The provincial challenge

This dissertation focuses on a set of historical circumstances in the Ottoman Empire wherein a new type of provincial elite emerged in the Balkans and Anatolia, consolidated their power in their provincial units and challenged the constitutional basis of the Ottoman imperial system in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The dissertation operates in two parts. The first part analyzes the institutional transformation of Ottoman provincial governance in the eighteenth century. Here, I discuss different mechanisms whereby some local individuals and families consolidated their power and gradually established their control over their provincial units. I particularly focus on the mechanisms of the delegation of authority from imperial authorities to local notables, the emergence of a managerial class as a result of the expansion of tax farming and the participation of communities in the election of municipal overseers. In Part Two, I depict the circumstances in different Ottoman provinces that transformed these individuals and families from local to regional and from regional to imperial actors. I analyze the political processes whereby they established their regional autonomy, set up networks on an imperial scale and became major actors within the imperial establishment. Then, I focus on the political developments between 1806 and 1808, a period of political turmoil, factional struggle and revolution. This political crisis gave birth to an alliance between some provincial power-holders and a faction in the central government. This alliance produced a major document, the Deed of Agreement ( Sened-i ittifak ), signed by members of the central state and provincial leaders and redefining authority within the imperial state. In the last chapter, I scrutinize the constitutional orientation of this document. As a conclusion, I argue that the provincial challenge experienced by the Ottoman Empire in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries created possibilities for the transformation of the empire into a more participatory and integrationist polity.