In this book Hülya Canbakal examines Ayntab (modern Gaziantep in south-eastern Turkey) in the seventeenth century from the perspectives of social and political hierarchy, the power of the urban elite and their relationship with the common people, a relationship which is “one of least explored aspects of Ottoman provincial life” (p. 123). These issues “cut across a number of research agendas in Ottoman/Middle Eastern history” (p. 2), including the politics of centre-periphery relations and the related questions of decentralisation/integration and the rise of local power groups; urban history, particularly the questions of urban administration, autonomy and identity; and the politics of everyday life.
In explanation of her choice of this particular town, Canbakal notes the location of Ayntab on the frontier between Bilad al-Sham and Rum which results in “interesting questions in relation to the historical traditions of the post-Ottoman world, which are based on linguistic and nation-state boundaries” (p. 4). Its position makes it “a city between two worlds” (p. 181). She also argues that Ayntab was interesting because it was a medium size town of no particular importance which makes it more typical of the Ottoman provincial world in many respects than the big cities which have been very much more widely studied, and have shaped our view of urban traditions in the Ottoman empire. While true that such a choice does have the potential to throw a different, and possibly more realistic, slant on the way we perceive Ottoman provincial urban life, it also brings with it its own difficulties, for, as Canbakal herself says, Ayntab was “an ordinary town no more or less significant for the historian than dozens of others located in the interior periphery of the empire” (p. 53), and was one which never received special attention from Istanbul. This can clearly make sources a problem.
The sources on which the research is based are 20 court registers from 1645–1699 and a register of probates compiled between 1682 and 1694. She acknowledges that using probate records in studies of wealth distributions “poses major methodological problems” (p. 91), noting also that the tax data for the late seventeenth century is possibly misleading (p. 31). She similarly accepts the difficulties of court registers, drawbacks which “significantly circumscribe the methodological possibilities that registers offer” (p. 14), but nevertheless argues, reasonably, that court registers still remain “irreplaceable” for any study of Ottoman social history. They are, in any case, the “only source which offers a close-up view of daily life” (p. 179). It remains the case, however, that the sources for this study of the social history of Ayntab are comparatively restricted and of necessity leave much either unknown or speculative. One is left on occasion with a feeling that the material is a little thin, forcing the author to bring in more general information either from a wider period, or from different areas of the empire.
Canbakal locates her study within the “interpretative shift” (p. 62) in the study of Ottoman history which has occurred over the last two decades and which has led to a critique of the ‘decline paradigm’. Rejection of the idea that after the sixteenth century Ottoman history moved into continuous decline has further encouraged “the on-going historiographic shift towards social history and comparative models” and “has helped convey the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the domain of historicity” (p. 62).
It is with comparative models that this book runs slightly adrift, setting sail with the modern mainstream which so likes to shower its readers with references to other histories. While it is, of course, desirable to understand a subject not in isolation, the almost formulaic way in which texts now must display the standard works of European history, together with a few references to Chinese and Russian history or that of classical Athens, can sometimes, though not in this case, become a smoke screen for lack of Ottoman research. In this context one could perhaps question whether we really need the discussion of Lawrence Stone's “inflation of honours” on pp. 62–63 to explain Ottoman desire for titles. Why, for example, is this not addressed by a discussion of this phenomenon in Ottoman society, with a note, preferably a footnote, that something similar was happening in Europe in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries? The more logical approach should surely be along the lines of ‘look this is happening in the Ottoman empire’, and, ‘by the way, it was also happening in Europe’, rather than the other way round.
Another concept particularly useful for her study which has, Canbakal notes, emerged from recent debates on Ottoman history, is that of ‘Ottomanism’, referring to a different and possibly stronger degree of integration between the imperial centre and the provinces than had been the case under the 150 years of the ‘classical’ centralist regime.
Having considered askeris, wealth, the legal process, and representation and decision making Canbakal draws various conclusions. She notes, in relation to the legal process, that several of her findings “point to a clear resonance between social hierarchy and the legal process, which calls for a nuanced understanding of the actual accessibility and ‘egalitarian’ nature of the Ottoman judicial system” (p. 149). Court records do not support any idea of a city politically and economically subservient to Istanbul, any more than, for example, Aleppo or Hama (p. 179). Nor was the city subjected to anything like a command economy, as argued by Stoianovich for early modern Balkan cities (p. 180). Findings in this study suggest that in most cases office-holders were local people whose family had been residents in Ayntab for a number of generations at least. They held office either as first-hand appointees or revenue-contractors filling in for absentee-appointees of the state. The capital's involvement in the daily functioning of the town was minimal (p. 180). Ayntab, standing somewhere between the ‘Anatolia city’ and the ‘Arab city’, seems more closely linked with the East than the core lands of the empire to the West (p. 182).
This is a useful study of a seventeenth-century provincial town which forms part of a growing interest in and awareness of the importance of research on regional centres.
