A Moveable Empire

Ottoman Nomads, Migrants, and Refugees

Resat Kasaba

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780295989488
• eBook ISBN: 9780295801490
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

A Moveable Empire examines the history of the Ottoman Empire through a new lens, focusing on the migrant groups that lived within its bounds and their changing relationship to the state's central authorities. Unlike earlier studies that take an evolutionary view of tribe-state relations -- casting the development of a state as a story in which nomadic tribes give way to settled populations -- this book argues that mobile groups played an important role in shaping Ottoman institutions and, ultimately, the early republican structures of modern Turkey. Over much of the empire's long history, local interests influenced the development of the Ottoman state as authorities sought to enlist and accommodate the various nomadic groups in the region. In the early years of the empire, maintaining a nomadic presence, especially in frontier regions, was an important source of strength. Cooperation between the imperial center and tribal leaders provided the center with an effective way of reaching distant parts of the empire, while allowing tribal leaders to perpetuate their own authority and guarantee the tribes' survival as bearers of distinct cultures and identities. This relationship changed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as indigenous communities discovered new possibilities for expanding their own economic and political power by pursuing local, regional, and even global opportunities, independent of the Ottoman center. The loose, flexible relationship between the Ottoman center and migrant communities became a liability under these changing conditions, and the Ottoman state took its first steps toward settling tribes and controlling migrations. Finally, in the early twentieth century, mobility took another form entirely as ethnicity-based notions of nationality led to forced migrations.

1 Empire, State, and People

Several years before I began writing this book, I noticed that the sources I was reading for another project repeatedly mentioned large numbers of nomadic tribes and other unsettled peoples who roamed the vast territories of the Ottoman Empire. According to these sources and the accounts of contemporary travelers and other observers, such groups were not confined to frontier areas or peripheral provinces but lived across the entire empire, even in urban areas. Furthermore, rather than figuring solely as carriers of dissent, in many instances migratory and nomadic groups actually mediated and imposed the will of the imperial center. It was particularly intriguing that the economic, political, and social changes the empire underwent in its long history—from roughly 1300 to 1922—and the Ottoman state’s repeated attempts to settle the tribes seemed not to have affected the position and prominence of tribal and other migratory groups. Tens of thousands of tribes, some encompassing thousands of people and animals, moved across great distances, crosscutting the Ottoman Empire, which at one point extended from Algeria in the west to the Iranian border in the east and from Crimea in the north to the Indian Ocean in the south. Together with the continuous migration of agricultural and urban workers within and across the many regions, this movement created a situation in which at any time a significant part of the people living within the borders of the Ottoman Empire was on the move. Far from being leftovers from a previous era, these mobile groups and individuals had become integral parts of the Ottoman Empire.

On one level, there is nothing surprising about the presence of large numbers of nomadic tribes and migrant workers in the Ottoman Empire. The lands the empire controlled for 600 years, from the Balkans to the Persian Gulf, cut across one of the five major areas of nomadic pastoralism in the world.¹ Central Asian tribes that played key roles in the creation of the Ottoman and other polities in the Near East migrated through these zones and arrived in Anatolia in the medieval era as nomads themselves.² At the same time, the mountainous terrain and the overall sparseness of population limited the development of large-scale sedentary farming in these lands. Instead, small to medium-size peasant farming became typical in large parts of the Ottoman Empire, and the farmers always depended on the availability of migrant labor.³

Hence, there are some answers to the question of why such a high degree of mobility exists in this part of the world. But if one asks how the nomadic tribes and itinerant workers managed to survive in an empire that was as bureaucratic and powerful as the Ottoman Empire, then the answer becomes less clear. Historians who tackled this issue in the 1930s and 1940s were more interested in exploring the role of nomadic tribes in the rise of the Ottoman Empire in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries than in the long-term coexistence of settled and migratory communities.⁴ Some of their studies were deeply ideological, seeking to “prove” the Turkishness of early tribes and show how that essence was maintained and carried over into the modern era.⁵ A third area of interest for these scholars was what role, if any, Islam played in this history, and if it did, what kind of Islam it was.⁶ In these studies the emphasis was especially on the Sufi orders that were organized in the frontier regions and on how such orders became the carriers of a uniquely “Turkish” version of Islam. Although these writers reflected a trend toward idealizing tribal forms, they shared an evolutionary understanding of history and considered tribal prominence as belonging to a more primitive stage that preceded the establishment of the central institutions of the Ottoman Empire.⁷

The question I pursue here is not the origins of the Ottoman Empire, the nature of its “Turkishness,” or the role played by Islam in the empire’s early expansion. I am interested in explaining how, despite the concerted efforts of the Ottoman and subsequently the Turkish state, tribes and other migrant groups survived over such a long period of history. A significant body of literature is focused on this question, but primarily from the perspective of the resistance of ethnically or religiously distinct communities, such as the Kurdish and Kızılbaş groups, that were organized in tribes. The writers of such studies tend to be more interested in the ethnic or religious aspects of these conflicts and treat tribal organization as secondary in importance.⁸

