Ottoman History Podcast - Privileges and Nobility in Ottoman Kurdistan

Episode Date: September 20, 2023

with Nilay Özok-Gündoğan hosted by Sam Dolbee | As the Ottoman state expanded in the sixteenth century, it extended a number of privileges to elite families in Kurdistan. In this episode, Nilay Özok-Gündoğan discusses her new book The Kurdish Nobility in the Ottoman Empire, which explains how these hereditary privileges—unique in the empire—developed and changed in the region of Palu between this moment and the nineteenth century, when the Ottoman state attempted to rescind such autonomy. Writing against scholarship that either ignores such families or understands them only in nationalist terms, Özok-Gündoğan attends to property, labor, and mineral extraction and how they ultimately all shaped the nature of the unprecedented violence at the end of empire. She also discusses her own journey writing this book, including her time teaching in Mardin and eventually being forced to leave Turkey.   « Click for More »

It's the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Sam Dolby. Today's guest, Nilay Özök Gündoğan. She has a new book out, which we'll discuss, but she's also perhaps our first guest to have had a past life as a child voiceover artist on Turkish radio and television, also known by its abbreviation of TRT. Yeah, that looks great. Does this take you back to TRT at all? Well, very bulky, pre-modern technology. I am Nila Yozok Gündoğan.

I am an associate professor of history at Florida State University, and I teach courses on Ottoman and Middle East history. When I was in America, there was this little chick, Kalimero. I actually was another animal. I don't remember what animal it was in that cartoon. So I am actually assimilated into the Kemalist culture through the TRT. it into the Kemalist culture through the TRC. Nilay Özök Gündoğan's book is The Kurdish Nobility in the Ottoman Empire, Loyalty, Autonomy and Privilege, and it's published with Edinburgh University Press. The book focuses on one Kurdish noble family in the district of Ottoman Kurdistan known

as Palu, and follows them from the 16th century and their incorporation into the empire to the 19th century and the abolition of their privileges. The book is pushing back against scholarship on the Ottoman Empire that ignores the Kurdish nobility and insists on an important distinctive feature of this group, their hereditary privileges, which set them apart from most other elite nobles. The book is also a response to nationalist approaches, which often focus on groups like the Babans or Bidirhans, their antagonistic relationship with the Ottoman state, and their subsequent leadership role in nationalist movements. Instead, this book situates Kurdistan and its noble families in a constellation of hereditary privileges accorded to groups in exchange for their loyalty in the 16th century

when the empire was at war with the Safavids. In exchange for loyalty, a number of families secured autonomy as part of principalities free of Ottoman governance mechanisms like temporary land and tax collection rights granted to cavalrymen, known as the timar, or land and revenue surveys. What this meant was that this was a region into which Ottoman governors and military did not go, and in which these noble families collected their own taxes. The book explains how these arrangements changed over the course of several centuries in relation to property, labor, and mineral extraction. And finally, how these changes culminated in unprecedented violence at the end of empire.

We pick up our conversation with Nilay as she discusses changes to this system in the late 17th and early 18th century in Padu. In Kurdish historical writing, or historical writings about Kurdistan and the Kurdish elite families, there is a conventional periodization or chronology, if you will. And that is based on this degrees of autonomy, perceived degrees of autonomy that the Kurdish elite families had. What I mean by this is the conventional accounts argues that the region Kurdistan came under the Ottoman rule in the 16th century and then defined as an autonomous area. And the autonomy persists for a while. We don't know how much in this conventional historiography. But in the 19th century with Tanzimat, the Ottoman state using really large military campaigns

wanted to destroy this autonomy and the Kurdish elite families react and resist in various military and political ways. So that's the established notion. But my larger scholarship is actually based on understanding how Kurds actually existed in various different ways in Ottoman history, meaning not in military, not just fiscal, but political, allies or rebels in multiple ways that this conventional historiography fails to show us.

I have been asking this question, okay, autonomy, yes, I, to a great extent, understand what is meant by autonomy. And I further elaborate on this in the book by using the notion of privilege, what privilege meant, how the Ottoman state conceptualized it, and how the Kurdish nobility accepted or, you know, negotiated over the terms of this notion of privilege. But then, and I also knew the end of the story, because probably we will talk about this, how that entire notion changed in the 19th century. But to a historian, of course, what would bug you as well, or me, the question is, what happens in between?

