الخميس، 27 يونيو 2024

Download PDF | M. Safa Saracoglu - Nineteenth Century Local Governance in Ottoman Bulgaria_ Politics in Provincial Councils-Edinburgh University Press (2022).

Download PDF | M. Safa Saracoglu - Nineteenth Century Local Governance in Ottoman Bulgaria_ Politics in Provincial Councils-Edinburgh University Press (2022).

213 Pages 





Preface 

Provincial governance was a very sensitive issue for the Ottomans, particularly during the tumultuous long nineteenth century, with its wars, uprisings and large demographic shifts. While conventional Weberian accounts of ‘Ottoman Modernisation/Westernisation’ continue to associate the provinces with resistance to centralisation or secessionist movements, this book subscribes to a critical view that warns against the urge to frame nineteenth-century Ottoman history in ‘empire vs provinces’ or ‘state vs society’ dichotomies. 













The tenuous provincial dynamics of the empire in this period were not only sensitive to imperial reforms but also influenced the design of such imperial policies. Many local agents successfully integrated into the post-1864 administrative structure, engaging in political negotiations to protect their interests. Local Governance in Ottoman Bulgaria provides a detailed picture of nineteenth-century provincial administration in the Ottoman Empire by focusing on a prototypical region and utilising untapped sources to reveal the dynamic interaction between imperial regulations and local politics. Trying to reconstruct a decent understanding of how provincial administration operated in a beautiful but lesser-known corner of the Balkans during the nineteenth century proved to be a lengthy and arduous process. 















People discussed in this book are not among the known Bulgarian or Ottoman elite with an established estate or family records that might reveal some bits about their lives. Rather, they were relatively insignificant notables who strived to improve their lives through their involvement with organisations that produced generic reports, revealing very little about the concerns and negotiations of their members. Yet, whatever is left from their traces in these reports, reveal a complicated and lively political space with intriguing negotiations and networks. The research for this dissertation was supported by the Ohio State University, the American Council of Learned Societies, Institute for Turkish Studies, Centre for Advanced Studies in Sofia, Nantes Institute for Advanced Studies and Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania. I am indebted to many friends and mentors in my struggle to understand the politics of local administration in nineteenth-century Ottoman Vidin.
















I wish to thank my mentors at Ohio State University – Jane Hathaway, Kenneth Andrien and my adviser Carter V. Findley – for reading and critiquing my graduate work. I believe this project ended up being a bit different, if not more, than what I could argue within the bounds of my dissertation. I am grateful to Charlotte Weber who read and helped me revise this text; the editors at EUP – Nicola Ramsey, Kirsty Woods, Eddie Clark and Lel Gillingwater – who assisted me throughout the complicated publication process; Kent Schull and the anonymous reviewers whose constructive feedback made me clarify my arguments; and Sue O’Donnell who assisted with the images in the book and designed the book cover. I am also indebted to the staff members of the archives and libraries in Ankara, Istanbul, Sofia, Vidin, Kew and Maryland who patiently guided me through their catalogues. I owe special thanks to Margarita Dobreva, Zorka Ivanova, Stoyanka Kenderova, Rumen Kovachev, Evgeni Radushev, Genadi Vulchev and As¸kın Zorlu. Milena Methodieva and her wonderful grandmother ‘Baba Radka’ kindly helped me fınd my way around in Vidin. My discussions with Iris Agmon, Yiğit Akın, Virginia Aksan, Silvia Angelova, Febe Armanios, Sedat Bingöl, Musa Çadırcı, Boğaç Ergene, Adrian Gonzalez, Michael Hickey, William Hudon, Gerassimus Katsan, Meral Kaya, Atabey Kaygun, Christine Philliou, Avi Rubin, Kent Schull, Emre Sencer, Lisa Stallbaumer-Beishline and Zeynep Türkyılmaz helped me organise my thoughts into writing. During the 2012/13 academic year, I had the opportunity to be a fellow at Nantes Institute for Advanced Study. The conversations that I had at the Institute with other fellows and staff, including Perry Anderson, Joseph Bergin, Emmanuel Droit, Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi, Roberto Fragale, Samuel Jube, Suleiman Mourad, Vidya Rao and Chaohua Wang, helped me significantly in revising earlier versions of this work and identifying new research questions that led me to my current project on the legal narratives and economic policies of the Ottoman Empire. This project has its origins in my time at the Middle East Technical University and I still cherish the bonds that I established during those years. 


























