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9 The Central State in the Borderlands OTTOMAN EASTERN ANATOLIA IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY Elke Hartmann The borderlands paradigm offers a way of understanding the mass violence that characterized especially the borderlands or shatterzones of the German, Russian, Habsburg, and Ottoman Empires from roughly the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, when these multiethnic , multiconfessional, and multilingual empires underwent massive modernizing and homogenizing transformation processes. The borderlands paradigm perceives the violence in these regions as concomitant to, and a consequence of, this fundamental political, social, and cultural change which accompanied modernization.1 The borderlands paradigm further assumes that “ethnic violence in the modern period has become so much more frequent, systematic, and deadly precisely because of its dual character, that is, fomented by states and enacted by significant segments of the population at large.”2 This points to the problem of central state control, which was fundamental for the eastern borderlands of the Ottoman Empire, i.e. the Kurdish and Armenian provinces in the eastern parts of Asia Minor. Rather than looking at ideological and intellectual or cultural developments in this connection, this chapter will adopt a pragmatic perspective, focusing on the shifts in Ottoman power structures and examining the changing nature of power within the Empire in the late nineteenth century. It will be argued that during that century a constantly widening gap opened between the postulated ideal of a modern central state exercising exclusive control over its provinces and guaranteeing public order on the one hand, and the real political desiderata and the applied practice on the other, especially in the provinces of Eastern Anatolia. It will further be argued that, under these conditions, the fragmentation The Central State in the Borderlands 173 and above all the delegation of power contributed considerably to the escalation of violence in the Eastern Ottoman borderlands. * * * Eastern Asia Minor shares important characteristics with other borderlands. The first among them is the geographical position between two great empires. In this case, the Ottoman lands bordered on Russia, and, in the south, on Persia. A second main characteristic was the extremely heterogeneous population: in addition to the fact that it was populated by relative majorities of (Christian) Armenians and (Muslim) Kurds, both of which groups were further subdivided into different confessional denominations, Eastern Asia Minor was inhabited by a multitude of ethnic and linguistic groups, among whom the growing proportion of muhacirun , Muslim refugees from the Crimea, the Caucasus, and the Balkans, deserve special mention .3 A third common characteristic of borderlands is the interaction of a single population group that lives on both sides of the border. Most important for Asia Minor was the migration of Kurdish tribes fleeing Ottoman state control, and the activities of Armenian revolutionaries who came to the Ottoman lands from Russian Armenia.4 Most of them were caught by Ottoman frontier guards; all told, these revolutionaries were few in number and hardly represented a real threat to the Ottoman state. Indeed, it seems that the revolutionary parties found comparatively little support among Ottoman Armenians.5 The central authorities nevertheless registered their border violations as anxiously as they did the tribal border crossings.6 The specific situation in Eastern Asia Minor resulted mainly from the weakness of the Ottoman central state in the region and from the way central state control was achieved and practiced there. Since the idea of central state control and the establishment of a central state monopoly on violence are specific for the modern state, the question of how and under what conditions modernizing reforms were conceived and carried out in the Ottoman Empire— and especially in its Eastern borderlands—is crucial in this context. * * * At the core of the Ottoman modernization process, known as Tanzimat (reorganization), stood the problem of centralization, the question of how to strengthen a central state confronted with regional power centers—local notables, de facto autonomous tribal chiefs, and its own provincial governors—who had steadily loosened their ties to the capital during a long process of decentralization and whose unauthorized actions and claims to power in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries called the persistence of the Ottoman state much more seriously into question than the secessionist movements that had arisen in the Balkans in the same period.7 In 1833 and 1839, the situation had become especially dangerous when only European intervention against the rebellious governor of Egypt saved the empire’s integrity. This so-called “Mehmed Ali crisis” marked the beginning of the “Eastern...

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