History@Newcastle Seminar: Nilay Ozok Gundogan (Florida State), The Beginning of the Endgame? The Road to the 1895 Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Palu. 10 May 2024
Co-hosted by Centre for Study of Violence.
In the mid-nineteenth century, the Ottoman imperial state initiated an ambitious project to abolish the hereditary military, fiscal, and administrative privileges of the Kurdish begs - members of elite Kurdish families who ruled the emirates in a hereditary manner. This policy contradicted three-century-old decrees granted by Ottoman sultans and aimed to establish a small, tax-paying peasantry. The goal was to undermine the economic and political basis of the landed Kurdish rulers’ authority.
The state confiscated the begs’ extensive landholdings and offered them for sale, sparking intense negotiations over their hereditary privileges. This negotiation involved not only the imperial state and the begs but also the emerging Armenian financial bourgeoisie, as well as Muslim and Armenian sharecroppers and small peasantry, alongside local Ottoman administrators.
Over six decades of ongoing negotiations and disputes among these parties, tensions culminated in 1895 with a series of massacres against the Armenian population of Palu. This discussion examines how socio-economic and political changes resulting from the government’s policy toward the Kurdish begs’ hereditary privileges set the stage for violent attacks on Armenians in the fall of 1895. It explores the escalation of intercommunal conflict in Palu within the context of the changing fortunes including diminishing wealth and authority of the Palu begs, alongside the growing hostility between them and the district’s Armenian population.
Nilay Özok-Gündoğan is an Associate Professor of Ottoman and Middle East history at Florida State University. Her research centers on the questions of modern state-making, property regimes, and intercommunal conflict and coexistence in the borderlands of modern empires. She also writes about the question of methodology in Kurdish Studies. Her publications appeared in Journal of Social History, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, New Perspectives on Turkey, and in edited volumes. She also contributes to Jadaliyya with op-eds on the Kurdish Studies. Her first manuscript, The Kurdish Nobility in the Ottoman Empire: Loyalty, Autonomy, and Privilege (Edinburgh University Press, 2022) received the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association’s 2023 Book Prize. Her current manuscript Forging Empire: Mineral Extraction, State-Making, and the Colonization of Ottoman Kurdistan, 1720-1870 examines Ottoman colonization of Kurdistan through the study of mineral extraction at the Keban and Ergani mining region in the eighteenth century.
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2 окт 2024