I became interested in how local administration produced statistical information while I was an economics student there. The politics around the gathering and representation of ‘factual information’ introduced me to the complexities of provincial governance. It has been a privilege to exchange ideas with Huricihan İslamoğlu even as the focus of my initial inquiry has expanded from my concerns back then. She has always been a stimulating intellectual mentor. In addition, I consider myself lucky to have discussed my work with Selçuk Dursun, Bogac Ergene and Alp Yücel Kaya. They have been inspiring friends and supportive colleagues at METU and after, for over two decades. I also would like to thank Ayça Akarçaya, Bülent Anıl, Teoman Ekerbiçer, Gül Ertan, Nurhan Örün, Meltem Özmut and Ela Özver for their support and friendship. My mother taught me to always ask why and to question everything. She pushed me to pursue my aspirations even if that meant being an ocean away. I cannot thank her enough for her support. In the process of research and writing, Heather and I welcomed Sofi Elif, Luke Emre and Marie Defne to our nomadic existence. As three beads of hope, they provided much needed entertainment and inspiration wherever we lived. They continue to brighten every single day of our lives, giving us something to look forward to tomorrow. My father-in-law Arnold Almer and my mother Nurcan Kaygusuz were invaluable to us as we often burdened them with our presence and requests. My sister Nihan Yolsal and her partner Ümit Yolsal gave continuous encouragement and support during the research and writing phase of this project. Finally, I want to thank Heather, my love, for making my life meaningful. Her endless patience and insightful discussions gently guided me and the sacrifices she made allowed me to finish this work. She had faith in me when I did not; without her, this would not be.
















Introduction

This book examines the politics of judiciary and administrative practices in Vidin County during the 1860s and 1870s. Today Vidin County is in modern-day Bulgaria, but between 1396 and 1878 it was a county under Ottoman administration. It became a part of the Danube Province when the latter was founded in 1864 in conjunction with an imperial reform that redefined the administrative divisions of the empire; under the new system, Vidin County (liva or sancak) included the districts of Vidin (the administrative centre), ‘Adliye (modern-day Kula), Belgradcık (Belogradchik), Berkofça (Bergovitsa), İvraca (Vratsa), Rahova (Rahovo) and Lom (Lom). The 1864 Ottoman Provincial Regulation also introduced a provincial bureaucratic framework that placed local judiciary and administrative councils at the centre of local governance. This book examines these councils to illuminate the contested politics of Ottoman provincial administration in the long nineteenth century. Although the 1864 regulation marked a seminal moment in provincial administration, it was part of the larger Ottoman transformation to the ‘liberal-capitalist social formation’.1 Thus, the offices and procedures generated with this regulation provide a lens through which to view the broader imperial transformation from the provinces. It was the prominent Ottoman statesman, Midhat Paşa, who was responsible for this regulation and he first applied it in the Danube Province, where he served as the first governor of the first province established by the same regulation. Midhat Paşa’s vision for the administrative divisions’ structure and functions had its opponents but, at the end of the day, his perspective determined modern Ottoman provincial governance. Several of his contemporaries praised his personality and efforts, including John A. Longworth, British Consul General in Serbia, who visited the province in 1865 to observe the new order: ‘A man [of] quick versatile powers . . . [with a] love for order’ who was ‘peculiarly [qualified] for the task of organisation’, which he executed with a level of ‘intelligence and vigour . . . [that] blinded [the Consul] to its shortcomings’.2 Therefore, as part of Midhat Paşa’s inaugural province, Vidin County serves as a good starting place to examine imperial change coming from the provinces. Through an examination of the Vidin administrative council’s correspondence with the Danube Province and Istanbul, Local Governance in Ottoman Bulgaria explores the relationship between provincial politics and imperial transformation. In Ottoman historiography, the imperial transformation of the late Ottoman Empire has been a lively field, shaped by modernisation– Westernisation debates in 1950s. With the rise of the New Left in the 1970s, revisionist scholars like İslamoğlu and Keyder (1977) rejected the modernisation narrative (Lockman 2004: 162–72). Despite the early start, the death of this narrative took a long time and particularly in the field of sociolegal studies it led to a false equivalence between unclearly defined notions of ‘secularisation’ and ‘Westernisation’ (Hathaway and Barbir 2008: 59–60; Rubin 2009: 121–5). Arguing for continuity between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this book contributes to the expanding revisionist historiography and presents the nineteenth-century transformation of the empire as one driven predominantly by internal factors as opposed to a series of reforms that were designed by the imperial administration to impose ‘modern Western’ institutions on Ottoman society.3 State–society relations in the Ottoman provinces have been a topic of interest to scholars of the Ottoman Empire for decades.4 Such works have shown clearly that provincial administration in the Ottoman Empire was a highly politicised arena, and that the boundaries of what constituted the state at the provincial level constantly changed, including and excluding certain members of the local community. However, the majority of these works focused on regions to the east of Istanbul, excluding Ottoman Bulgaria.5 The Balkans constitute a significant but understudied region in both Ottoman and world history. As Frederick Anscombe (2012) noted, most Balkan histories focus exclusively on social unrest, emerging because of nationalism or class conflict. Anscombe invites us to examine how the Ottoman state operated in order to understand this transformation in the Balkans and how it fits within the rest of European history. In a similar vein, recent comparative histories of imperial rule underscore the role of imperial politics and institutional transformations (related to the rise of modern states) in the emergence of nationalist movements that destroyed several nineteenth-century empires (Bartov and Weitz 2013: 2; Burbank and Cooper 2010: 219; Leonhard and Hirschhausen 2011: 10). Focusing on the significance of imperial provincial administration in this understudied region that played a unique role in the nineteenth-century Ottoman imperial transformation, I argue that the Ottoman transformation is comparable to the histories of change and state formation in other world empires during this period. 

































