This paper examines the transformation of the Ottoman state’s relationship with its predominantly Kurdish eastern periphery in mid-nineteenth century within the context the modernization of the Ottoman state. Using land policies and conflicts as a prism through which to view the unfolding of modern statecraft, my paper demonstrates late Ottoman efforts to incorporate this region, which had hitherto remained on the margins of Ottoman politico-administrative organization. Starting from the 1840s, Kurdish “land” accrued a plethora of new meanings in Ottoman statecraft: as a productive unit to maximize agricultural surplus; as a wilderness to be tamed; as the inhabitance of nomadic tribes, and finally, as a piece of territory to be integrated into centralizing state. These novel meanings of the land triggered a long process of conflict among different actors, including central and local state officials, Kurdish
emirs, and the sharecroppers. The paper focuses on ordinary Kurdish-Armenian inhabitants’ perceptions and reactions to the changing meanings of the land, the ever-increasing encroachment of both state and local notables, and the dramatic changes this brought to provincial life.
Kurdistan, which was a province of the Ottoman Empire, rarely entered the historico-geographical horizons of the Ottoman historians. Historians writing under the influence of nationalistic paradigms, failed to think this region’s history within the framework of an imperial entity. Using previously unearthed sources, such as petitions and the private archives of the Kurdish notable families, as well as more conventional archival materials, my paper challenges these narratives in two ways: First, it brings the history of Kurdistan back into the Ottoman imperial history and ultimately comparative histories of the modernization of the Eurasian empires. Second, it strives to “rescue” the Kurdish sharecropper, and the landless peasantry, which have largely become invisible in the state-oriented and nationalistic historiographies, “from the enormous condescension of posterity." (Thompson, 1980).
