Sultan Abdulhamid II (r. 1876-1909) transformed into the largest property owner in Ottoman domains during his reign through acquisition of vast estates in over fifteen Ottoman provinces. This transformation was predicated on the systemized separation of his personal treasury, the Privy Purse, and the state treasury in the 1880s. Abdulhamid II, in his capacity as a private entrepreneur, received revenues from the properties he privately owned, which were exempt from state taxation, and created himself a private source of income. Furthermore, he notably acquired numerous concessions, including oil concession in Baghdad and operation of steamships over the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers, under his Privy Purse. In this Hamidian project, which I argue underpinned the late Ottoman political economy and sovereignty, Basra and Baghdad were at the forefront: Abdulhamid II extracted most revenues from his private properties in Basra among all Ottoman provinces whereas those in Baghdad were a close second. This paper revisits the question of “settlement of tribes” in the Ottoman historiography at the cross-section of Abdulhamid II’s private ownership of property and the scholarship on (im)mobility. To that end, I focus on the administration of Hamidian estates in Basra, which was underpinned by the paradox that Abdulhamid II was the monarch of the state and acted in his capacity as a non-state actor. Increased agrarian productivity on Hamidian estates, which augmented the revenues Abdulhamid II individually accrued while simultaneously depriving the Ottoman state from taxes, was dependent on the creation of an immobile labor force. Through a systematic study of revenue registers and legal orders that were produced by the Administration of Emlak-i Humayun, the institutional body under the Privy Purse responsible for the administration of Hamidian estates and collection of their revenues, I shed light on the complex relationship among the Ottoman state, administrators of Hamidian estates, and tribal populations in Basra that enabled the flow of the revenues from Basra to the capital, created on the backs of the inhabitants of these estates.

So much of contemporary Middle Eastern history seems to be marred by subjects in motion: travellers, traders, migrants, refugees, exilees. What if we look at history through the eyes of those who are immobile, whose social experiences are defined by conditions of immobility and stuckness? Based on ethnographic fieldwork in an internally-displaced persons [IDP] camp in Southern Kurdistan [Kurdistan Region of Iraq], this paper shows how immobility can be socially generated and maintained. It is the “era of returns” in Iraq: Internally-displaced persons [IDPs] are packing up their belongings, preparing to leave; international NGOs are halting operations; government officers are increasingly calling for what they deem a ‘return to normality’. In the meantime, members of an Arab tribe find themselves in constant fear of being arrested through false accusations of being members of the Islamic State by their previous neighbours. When a person is accused, they find themselves in a thorny social field comprised of what they deem to be immoral others: secret informants, mukhtars that spy on them, opportunist lawyers, sectarian militias and untrustworthy relatives. While humanitarian and governmental organisations underline that they can walk out the door at anytime, these tense social intertwinements render those who are accused fearful and immobile. Through an analysis of social interactions that took place, and stories of violence that were narrated during ethnographic fieldwork between 2017 - 2019 in Southern Kurdistan [Kurdistan Region of Iraq], I argue that such socially generated immobility can be understood through a particular historico-moral sensibility that perceives displacement as binding together a long history of violence that includes British and American Imperialisms, Ba’athism, and sectarian civil war.

A growing number of scholars have examined new ways of understanding material, institutional, social, and intellectual transformation within and across empires by focusing on forms of mobility and migration as an analytical lens in the recent decades. Immobility is the hidden counterpart of mobility, which this paper understands not as staying behind or an enforced inability to move, but as stasis. Stasis may refer to a state in equilibrium as well as civil strife. Yet, particularly through the eyes of intellectuals in an unevenly modernizing empire, such as the Ottoman Empire, stasis should be understood as a perception of immobility, inertia, and even apathy or disinterest toward a project of modernization. By a close reading of select qasidas (odes) of Ma‘ruf al-Rusafi (1875-1945) and Jamil Sidqi al-Zahawi (1863-1936) in dialogue with the historical transformation in Ottoman domains at the turn of the twentieth century, this paper investigates their perception of stasis in Ottoman Baghdad as manifested in their literary production and illustrates the ways in which modern Arabic neoclassical poetry could be used as a historical source. During the late-Ottoman period in Iraq, intellectuals reflected on what they perceived as stasis pervading Iraqi cities, Iraqi people, and Iraqi lives through lines of poetry. There was widespread censorship in the Ottoman press, curtailing incendiary political language, which made poetry and its symbolism a natural outlet for intellectuals’ political reflection. The Baghdadi poets Ma‘ruf al-Rusafi and Jamil Sidqi al-Zahawi critiqued this stasis of Ottoman Baghdadi society through their Arabic poetry and provided insights into why this stagnation had arisen. Both al-Rusafi and al-Zahawi had spent time in Istanbul, and other Arab cities on the Eastern Mediterranean. Their travels brought them into contact with other like-minded intellectuals and poets. Additionally, both men were in Istanbul during the 1908 Young Turk Revolution that brought the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) to power and forced the restoration of the Ottoman constitution and parliament. Witnessing this revolutionary occasion and their quotidian—but no less transformative—modern experiences in the cafés and nightclubs of Istanbul returned with them to Baghdad. Having traveled elsewhere and then returning to Baghdad to see it had not changed, and having observed the inertia toward reform and modernizing in Baghdad, al-Zahawi and al-Rusafi performed poetic social critiques that discussed how the very lack of movement was leaving Baghdadis behind the rest of the empire.

Despite the centrality of practices of punishment and imprisonment, and their global dimensions in the birth of modern nation-states in social theory, they remain largely understudied in the literature on Iraq and the broader Middle East. In this paper, I analyze Iraqi police reports, British mandate archives and memoirs of former political prisoners, and use penal history to look at the emergence of authoritarian violence under the Iraqi nation-state from 1920-1958. The British Mandate (1920-1932) heavily transformed the Iraqi penal systems, including expansion of prisons, mass incarceration, industrial scale prison labor as well as more strict punishments, such as corporal and capital punishment. While some forms of punishment, such as banishment and forced political exile, reflected the global nature of the empire, for most Iraqi detainees however, prison meant being stuck in confinement. Contentious politics and the threat posed by the growing leftist movements under the monarchy (1932-1958) effectively made activists and their opponents geographically and figuratively ‘stuck’ together. In this, the modern Iraqi state effectively created the ‘modern Iraqi political prisoner’, whom, despite their immobility inside designated political prisons, transformed confinement into productive spaces for revolutionary political thought and political mobilization. Conceptually drawing on literature on the state and punishment, I ask: what role does the penal system play in Iraqi state formation? How do developments in Iraqi penal practices help explain the making of authoritarian political systems in Iraq and other post-colonial regimes? In what ways do Iraqi experiences reflect broader global developments in this period? Looking at punishment and state violence from the perspective of imperial mobility and nation-state immobility and ‘stuckness’ not only suggests a close relation between punishment and contentious politics, but also, as I would argue, helps us understand the emergence of authoritarian violence and revolutionary politics in Iraq, and perhaps other post-colonial contexts.