The Margins of Empire: Kurdish Militias in the Ottoman Tribal Zone (review)

In this informative study, Janet Klein discusses Hamidiye Light Cavalry in the context of state-tribe relations. The book is the first one in English language that is devoted entirely to this subject and is significant in that it introduces the reader to a wealth of primary documents mainly from French and British archives. This sound scholarship is a welcome addition to the growing literature on Kurdish studies which has also become a noteworthy subject in Ottoman studies.

Consistent with the author's aim, the book can be read, and hence judged, at two different levels. The first level, at which the book is most authoritative, is the narrative. Klein's use of the French and particularly the British archival material helps draw a vivid picture of the Hamidiye Kurdish militia. We learn, for example, how the militia was dressed, what medals they were given, and how they were recruited. Klein's narrative is engaging and fluent.

However, there is another deeper level of reading that is most interesting and intellectually rewarding. At this level, the author makes several significant theoretical claims and suggestions on which her book can be situated. This attempt is successful in that it will surely create healthy debates among students of Ottoman history and those whose primary specialty is empire/tribe relations. Although some of the author's claims have solid proof, others can be seen as exploratory, if not speculative, in nature. To be more specific, the author, in certain areas, comes dangerously close to reading history retrospectively. For example, she asks, "what happens when a state empowers a group that it would rather suppress" (p. 9)? Similar implications to this effect are scattered throughout the entire text that the Ottoman state aimed at suppressing the Kurds but consciously empowered them in an attempt to manipulate the power struggle between the Kurds and the Armenians. Klein is careful, and she should be commended for it, not to ethnicize the problems of the 19^th century between the Armenians and the Kurds. Therefore, the assumption is not about their soon-to-be crystallized "ethnic" identity. In other words, the Ottoman state was not empowering the "Kurds" per se, but rather the "tribes" (which happened to be Kurdish) in order to exert authority in the "tribal zone." A question that I believe would ignite a healthy debate is: Did the Ottoman state wish to suppress these tribal formations later and knowingly empower them for the time being, or was this empowerment itself in fact the method with which the state aimed at taming the (Kurdish) tribes? This issue becomes more important when the author makes an interesting but not authoritative comparison between the Hamidiye Regiments of the 19^th century and the Village Guards of the 20^th century.

Another thought-provoking issue is that of timing. We know that the Ottoman (and other empires) state interacted with their "tribal zones" by empowering them for several reasons throughout history. The Ottoman support for the Bedirhan confederacy in the 16^th century is only one example. There are many others. What, then, sets the Hamidiye experiment apart from the rest? Klein is convincing when she claims that it coincided with the crystallization of ethnic identities that soon gave way to Kurdish nationalism. Many conflicts in the "tribal zone" between groups such as Armenians and Kurds) or between a group (Kurds) and the state (Ottoman) were later read as nationalist struggles. Therefore, in the grand narrative of their respected nationalist discourses, these bloody events were marked as cornerstones. That is why the Hamidiye Light Cavalry is significant and why this solid piece of scholarship is an important contribution to the field.

It is a pity that Professor Klein was initially denied access to the Ottoman archives. She had only limited time before the production of this book to examine the Ottoman archives. As a trained Ottoman historian, she would have provided more solid bases to her...