Tracing Relations of Power in the Ottoman Empire through Subjectivities of Armenian Petitioners from the Province of Van in the Mid-19th Century

Petitions written in Armenian, sent from provincial Armenians of various backgrounds to the Constantinople Armenian Patriarchate during the Tanzimat reform era of the Ottoman Empire between 1839 and 1876 can tell us much about the complex relations of power that existed across gendered, religious, ethnic, socio-economic, urban versus rural lines within the Ottoman Empire. Attending to the subjectivities expressed in petitions, one can delineate the power structures that shaped the subject’s position towards the other, i.e., Muslims, Kurds, villagers, higher-ranked ecclesiastic and government officials, etc. Petitioners in the mid-19th century wrote to the Patriarchate to seek remedy to their problems regarding marriage, property, finances, conflicts with appointed ecclesiastics, etc. Tracing the disparate subjectivities expressed by Armenian petitioners of the Ottoman eastern province of Van, this paper seeks to unravel the complex and dispersed set of power dynamics within the empire, against the common top-down hierarchical relations of power that appears in Ottoman historiography.