This paper explores the intersection between kinship, property, and politics in the Ottoman province of Tripoli in the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. Through an investigation of investment and inheritance strategies employed by members of the ‘askeri class, it aims to complicate two major trends in the field. The first of these is the decline-cum-decentralization paradigm based on historians’ conception of Ottoman state rule in the provinces as a zero-sum game between ‘state’ and ‘local’ actors. The second is an orientalist holdover by which historians continue to accept the paradigm of the Ottoman Empire as an agrarian empire whose ruling idiom and strategies rested upon a peasant taxpayer class of subsistence agriculturalists. This focus on agricultural land as the foundation of social structure and administration has tended to obscure the diversity of local political economic contexts within which state representatives and institutions came into contact with local social orderings. Taken together, these two issues will be addressed through an examination of the ways in which the distinct, local political economy of the Ottoman province of Tripoli was implicated in networks of property and inheritance among ‘askeri families of both local and imperial extraction after the ‘reconquest’ of Tripoli and Mt. Lebanon from the Ma’n dynasty in 1635. Ultimately, by highlighting kinship structures within the ‘askeri class (which is broadly and porously defined to accommodate individuals and families hailing from a range of ranks and backgrounds) and investigating transfers of property within and between families in Tripoli, this paper highlights the need to understand the political class as socially embedded in networks of social capital and material support, rather than as independent political or economic actors. This study is based on the sijills of the local Ottoman court of Tripoli from the 1660s to the 1710s, and traces the changing composition and fortunes of families affiliated with the state as they appear through dealings with their local property holdings. In the case of Tripoli, these were largely holdings in mulberry trees and orchards, indicating an important alliance between the local court, Tripoli’s booming silk industry, and families with a stake in Ottoman provincial government in Greater Syria. This paper thus seeks to understand the nature of Ottoman state presence in a provincial context marked by a distinctive and under-analyzed political economic regime based on ownership of trees as an essential link in luxury production in the early modern Eastern Mediterranean.

The direct rule of the Ottomans in Bosnia started in 1463, and with it began the long process of the incorporation of this province into the Ottoman system. Bosnia stands out as one of the most successful instances of integration of a European territory into the Ottoman Empire. Not only did the province stay loyal to the Empire for more than four centuries, it is also one of the only places in Europe where large scale Islamization took place, and where locals played important roles in the Ottoman military and administration as Muslims. Within a century from its occupation, Bosnia became an Ottoman province, with a new, Ottoman provincial capital – Sarajevo – inhabited by a Muslim majority. In this paper I address an important aspect of the successful incorporation of Bosnia into the Ottoman Empire: the emergence of a new Ottoman-Bosnian urban elite. In the overwhelmingly Christian Balkans, Muslim communities grew up around the nuclei of Ottoman office-holders. The urban elite included, in addition to military and administrative officials, members of the religious hierarchy, such as imams, muftis, and teachers, and large land-owners. These elites remained loyal to the Ottoman Sultan until as late as the nineteenth century. My paper analyzes this process by looking at a variety of sources. Based on waqfiyyas (endowment deeds) from Sarajevo and Mostar and biographical dictionaries, I trace the education and careers of religious and political figures of Bosnian origin. I follow petitions made to the Sultan by members of these elites, which were recorded (along with their answers) in the mühimme defters (Registers of Important Affairs) in Istanbul. Finally, I traced the development and proliferation of thesauruses and dictionaries from Bosnian to other Islamic languages. Such dictionaries became crucial as communication between speakers of these languages grew more extensive. The examination of these sources shows how remarkable the transformation of urban life in Bosnia was. During the sixteenth century Bosnia became an important scholarly center. As I show, this process corresponded to another one, in which Bosnian Muslims were recruited into the Ottoman army and palace, and were sent en masse to the palace or into the prestigious bostanc? unit (unlike most of the Christian dev?irme recruits). My claim is that this dual process of the growth of a Bosnian Muslim elite in both the province and the imperial center had a crucial role in the successful incorporation of Bosnia into the Empire.