Like, from the 16th century to the 19th century what happens to Kurdistan and the 18th century is the least studied aspect of Kurdish history I mean a general problem in Ottoman historiography I would say so I wanted to understand how did this terms of the term the notion of the scope of privilege changed from the 16th century to 17th and 18th centuries before they were abolished by the state altogether. Focusing one specific elite group, I realized that the establishment of the Maiden-Humayun Emanati or the Imperial Mine Administration was a very significant moment in terms of the changing relationship between the Kurdish nobility and the Ottoman state. So a little bit of information on the Keban-Argani mines.

Keban-Argani mines is actually the most significant mining area of the empire in the 18th century. of the empire in the 18th century. Keban provided mostly for the Ottoman mint, silver, and Ergani provided mostly copper and iron to the Ottoman military industry. So in a period of long wars at both fronts in the east and in the west, these mines became really important for the Ottoman fiscal and military system. And this is also impacted by New World silver. Is that part of the story too? Yes, because in the 18th century, the New World silver is actually winding down. There is like a scarcity of silver in the Ottoman world, especially in a period of commercialization. So what we see in the 18th century from around the 1720s onwards is the Ottoman state establishing provincial mints.

And these provincial mints is mostly to provide for the much needed coin. And, you know, considering the technological problems of the time period, they needed to have these mints in the provinces. We know that around, I think around the 16th century, there was a mint in Diyarbakır. But we don't know at what point or under what circumstances it disappeared. But all this is to say that in the 18th century, for the Ottoman state, mineral extraction becomes really important, like you said, as a result of the combination of the global imperial and regional factors. And it is within this context that Keban-Argani mines became really important for the Ottoman state. We can even

consider it as a larger integrated system with the mines in Gümüşhane in the north. But in my study, I focused specifically on the Keban Ergani mines. And in the late 18th century, the Ottoman state decided to establish this large bureaucratic entity in the region called the Malini Humayun Emaneti. And it's actually an outcome of like decades of trial and error in terms of how to administer this really very important mineral area for the Ottoman military and fiscal needs. And the Madin-i Humayun Emaneti is not unique, but definitely a specific way of administering the region in the sense that the emins or the trustees or the superintendents, we can use both terms, were given a certain amount of capital

by the Ottoman state. In addition to that, they were given a notion or a concept of serbestiyet, which means autonomy. What we mean by this is they were really protected from the intervention of the other provincial actors, provincial governors, so they had really maximum authority to rule the mining area. So it is, in its essence, originally, it is an administrative position to administer the mines. But the reality is much more complicated than that, because the mine superintendents lived in the mining area. They are a part of the larger fiscal system in the region. Specifically, I'm referring to the malikane system. So they are big shareholders. Superintendents are big shareholders. to the malikani system. So they are big shareholders, superintendents are big shareholders.

Depending on the specific emin or specific superintendent, they are also willing to use a big amount of degree of military power to suppress groups that they potentially considered as resistant. And this happened with particular specific superintendents. They actually used military force to suppress the tribes or to actually make the Kurdish nobles comply. So all this is to say that the significance of the Keban-Argani mines and the emergence of the specific mine administration is really the most important parameter that changes the relationship between the Kurdish elite families and the Ottoman imperial center. And in order to understand that, I think we have to look a little bit more closely into how mining worked in a pre-capitalist system, right? So contrary to Europe, Ottoman mines, specifically in Kebanargani mines I'm

going to talk about, relied on charcoal. So charcoal was the main fuel. Coal was not a thing at this point in time. What was done with the charcoal? Charcoal is used to smelt the mines. And it is basically no mining operation without charcoal kind of relationship. So in order to smelt the mine, they need like ongoing uninterrupted flow of charcoal. But charcoal is not a natural element. It's not out there. It is produced by human action using wood. And so this is actually the specific type of production in a pre-capitalist mining sector

really connected different local and imperial actors into one another, including my Kurdish nobles and the, you know, larger ordinary sectors of the society in Kurdistan. So when the mining administration was established in the area, considering the specific way in which production happens in the Keban Ergani mines, the superintendents have to really come to an agreement with the elites of the region. Because the elites are the ones who can, or who might not, get the cooperation of the local population for providing labor. And they are the ones who will actually provide the security of those who provide the labor. Because maybe I should tell you a little bit more about how charcoal is produced and how it is transferred to the mines, because this actually involves different sectors of the

Kurdish and actually non-Kurdish, like Armenian or other Greek members of the local population. So the placement of these mines wasn't simply a challenge to local notables authority, but was actually a place in which further negotiation and kind of mutual reliance was occurring. The answer is yes and no. Of course, it opened up an area for negotiation between the superintendents, mine superintendents and the Kurdish nobility because the Kurdish nobles had to be on board.

