confident in his previous constitutionalist experience in Cyprus. He stood for a dove policy in arresting some suspects at large. Yet as the suspects were charged with attacking on the government building in the Counterrevolution, army officials were for repressive measures. Soon, the failure in catching the suspects would make both sides blame and castigate each other and defend their stands ambitiously. Their polemic makes one question whether a totally different Armenian policy could have been followed by the Young Turk regime.

This paper investigates the repercussions of the compulsory population exchange between Turkey and Greece in 1923 upon a town situated on the western Aegean coast of Turkey, Ayvalik. Many scholars have noted that during the population exchange, while the Greek-Orthodox population which left Turkey was mostly bourgeois, the newcomers were almost all peasants and this resulted in the existence of a weak bourgeoisie during the formative years of the republic. Besides the devastating effects on the Turkish economy, the prevailing literature mainly focuses on the trauma and loss behind the population exchange. This paper, while admitting the devastating and traumatic character of the population exchange, claims that both the state and refugees have developed strategies in their own interest to overcome and mitigate this migration process. On the one hand, the state, as an all-powerful actor, in addition to its settlement vision, conducted cultural policies in line with its modernization project in order to facilitate the integration of this population and, hence, national homogenization. On the other hand, the middle class refugees were not merely dispossessed and victimized but had developed survival strategies and even gained significant economic, social, cultural and political roles within their new habitat. They used their bourgeois history, social capital and negotiation capacity to cooperate or conflict with the state whenever it is necessary; build or participate into voluntary and leisure institutions in order to organize the quotidian realities of the town, and enter local politics in order to seize political power first at the micro and, then, macro level. Hence, this paper aims to juxtapose the state-refugee relations with class-state relations while highlighting the refugees’ active agency and aims to defy its portrayal as a victimized and dominated one vis-à-vis the state.