The Margins of Empire

The opening of Turkey's archives to foreign researchers, which began in the Turgut Özal era (c. 1983–89), although still incomplete, has been a great boon to historians of the Ottoman Empire, unleashing a wave of rich scholarship which has yet to recede. Previously obscure topics, such as the role of tribal Kurdish chieftains in helping the Sublime Porte rule (or mis-rule) the empire's southeastern borderlands, have been subjected for the first time to intense archival study by non-Turkish historians, even as more celebrated subjects, such as the Armenian deportations of 1915, have seen important archival discoveries enrich (and complicate) our understanding. Janet Klein's 2011 study of The Margins of Empire, in which she investigates the activities of Kurdish militias such as the notorious “Hamidiye regiments,” is a worthy addition to this new scholarly genre.Klein's own scholarly odyssey is instructive. Denied access for several years to the Ottoman archives in Istanbul “due to the sensitivity of the topic,” she was initially forced to rely, like so many scholars before her, on English- and French-language sources in Paris, London, and Washington, DC. Only in 2006 was she allowed to tackle Ottoman sources, which she appears to have done with great relish (6–7).While no apologist for the often-brutal treatment of settled Armenians in eastern Anatolia by Kurdish tribesmen, Klein tells her story largely from the perspective of the Ottoman government of Sultan Abdul Hamid II (1876–1909), as it sought to leverage Kurdish power and influence to secure the empire's southeastern borderland, aiming to “turn tribesmen into Ottomans” (45–47). The Hamidiye light cavalry regiments created in 1890–91, Klein argues, comprised a “fuzzy blend of state and nonstate power,” answering to an Ottoman commander in the Fourth Army Corps, “assistant field marshal” Zeki Pasha, who was himself something of a free agent, ambitious, unbiddable and hard for the Sultan to control (76–77).The result was something of a mess, with Kurdish Hamidiye chieftains using their fancy new equipment, arms, and badges less to enforce the government's writ than to enable “raids, extortion, tax abuse, and land usurpation” (149). By the end of Abdul Hamid's reign and the advent of the CUP or “Young Turk” era in 1908–9, grievances against Hamidiye abuses filed mostly, though not exclusively, by Armenians deprived of their land or property, were piling up in Istanbul. Many CUP leaders wanted, in theory, to redress these grievances—only to learn that the power of the Hamidiye chieftains was by then too secure to be budged. In CUP journals such as Tanin, Klein tells us, Young Turk intellectuals “counseled the Armenians to be patient, saying that for now it was best not to alienate the Kurdish aghas” (167). This was disappointing advice for the beleaguered Armenians of the empire's six eastern provinces, to put it mildly.The story Klein tells is measured, subtly argued, and very well documented. Her aim in writing this book, she states, was to offer readers “a more complex understanding of modern Ottoman state-building processes” (9). Another goal, as she explains in her conclusion, was to “identif [y] the ingredients of violent conflict and identity construction.” Her tone is neutral, even—indeed especially—when discussing explosive matters such as the “ethnic cleansing” of Armenians. The displacement of Ottoman Armenians from the six eastern provinces, she argues, was not simply born of “ethnic or communal” animus but rather grew out of a “struggle over concrete material resources but became ethnicized in the process” (183).Not all readers may be satisfied by this clinical approach to the problem of ethnic rivalry, violence, and (as the Armenians insist) genocide. Klein tiptoes carefully around the elephant in the room, so carefully, in fact, that she skips over the central act in the Kurdish-Armenian drama. After two chapters on the Hamidian era and two more on the Young Turk period, Klein brings her narrative on the Hamidiye light cavalry up to about 1912, when the CUP finally dashed the last Armenian hopes that land seized by Kurdish Hamidiye chieftains would be returned (168-69).Chapter 5, on “The Hamidiye and Its Legacy,” then jumps straight to the post-World War I era (and then to the 1980s!), with only the briefest nod, in a single page, to what one would assume to be the climax of her story, the decision by the CUP triumvirs in 1915 “to occupy ‘abandoned’ Armenian property”—abandoned, that is, after the mass expulsion of Ottoman Armenians from the six eastern provinces (and a few points further west besides). As if in passing, Klein does note that the worst wartime atrocities committed by Kurds against Armenians occurred “the further east one went, where the Russian danger was the greatest,” and that many Kurds justified their actions on the logic that, with a pro-Armenian Russian army invading, “it was a question of ‘them or us’” (171). This is all she has to say on the subject.By way of explanation, Klein explains that “the Armenian genocide is not a focus of this book” (171). This is her choice to make, of course, but it is an odd one. After devoting years of archival research (including Kurdish sources) to the Hamidiye Light Cavalry, after carefully analyzing the ways in which Kurdish tribal chieftains used their new imperial status to expropriate their neighbors' land (mostly Armenians, although settled Kurdish farmers, too, were victimized), Klein cuts off her narrative just before the climactic struggle was joined. It is rather as if one were reading a history of World War II that concluded in 1938.Considering how explosive and controversial her subject is, how radically different are the approaches to it that Klein calls “Turkish nationalist” and “Armenophile” (7), one cannot entirely blame the author for tip-toeing delicately around the events of 1915. Nonetheless, one feels that her editor should have insisted that she try. Valuable as The Margins of Empire is for its contribution to our understanding of the Hamidiye in the pre–World War I era, it would have been far more valuable had she followed her story through to its cataclysmic conclusion

Ancient history · Armenian · Empire · Ottoman empire · Political science · Scholarship · Turkish · Classics · History · Islamic Studies and History · Law · Philosophy · Politics and Conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Middle East · Turkey's Politics and Society

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