They needed their collaboration. But at the same time, the relationship was tense because the superintendents continuously tried to challenge the privileges, fiscal and military privileges of the Kurdish nobility. So the establishment of this specific administrative body in the region created more interaction between the superintendents and the Kurdish nobility. So the first thing is this is more interaction because up to that point, remember the notion of privilege, the Kurdish nobility really didn't have to deal with Ottoman administrators to a large extent.

Unless they participated in the military marches, they really didn't have that much face-to-face relationship with Ottoman administrators. But this is the first time at which the Kurdish nobility have ongoing relationship and face-to-face encounter with an Ottoman administrator. So the relationship is, it can go both ways. At the end, it ended up as a negative relationship for the Kurdish nobility because the superintendent position became bigger and larger and more powerful. And it actually ended up challenging the long lived privileges of the Kurdish nobility. Maybe you could talk about the ecology of extraction too, and how all of these conflicts, tensions, negotiations play out in relation to that.

Really, the economy of charcoal production is at the core of this, because like my scholarship is really based on understanding the political economy of the changing relationship between Kurdish elites and the Ottoman state. And at this point in time, the economy of charcoal or mineral extraction at large is the key to this relationship. So like I said, charcoal has to be produced by human agents by cutting the woods and burning it and transferring it to the mine area. And so roughly speaking, the distance between the specific region that I focus on, Palu, and the mine area is about 70 miles distance. And so the Kurdish nobility, they are supposed to actually force their constituency to provide charcoal. So what

that means is that loggers, they will go to the nearby forests, they will cut the trees, they will burn them, and then they will send charcoal down the Euphrates River and its branches to the mine area. But forests, which is the material that you need for charcoal, it's not infinite, right? As they cut the trees, the area that they need to travel in order to get the woods actually extends and it goes further away from the areas where the loggers are coming from. And then it creates a necessity for providing more security because the Kurdish nobility, they are the ones who have the military power, right, in the area. They are the ones who are responsible for providing the security, providing security for the loggers and various other economic actors of the larger mining sector. But then as time goes and as the mines need more and more charcoal for smelting of the mines,

the relationship becomes really more difficult because the Kurdish nobility comes to a point that it's not a profitable enterprise anymore. Kurdish nobility comes to a point that it's not a profitable enterprise anymore. The necessity of protecting the loggers and then buying their compliance, if you will, becomes a pricey enterprise for the Kurdish nobility. So coming to the early 19th century, they actually don't want to do this anymore. But contrary to our established notion, it's not because they are antagonistic to state power, categorically speaking. It is because of the political economy and ecology of this specific type of work that they start to negotiate that. So to me, one of the most powerful aspects of the book is the way you disentangle all of these complicated methods of revenue extraction. And I wondered if you could give a sense of what different mechanisms there were

for revenue extraction before the Tanzimat, and how that kind of mix of various methods shaped reform policies in the region in the 19th century and the relationship of the Ottoman state to local noble families. Sorry, that was a big question. That is the most difficult aspect of the book for me to figure out from the documents and then formulate in a narrative. Because really, it's the most complicated aspect of it. I mean, I really got that sense reading. And this is kind of related to what I said before, where I was just kind of in awe of knowing the amount of work that had to go into just spelling out one of these particular revenue arrangements, you know, how many documents and strange terms

did you have to struggle with? I would like to talk a little bit, in order to answer this question, I need to give you a little bit of more information about the nature of the Kurdish elite's land ownership and what it entails. I think that will help me explain in a more clear way how surplus extraction actually worked in the region. in a more clear way, how surplus extraction actually worked in the region. So one of the biggest aspects of the notion of privilege that the Kurdish nobility had concerned surplus extraction. What I mean by this is they were entitled to the entire surplus without having to share it with any type of government agent. That gave them extraordinary control. The details of surplus extraction for the period between the 1600s until the 18th century is a little fuzzy, because that's the time period in which the record-keeping about the Kurdish elite families is really less systematic, if you will, and the conflict resolution about the terms of rural exploitation also remains mostly outside of the Ottoman state site. But coming to the 18th century, somehow it becomes more clear.

