Historians interested in the late Ottoman Empire, particularly the 1880s to 1910s, recognize educational reform as crucial in constructing citizens. The Asiret Mektebi (School for Tribes) has received attention largely due to its significance as a priority of Sultan Abdulhamid II (see for example Akarli, 1986 and Somel, 2001). Eugene Rogan’s analysis of a sample of 100 students from the Asiret Mektebi contextualizes the institution as a state project designed to increase loyalty of elite tribal students and prepare them as Ottoman bureaucrats and officers; however, to date there has been little further research to analyze the school’s students as a cohort and the role of the school in generating a new notable class. In order to add to Rogan’s sample and expose deeper connections between the graduates themselves, this paper relies on a form of prosopography – an investigative tool for historical analysis that was widely used throughout the 1960s, which has since fallen out of favor. Utilizing secondary Ottoman sources that focus on the 1880s – 1910s (Antonius, 1939; Cankaya, 1969; Dawn, 1973; and Kansu, 1997) as well as memoirs and biographies (Abdullah, Cleveland, al-Ghusayn), I examine some of Rogan’s unanswered questions: Do student networks formed at Ottoman schools remain intact once they completed their schooling? Does the Ottoman education system serve as a method to transcend class? What roles do these former Ottoman students play in subsequent successor states? Due to the challenges of identifying individuals in this era, this methodology is essential to verify the trajectories of these students. For example, ‘Abd al-Muhsin Al-Saadoun, once a student at Asiret Mektebi and future Prime Minister of Iraq under King Faisal, served in Ottoman Parliament as Ferid Pasazade ‘Abd al-Muhsin Bey. The “overt nationalist” Fa’iz al-Ghusayn identified by Dawn appeared on the Asiret Mektebi and Mulkiye’s rosters as Mehmed Faiz; he became involved in early Arab nationalist secret societies, served as Amir Faisal’s personal secretary, and acted an intermediary between Faisal and tribes of the Hawran during the Arab revolt of 1916. Reconstructing these cohorts helps to identify groups over space and time and demonstrates an evolution of teenagers in Istanbul to prominent leaders in successive Arab states.

Kurds, mostly living within present-day Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria, are the largest stateless nation in the world. Despite the fact that there has been a long history of Kurdish nationalism, an officially recognized Kurdish state has never existed. This paper focuses on the construction of Kurdish cultural and national identities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries within the context of Kurdish national discourse. While doing so, the paper analyzes the constant dialogue that took place among: 1- Various strategies that the Ottoman state and its bureaucrats adopted to gradually transform the Kurds from “the state of savagery and nomadism” into the fold of civilization, through institutions like the Commission of Tribes and Immigrants, Hamidian Light Cavalry and tribal/local schools especially during and after the reign of Abdulhamid II, 2-Rhetorical, institutional and political strategies that Kurdish leaders adopted to exteriorize the Ottoman state and the discourses that the state had applied to its nomadic/tribal periphery and 3- Socio-political structure in Ottoman Kurdistan. The last dimension of this trilogy does not only help us to understand how nomadic, semi-nomadic and sedentary tribal organizations, family structures, and religious systems of Ottoman Kurdistan affected the Ottoman state’s policies to deal with its ‘disordered Kurdish provinces’ but it also gives us insights about the constructive and constitutive role of Ottoman Kurdistan in the formation of Kurdish national and cultural discourses in the late Ottoman period.

Kurdish and Assyrian communities in the mountainous region located between Van and Mosul lived together in relative peace for most of the period between the late sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries. However, beginning in the 1830s, social and political tensions between these communities grew considerably, eventually escalating into widespread violence in the 1840s. The most violent episodes occurred against Assyrian communities in the villages of Tiyari, Diz, and Ashitha in 1843 and in the village of Tkhuma in 1846 in which some five to ten thousand women, men, and children were killed. There are two prevailing scholarly camps that have emerged around the questions of who was behind such violence and why it occurred. According to one camp, the Ottoman state worked in tandem with semi-autonomous local Kurdish groups to perpetrate violent attacks against the Assyrians as a means of centralizing control over its periphery. According to the other camp, Assyrian communities agitated for increasing political autonomy and provoked local Kurdish groups to undertake violence against them, which the Ottoman state was unable to prevent due to its weak political control over the region and the region’s geographic inaccessibility. Both scholarly camps craft their narratives by relying primarily on Western sources. Furthermore these camps have generally been preoccupied with the question of culpability in violence and have not rooted their arguments in a strong theoretical framework that explains in great depth why actors justified either non-violence or violence as a means of achieving different sociopolitical objectives. The aim of this study is to reassess Kurdish-Assyrian relations between 1831 and 1864 through the lens of a different theoretical framework that focuses on the logic of peace and violence among different actors. It interrogates a diverse array of sources, including the Ottoman, Russian, and British archives as well as reports and memoirs from Western missionaries and state officials, in order to determine how different actors viewed the role of violence and peace in relationships with other communities. It also makes extensive use of the Ottoman archives in order to provide a vivid backdrop of competing political forces in the Mosul, Diyarbakir, and Van eyalets (provinces) during the time, which previous studies have not done. Lastly this study looks at how state and local actors interacted to either resolve or table conflicts in the region. This will hopefully provide a valuable contribution to the study of Muslim-Christian relations in the late Ottoman Empire.

