In August 1567, the Divan urged the Doge of Venice to hunt pirates who had captured Ottoman subjects traveling between Ancona and Istanbul. The Ottoman correspondence argued that the Doge should recover the travelers “in accordance with the protection agreement” between the Serenissima and the Sublime Porte. Requests like this were commonplace. They were grounded in an Ottoman interpretation of the treaties linking Venice and Istanbul (ahdname), as well as in the Venetian pretense to have jurisdiction over the Adriatic. In this regard, the Venetians argued fiercely that the Ottomans should keep their warships out of the “Gulf of Venice;” in return, they promised that Ottoman subjects would be protected by – and from! – the Venetian navy. However, protection was more easily promised than delivered. By the mid-sixteenth century, pirates targeting Ottoman travelers infested the Adriatic. When confronted by the Divan, the beleaguered Venetian authorities frequently retorted that, in spite of the agreements, they “had no obligation” to protect the mobility of Ottoman subjects and that “all we do is a favor to the Sultan!” In light of the ahdname and of the Venetian claims over the Adriatic, this statement seems preposterous. However, many other polities besides Venice used similar arguments to justify their failures at protecting foreign subjects at sea. Venice’s diplomatic stance suggests that the terms “jurisdiction” and “protection” were ambiguous concepts in the sixteenth-century Mediterranean that had to be negotiated constantly. Indeed, scholars today still struggle to define them. Likewise, the connections between these concepts and cross-cultural circulation remain obscure. How did negotiations about mobility shape the Veneto-Ottoman understanding of maritime space? Who had the right or obligation to protect whom? How did attempts to promote and protect mobility affect the formation of jurisdictions and the projection of imperial power? This paper seeks to explore these questions through Venetian and Ottoman sources (Senato Dispacci, Documenti Turchi, Mühimme Defterleri) from the sixteenth century. Scholars have long identified maritime mobility as the defining feature of the Mediterranean. Currently, the history of Veneto-Ottoman relations tends to characterize circulation between the two polities either as seamless or as highly contested. This paper takes a middle ground. It shows how ideas about mobility, jurisdiction, and protection took practical shape through a constant process of negotiation and conflict resolution couched in rhetoric that aggressively manipulated concepts such as reciprocal recognition and obligations, in ways typical of early modern international diplomacy.

The pirate attack by Henry Every in 1695 on a Mughal ship carrying pilgrims returning from Mecca has received some attention by historians trying to fit this incident into a larger history of European piracy using mainly the English sources related to the incident. Drawing from this literature the aim is to combine it with the Mughal Persian material available to demonstrate what this incident reveals about the early modern hajj and our understanding of ships carry pilgrims and goods between Ottoman and Mughal Empires. A previously unstudied Mughal letter related to the incident, by the captain of the Mughal ship in question, reveals the ways in which the Mughal Empire understood this encounter with European piracy and provides important context for our understanding of this incident and the Mughal relationship with Islam's holy cities.

In late 1785, four ambassadors left India on a ship bound for the Ottoman Empire. They brought with them a retinue of 400, who sailed to Muscat and Basra, and four elephants, who did not make it that far. Such grand diplomatic missions across the Indian Ocean were not unheard of, but this one was particularly remarkable because it was sent not by the long-lived Mughal empire, but by Tipu Sultan of Mysore, who was then in between wars against the British. Both Ottoman and Indian historians have touched on this mission, but they have tended to talk past each other. This paper, drawing on Ottoman and British archives, Ottoman and Indian chronicles, and travel narratives, begins an effort to think through the mission’s implications, arguing that it had a major but overlooked effect on Ottoman military reform and modernity. The mission failed in its remarkable main goal of building a transoceanic anti-British alliance, to be cemented by exchanging Basra for an Indian port of the Ottomans’ choice. Many of its members died of disease in Istanbul. But during its residence in the Ottoman capital, this mission attracted tremendous attention. It included 200 sepoys, long-service volunteer soldiers trained in the new European drill. They performed their exercises before rapt and excited audiences of Ottoman officials, who were then preparing for war their Eurasian rival, Russia, with its disciplined conscript armies. Grand Vizier Koca Yusuf almost immediately acted to follow the Indian example. By carefully following both the subsequent activities of Ottoman officials and the memory of chroniclers, I show how he and other Ottoman elites received, translated, and modified that example. Even as they copied the idea of trained, Muslim soldiers fighting in formation, the Porte innovatively drew upon very different sources of available labor, relying on involuntary recruits from across Eurasia—Russian prisoners, Austrian deserters, and eventually Ottoman Muslim conscripts. The resulting Nizam-? Cedid army is often seen as a straightforward imitation of western European military innovations. But Ottoman military reforms must instead be seen in two different contexts: that of diplomatic and cultural exchanges across the Indian Ocean, and that of military conflict and military labor in Eurasia. The Ottoman Empire was part of both contexts, and brokered between them. But at the same time, the paper will raise questions about what we gain and lose by moving between the historiographical frames of “Eurasia” and “the Indian Ocean.”

During the Second Constitutional period (1908-1918), the most pressing political debate among Ottoman subjects concerned imperial organization. The Committee of Union Progress (CUP) favored centralization, whereas the liberal opposition advocated decentralization along ethnic, religious or regional lines. While Istanbul intellectuals and politicians fought over the empire’s administrative organization, powerbrokers across the Arabian Peninsula—from Yemen to Kuwait—negotiated or tried to negotiate autonomy within an Ottoman imperial framework. Despite the CUP’s anti-autonomy polices, the government was compelled to accept autonomy or offered autonomy preemptively. For example, British Foreign Office officials fought bitterly over the status of Kuwait with ?brahim Hakk? Pa?a—the former Grand Vizier and one of the principal international law experts in the empire. Hakk? Pa?a was compelled to recognize Kuwait as an autonomous kaza in the Anglo-Ottoman Convention of 1913. The legal instrument was a confusing amalgam of elements drawn from earlier Ottoman autonomy schemes and British ideas about “suzerainty” in the princely states and the Gulf shaikhdoms. The Foreign Office and the ?brahim Hakk? differed on the meaning of “suzerainty” and “sovereignty” and so abandoned both words in the Convention. Mubarak al-Sabah was confirmed as the ruler of Kuwait but was also the Kaymakam responsible to the Ottoman government. He was given many of the privileges bestowed upon the family of Mehmet Ali’s family in Egypt—including “complete administrative autonomy” and the central state agreed to abstain from interfering in his domains. This paper is a comparative analysis of the legal status of Ottoman autonomous provinces, the Gulf shaikhdoms and the Indian princely states. While the Ottoman Empire had long maintained flexible administrative arrangements throughout the empire, starting in the 1830s, the exigencies of the Eastern Question resulted in the creation of a new type of province. Categorized as “exceptional” by the Ottoman state, the new autonomous provinces (eyalet-i mümtaze) were the product of an uneasy compromise between the Ottoman and European empires. I argue that these provinces were the key arena in which new possibilities for sovereignty and imperial control were negotiated and tested in the Middle East. Ottoman autonomous provinces, like the Gulf shaikhdoms and the Indian princely states, possessed elements of local control but there were critical differences between them. Ultimately, these experiments in sovereignty and imperial control informed Ottoman and British visions for the post-war order in the Middle East.