Negotiating Empire in the Middle East: Ottomans and Arab Nomads in the Modern Era, 1840–1914 by M. Talha Çiçek (review)

The same features that made it difficult for agrarian states to govern pastoral societies continue to frustrate scholars in their efforts to study them. Mobility, for instance, makes nomads more difficult to trace in the archival records and obstructs attempts by historians to adopt an explicit geographical framework in their narrative. Nomads, in addition, preserved their past largely in oral form. As a result, historians today, blinded by their bias toward contemporary written sources, often resort to imperfect sources about nomads, mostly written by their literate and hostile neighbors.

Çiçek's Negotiating Empire in the Middle East overcomes these and other research perils with dexterity. Through a rare synthesis of Ottoman, Arabic, French, and British sources, along with a peerless knowledge of the inner workings of the Ottoman bureaucracy, Çiçek writes a rigorous and captivating account of the Ottoman Empire's experience with Arab nomads in the modern era. The book studies the integration of the two largest nomadic confederations in the Arab world—the Shammar and Anizah—into the late Ottoman imperial structure. Geographically, the narrative is centered in the deserts of Syria and Iraq. Temporally, it starts in 1840 and ends in 1914. The common thread running through the book is the clash between two starkly different visions of the world. On one side are Ottoman advocates of the Tanzimat reforms, who aspired to reestablish a centralized state that would directly collect taxes, provide security, and vanquish provincial centers of powers that had thrived since at least the eighteenth century. On the other side are sheikhs of the Shammar and Anizah confederations, who sought to preserve their right to collect the khuwwa taxes (protection money imposed on their neighbors), plunder peasants and caravans, and run their own system of justice.

The book argues that the nineteenth century witnessed an important transformation in Ottoman-nomadic relations in the Arab world. A coercive Ottoman ideal to dominate the tribes through forced settlement and war in the 1840s gave way by the 1870s to a policy of pragmatism, negotiation, and collaboration. In the reconciliation process, the state exempted tribes from conscription and surveying necessary for compiling its census and renounced its policy of forced settlement. In return, tribal sheikhs relinquished their right to the khuwwa tax and to raid caravans and settlement centers, which used to be major sources of income for them. This was a win-win situation for both sides. The Ottomans, for example, gained allies against European powers encroaching on their territory, while tribal sheikhs gained access to Ottoman markets and reinforced their legitimacy within their society. The result of this "politics of negotiation," Çiçek argues, was not domination of the tribes by the state but rather a partnership built on trust, mutual recognition, and reciprocal rights and obligations. This is a refreshing new account of Ottoman expansion into the Syrian and Iraqi deserts, overturning previous celebratory portrayals of the process as a triumph of an Ottoman civilizing mission among a benighted and doomed nomadic society.

The book is comprised of seven chapters. Chapter 1 discusses initial policies to solve the "tribal question" through forced settlement or by playing one tribal sheikh against another. Chapter 2 examines the Ottoman establishment of new agricultural and military outposts in the desert to push nomads further away from major settlement centers. Chapters 3 and 4 offer case studies of the Ottoman venture deeper into the desert, detailing the expansion of the Ottoman presence in Deir al-Zor (eastern Syria) and Hawran (southern of Syria), respectively. Chapter 5 covers the consolidation of the Ottoman-Shammar partnership in the early 1870s. Chapters 6 and 7 are thematic, covering the Ottoman systems of taxation and justice among the Shammar and Anizah.

The book offers specialists an important service by charting a clear time-line of the countless alliances and...