“The Envy of Surrounding States”: The European Commission for the Organization of Eastern Rumelia and Transimperial Provincial Constitutionalism in Late Ottoman Europe, 1878–79

This paper examines the proceedings of the European Commission for the Organization of Eastern Rumelia, an autonomous Ottoman province decreed into existence at the Congress of Berlin (1878). The Commission’s objective was to devise a system of governance for the new subimperial polity encompassing the southern half of present-day Bulgaria. Meeting seventy-nine times between October 1878 and June 1879, the Commissioners—nine quasi-diplomatic agents of the self-styled Great Powers and two Ottoman officials—applied European legal-administrative repertoires to Ottoman provincial politics and formulated Eastern Rumelia’s organic statute. Rather than an isolated episode of legal-political change that followed the Ottomans’ catastrophic defeat at the hands of Russian imperial armies (1877-78), the Commission should be understood as an integral part of a longer history of transimperial provincial constitutionalism in the Ottoman Empire. Dating to the 1830s and the constitutional “moments” in Moldova-Wallachia, Samos, and Serbia, Ottoman Christian-majority provinces emerged as vibrant legal-political arenas in which imperial authorities, provincial state-makers, middling European diplomats, and “ordinary” claimants experimented with new discourses of sovereignty. The Eastern Rumelian Commission was, therefore, the latest instance of “constituting” Ottoman provinces as contested spaces of foreign intervention, legal reform, institutional engineering, and sovereign claims-making. By focusing on the Commissioners’ discourses of “legal modernity,” the paper contends that the Eastern Rumelian organic statute emerged as a result of sustained efforts to solidify inchoate European visions of “civilized rule” and exclude the Ottoman Empire from the Europe-centered state order. The analysis of the Commission’s pained labors to amalgamate members’ divergent understandings of “good governance” highlights the Ottoman Empire’s central role in the nineteenth-century juridical definitions of “Europe” and its limits. Finally, the Commission’s archive reveals how local actors routinely mobilized legal languages of rights, representation, and “humanity” to pursue outcomes that clashed both with Ottoman and “European” imperatives.