In order to gain a better understanding of the relationship between tribes and empires, one needs to move beyond the Ottoman context and consider the influential writings of the North African philosopher and statesman Ibn Khaldun, who lived in the fourteenth century. Ibn Khaldun described tribes as entities bonded by strong feelings of solidarity based on lineage.⁹ According to him, the closeness of the ties that gave the tribes their unity also made them cohesive and powerful. As such, tribes were more effective than sedentary empires in fighting and in spreading their influence. Historically, however, tribes almost always lose their unity and succumb to the cosmopolitan ways of settled urban cultures after they defeat and displace urban civilizations. In Ibn Khaldun’s scheme, it took four generations for this circle to close—that is, for tribes to become urbanized, grow weaker, and end up as targets of other tribes, ushering in another cycle of conquest and displacement.

Ibn Khaldun was translated into Turkish in the eighteenth century and read by Ottoman historians who were trying to figure out the reasons behind the difficulties the empire was facing. Ottomans found Ibn Khaldun’s explanation for the decline of dynastic centers—that it could be attributed to their loss of familial solidarity and ideological purity—appealing. They used a Khaldunian framework, versions of which some Ottoman historians had developed on their own, to explain the decline of their empire and also to make recommendations to the sovereign about the best way of restoring good government and imperial power.¹⁰

Whereas an idealized, almost nostalgic vision of tribal culture permeates Khaldun’s writings, scholars with a modern vantage point have grown suspicious of this form of existence. Modern writers have privileged settled forms of living and governance over those that are footloose and indeterminate. Just as empires such as the Roman and the Chinese labeled their nomadic and tribal adversaries “barbarians,” so did early modern states regard them as threats to social peace. According to Simon Schama, “to be of no fixed abode constituted deviant behavior” in the Dutch republic in the seventeenth century. Such people were “civically indigestible” and were punished severely for being vagrants and vagabonds.¹¹ “Heathen hunts” targeting that perennially vagabond community, the Gypsies, offered big rewards. Such hunts continued in Europe well into the nineteenth century.¹²

Even without such overt hostility, Enlightenment thinkers still saw tribes as primitive entities. They used this way of thinking about tribes to interpret the new information that was arriving from the Americas and the Pacific. They considered the exotic “savages” of these lands as belonging to one of the early stages of human history. This was a simpler and happier age, but people could not be left to live in such an innocent state. European civilization, representing the more mature, older age of humanity, had the responsibility to pull these communities out of their childlike stage.¹³ Karl Marx’s writings on India provide a good example of such a point of view: “Arabs, Turks, Tartans [sic], Moguls, who had successively overrun India, soon became Hindized [sic], the barbarian conquerors being, by an eternal law of history, conquered themselves by the superior civilization of their subjects.” According to Marx, “the British were the first conquerors superior and therefore inaccessible to Hindi civilization.”¹⁴

With or without a negative gloss, from the medieval to the modern industrial period most scholars who wrote about tribes and mobility saw these communities as belonging to a more primitive stage of human development. Scholars such as Emile Durkheim lamented the implications of the development of modern life but still saw stable institutions as key components of civilized society. Durkheim regarded tribes, which he called “hordes,” as the most elementary type of social organization. According to him these units acted as “protoplasm” out of which all social forms developed. Hordes created clans by coming together and forming associations. The underlying principle that held these units together was that of “mechanical division of labor,” which was characterized by sameness and repetition. The key to transition to a higher form of society was the development of moral individualism, which ushered in a division of labor based on functional differentiation. Durkheim described this as “organic division of labor.” For Durkheim, this change in the mode of solidarity necessitated a change in the structure of society.¹⁵ In more recent years, the study of tribes in the Middle East has been influenced by the writings of Ernest Gellner, who is credited with helping Western scholars discover the writings of Ibn Khaldun and use them as a framework for analyzing not only the history but also the modern dynamics of “Muslim societies.”¹⁶

Although they represented vastly different schools of thought, most authors who wrote about tribes until recently used an evolutionary perspective. By and large, they concurred that the persistence of nomadic and migratory communities and the formation of strong polities represented different stages of human development and as such were inherently incompatible with each other. Ibn Khaldun’s cyclical framework might look like an exception, but on close examination one sees that he, too, found relations between tribal solidarities and urban civilizations to be fundamentally conflictual. Uncritical acceptance of such dichotomies led scholars such as James Scott to ask “why states are the enemy of the people who move around” and “why civilizations can’t climb hills.”¹⁷