Delineating the ‘internal social and political bases of the modern period’, to use Dina Rizk Khoury’s phrasing (Khoury 1997: 214), in their continuity over the last two centuries of the Ottoman Empire requires a different framing of Ottoman state–society relations following the direction suggested by Timothy Mitchell (1999: 77) to ‘take seriously the elusiveness of the boundary between state and society . . . [and to] examine the parallel distinction constructed between state and economy’. Until recently, the literature on this topic in general has been dominated by two models: that of a strong state mitigating or co-opting oppositional groups or one of a weak state that existed separate from a relatively independent civil society (Khoury 1997: 213). The historiography on Ottoman administration in Bulgaria is no exception.6 However, the relationship between state and society was not that simple. Following Albert Hourani’s influential work on the ‘politics of notables’, particularly after the end of 1970s, an increasing number of scholars explored the connection between the local power elite and Ottoman imperial rule. As Khoury (2006: 137) has written, perhaps most critical for relations between the provinces and the central government, was the local social matrix within which the prerogatives of the government were played out. Although we have as yet relatively few and unevenly distributed studies of provincial Ottoman history, what is available points to the centrality of local familial and group networks in shaping the central state’s relations with provincial societies.7 Local social matrixes constituted a grey zone where the boundaries between Ottoman state structures and provincial society became blurred. Elucidating the nature of this complex relationship and the procedures/ structures that regulated it is essential to understand the nineteenth-century transformation in the larger context of the Ottoman legitimation crisis. The Ottomans established these administrative councils at the provincial, county and district levels to handle essential local tasks, including tax collection, overseeing the planning and financing of provincial infrastructure, payment of state employees’ salaries, and so on. Their tasks included reporting local incidents to the provincial capital and conveying orders from the provincial offices above to the units below their administrative supervision. The county administrative council’s correspondence provides valuable information on Ottoman provincial governance in this period. However, the correspondence of this office at the imperial archives reveals a limited picture of such practices because several issues were resolved in the provincial capital before reaching the imperial centre, and those that actually made their way to Istanbul were quickly forwarded to various different offices of imperial bureaucracy. While such correspondence was recorded in the ‘provincial incoming-outgoing ledgers’ (Vilayet GelenGiden Defterleri) in the imperial capital, tracing it is a daunting task – if not entirely impossible – because the records of certain significant offices are still not available to researchers.8 One way to overcome these limitations is to analyse the copies of this correspondence kept at the local level. This book analyses the Vidin County administrative council’s copy registers along with other documents available at Bulgarian and Turkish archives to get a better understanding of the institutional environment that produced them. The purpose of this analysis is to ascertain how local inhabitants in this particular county responded to the policies and reforms of the modern Ottoman state. The Argument My main argument is twofold: (1) the offices and practices of nineteenthcentury Ottoman provincial governance served as a dynamic platform for the politics of local administration, and (2) the local inhabitants of Vidin effectively used this judiciary and administrative framework in this period of transformation to devise strategies for advancing their interests. Local Governance in Ottoman Bulgaria challenges an understanding of nineteenth-century local politics as polarised between a dominating local government trying to impose unprecedented reforms designed at the imperial centre on the one hand, and an oppressed but resistant people, rebelling against the insensitive policies of the state on the