Yonca Köksal’s The Ottoman Empire in the Tanzimat Era: Provincial Perspectives from Ankara to Edirne presents a novel reading of the Tanzimat, the profound centralizing reforms undertaken by the Ottoman bureaucratic elite during the nineteenth century. Köksal refutes long-established notions that have alleged the failure of the Tanzimat reforms as a result of societal opposition on the one hand and the inability of the state to control the periphery on the other. To this end, the author uses a wide variety of archival sources, including Ottoman documents like petitions between the state and the provinces, Sharia court records, property registers, imperial orders, state expense registers, and provincial yearbooks, in addition to British consular reports. As is explained in the book’s introduction, the previous literature on the Tanzimat has been based on a sharp state-society distinction, as well as on a zero-sum assumption according to which incapable bureaucrats, the state’s inability to eliminate tax farming, and the gradual spread of separatist nationalism among the empire’s subjects rendered “the Tanzimat as a ‘necessary but failed step’ toward Westernization and modernization” (p. 3). Contrary to this approach, Köksal employs social network analysis (SNA), and she argues that negotiation between state and local intermediaries, the latter of whom continued their brokerage position during this period, could often lead to a positive sum between social relations and state reform success. In Chapter 2, the author introduces a comparative aspect by juxtaposing two Ottoman provinces, Edirne and Ankara. These two provinces presented a number of notable socioeconomic differences. In Edirne, small peasant landholdings existed next to commercial ones (çiftliks). Indeed, trade played a major role in the province, and a new bourgeoisie, the majority of whom were non-Muslims, challenged the authority of the old elites. Trade relations created a densely connected social structure in Edirne, which encouraged the formation of coalitions among competing intermediaries. In Ankara, on the other hand, a few strong local families loyal to the state exerted control over local relations, occupying several administrative posts in fields such as tax collection and local governorship. Local relations were disconnected, and trade was only of low density, with wealth being based on animal husbandry; trade in mohair; rent from stores, houses, and sharecropping; and the financing of local artisans through loans. These differences between the two provinces influenced the outcome of the reforms on the local level. In Ankara, extractive state policies based on revenue extraction and policing activity were followed (the coercion-intensive path), while in Edirne an integrationist state rule (the capital-intensive path) was followed, which “strives to incorporate the local level into state administration with state investment in development projects” (p. 56).

In Chapter 3, Köksal concentrates on Ankara. Here she uses a detailed presentation of certain leading local families of Ankara (e.g., the Cabbarzades), some small-scale families (e.g., the Zennecizades), and prominent individuals (e.g., Hacı Seyyid Ağa) to show how an overlap of vertical (i.e., relations with the state) and horizontal (i.e., relations within the community) brokerage marked Ankara’s political landscape, as local elites were able to secure state and quasi-state offices. While such an overlap did emerge generally in the Ottoman Empire, Köksal specifically emphasizes how local elites were different in Edirne and Ankara. In the former, the imperial center emerged as the actor controlling the local structure, which it managed by mediating between numerous mid-level local intermediaries who were competing to secure economic and state privileges (i.e., organizational brokerage), whereas in Ankara the central elite could not act autonomously from the few prominent local elites (i.e., patron brokerage). Thus, the reforms were only able to produce limited change in Ankara, and so the centralization of the administration progressed slowly. The local elite was unwilling to contribute to public projects, and there were no organized public campaigns aimed at bringing residents together in support of development projects. In Edirne, on the other hand, which is dealt with in Chapter 4, the reforms showed tangible results. Here local councils, an innovation of the Tanzimat, were formed remarkably quickly, they were more active and influential in local administration, and they actively generated local support for the state reforms. What is more, the province of Edirne had fewer state officials of local origin than Ankara, and local intermediaries supported and voluntarily participated in state development projects via monetary contributions and individual labor. Tax revenues increased much more in Edirne than in Ankara, and public works like roads, schools, cafés, hospitals, libraries, and theaters were built with a combination of state money and local initiative.

In Chapter 5, the final chapter before the conclusion, Köksal further consolidates her argument by using SNA, which measures relations among social actors and maps them by the application of mathematical methods on the dataset representing a social network. Specifically, Köksal uses blockmodeling, a visualization of networks comprising dots and arrows that “partitions the actors in the networks into discrete subsets called positions, and for each pair of positions a statement of the presence or absence of a tie within or between the positions is stated on each of the relations” (p. 135). According to SNA, in the case of Ankara the imperial center did not enjoy much autonomy from local actors, since it was positioned in the same block as the region’s important local intermediaries and local governors, who mediated between tribes and Ankara residents. The same model also confirmed the loosely connected structure described earlier in the book, as four of the overall seven blocks appear isolated, having no connections with each other. In Edirne, the state is in a separate block mediating the relations among coalitions. In the province’s densely connected network, there were several competing local groups, especially those involved in trading activities, whose relationship was mediated by the central state. Finally, in the conclusion, Köksal sums up the main argument of the book, which is that the different outcomes of the reforms in Edirne and Ankara can be explained by the differences between the two provinces in terms of economic development, geopolitical location, and prior relations between the state and local actors. In this chapter, the author also compares her findings with the literature dealing with other Ottoman provinces during the Tanzimat. She thereby argues that the existence of dense trade connections and a plurality of mid-level intermediaries made it easier for the Ottoman state to generate local support for its reforms in those cases where the local elites were able to form coalitions.