So we get a better sense of the terms of agrarian production in and around the region that I'm looking at. And there is one significant transformation in the 18th century as far as rural surplus extraction is concerned, which is within the context of commercialization and monetization. You know, these are larger processes, not only in Kurdistan, but in the entire imperial geography. The Kurdish elite families, they start to actually lease out their lands. What I mean by this is they still maintain the hereditary ownership of the land, but then they actually need more cash. And in order to acquire

more cash, they lease out their lands. This idea of hereditary ownership of land, this is particular, this is seen as being at odds with the kind of classical vision of the Ottoman Empire and its key institutions. Absolutely. I mean, we our notion of the Ottoman imperial system and its like economic characteristics is based on this assumption that private land ownership was not a thing, was not an accepted aspect of Ottoman economic system until the Land Code of 1858. But when we look at Kurdistan, I see something totally different. Much before the 1858 Land Code, land had become private property in terms of surplus extraction, in terms of surplus extraction,

in terms of how the elites treated the land, how they exchanged it, and so in terms of economic relationships. But even before the privatization of land as a commodity, within the Ottoman imperial system, the land that the Kurdish nobility had was defined as mülk. That is also something counterintuitive to our established notions of Ottoman administrative system. It was defined as mülk and it was outside of the intervention of Ottoman administrators. But then the 18th century, we see that the nature of the Kurdish nobility's ownership, land ownership changes. Now, on the one hand, there is like internal divisions within the family. And so we have like increasing numbers of members of the family having control over land.

control over land. And this is also actually parallel to the larger processes in Europe, too. We see in the 17th and 18th centuries increasing numbers of families with noble claims over land. But if we focus specifically on the ownership of land as an economic source of wealth, what we see here is that the Kurdish base, they actually see it as an economic entity. They lease it out or they actually subcontract surplus extraction to various tax farmers. But except there is one big reservation here. The areas under the rule of the Kurdish nobility never became a part of the larger malikane system. So life-term tax farms? Exactly. Life-term tax farms,

which is the single most important economic parameter that we use to understand changes in Kurdistan and its vicinity, never had any inroads into the areas under the Kurdish nobility, which further shows the uniqueness of the Kurdish nobles' control over land. Parallel to this process, in the book, I actually show this changing labor processes in land in the agrarian sector. As there is like a fragmentation of land ownership of the land that the Kurdish nobility had, there is also an emerging notion of sharecropping. Sharecropping becomes really the dominant form of labor in the agrarian sector.

As these new owners, not the new owners, but those who possess the lands, they make profit out of land in and around the area that I'm looking at. you know, they make profit out of land in and around the area that I'm looking at, they need more labor. And that results in the larger segments of the area's rural population becoming sharecroppers. But that relationship will also change with the 19th century changes as well. So the book begins with a fight between a particular noble, Abdullah Bey, and a village, and what seems to be, potentially, according to the testimony of some people, a fight over a half ton of clarified butter. I don't want to get too much into the details. I want people to go to the book to get the full story here. But what I found really interesting about your attention to shifting dynamics in Palu specifically, is in relation to this conventional narrative that

we're familiar with, about military confrontations between the Ottoman state and Bedirhan, for example. In contrast, in Palu, we see people, Ottoman officials, similarly frustrated with the exceptional arrangements. I don't know if that's the right term we want to use, but all of these complicated revenue flows that are not going to the Ottoman state. And yet, they don't necessarily choose violence. I mean, you describe it really nicely, how complicated it is to figure out how to annul privileges granted by the Ottoman state. And to convince local notables to do that, to go along with that, in a diplomatic way, it seems. to do that, to go along with that in a diplomatic way, it seems.

