This article argues that the late Ottoman Empire saw the rise of a novel concept of difference, the “millet,” that fundamentally reordered the lives of the empire’s many subjects. Rather than a term with clearly identifiable content—“religion,” “nation,” “ethnicity,” or otherwise—millet should be understood instead as auguring the emergence of history as the organizing principle of the late Ottoman politics of difference. Unlike the Islamic distinction between Muslim and non-Muslim that had previously structured Ottoman rule, the millet paradigm did not stipulate any predetermined set of terms through which difference had to be articulated. Instead, it issued an injunction to Ottoman subjects to merely say who they were, to declare the name they went by—to confess. This simple injunction, however, which appeared to require nothing other than assent to the reality of history itself, tended to misfire. When it did, Ottoman subjects confronted the anxious truth that history—the purported ground of the millet paradigm of difference—was no ground at all.

The Ottoman state and the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople during the mid-19th-century Tanzimat reform era relied on ethno-confessional and gendered differences, new administrative organization, and coercive institutions like the police to centralize and expand their power. Yet Armenian men and women used those same tools of power to seek justice in ways that created instances of disorder for their families, local community, the church, and the Ottoman state. Attending to the voices and experiences of Armenians through untapped petitions from Erzurum, Mush, and Van, this article highlights the ways in which provincial Armenians interacted with and navigated their diverse ethno-confessional milieus.

This article argues that non-Muslim engagement with 19th-century Ottoman reform should be understood in the context of a confessionalized politics that originally fostered partnerships of governance in the 18th century. The confessionalization of non-Muslim communities in the 18th century, which resulted in the political empowerment of Istanbul-based ethnarchs, promoted the establishment of robust communal boundaries that were more legible to the central state. These arrangements also made non-Muslim communities such as the Armenians partners in governance, responsible for supporting the state's effort to maintain its place atop a contentious imperial politics. The Tanzimat reforms, which reorganized non-Muslim communities and devolved some power from the clergy to the laity, were not a novelty, but instead a renegotiation of non-Muslims’ roles in the centralization of state. Rather than embrace secularized identities, non-Muslims enthusiastically used their own religious institutions to promote state centralization. In the process, they reconfigured relations of power in the region that left non-Muslims structurally marginalized.

The present article is a study of provincial administration in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Albania and Kurdistan. It examines the transformation of provincial administration in Dibra and Hazro after two towns’ hereditary rulers were exiled. Focusing on the employment patterns of the notables in exile as well as the ones who occupied the posts in the absence of the former, this study challenges the binary framework mostly employed in conceptualizing the making of the modern Ottoman state. Particularly, the employment of the notables exiled to the distant parts of the empire necessitates a revision in the presumptions about the origins of appointed Ottoman officials. By focusing on the partnership operating by means of employment, this study argues that the making of Ottoman state follows a trajectory of flexible centralization based on the partnership between the government and notables, terms of which were constantly negotiated.

The 1917 promulgation of a new Ottoman family law is recognized as a landmark moment in the history of Islamic law by scholars of women and gender in the Middle East. Yet the significance of the 1917 law in the struggle over religious jurisdiction, political power, and Ottoman sovereignty has been overlooked in the scholarship on both Ottoman legal reform and World War 1. Drawing on Ottoman Turkish, German, French, and English sources linking internal interpretations of the law and external reactions to its passage, we reinterpret adoption of the family law as a key moment in the geopolitics of World War 1. We demonstrate that passage of the law was a critical turning point in the wartime process of abrogating the capitulations and eliminating the last vestiges of legal extraterritoriality in the Ottoman Empire. The law is situated in its wartime political context and the geopolitical milieu of larger Europe to demonstrate that, although short-lived, the 1917 family law was a centerpiece of the wartime struggle to define extraterritorial rights of the Ottoman Empire, the Great Powers, and their protégés within the empire.

This article studies how the Cihanbeyli tribe became a crucial economic actor for the meat supply of İstanbul, by focusing on a conflict between the tribe’s leader, Alişan Bey, and the Russian trader David Savalan, which lasted from the 1840s to the 1850s in and around the province of Ankara. Two important processes of the early Tanzimat era had an impact on the Cihanbeyli’s role in animal trade. First, as part of the centralization project of the Tanzimat, the Cihanbeyli tribe was sedentarized in the 1840s and 1850s. Second, although the Ottoman state adopted liberal economic policies during the Tanzimat, the provisioning of meat to the imperial capital continued until 1857. Therefore, the article examines the Cihanbeyli’s role in the animal trade in the light of these administrative and economic changes. Our findings support the argument that tribes were an integral part of the imperial economy, politics, and society. The dependence of the Ottoman state on the supply of meat by the Cihanbeyli increased significantly from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century. This opposes the conventional view that posits tribes as primordial forms hindering economic and social development in the modernization processes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

During the late Ottoman period, a large influx of migrants and the expansion of cultivation created opportunities for new settlements in the countryside of Anatolia, Greater Syria, and Iraq. However, settlement often brought misery to newcomers in the form of malaria, especially when it occurred in the lowlands of the Mediterranean. This article traces the contours of the encounter with malaria that arose out of settlement, offering an overview of how Ottoman state and society confronted the conundrum of the swamp and examining the impact of this confrontation on local political economies. It demonstrates that swamps and malaria were a significant concern for late Ottoman state and society, and that policies adopted to address malaria sometimes facilitated the creation of large estates in the countryside of the Mediterranean littoral.

This article traces the struggle of the people of Vranje to unseat their governor, Hüseyin Pasha, in the 1840s. It situates this struggle within the context of the Tanzimat reforms, one primary objective of which was to use financial and legal means to bring powerful local governors under the control of the central government. The case of Vranje, this article shows, provides a particularly colorful example to observe the disrupting effects of the center’s intervention in the provinces, to investigate the various dynamics and difficulties the center confronted in its attempt to control the periphery, and to understand the ways in which the new political discourse of the Tanzimat shaped local resistance. This article also traces the stages of political mobilization and dissent through the various strategies the people of Vranje employed, from petitioning to armed resistance, in order to fight perceived injustices.