The Ottoman Empire and the Bosnian Uprising: Janissaries, Modernisation and Rebellion in the Nineteenth Century by Fatma Sel Turhan (review)

developing new entrepreneurial strategies as well as new forms of trade. In this way Vlami’s book opens the door for new studies of its kind. Gülay Tulasoğlu Hacettepe University doi:10.2979/jottturstuass.3.1.12 Fatma Sel Turhan. The Ottoman Empire and the Bosnian Uprising: Janissaries, Modernisation and Rebellion in the Nineteenth Century. London and New York: I.B. Tauris & Co., 2014. 336 pp. Cloth, $100, ISBN: 978-1780761114. Fatma Sel Turhan’s monograph, a detailed case study of a local Bosnian Muslim uprising against the centralizing military and fiscal reforms under Sultan Mahmud II, is a significant contribution to historical literature on this topic and that of early nineteenth-century Balkan and Ottoman history overall. Based on a thorough reading of Ottoman administrative and narrative sources, as well as that of relevant secondary literature, both in the lands of former Yugoslavia, and the world at large, she has painstakingly analyzed the root causes, events, reactions, and consequences of the ten-year revolt in Bosnia that followed the abolition of the Janissary Corps in July 1826. As Turhan illustrates, the Janissaries, the military order that had dominated the Balkans in particular since the fifteenth century, and had, since the seventeenth century, established itself as a hereditary grouping that dominated landholdings and the urban economy throughout the empire. Bosnia, a distant frontier province, was an ideal location for local Muslim elites to resist threats from Istanbul. These elites, as elsewhere in the Balkan periphery (i.e., Vidin, Ioannina, Rusçuk), had organized themselves around an ayan military chief, also known in Bosnia as the kapudan. As the author points out, such leaders, particularly Rusçuklu Ali Ağa, a Janissary chief, and Hüseyin Kapudan, enjoyed support amongst the majority of Bosnian Muslims, whose military, economic, social, and cultural privileges as the dominant religious community were threatened by the attempted formation of a conscript-based army, a new centrally-controlled fiscal and judicial bureaucracy, and the promise to provide greater rights to non-Muslims (i.e., the Bosnian Serbs or Croats). Turhan relates that the Ottoman attempt to bring these reforms met resistance in the immediate aftermath of the abolition, with the center of the rebellion in Sarajevo and Central Bosnia, where the Bosnian Muslim community 196 Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, Vol. 3.1 was strongest. The forlorn Ottoman attempt to move the offices of the governor from the northern town of Travnik to Sarajevo represented a bold effort to reestablish central control. The Ottomans may have been successful in defeating Rusçuklu Ali Ağa in 1827 and Hüseyin Kapudan in 1832, but were forced in the end to compromise with local elites because of ongoing domestic and international crises (i.e., the Greek revolt, the Ottoman-Russian war of 1828–29 and Ibrahim Pasha’s invasion of Syria). The Ottomans, in their desperation, also relied on the Serbs under Knez Miloş, and the Austrians―who themselves had designs on Bosnia―leading to Bosnian Muslim resentment. Turhan shows that the Ottoman officials’ derogatory comments towards Bosnian Muslims as a whole, and not just the rebels, also contributed to this emerging nationalist sentiment. The structure of her book generally is effective in conveying this argument. After a rather extensive historiographical summary of the topic among Ottomanists and Bosnian scholars in her introduction, she then launches into a contextual chapter of Bosnia’s geography and society. This is followed by two chapters that analyze the revolt in “two stages,” the first beginning with the initial uprising until the appointment of Hüseyin Kapudan in 1831, and the second covering the entire length of Hüseyin Kapudan’s struggle with the Ottomans as well as his subsequent exile and death in Istanbul. Chapters then are devoted to the Ottoman description of the rebels, and finally a discussion of the above mentioned kapudans as leaders, and how reflective they were of the ayans of that time. The one major drawback I found was in the introduction. This section, with an exhaustive coverage of modern secondary source literature, reads far too much like a dissertation. While this no doubt suits specialists in the...