This is something that I, to this date, find really curious, because we know that in the 1840s, from around 1846-47, Ottoman state organizes large scale military campaign, just to undermine the military and economic power of Bedirhan and other actually elites as well. The Ottoman state is more hesitant when it comes to the elites on the border with Iran, around Hakkari, around Van, they are more careful. But there is this notion of like use of military force in order to institute the Ottoman state's authority. But when I look at these other cases, including the case of Palu, I see a more hesitant Ottoman state, more hesitant documents in order to justify why it is necessary to confiscate these privileges. issue related to legitimacy. Because whenever there's an attempt by the Ottoman administrators to abolish the legal privileges granted to these begs by the previous Ottoman sultans in the 16th century, these families literally show the temlikname given by Kanuni Sultan Süleyman to

them back in the 16th century. So it kind of creates a notion of legitimacy. How can we change the system here and really make their, annul their privileges without putting potential symbolic harm on the imperial legacy here? Because these rights and privileges were given to these groups by the former Ottoman sultans.

And I think, like, one of the larger issue, like points that I want to make in the book, and also kind of like direct attention of the scholars is the notion of privilege, we have to be talking a little bit more about the notion of privilege, both in terms of how certain groups feel entitled to these privileges, and what the Ottoman state notion of privileges and how they actually honor these privileges for several centuries. As these privileges are sometimes quickly, sometimes very slowly being abolished, as these variations are being smoothed out, how does the local social agrarian context change in Palu?

agrarian context change in Palu? In the 19th century, it is a transformative moment. I mean, we as Ottoman historians, we talk about this, whether Tanzimat was the beginning of modernity or things have been changing even before that. But looking at this particular region, the beginning of the Tanzimat in the 1840s, Tanzimat comes to Kurdistan in 1845, was a transformative moment because it was like for the first time the Kurdish elite see an

Ottoman state that is really more interested in claiming a share of the surplus or conscripting, like, you know, making use of the manpower in the area. So it is really a transformative time period. But when it comes to the actual strategies, actual ways in which things work on the ground, that's when I think we have to look more closely at the local population. So for one thing, we almost always believe that there's always like a consensus between different sectors of the Kurdish society, elite and non-elite, over how things need to be done, which is not true. And the Wessian incident, which you referred to previously, actually shows that there was not. There was like always tensions.

There was always disagreements within the Kurdish society over authority, over economy, over terms of surplus extraction. And so that's one thing. But the second thing is, up to this point, we didn't talk really that much about the Armenian population. In the region that I am looking at, Armenians constitute like a sizable population. And when the Tanzimat changes happen, the privileges that the Kurdish nobility had came to be challenged by various directions. On the one hand, we have these Kurdish villages. They are done with the extraordinary authority that the Kurdish nobles have. And then they use the Ottoman state's interest and its administrative capacity to dispute that authority. But on the other hand, we have the Armenians, Armenian population in the north of the Murad River.

They constitute a significant part of the sharecropping population in the area. Or let me rephrase it, a big chunk of the sharecropping population is Armenians. That's what I actually, that would do justice to the reality. And when the Ottoman state appears as like an adamant actor to claim surplus, the Armenian population, they are now on board with this, and they become very vocal about it. Adding another complicating factor. I mean, this is a term I've been using, and it's a problematic term, which is Ottoman state, right? Because part of what you show is that these noble families are also a part of the state, they're becoming provincial officials, in some cases. Absolutely.

I mean, especially in this specific case, I can pinpoint the moment of the Kurdish nobles being redefined and actually redefining themselves as the fiscal agents of the Ottoman state. Around the 1830s, even before the Tanzimat was actually a formal mechanism in the area, the Kurdish nobles were given the task of text collectors. And then even there's like a lot of different vocabulary used to describe these guys. At some point they are described as voivoda, at some point they are described as subhashil. All this is to indicate that they are now acting as the formal tax collectors on behalf of the Ottoman state. This is new. From around the 1500s until the 19th century,

we don't see the Kurdish nobles taking over this role in a formal capacity. So that's your right. And then for the Kurdish nobility specifically, they actually take over this role in the 1830s, with increasing influence of the governors trying to confiscate their long lived privileges. So the endpoint of the book are the massacres of Armenians in Palu in 1895. Could you talk about what happened in Palu in 1895? and then also how this attention to this long trajectory of privileges being abolished, of revenue streams being changed, how does that help us understand