Under the influence of their European contemporaries, and constrained by the requirements of running a modern state, Ottoman and Turkish intellectuals and Ottoman statesmen grew increasingly wary and harshly critical of nomadic tribes and other migrants in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One of Emile Durkheim’s followers was Ziya Gökalp, who became a key intellectual during the Young Turk and early Kemalist periods. Gökalp likened tribalism to a “disease” that needed to be cured. In his study of Kurdish tribes in Turkey, he identified five stages in the evolution of these communities: fully nomadic tribes, semi-nomadic tribes, settled tribes, tribes dominated by landlords, and settled villages. According to Gökalp, the new Turkish state had to understand the factors that led to the development of tribalism and take the necessary steps to hasten the move from the first stage of evolution to the last.¹⁸

The evolutionary perspective on tribes has been challenged in recent years, especially by some anthropologists who see tribes not as representing an early, primitive stage in human history but as a constantly changing, integral part of the modern world. Furthermore, instead of seeing states and tribes as exclusive entities belonging to different stages of social evolution, researchers have shown that in places such as Iran and Turkey, states have preserved and even created new tribes in order to perpetuate their rule.¹⁹ In this book I question the assumption of a sharp divide between stasis and mobility as markers of civilization and barbarism, respectively. By looking at Ottoman history, I show how tribal interests were incorporated first into Ottoman institutions, then into the reformed institutions, and ultimately into early republican structures. In this way, migratory habits became a constitutive element in the making of modern Turkey and continue to be significant even in the twenty-first century, when more than two-thirds of Turkey’s population is classified not only as settled but as urban.²⁰

In this outcome, the power of the tribes and their ability to negotiate with the centralizing and reforming Ottoman authorities played a key role. Accordingly, I argue that researchers need to see the institutionalization of the Ottoman-Turkish state as a process unfolding in continuous relationship with other groups and elements of society and with counterparts in surrounding areas. As a result, conceptually and in real terms, the internal boundaries that separated the Ottoman state from the tribal social structures were never clear. Nor were the external borders separating the Ottoman Empire from its neighbors as clearly identifiable as historical atlases presume.²¹ There was always movement of people, goods, and ideas, not to mention armed groups, that cut across internal divides as well as the borders of the Ottoman Empire. Consequently, both the imperial center and the modern state that emerged from it were deeply embedded in local practices, making it impossible to talk about centralization as having clear starting and end points. Similarly, dividing the history of the Ottoman Empire into distinct periods such as Classical, Transition, Reform, and Collapse, or imagining a unilinear progress from tribe to empire to nation, imposes too compact a framework on a complex history. Rather than being strictly separated, the phases of this historical transformation overlap, crosscut, and build on one another in myriad ways. They are not distinct steps in the staircase of universal civilization.

In this book I examine the status of tribes in the Ottoman Empire and their relationship to political authority in five chapters. Chapter 2 is focused on the early part of Ottoman history, when maintaining a nomadic presence, especially in the frontier regions of the empire, was an important source of strength. The imperial center used these communities as tentacles of its reach into neighboring territories. Sometimes the communities moved on their own, occupying new territories, and the imperial administration followed with its institutions and practices. These frontier communities also helped expand the influence of the empire by proselytizing in the border regions and laying the groundwork for subsequent invasion by Ottoman forces.

Tribes that were engaged in pastoral nomadism were important for the internal organization of the empire as well. They were the main suppliers of animals for military and civilian purposes. Through their mobility and part-time farming they helped cultivate a larger part of the Ottoman lands than would have been possible otherwise. They facilitated the internal movement of goods for trade and taxation purposes, and by carrying messages and maintaining a transportation network, they provided the main lines of communication between the imperial center and its provinces. The organization, functioning, and expansion of the Ottoman Empire involved the participation of many communities that were accustomed to living independently. The prominence and importance of nomadic activities meant that the power of the imperial center was refracted through tribal leaders, which allowed these chiefs to perpetuate their authority while providing the center with an effective way of reaching distant parts of the empire.

Tribal cooperation with imperial and subsequently state authorities was an important factor in guaranteeing the survival of tribes not only as an organizational form but also as bearers of distinct cultures and identities within the Ottoman Empire. Such cultural characteristics were neither insular nor static. On the contrary, the very mobility that defined these communities created eclectic lives and practices that were highly fluid and dynamic. Islam, for example, which was practiced among most of the people of the Ottoman lands, incorporated aspects of other religions and a wide range of vernacular practices, some of which were influenced by pre-Islamic traditions. Other religions developed their own local traditions and schisms, making them, too, resistant to simple categorizations. With unorthodox beliefs permeating all the religions practiced in the Ottoman Empire, and with a high degree of mobility characterizing the lives of a significant portion of the Ottoman population, how could Ottoman culture have been anything but fluid?

The fluidity and indeterminacy of Ottoman society gave the empire an advantage in earlier parts of its history, when it was faced with the remnants of medieval feudalism in the Balkans and with severely compromised Arab dynasties and tribes in the south. In chapter 3 I examine the way these conditions, which favored the Ottomans, changed significantly starting in the seventeenth centu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Empire, State, and People
• 2. A Moveable Empire
• 3. Toward Settlement
• 4. Building Stasis
• 5. The Immovable State
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index