My paper examines the changing land tenure in Palu, a town in the eastern frontier of the Ottoman Empire, within the context of the Ottoman centralization program of Tanzimat. Palu was one of the hükümet sanjaks which remained under the hereditary rule of the Kurdish emirates from the sixteenth until the mid-nineteenth century. These lands were granted to the Kurdish emirs who declared their allegiance to the Ottoman Empire during the Safavid-Ottoman imperial rivalry. The emirs maintained their political and economic ‘privileges’ until the mid-nineteenth century, a period when the Ottoman state set out to “turn conquest into government” in its eastern provinces. In this context, Palu gained increased significance as one of the places where hereditary land ownership by the Kurdish emirs still prevailed. Not having conducted land and population surveys (tahrir) in this district and hence, not being able to extract sufficient tax revenues, the state sought to abolish this type of land ownership starting from the 1840s. Ottoman program entailed an effort to divide large lands under the control of the Palu emirs, conduct land and population surveys and establish direct taxation in the region. Using Ottoman archival sources, my paper looks at how these policies were implemented on the ground in Palu. Throughout the process, conflicts revolved mainly around “land” which held different meanings for different parties: a source of tax revenues for the Ottoman state; agricultural surplus for the Kurdish emirs; and finally a means of subsistence for the sharecroppers. As the land program was being drawn by the Ottoman authorities sharecroppers conveyed their demands to the state mainly through their petitions and sought to shape the land allocation process. Petitions present a graphic account of the ordinary inhabitants’ expectations from and responses to Tanzimat state-in-making in the region. The scant writings on the Kurdish frontier of the Ottoman Empire looked at the Tanzimat only in terms of the changing relations between the notables and the Ottoman state. My paper, however, situates land at the center of the conflicts at the local and imperial levels and demonstrates how land relations were redefined, challenged and negotiated among multiple actors including sharecroppers, small landholders, Kurdish emirs, and the Ottoman state. In this way it brings a bottom-up approach to the Ottoman state-making in its Kurdish periphery.

The nineteenth century was marked by a rapid and widespread expansion of foreign missionary activities among all the Churches in the USA and Europe. In addition to sending missionaries all over the world to preach the Bible, both American and European missionary organizations also aimed to bring “true” Christianity to the peoples of the Ottoman Empire. While seeking converts to the Christianity it soon became clear that there was little point in attempting to proselytize among the Muslims because missionary activities among them were illegal in the region. Therefore, the Western missionaries concentrated primarily on the Christian minorities in the Middle East, including Armenians, Greeks, Jacobites, Nestorians, Chaldeans, Copts, and Maronites. The purpose of the paper is to present a history of the American missionary activities in Mardin in the nineteenth century. I will be particularly interested in the activities of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) which was the most substantial American missionary organization in the Ottoman Empire throughout the nineteenth century. The ABCFM sent its missionaries to the Middle East in 1820 and several exploratory journeys were undertaken during the early decades of the ABCFM mainly to investigate conditions in the region, to find suitable locations for mission stations and congregations to be evangelized. Mardin was one of the suitable places that the ABCFM decided to open a mission station. In addition to educational and medical work (operating hospital), the missionaries in Mardin distributed copies of the Bible and other religious tracts in the vernacular, in order to reach those to whom they referred as the “nominal Christians” of the Eastern Churches. In my paper, I will present a brief history of the ABCFM missionary activities and schools in Mardin and explain the characteristics of these activities in the period that began with the arrival of the first group of missionaries at Mardin until the beginning of the 20th century. Moreover, I investigate the impact of these activities on the peoples of Mardin and the reaction of the Ottoman authorities. Last, examining the efforts of the American missionaries to seek converts among the minorities in the Empire to the Protestant faith helps us understanding the religious, moral, intellectual and social situation in the region. I use primary sources such as letters, diaries, annual reports, journals, school records, pamphlets, and newspapers of the missionaries as well as the secondary sources and pictorial materials.