Traditional explanations of the new nationalisms arising in the nineteenth-century Otttoman empire as inspired by European romanticism, in particular the work of the German philosopher Herder, are unsatisfactory for both chronological and conceptual reasons. More recently, Karen Barkey, has argued that this rise should be explained in terms of newly emerging regional networks and alliances; but her analysis fails to account for the specifically nationalist forms many of these new networks assumed. Here, I would like to argue that the roots of nineteenth-century nationalisms lie in the eighteenth century, when, in public spaces like coffee houses and medreses, new simplified varieties and new public and literate usages emerged, both of existing languages of (religious) learning and administration, like Turkish, Greek, and Armenian, and of vernacular languages hitherto only spoken, like Albanian and Kurdish. But not only does one encounter new kinds of language usage in these spaces; one also finds new attitudes to, or ideologies of, spoken vernacular languages. It appears that these changes in language usage and ideology were driven primarily by an internal Ottoman dynamic, rather than inspired by movements abroad or triggered by outside interference. They also reflect societal developments that occurred largely independently from official government policies, such as the nineteenth-century reform of the millet system. Among Christian Ottoman subject peoples, the rise of new vernaculars primarily amounted to a reaction against the dominant status, or linguistic hegemony, of language varieties like Church Greek and classical Armenian (Grabar) in religious education and administration; among Muslims, this vernacularization process primarily concerned the rise of new languages of instruction in medreses (like Kurdish and Albanian) and in poetry of religious learning. I will base my claims on both literary and grammatical texts from the period, with an emphasis on materials from relatively marginal and/or underexplored languages, like Albanian, Armenian, and Kurdish. By taking an explicitly comparative approach, we may discover patterns explaining the emergence – or demise – of particular languages in the age of emerging nationalisms that go beyond conventional nationalist narratives of oppression and liberation, and get a rather more differentiated picture of the complex linguistic and ethnic reconfigurations of the period.

Despite an earlier tendency to compartmentalize Ottoman history retroactively into national domains, recent historiography on the Middle East, North Africa and South-East Europe has sought to highlight the connecting factors between these regions under Ottoman rule. This reminder of Ottoman unity also contains a useful reminder of its diversity; thus, the history of Arabs and Bulgarians, and not just that of Turks, is being enriched by being examined through an Ottoman prism. With few exceptions, what is less apparent in these histories is the wide diversity of landscapes that could be found within the Empire, from the mountains and valleys of the Balkan Peninsula, to the Anatolian Plateau, to the deserts of Arabia and North Africa. This diversity of environments gave rise both to unique opportunities and constraints on human activity in different parts of the Empire. These environmental factors, when combined with cultural ones, could contribute to the centrality of a location from the point of view of Istanbul or, conversely, could relegate it to the imperial periphery. How did Ottoman officials based in Istanbul view Ottoman subjects who inhabited this kind of double (environmental and cultural) periphery? This paper will attempt to address this question by examining the travel account (first published in 1896) of the Ottoman army officer of Syrian origin, ‘Azmzade Sadiq al-Mu’ayyad, who was dispatched to North Africa by Sultan Abdülhamid II (r. 1876-1909) on two occasions, in 1887 and 1895 and tasked with strengthening the Sultan’s ties with the Sanusi Sufi order, which was a force to be reckoned with in the Cyrenaica (Benghazi) region. How did al-Mu’ayyad perceive the Sahara and its inhabitants? Did he view them primarily as his fellow Ottomans, fellow Muslims or fellow Arabs? Or did he instead focus on differences stemming from the lifestyle pursued by the desert dwellers? The environment of inland portions of Cyrenaica (lying in the Sahara and thus featuring a vast desert along with a string of oases) arguably made a political order quite different from that of the bulk of the Ottoman Empire to arise, with the Sufi lodges of the Sanusis acting as fortresses and with the Sanusis using their control of the trade routes to consolidate their political and military position. As an Ottoman officer, how did al-Mu’ayyad view this proto-state? Is Ottoman Orientalism the best way to understand his views, or is another paradigm called for?