This study of M. Safa Saraçoğlu focuses on practices of local governance in the sanjak of Vidin prior to Bulgarian independence in 1878. The period of 1864–78 witnessed provincial reforms that lasted until the demise of the Ottoman Empire. Vidin was a part of the newly-formed Danube Province where governor Midhat Pasha was piloting reform projects designed in Istanbul.
Saraçoğlu's investigation aims to “. . .provide a detailed picture of nineteenth-century provincial administration in the Ottoman Empire. . .” by discussing the interrelationship between Sublime Porte legislations and responses at the level of local elites (ix). In order to realize this goal, the author studies the judicial and administrative processes at the level of the Vidin sanjak councils.
In the introductory Chapter 1 (1–13), Saraçoğlu challenges the hitherto two dominant paradigms on this issue, one of them underlining a strong state that contained local oppositions, and the other one arguing for a weak state isolated from the population. The author argues that local administrative councils constituted an interface between the state authority and civil society, thereby forming “local social matrixes” that softened the boundaries between central administrative bodies and the provincial public. Ottoman provincial offices provided “a dynamic platform” for local politics, while the local population used the councils in order to promote their interests.
Chapter 2 (14–43) discusses the transformation of the Ottoman Empire from a feudal system into a liberal-capitalist economic structure. He argues that a socio-economic crisis, which began as early as the seventeenth century, changed the society previously organized along social statuses into class domination based on wage labor and capital. Here Saraçoğlu informs the reader of pre-1864 legislative and infrastructural developments.
The following chapter (44–80) describes the structure of the administrative council and of the council of appeals and crime, both defined by the laws of 1864 and 1871. These bodies, which included equal numbers of elected Muslim and non-Muslim local notables and appointed officials, effectively created a system of checks and balances, whereby power limits were imposed on both representatives of the Porte and local elites.
The next part (81–115) analyzes in detail the judicial-administrative roles of the local councils. By analyzing provincial yearbooks and the council reports, Saraçoğlu discovers irregularities in the way these councils functioned, such as the non-attendance of members at council meetings. Such irregularities, however, probably did not harm “the presence of polyphony” in the councils (110).
Chapter 5 (116–145) focuses on concrete cases in order to understand the actual political processes behind council reports. The author's investigations corroborate the weakness of the notion of a state-society divide in favor of a complex “singular government of state and society” (9). Local notables’ familiarity with the language and practices of the state produced “intertextual exchanges of opinions and observations” that enabled them to attain specific goals as long as they applied the language of the state (126).
In the final chapter (146–164) Saraçoğlu applies the Foucauldian term biopolitics as a multi-faceted liberalist policy to remove obstacles to market forces by applying rational policies to regulate human lives (146). The author explains state policies related to the settlement of Circassian refugees in the Balkans and measures to ensure public security in order to enhance the economic boom within the conceptual frame of biopolitics, which according to him determined also the effectiveness of Ottoman local governance.
This study has merit in terms of criticizing conventional notions of inefficient Ottoman rule, widespread Bulgarian resistance to the Porte, as well as the supposed divide between the state and local society. The utilization of hitherto underused Ottoman documents from Sts. Cyril and Methodius National Library of Sofia is praiseworthy. This work points to the urgent need to rewrite the nineteenth-century history of the Balkans divorced from nationalist paradigms.
Certain issues exist in this study, however, which an expert reader would have welcomed to see remedied. For example, the administrative practice of local councils go back to the early eighteenth century, as Halil İnalcık, Yücel Özkaya, and Yuzo Nagata have previously discussed. Signs of biopolitics already emerged during the reign of Abdülhamid I (d. 1789), which turned into full-fledged policies during the sultanate of Selim III (d. 1808). These two facts reveal for us a dimension of continuity that the author could have addressed. Though this work focuses on the sanjak of Vidin, the reader is unable to have information about its subgovernors (mutasarrıf) or the relationship between the subgovernors and the local councils. Nevertheless, this book is highly recommended for nineteenth-century Ottomanists, Balkanists, and political scientists.
