DEMARCATING AND DELIMITING THE UMMA A well-established tradition in Middle Eastern historiography proposes that the Iranian-Ottoman boundary was firmly established in 1639; it is one of the oldest boundaries of the world, and even before the nineteenth century was well-defined. This paper argues that the history of this polyglot borderland defies such a simplistic description. Even in the 19th century, it resembled many things, but a pacified and settled frontier it was not. It took more than seven decades long (1843-1914), intermittent work of Russian, British, Ottoman, and Iranian technical and diplomatic teams to survey and demarcate this frontier extending from the Persian Gulf to Armenia. The paper contends that from the first treaty of 1639 to 1914 sovereignty over this borderland and the communities inhabiting it variously shifted between the Shi'i dynasties ruling over Iran and the Sunni Ottoman Empire. Yet, in times of both war and peace, the borderland witnessed a relatively free flow of goods and ideas; as well as of armies, diseases, refugees, nomadic and semi-nomadic tribes, fugitives, pilgrims, and many others. However, the human and political geography of this hitherto highly porous and ill-defined frontier region dramatically changed with its transformation into a boundary region in the period between 1840-1914. Although there exist some geopolitics informed studies on the river boundary between Iran and Iraq, studies on the history of people inhabiting their common frontier and the frontier itself are nearly non-existent. Based on a vast array of the Ottoman and Iranian documents, chronicles, and travelogues this paper provides a history of the transformation of the Ottoman-Iranian frontier into boundary and discusses the notions of frontier/border in the Islamic world. It highlights the different and changing meanings of frontier/border and sovereignty in the vernaculars of the Ottoman and Iranian states. It also aims to show how these notions changed in relation to the modern concept of territoriality and institutions related to it. Moreover, questioning the notion of umma the paper analyzes the Shi'i-Sunni perceptions of the community of believers and examines how Ottoman and Iranian states built their notions of citizenship and differentiated their territories and subjects from one another.

By 1734, the region of Bihar, which had existed as an independent subah (province) since the days of the Mughal emperor Akbar (r. 1556-1605), was incorporated into the larger and richer subah of Bengal to its east. It was to remain part of Bengal until 1912. However, while Bihar was absorbed within the boundaries of Bengal, it was never assimilated. Ironically, whereas Bengal had been thought of for long centuries since the thirteenth, and especially from the perspective of empires based in Delhi/Agra, as a frontier territory, now it was Bihar that came to assume that position from the perspective of the Bengal nawabs’ capital of Murshidabad (and under British colonial rule, from the perspective of Calcutta). This paper examines the important political and social effects of this making-into-a-periphery of a region otherwise located in the Gangetic heartland of northern India not only geographically but also in terms of its intimate and vital links with the western lands of ‘Hindustan’ through its religious traditions, pilgrimage circuits, its cultural orientations, its linguistic ties, its agrarian and trading networks and practices. Specifically, it investigates the consequences of this administrative subordination of Bihar to Bengal for the lineaments of agrarian, political and economic power as they affected social relations in the former. It discusses the relations between the provincial governors and jagirdars of the decentralizing Mughal Empire, local lords and the different layers of their subordinates, including cultivating groups, landless labourers and artisans. With the power of local lords stunted by the greater ones in Bengal, and the horizons of their political ambitions and growth circumscribed within these ‘borderlands’, this paper asks what the consequences were for the relations of patronage, protection and the reciprocal duty of service that had sustained dynamic relations of mutuality between dominant and subordinated groups within local communities in Bihar. It asks whether we can we already detect some of the signs of rigid and violently maintained caste hierarchies that are today identified with Bihar and that so frequently engender its characterization as a political, cultural and social ‘back-water’.

The City of Balkh and the Caravan Trade of Nineteenth-Century Central Eurasia It is commonly claimed that following the Mongol conquests of the thirteenth century and with the rise of the newly discovered sea routes of the Indian Ocean during the sixteenth-century, the Central Eurasian overland traffic commonly referred to as the Silk Road was eclipsed, falling into ruin in the steppes. However, nineteenth-century Persian and European sources on Afghanistan and Central Eurasia paint a different picture of a steppe world still connected by networks of trade, travel, and pilgrimage. The Afghan city of Balkh was an important entrepot in the early modern Central Eurasian world. Lying on the frontier between the steppe and the sown, Balkh was situated at the intersection of caravan routes leading to India in the south, to Iran in the West, and to China in the East. Within the gates of Balkh, merchants, pilgrims, pastoral nomadic and settled populations were brought together in economic and cultural exchanges. The Central Eurasian caravan trade in horses, silk, and silver, the movements of the nomadic Turkmen tribes, and the pilgrimages of the disciples of the Naqshbandiya Sufi brotherhood reached the city’s caravanserais, bazaars, shrines, and hinterland. Balkh, once known as the “Mother of Cities” (Umm al-Balad), remained a viable outpost on the edge of the steppe and the sown until its environs grew swampy and repeated outbreaks of cholera in the mid-nineteenth century led to the abandonment of the city in favor of the nearby Mazar-i Sharif. With rare exceptions, the existing literature on modern Afghanistan and Central Eurasia has privileged political narratives and has been written from the narrow perspective of the nation-state. The prevailing scholarship, largely a product of Russian and Soviet historiography, has offered only a fragmented view of the Afghan and Central Eurasian past and neglected the indigenous Persianate sources for its study. Based on Persianate travel narratives and geographical histories, as well as archival sources, this paper examines the position of the city of Balkh in the networks of caravan trade that integrated the steppe and the sown in early nineteenth-century Central Eurasia.

Drawing on a broad range of primary sources in Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, and English, such as governmental correspondence, memoirs, and local chronicles this paper explores Ottoman government attempts to achieve control over the Zaydi-Shii population of southwest Arabia, one of the most strongly contested frontier regions of the empire during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I will focus on the Da’’an agreement concluded in October 1911 between the Zaydi Imam Yahya and representatives of the Ottoman central government as well as on the political struggles and negotiations among Ottoman government officials and local leaders that preceded it. The Da’’an Agreement brought to an end more than two decades of armed conflict between the Ottoman imperial government on one side and Imam Yahya and his predecessors on the other. Historians have interpreted this agreement and the political arrangements it helped usher in primarily as the first step towards independent Yemeni statehood under Yahya’s leadership. However, there has been virtually no attempt to analyze the Da’’an agreement within the larger context of Ottoman imperial governance. I argue that the Da’’an agreement reflects government efforts to combine the long-standing Ottoman strategy of devolving power to the leaders of religious communities with elements of indirect rule practiced by the British in India. For instance, it is clear from government correspondence that Ottoman policy makers were favorably impressed by the cost-saving British policy of ruling large parts of India indirectly through local princes. But they hesitated to adapt this form of colonial rule to Yemen by appointing the imam governor over the Zaydi-populated parts of the province because past experience in the Ottoman Balkans seemed to suggest that devolution of power along these lines would ultimately lead to local independence. Rather, the Da’’an agreement made Imam Yahya a dependent ruler under Ottoman sovereignty only in those parts of southwest Arabia that had remained outside the Province of Yemen. In the province itself he became the leader of something unprecedented in the history of Yemen, namely of a Zaydi “millet” that was differentiated through judicial and fiscal boundaries from other local Muslim groups and placed under the sovereignty of the Sunni sultan-caliph in Istanbul. The Da’’an agreement therefore illustrates important ways in which imperial bureaucrats tried both to learn from forms of organizing difference practiced in other parts of the Ottoman Empire and to translate forms of British colonial rule into an Ottoman context.