The Ottoman Empire in the Tanzimat Era: Provincial Perspectives from Ankara to Edirne by Yonca Köksal (review)

Köksal’s The Ottoman Empire in the Tanzimat Era: Provincial Perspectives from Ankara to Edirne offers a novel and revisionist perspective on the interaction between the provincial notables and the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century. In this comparative work, Köksal does not merely bring back the notables of the prior century into the nineteenth-century politics, but also underlines that it was the interaction between the empire and the notables that set the course of reforms during the period. In the introduction, the author challenges the structuralist perspectives of Ottoman modernization, mostly confined to a zero-sum game in which the notables’ accumulation of economic and social capital challenged the power of the imperial center. Contrary to a rather uninterrupted transformation from indirect rule to a direct one, Köksal emphasizes the existence of “previous administrative practices which conditioned how the state conceived and experimented with reform” (p. 14).

In Chapter Two, the author introduces the provinces of Ankara and Edirne. Noting the political, geographical, and economic differences between the two provinces, the author argues that “Tanzimat strategies of rule and their outcomes varied on the basis of divergent paths in the provinces” (p. 30). While the state followed the coercion-intensive path in Ankara (the extractive state policy), it followed an integrationist policy (capital-intensive path) in Edirne due to the concerns of social and economic development of the region. In Chapter Three, focusing on local administration and reforms in Ankara, Köksal demonstrates that the ayan families of the previous century assumed administrative responsibilities as state officials of local origin. Underlining the disconnected local structure, she argues that the Tanzimat reforms brought about gradual changes in Ankara, which were rather slow compared to the Balkan provinces. In Chapter Four, the author deals with the province of Edirne. She demonstrates that the densely connected local networks, severe competition among many intermediaries leading to coalition formations, and collective action based on formal ties and market relations in addition to the gradual elimination of state officials of local origin led the Tanzimat reforms to accomplish a lot in the province (p. 125). In Chapter Five, Köksal applies Social Network Analysis (SNA) to the local intermediaries of the two provinces. By the analysis, she substantiates the arguments she makes in the previous chapters. Finally in the conclusion, Köksal sums her argument that the differences in terms of local political structures, geopolitical location, and economic development led to varying outcomes of the Tanzimat reforms in the provinces of Ankara and Edirne. She skillfully shows that the incorporation of local intermediaries into its administration was “important to understanding the emergence or the absence of local support organized by the local elite in both provinces” (p. 158).

Köksal’s study is a brilliant challenge against the rather standardized and top-down representation of the Tanzimat. Framing the rich archival material with the sociological methods, the author shows that it was not just the state but the societal actors who actually set the course of the reforms. Given the still infant state of provincial and comparative histories of the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, Köksal’s study delivers a fresh perspective on conceptualizing different regional transformations. Her argument that Tanzimat was a transition period in which the imperial government continued benefitting from notables is important not only in terms of bridging the two distant periods of the empire (i.e., age of ayans and the Tanzimat) but also demonstrating the path-dependent trajectory of the reforms, results of which were based on negotiation between the state and societal actors. Considering the Ottoman historiography’s preoccupation with annihilation of local intermediaries from the provincial political landscape, Köksal meticulously shows that albeit with the gradual elimination “a considerable number of müdürs of local origin continued to exist in the system throughout the reform...