ARTICLE Reconsidering Local versus Central: Empire, Notables, and Employment in Ottoman Albania and Kurdistan, 1835–1878 Uğur Bayraktar* History Department, Social Sciences University of Ankara, Hükümet Meydanı No: 2, Ankara, 06050, Turkey *Corresponding author. E-mail: ugur.bayraktar@asbu.edu.tr Abstract The present article is a study of provincial administration in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Albania and Kurdistan. It examines the transformation of provincial administration in Dibra and Hazro after two towns’ hereditary rulers were exiled. Focusing on the employment patterns of the notables in exile as well as the ones who occupied the posts in the absence of the former, this study challenges the binary framework mostly employed in conceptualizing the making of the modern Ottoman state. Particularly, the employment of the notables exiled to the distant parts of the empire necessitates a revision in the presumptions about the origins of appointed Ottoman officials. By focusing on the partnership operating by means of employment, this study argues that the making of Ottoman state follows a trajectory of flexible centralization based on the partnership between the government and notables, terms of which were constantly negotiated. Key Words: Ottoman Empire; Tanzimat; notables; province; provincial administration In 1835, the Ottoman Empire was struck by two rebellions, one in Dibra, today a Macedonian town bordering Albania, and the other in Hazro, a town in the northeast of Diyarbakır province. In the former case, Hakkı Pasha of Dibra was defeated and consequently exiled to Istanbul. 1 Meanwhile, in Hazro, the increasing discontent of the Zirki emirs due to taxation and conscription turned into open rebellion. As a part of the greater reform scheme in Ottoman Kurdistan, Mehmed Reşid Pasha defeated the forces of the emirs, banishing them to Edirne. 2 What made these otherwise ordinary rebellions remarkable was that their suppression terminated hereditary rule in both Dibra and Hazro. In other words, the Hoxholli beys in Dibra and the Zirki emirs in Hazro, who had ruled their provinces for centuries, were uprooted from their homelands and exiled to the opposite ends of the empire. The survival of the provincial notables into the 19th century is a phenomenon the systematic descrip- tion of which still suffers from conflicting interpretations of state and society. Two seminal works by Halil Inalcık and Albert Hourani have stimulated a large volume of studies on provincial notables, yet the resulting scholarship has been marked by an almost insurmountable opposition between those who focus on the “central” and those who emphasize the “local.” 3 Notwithstanding the edgy positions and politically charged claims of the opposing sides, the two approaches to historiography in fact share a com- mon infrastructure. In addition to a framework of curiously rich binary differences, Inalcık- and Hourani-led historiographies have in common an extreme grounding in modernization theory. The two historiographies have concomitantly confined discussions of the Tanzimat (1839–76) reform project to a spectrum of success and failure in which modernization, used at times interchangeably with © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press 1 State Archives of the Republic of Turkey, Department of Ottoman Archives, Istanbul, Turkey (hereafter BOA), HAT. 414/ 21464-A, 13 Receb 1251 (4 November 1835). 2 BOA, HAT. 453/22435-A, 5 Zilkade 1250 (5 March 1835). 3 Halil İnalcık, “Military and Fiscal Transformation in the Ottoman Empire, 1600–1700,” Archivum Ottomanicum 6 (1980): 283–337; Albert Hourani, “Ottoman Reform and the Politics of Notables,” in The Beginnings of Modernization in the Middle East: The Nineteenth Century, ed. W. R. Polk and R. L. Chambers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 83–109. International Journal of Middle East Studies (2020), 52, 685–701 doi:10.1017/S0020743820000835 available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020743820000835 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Univ of Washington, on 29 Jan 2021 at 10:24:13, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use,