this violence in a new way? So my driving question for including 1895 for the analysis was, what was the role of the Kurdish nobility in the area. And so I look at a couple of different dynamics here. The first one is the period from the 1860s until the 1890s is very important to understand the Kurdish nobles losing their land. Not extraordinary amount of land, but they still lose land and the majority of the new buyers of this land, it's the Armenians. I mean, and then I give details on why this is the case and how it happens. But in relation to the 1895 movement, coming to the 1890s, the Kurdish nobles, the Begs, they were really upset because they saw the Armenian population as the ones who took away their privileges. And so there was like great resentment on the part of the Kurdish nobility. But another thing is a few villages of Palu, mainly among them being Havav or Habab in the Ottoman records,

these were really politically active areas. And this goes back to the mobility of the Armenian population in these areas. They have solid, you know, ties with Istanbul. They come and go. They're so, like, they're really enlightened. Like, these Armenian villages. Some of them are really enlightened, and then they become really important centers for the emerging Armenian revolutionary movement. And significantly, some of the Armenian villages where we see the Armenians are being put on the spot because of their political identities or political activities. These are the very same villages that had been having tense relationship with the Begs over land, over terms of agrarian production, negotiating sharecroppers. So economic and political went hand in hand in that particular context. But also there is the larger imperial context. The Armenians are becoming really suspicious in the eyes of the Ottoman administrators,

both in the locality and in the center. All these culminated in a moment of violence in 1895. So in Polu, unfortunately, compared to some other places, compared to Harput, for instance, our knowledge of what actually happens in those three, four days in October of like the fall of 1895, we know less because there wasn't missionaries, American missionaries based in the area. Ottoman administrators, they had no access to it. So what we know is mostly come from the accounts aftermath of the actual violent events or the admin administrators

reports that obviously are very much filtered have a standard language try to frame Armenians in a particular way but from what I understand from everything that I read I think there are two types of happenings in Palu at the time. One is what happened in the town, in the town Palu. And what happened in Palu at the time was very much similar to what happened in other areas. And the narrative is actually really standard. According to the Ottoman accounts, you know, Armenians actually started violence, they used arms, and then it actually triggered the local population in mosques. This is the conventional account. What we know here is that there was violence against the Armenians in Polu, within the town of Polu, in the fall of 1895.

But the actual events that really resulted in the bigger scale of violence is what happened with the tribes coming from around Darsim into Palu. So the Aduan accounts show that like at some point these tribes surrounded Palu and the Armenians they actually they started to run away and then they were caught on the way to the violence coming from the tribes. But all this is still, I want to say that we really need to more in terms of what actually happened in the Palus, in Palus countryside, in terms of the actual scale and type of violence. In my account, what I see here is that my bags actually saw this as an convenient moment to take their lands back. They took their lands back and we see that actually a reverse process

in terms of Armenians losing the lands that they acquired from the 1860s up to that point. And two, we see that the terms of agrarian production reversed back to what it used to be in the 1830s and 1840s, meaning the scale of exploitation in land, the scale of exploitation and surplus extraction, all of this reversed back to the pre-Tanzimat era with the 1895 movement. But another question is, of course, what was the role of the Kurdish Begs in the case?

There are multiple accounts of their roles. There are instances, narrative accounts of Beggs actually trying, I mean, actively trying to punish those villages that they considered as rebellious, the Armenian villages as rebellious, and they used violence against them. There is also accounts of them taking actually their lands back, you know, physically in a concrete way. Another account, let me put it this way, is that two specific bags, Kurdish nobles, trying to actually protect Armenians from violence. And they are creating like safe zones in their respective spheres of authority. But then later, they are actually kind of monetizing protection by charging Armenians money to protect them from the attacks of the Kurdish tribes. So

there is one account speaking to that as well. So I asked this question. In the book, I don't claim to answer all of these significant questions about the 1895, because it is a much larger topic than I can actually solve in one chapter. But the question that I pose in the book is, to what extent the Kurdish nobles were able to protect the Armenians if they wanted to? We don't know if they wanted or not. Very unlikely. But were they able to protect them from the attacks of certain Kurdish tribes in that moment of violence? My answer is no. And then the way that I explain this is by the 1890s, the Kurdish nobles had lost their

