This paper explores the expansion of Ottoman state power over the territory of the Jazira region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The paper describes a trajectory of greater control over the arid space stretching across the provinces of Aleppo, Diyarbak?r, and Mosul and the special administrative district of Dayr al-Zur. It also follows a number of paths not taken. In addition to tracing the bounds of an aborted plan to form a massive Desert Province in this region, the paper also follows a case in which officials proposed forming a “moving administrative district” not corresponding to land but instead to the nomadic Shammar group. The paper thus introduces a tension between whether the Ottoman state derived its power and extracted value from people or place. It considers this dynamic with respect to a broader context in which some officials attempted to use grain to supplement and, in other cases, supplant pastoral nomadism in the Jazira, and thereby improve governance. It moreover illuminates cases in which these approaches by the state offered openings for local actors to resist control and, indeed, the very labels of state and local in the first place. Relying on archival materials from the Ottoman archives in Ottoman Turkish and Arabic as well as European consular records, the paper intervenes in questions related to global histories of the period as well as those more particular to late Ottoman history. The late nineteenth century was a period of agricultural expansion globally, particularly in the wake of the American Civil War and railroad expansion across North America. As a result, low grain prices prevailed worldwide. The paper thus considers how Ottoman strategies of governance related to these broader fluctuations in commodity prices. Moreover, the paper joins a new wave of scholarship on motion in the Ottoman Empire, highlighting how migrants, refugees, and nomads have acted as engines of the state and capitalism. Altogether, the paper explores how new ideas about managing people and land emerged in this context of global connection and disconnection.

Historians often approach territoriality, particularly territoriality enacted by the state, from a perspective of success. This paper, however, conceptualizes territoriality as an inherently incomplete process. In May 1864, a British consul in the Ottoman Empire reported that one hundred and fifty Circassian refugees died per day in overcrowded conditions in an encampment near Trabzon. Similar episodes occurred across the Black Sea coast that year, as hundreds of thousands of immigrants fleeing from the Caucasus overwhelmed Ottoman cities and towns. Immigrant settlement contributed to the centralizing Ottoman state’s attempt to make legible its population and territory. Nevertheless, repeated refugee crises in subsequent decades reflected the empire’s changing borders and the limits of its institutional capacity. Territorial loss and immigrant mortality are clear indicators of state failure, but rather than taking these failures at face value, this paper considers how failure functioned as a productive element of governance. Territoriality offers an essential example of “productive failure.” For example, the failure of modern governments to organize and regulate completely the circulation of people, goods, and resources in and through their territories allows states to continuously police borders. This paper argues that moments of “failure” identified by officials, immigrants, and other observers contributed to the development of immigrant settlement policies and the process of Ottoman territoriality. The Ottoman Empire’s international standing and its intensive debt in the second half of the nineteenth century circumscribed the state’s sovereignty and resources. Although Ottoman officials developed institutions and policies intended to rapidly and successfully settle immigrants, newcomers remained in temporary housing for months. After officials transferred immigrants to designated regions, some newcomers rejected settlement locations. The state’s inability to actualize projects allowed officials, immigrants, and other observers to leverage claims to expertise as they evaluated and adapted settlement policy. Ottoman officials’ portrayals of administrative failure contributed to plans to collect ever more granular data about the immigrant population. While the discourse of failure contributed to technologies of knowledge production among officials, immigrants mobilized failure to their own ends. In petitions, migrants claimed experience-based expertise and utilized knowledge of government policies to affect settlement outcomes. Finally, European observers mobilized the discourse of failure to comment on the limits of Ottoman governmental capacity. Overall, the inevitability of failure allowed it to be both anticipated and deployed to redirect power and resources.

Kurdish principalities came under the Ottoman rule in the sixteenth century within the context of the Ottoman-Safavid imperial rivalry and until the Tanzimat policies of the nineteenth century, Kurdish nobles maintained a degree of "autonomy" recognized by successive Ottoman sultans. This "autonomy" entailed various hereditary administrative and fiscal prerogatives -most important of which was their unhindered control over land and agricultural revenues. This paper analyzes the nature of the Kurdish nobles' rule over their territory with an eye to will reveal the extent and the degree of their "autonomy." It challenges the dominant trend in the literature which gauges the extent of the Kurdish nobility's autonomy or the limits of the Ottoman state's sovereignty merely by looking at what was stated in the governmental documents on the administrative status of these principalities -i.e. in the imperial orders, law books, etc. and demonstrates the actual ways in which this original agreement between the Ottoman state and the Kurdish nobles were materialized on the ground. Prior to the Tanzimat, the Kurdish nobility of Palu, one of these principalities, interacted with the Ottoman state through three interconnected realms: economic (through mines); fiscal (through taxation), and military (through providing soldiers in times of military campaigns). Each of these realms granted special prerogatives but also put certain responsibilities to the Palu nobility. As they assisted for the procurement of the mines, they were given immunities in taxation and participating in military campaigns. At the heart of this arrangement was the accepted notion of the Palu nobles' uninterrupted control over agricultural revenue. With the Tanzimat, the imperial state set out to undercut the Palu nobles' rule over agricultural land -while maintaining their administrative authority. Indisputably, the original agreement of the sixteenth century provided the larger framework in which the Ottoman state interacted with the Palu nobility. What determined the actual outcomes on the ground, however, was constant negotiation between the two parties. Prerogatives and responsibilities were defined within the context of the permutations of these three interconnected realms (i.e. mining, taxation, and military) and the leverages the parties held in each realm. Through the analysis of these realms of interaction between the Ottoman state and the Kurdish nobility from the late eighteenth century to the early Tanzimat era, this paper demonstrates the nature of the Kurdish nobles' control over land, the degree of their "autonomy" and the limits of the Ottoman state's authority.

Historians have typically emphasized cartography and border demarcation as necessary determinants of nation and state formation in the modern era. This paper will adopt a different approach to national territoriality, arguing that Egypt and Libya emerged steadily as modern territorial nation-states in the decades before World War I despite the fact that they lacked authoritative representational practices to circumscribe the bounds of the nation. Indeed, a heightened awareness of the existence of distinctive Egyptian and Ottoman Libyan territorial spheres began to develop in this period, not through the imposition of clear-cut boundary markers or cartographic evidence, but rather through a complex interplay of local and state spatial practices that often worked at cross-purposes. As such, in this paper, I will make a special case for what I call the "lived experience of territoriality" as the conceptual lens that best enables scholars to capture the dynamic interaction between state and local actors in the forging of modern bordered political identities. Viewed this way, territoriality as it was practiced in the nineteenth century was not the sole province of state power-something that the center simply injected into the peripheries using the various administrative technologies at its disposal-but rather more of a feedback loop. Just as centralizing states were forced to adapt their territorial imperatives in light of the diversity of local spatial practices they encountered across their sovereign domains, so, too, were these various local spatial practices transformed by their encounter with modern nation-state building. The borderland that Egypt shared with Ottoman Libya presents a particularly illuminating case study for exploring territoriality in this manner. Though sparsely populated, this vast swath of the Eastern Sahara was home to a rich tapestry of local denizens, ranging from numerous pastoralist bedouin tribes, to itinerant merchants operating along the Mediterranean coast, to sedentary agricultural communities settled for centuries in the various oases dotting the desert interior. For these populations, the desert borderland was not "marginal," as it would have been seen from the seats of state authority in Cairo or Istanbul, but rather the very locus of their spatial identity. By reconstructing the multiple layers and meanings of territoriality in the Egyptian-Libyan borderland, I seek in this paper to recast the history of Egyptian nation-state formation as well as Ottoman re-centralization after the Tanzimat.