book reviews 328 M. Safa Saraçoğlu, Nineteenth-Century Local Governance in Ottoman Bulgaria: Politics in Provincial Councils (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), pp. xi, 199, isbn 9781474430999. Reforms in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, especially the adminis- trative, judicial and fiscal reforms during the Tanzimat era, constitute a major research field in Ottoman history. Mid-nineteenth-century uprisings and the consequent measures taken by the government as a response to public discon- tent had particular importance for the Balkan context. Vidin (in present-day Bulgaria), for instance, has always attracted scholarly interest due to the Vidin Uprising of 1849 (which was also the main subject of Halil İnalcık’s doctoral dissertation) and the provincial regulation of 1864 through which the Danube Province was established as a model for other provinces. Nevertheless, the existing literature rarely analyses the effects of these reforms on Vidin after 1864. M. Safa Saraçoğlu’s Nineteenth-Century Local Governance in Ottoman Bulgaria: Politics in Provincial Councils constitutes an important contribution to the literature on this little-known topic. The book focuses on Vidin in order to explain how local politics represented the transformation of imperial governance during the third quarter of the nine- teenth century. It aims, first, to analyse the provincial history of the Ottoman Empire by taking local administrative and judicial councils as its vantage point, and second, to explain the formation of the “liberal capitalist order”—a term that the author borrows from Legitimation Crisis by Jürgen Habermas—in the Ottoman Empire. Its main themes are governance and governmentality, the formation and operation of local judicio-administrative institutions, the par- ticipation of the local elite in politics, the public space and civil society, and state-society relations. The book is based on extensive archival research con- ducted in Turkey and Bulgaria. Documents from the British archives have also been used as supplementary material. Its methodology integrates local with imperial archival documents in order to overcome the limitations of the lat- ter and also to reveal the symbiotic relation between centre and periphery. Its conceptual framework, which is built upon the rich database extracted from the archives, is formulated with frequent references to the literature on politi- cal anthropology, institutional analysis, and historical materialism. The book has seven chapters. The first chapter introduces the main themes and arguments of the book. The politics of local administration and the trans- formation of nineteenth-century imperial governance are highlighted through the scholarly discussion on state-society relations. Provincial governance is conceptualised as a dynamic platform on which different members of society © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/18775462-01102007