symbolic authority and military force to be recognized by the various tribal entities in the region. So they were now seen as like one ordinary Ottoman administrator in the larger scheme of things. And they really didn't have any sort of military or symbolic authority to protect the Armenians, even if they wanted to, but again, very unlikely. Something I really like about the book is how you push back against all these different ideal types, whether that's the Ottoman state or the category of nobles. And I'm going to ask a question that engages in some ideal types. So it's okay if you reject it. But just listening to you talk and this idea of essentially private property existing in

these places. private property existing in these places. And, you know, one of the conventional narratives of violence in Kurdistan toward Armenians is this kind of inexorable ethnic hatred between Kurds and Armenians, right? There are lots of ways to push back against that. But it seems to me that part of the story you're telling is, if we think of private property as the ideal type modern thing, in fact, this violence is hyper modern in some ways, in that it's so enmeshed in property. describe this as like senseless. The perpetrators have no motivation. It only stems from ancient ethnic or religious hatred, which is absolutely not true. I mean, I don't think it is true for any region to explain the 1895, not for Palo either. Because that's in the book, actually, that's why property, the creation of private property, the privatization of property is one of the key ideas or processes. But again, not as an ideal type.

The land doesn't become private property in a linear and absolute way. And then it creates a lot of tensions with parties having different stakes over that. And what happens in Palu in 1895 is actually a revanchist moment of an elite group. They actually want to reclaim the land that they lost in the past three, four decades. The land that they're claiming and then the grammar and the vocabulary that they use to describe their attachment to that land is very different from what they would have used in the last century or so. So now this elite family is, they want their land back. They're not happy with the Armenians buying this land. There's like a monetized, commercialized relationship here. buying this land. There's like a monetized, commercialized relationship here. And they want to claim the land referring to their privileges, ancient privileges. But they see

the land as private property and they use and exploit it as a private property because even within the family, they don't see it as the land of the family anymore. It's not the land of the Palu Umarası or the Palu nobility, but the individual begs, even within the same nuclear family, sons and fathers, brothers, they have separate claims to land and the ownership of it. So what is at stake is actually, well, the anxieties of land becoming private property and redefinition of the Kurdish nobility's attachment to that land using this new vocabulary. It seems to me one of the challenges of writing this history has been defying nationalist narratives while at the same time ongoing statelessness and violence toward Kurds in various states

makes nationalism seem appealing and important, perhaps. So how do you grapple with that dynamic? In a way, this is a micro history, right? I focus on a specific elite group. And then I look at particular regions in the grand scheme of things in the larger imperial territory. It's a relatively small area that I am looking at. But considering the existing historical accounts of Kurds and Kurdistan, this methodology of microhistory has a lot of meanings or it is significant because in the nationalist accounts, nationalist historical

accounts, by the way, what I mean by this is not like a good or bad type of history. It is like an epistemological position that historians had to deploy within particular circumstances. Kurds are actually, they exist, but even when they exist, they are nameless. They are anonymous. And rather than how they operate as complex historical actors, what we see in the existing accounts is the roles that we attribute to them. If you want them to be the heroes, there you go, that you have your heroes, the Kurdish nobility. If you want them to be like the military commanders, for sure they have, they played that role. Or depending on your political position, you might see them as the early examples of Kurdish separatism, which is the Turkish nationalist position. You can definitely drive that history out of that material. is based on incorporating the Kurdish population and Kurdistan as a region as concrete elements

of larger Ottoman imperial writing. What I mean by concrete is that to show their complexity. And complexity means that they operate just like any other historical actors within certain circumstances. They make decisions which we consider as right or wrong from our presentist notions. But they are complex. And the complexity, in order to show that complexity, I wanted to show the conflicts between various actors in Kurdistan. Like sharecroppers, like tribal elements, nobles, Armenian sharecroppers, or Armenian middle peasantry, which is a category that I really like using, because it is, it complicates our established accounts of dispossession of the Armenian population and the Kurdish elites

dispossessing them, essentially. So there are all these like gray areas, which never find room in our understanding of the history of Kurdistan. So in my scholarship, both from the Kurdish studies point of view, and from as an Ottoman historian, I try to show that complexity, complexity of the region's history. And I think that is the best way to go beyond the caricaturized nation state centered accounts of the history of this region and this population. I wanted to ask about the recent past and the present too. Of course, while working on this book, you were at Articlu University in Mardin, came to the United States, ended up in Florida. Can you talk about what happened and what it was like to think about all these issues of complexity while feeling the gravity very materially of political circumstances in

