Deportation as an Expression of State Power in the Ottoman Empire

For the Ottoman Empire, coercive population transfer (sürgün, sawq) was an important state-building tool. As a “method of conquest,” in Halil Inalcik’s classic formula, such transfers facilitated territorial expansion and political control. As the practice became entrenched and its uses multiplied, an Ottoman deportation regime took shape. Given the logistics of relocating groups of people—often entire communities—one might imagine deportation as a form of violence and power (Gewalt) that only strong states could manage—and “monopolize.” It thus provides a fertile test case for the utility of Max Weber’s ideas on politics and state formation in a dynamic premodern setting. Accordingly, this paper will examine the practice in the 16th-century Arab lands—focusing on Aleppo and Cairo. With the aid of narrative sources and state records in Arabic and Ottoman, the paper will analyze transfers ordered by Sultan Selim (r. 1512-20) after his defeat of the Mamluk Sultanate and annexation of the Islamic heartlands. While one interpretive model suggests a shift in governing rationale took place at this time, from “resource colonization” to “punitive regulation,” this study will argue that deportation remained strategically flexible and that multiple policy goals were pursued simultaneously. The analysis will unpack local conditions, draw in geopolitical context, and offer comparative examples. And it will comment on resistance to—and thus the effectiveness of—deportation in an effort to assess the limits of state power and any putative Weberian monopoly. In Ottoman studies, moreover, research on demography and mobility has tended to focus on the empire’s early and late history and the regions of Anatolia and the Balkans. It has also been heavily empirical and under-theorized. This paper aims to address these imbalances, while also speaking to broader interest in the value of Weber’s “monopoly of violence” schema to histories he did not consider.