Ottoman Notables and Participatory Politics

Tanzimat Reform in Tokat, 1839-1876

John Bragg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317701439
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

Focussing on events in the Anatolian town of Tokat during the final two decades of the great Ottoman legal and administrative reforms known as the Tanzimat (1839-76), this book applies elements of social networking theory to analyze and assess the establishment of local governments across the Middle East.

The author's key finding is that the state's efforts to centralize authority succeeded only when and where locals acted as the primary agents of change. Independent notables, such as the military a'yân, demanded wealth and state offices in exchange for meting out reform measures according to local idioms of power. Newly created administrative bodies also offered greater social mobility to a growing multiconfessional middle-class in small towns like Tokat. The state was desparate to reform, but opportunistic provincials were eager to have it only on their own terms.

Challenging false assumptions about the limited scope of participatory politics in the Middle East during the nineteenth century, Ottoman Notables and Participatory Politics will be of interest to students and scholars of Political Economy, History and Middle East Studies.

1 Tokat’s Tanzimat-era notables in service to the state

Anatolian notables were major figures in their communities, and they were not passive spectators as the Tanzimat reforms unfolded.¹ Relatively few of Tokat’s notables functioned as rentier landlords who presided over vast commercial operations and complex tenancy arrangements, although many of them were invested contractually in agriculture, trade, and finance on an ad hoc basis due to the generally favorable conditions of commercial expansion during the nineteenth century. Notables of all stripes engaged in social networks that connected them to resources in capital, trade, and nearby regions. Tokat’s notables used their prominent positions at the interstices of the town’s social relations to take on leadership roles in Tanzimat-era district councils.²

The combined legacy of social institutions from the Islamic middle periods, early Ottoman honorific titles, and the multiplex commercial relations of the nineteenth century helped to establish several categories of notable distinction, or henceforth, notability. These qualities of notability could be sliced and blended according to ready-made precepts in local customary practices and Ottoman bureaucratic culture, but few markers of notability can be declared to constitute legal or quasi-legal categories. Even seemingly objective markers of notability, such as the special status conferred on descendants of the Prophet Muhammad must be treated with circumspection because tracing decent over multiple generations is inherently difficult and subject to societal pressures to create fictive kinships.

Despite the imprecise nature of notability, some contours may be drawn to define the social attributes of Tokat’s larger notable families. By the mid nineteenth century, many notables operated as members of multi-generational extended families who shared a wide range of corporate interests, outlooks, and resources.³ There are indications that some notable families maintained joint or extended households beyond the scale of conjugal family units, although the precise dispositions of these larger entities are difficult to determine from şer’î court records alone. The court records report summaries of decisions and final outcomes for the most part, and judges and scribes often followed prescribed formulas within the şeriat that prioritized certain kin relations over others, leaving a fragmentary picture of horizontal and vertical trajectories in family relations. There are also signs that extended notable families acted as magnets of human capital such as their abilities to draw servants and slaves into their orbits. Moreover, larger notable households recognized social mobility in the larger community by selectively drawing new affiliates through marriage and business contracts. In the expansionary commercial environment of the nineteenth century, Anatolian notables could not wholly function autonomously according to a closed caste system of ties due to the mutual interdependencies of local, regional, and imperial markets and the notables’ frequent dealings with the commercial elites who ran them.

As a result, the notables of mid nineteenth century Tokat evolved from diverse and overlapping categories of notability. Their number included multigenerational dynastic families, commercially active non-dynastic notables, vakif foundation directors and beneficiaries, descendants of the Prophet Muhammad, and technically skilled teachers and reserve military officers. Some qualities of notability, such as holding some sort of credential in liberal education, were wholly new to the nineteenth century milieu. Up to the Tanzimat, notables had rendered community service by holding official posts circumstantially and in varying degrees of formality. More typically, notables became accustomed to exercising levers of soft power to sway their neighbors rather than resorting solely to claims of state backing and patronage. This chapter examines the types of notables in Tokat and discusses their involvement in Tanzimat-era reforms and institutions.

Dynastic notables

The most widely recognized and prominent segment of Tokatli society were a small subset of dynastic notables.⁴ These notables and their families had gained notoriety over the generations by acting in concert to run the affairs of the town. They developed their bases of wealth and power by taking up local military, religious, and tax collection posts and working as intermediaries between state officials, local institutions, and sub-groups. In the later Tanzimat years, dynastic notables still retained sonorous titles that made them stand out from the rest in Tokat’s court records. For example, dynastic notable families prefixed their long form names with patronyms ending in the Persianate expression -zade, meaning “son of,” to indicate shared descent with relatives from a renowned progenitor.⁵ Hence, among the great dynastic notable families of Tokat were the Abdüllatifzadeler, Elmaizadeler, Haci Recepzadeler, Kara Hafizzadeler, Kufluzadeler, Kundakçizadeler, and Kuralzadeler.⁶ These town-based dynastic notable families had managed to retain and even augment their landed wealth and corporate identities after the demise of regionally powerful notable families, such as the Katiroğullari and Çapanoğullari, during the apogee of the Age of Ayans in the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries.⁷ Several şer’î court record entries from the Islahat years recapitulated dynastic family reputations by referring to individuals specifically as hanedan notables.⁸ The Köle Seferoğullari were the only ethnic Armenian family in the city to use the same family name for more than three members.

The scions of these dynastic notable families were very active in the new local councils introduced by the Tanzimat. The precise comportment of political influence within extended families is difficult to determine based on available evidence, but individuals from each of these families seem to have stepped forward to establish wider and more numerous external ties to other notables and local institutions. Such individuals may have acted as the public faces of the larger and more powerful families.

The interconnectedness of dynastic notable families can be shown in several steps by mapping out their social network in transactions before Tokat’s şer’î court.⁹ In the next several sections of the chapter, social networks are reproduced by linking dynastic notables first to one another, then to the town’s potential nondynastic notables, and finally to the Tanzimat-era district councils and bureaus. For the purpose of building these networks, two types of bonds were taken to be necessary to establish bilateral links. First, if individuals had any type of litigation, contracting, or witnessing relationship in business before the şer’î court, it was taken to be a signifier of mutual acquaintence and voluntary association. Second, a very close blood relationship such as father-to-son and brother-to-brother was taken to be sufficient cause to be linked to the network.

The establishment of sufficiently large data sets required hard choices in periodization. The first data set was drawn from a synchronic prosographic study of seven court registers during a twelve-year period centering around the decade ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Tokat’s Tanzimat-era notables in service to the state
• 2 Relations among Tokat’s notables and bureaucrats
• 3 The litigation tactics of notables at Tokat’s şer’î court
• 4 Lending in Tokat and notable social networks
• 5 Patterns of investment in Tokat’s land and agriculture
• 6 Patterns of investment in Tokat’s industry
• 7 Non-Muslim leaders in Tokat
• Conclusion
• Appendices
• Glossaries
• Bibliography
• Index