Chapter 4 - A System in Transition: Negotiating Nobility in the Locality

Summary

One evening in 1840, a group of notables from Diyarbekir and Harput were visiting İsmail, the Diyarbekir governor Sadullah Pasha’s official deputy (kapı kethüdası), at his residence. The guests were Şeyhoğlu İbrahim Pashazade Mehmed Beg, from one of the notable families of Diyarbekir, and his müfti friend, Colonel (miralay) Süleyman Beg of the reserve troops (redif) from the Çötelizade family of Harput, along with his friend, müfti Ömer Naîmi Efendi. Sadullah Pasha had invited them on the pretext of discussing Tanzimat-ı Hayriye. In reality, however, the governor and his deputy were trying to sound them out about the Palu begs and investigate the complaints raised about them in a recent collective petition sent from Palu. With the advent of Tanzimat, the governors often got involved in local clashes of this type, especially when the begs were involved.

The need for such a meeting speaks to the local politics of negotiating the Palu begs’ position, actions, and, ultimately, their noble privileges. While it is true that the imperial capital had increasing qualms about the necessity or legitimacy of the fiscal and administrative privileges of the Kurdish nobility, and only a few years after this meeting the Ottoman state organised a massive military operation to subdue Bedirkhan Beg of Cîzre, locals also had concerns about the Kurdish begs. During the early Tanzimat era, their privileges were fiercely discussed and contested among various local actors, both implicitly and explicitly. Local concerns were not based on the categorical rejection of the notion of the privilege per se, and local actors, including rival notable families, Ottoman provincial administrators, tribes, agrarian producers and Armenian sarrafs, considered the Kurdish nobility’s position through the prism of their own interests and in a context of changing economic structures. Their discontent with the nobility’s privileged position was expressed through negotiations over aspects of the local economy, including mine work, landownership, and agrarian production, surplus extraction and labour organisation. This chapter will zoom in on the locality and show how a Kurdish hükümet, ruled by the Kurdish nobles for three centuries, met the economic, administrative and political changes of the Ottoman Empire’s long nineteenth century.