the present? Of course, yes. And this is the first time that I will be talking about this here for a hot ministry podcast. So in 2014, my family, at the time I had a two months old daughter, we decided to go back to Kurdistan and teach in Artikli University as my spouse and myself as two professors. And the year was 2014, like I said, and things in Turkey at the time we didn't know that was about to change in a very negative direction, towards a negative direction. But I always had this, you know, image or ideal of being able to teach to Kurdish students because I went to Boğaziçi in Istanbul. I went to universities in the United States for my PhD. So living and teaching in Kurdistan was really like

a dream that I wanted to accomplish. And so in 2014, we went back and we established our life in Artuklu University. And Artuklu University, it is, maybe I should give you some background on this provincial university. It's actually, it has like a very controversial history to it, because from around 2010 until actually 2009 through 2012, the Turkish state established several provincial universities in Kurdistan. And from a critical point of view, and rightfully so, these can be interpreted as the state's attempt to appropriate the cultural and academic production in these major Kurdish cities. Artuklu became a different example that's why actually like I feel like this exemplifies my

approach to history as well on the one hand hand, the state, the power elite, they have their own visions, but the reality actually might be very different from what they imagined. And Artuklu was one example. When we went there, there was like a sizable international community of professors teaching at Artuklu. So it was like quite diverse, quite quote-unquote liberal in the sense that you had an opportunity to express yourself in a relatively free environment compared to other provincial universities in Turkey. And we had a community, we had like-minded people, and I was in the history department. But then the reality is different.

The reality, what I saw in Artuklu was that the Turkish state, I tend to say Ottoman state, but the Turkish state was trying to really experiment. It was a test run, trying to take back what they thought was like going out of line. And Articlu was one example of that. And then they first started with actually firing all the international faculty with no reason, with no legal justification. And it happened literally a couple of months after we arrived in Artuklu. And so we had to quickly organize and we tried to, you know, with them, protect the rights of the international faculty there. But that was the beginning of a process that finally resulted in a change in the administration in a very negative direction in the sense that they not only wanted to control the areas that you teach,

but also, you know, marginalized faculty like myself who wanted to create a democratic environment where our students would actually receive the best education. But being teaching, being able to teach to majority Kurdish students coming from the region, I think it was all worth it, I would say, because it was for the first time for a short time period that I was able to do that. The way I teach my courses to an American audience addresses different things, like Orientalism, what they know, what they have to unlearn. But the reality for students in Kurdistan, that's different. How the Euro-American world sees the East does not really mean much. So it really occurred to me that, yes, I have to, this has to speak to them in ways that is more real, that will make sense to them.

And that's how I actually stopped talking about Orientalism as we know it, as we teach in our classrooms. And I actually switched back to Orientalism and racialized discourses of the Turkish state towards Kurdistan from the late Ottoman, early Republican period. January of 2015, the actual war started in Kurdistan. So it was like the ditches or the Hendek War, the trenches. And then that was like when being in the classroom became real, teaching to a body of students coming from all around Kurdistan, because there were days that some of my students couldn't come to class because they were actually in these cities, and there was

no way for them to pass the police barricade. And I don't want to go into the details of what happened in the aftermath of that, but it became a very insecure environment for me and my family. It became a very insecure environment for me and my family. Shortly after that, the peace petition case emerged. But our exit was kind of related to peace petition, but it actually, it would have happened even before or even without the peace petition, the Academics for Peace petition happened. So we decided to leave

and I received a Scholar Rescue Fund scholarship, which is for scholars who are at risk in their home countries. And I went back to the United States, went back to the job market. And as all of these things were happening, I was actually writing this book. I tried to forget everything that happened in the aftermath of Mardin because it was like a crisis that lasted for several years. But being in the classroom with my Kurdish students, as a Kurdish woman, I still to this day think it was all worth it. Nilay, thank you so much.

Thank you very much, Sam. It was a pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much for letting me talk about the book for the first time. That's Nilay Ozark Gündoğan. Her book, The Kurdish Nobility and the Ottoman Empire, is out now with Edinburgh University Press. Of course, as always, you can find more information on our website, ottomanhistorypodcast.com, including a bibliography. Thanks for listening to this episode. Until next time, take care. you