Köksal’s study is innovative in its combination of sociologically-grounded historical analysis and meticulous archival research, a combination not often encountered among Ottomanists. Overall, the book thus presents a groundbreaking analysis of the complex modernization processes of one of the major empires of the nineteenth century. As alluded to above, contrary to the previous historiography that has viewed the Tanzimat as a short interval of doomed reforms overshadowed and even undone by the interethnic strife during the subsequent Hamidian regime, Köksal convincingly recasts the Ottoman reform era of the nineteenth century as a telling object of study. Moreover, while the findings of studies on the empire’s Balkan, Anatolian, and Arab provinces have rarely been put into dialogue with each other, Köksal applies just such a comparative approach among different geographies in order to illustrate the complexity of the vast Ottoman Empire and the consequent need to avoid generalizations in discussing the outcomes of the Tanzimat reforms. In this regard, the book resonates with a handful of similar recent works, such as those by Isa Blumi and Maurus Reinkowski.Footnote ¹ Köksal also successfully fills a gap regarding the study of state-province relations during the Tanzimat: while state-centered perspectives treating local notables as a threat to the central state have long since been disputed by authors like Albert Hourani and, more recently, Ali Yaycıoğlu (though they admittedly deal with earlier periods of the empire),Footnote ² the study of the Tanzimat period in particular still lacks a repositioning of local elites’ role in the process of centralization and modernization. Köksal’s book thus greatly contributes to a rethinking of Ottoman modernization as a complex process evolving out of different interactions between the center and local actors.

It should be noted, however, that there are a few flaws in the book. One of these is connected with the term and concept of negotiation, which plays a central role in the study. Over the last few decades, Ottomanists have widely used this term to explain the durability of Ottoman governance throughout the centuries. Given the near ubiquity of the term, a brief discussion of negotiation by Köksal, and especially of the ways in which practices of negotiation during the Tanzimat differed or resembled earlier practices, would have helped the book to make a significant contribution to the ongoing discussion of Ottoman governing practices of negotiation. In addition, further elaboration on the content and outcomes of the negotiation between the state and local elites would have added analytical strength to the book’s main argument. While the prerequisites of interactions and cooperation are indeed given in detail, more information on the concrete incentives of elites to cooperate and negotiate, as well as the various forms this interaction acquired, would have shed additional light on the latter’s importance. In particular, while it is true that Köksal does refer to Tanzimat development projects as the outcome of a fruitful interaction between state and local elites, the actual content of these projects is not described in detail. It would be interesting, for example, to see which particular concrete projects (among the various ones related to infrastructure, culture, education, etc.) were favored by which elite coalitions and why, as well as to observe the relation between such projects and notions of wealth and/or cultural prestige among elites.

Another area in which Köksal’s study is somewhat lacking is the gradual rise in nationalist mobilization among Ottoman subjects that occurred over the course of the nineteenth century, a process that was much more multifaceted than the conventional literature has suggested. While Köksal does refer to the non-Muslim majority in Edirne and the non-Muslim composition of the province’s newly emerging bourgeoisie, there is no corresponding evaluation of the role of ethnicity in the formation of coalitions among local elites. Such elements of the local notables as religious and ethnic belonging remain rather in the background, but they could have offered an illuminating perspective on the changing role of the millet (i.e., ethnoreligious) structure during the Tanzimat. Finally, the many technical terms used in Chapter 5—which introduces SNA, a key technique in modern sociology, in order to visualize province-state relations during this period—make this chapter rather difficult to follow for readers not already versed in the subject. Further explanation of the relevant terms and the usage of language familiar also to an audience not trained in quantitative analysis would greatly help in this direction.

Despite such shortcomings, however, overall Köksal’s The Ottoman Empire in the Tanzimat Era provides an excellent and innovative analysis of the Tanzimat, and constitutes must reading for anyone interested not only in the social history of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century, but also generally in questions regarding the modernization processes of complex governing structures during that period. It is an inspiring study that paves the way for similar research on other Ottoman provinces during the Tanzimat era, as well as for further fruitful comparisons between different state policies and social reactions to the reform period in the various Ottoman territories.