other. Without denying that a certain level of violence was prevalent, I argue, first, that the distinction between state and society was not as clear as presumed; second, that the local administrative branch of the state was not a monolithic body of state agents; and third, that society was not always oblivious to or rebellious against reform policies. A perspective that presumes a state–society split at the local level easily lends itself to an unhealthy coalescence of theories on Ottoman decline and Bulgarian romantic nationalism (Anscombe 2012). Consider, for example, how Duncan Perry (1993: 3–4) characterises the nineteenthcentury Ottoman experience in general as a ‘downward spiral of ultimate dissolution, interrupted by one important era of progressiveness’. In Bulgaria, only Midhat Paşa’s governorate, the Danube Province, prospered while he rooted out and quashed all revolutionary activity. But in general, reforms were not faithfully or fully implemented or sustained in the Balkans, and when Midhat [Paşa] was transferred [in 1868], his reforms eroded. However, for the increasing number of educated Bulgarians, even the imperfectly enacted reforms of this era provided a foretaste of liberty and fed their desire for still more.9 The ‘decaying Ottoman administration’ was functional only long enough (Perry does not note that Midhat Paşa’s administration lasted only four years) to stimulate ‘the increasing number of educated Bulgarians’. Michael Palairet (1997: 84) rejects Perry’s assertion of political and economic collapse in the nineteenth-century Danube Province, arguing that ‘although the most rapid phase of expansion was probably concluded in the late 1860s, the output of the Bulgarian lands . . . was at or near its peak at the time of the liberation [1878]’. As informative as Palairet’s work is on the Balkan economies, he does not focus much on the political transformation of this period. His analysis, however, underscores the need to question claims regarding the impact of the ‘decaying Ottoman administration’ in Bulgaria. I focus on the politics of local administration in the second half of the nineteenth century in an Ottoman county in modern-day Bulgaria with hopes of contributing to the still-emerging body of scholarship on the provincial history of the empire (Blumi 2012; Aymes 2014). Adding to that literature, I explore the nineteenth-century transformation of the empire’s provincial judiciary–administrative structure by looking at a peculiar region, the Danube Province. The Ottomans established this province as a trial ground for an empire-wide reform under the governorship of Midhat Paşa who supervised the transformation of provincial administration in the whole empire (Todorova 1980; Abu-Manneh 1998; Göyünç 1982; Todorova 1993; Ceylan 2011; Petrov 2006). While this is an attempt to understand the dimensions of the nineteenth-century transformation of the Ottoman Empire at the local level, its primary focus is on how the local notables and peasants utilised Ottoman local institutions to further their interests. An essential source for this investigation is the reports produced by the local administrative councils, which were copied in registers that were meant to be kept in the provinces. The correspondence of the administrative council – a product of various political processes – can reveal a lot about the breadth of political participation in the Ottoman administration during this period. 




















Vidin Vidin is a town where the borders of Romania and Serbia meet along the Danube River. Under the Ottomans, it was a centre of a larger administrative unit bordered by the Iskar River to the east, the Stara Planina mountain range to the south and west, and the Danube River to the north. Fertile soil and a moderate climate made these lands suitable for agricultural production, mostly cereal and fodder crops, vegetables, fruit and grapes. An Ottoman survey published in 1873 indicated that 81 per cent of the population lived in rural areas (Petrov 2006: 63). The county of Vidin spanned 4,092 square miles (10,600 square kilometres). It was, and remains, a predominantly non-Muslim region – with a Muslim population below 20 per cent in the 1860s and 1870s. This was the general character of the western counties of the Danube Province (Petrov 2006: 69–70). Ottoman statistics published in 1878 list a population of 37,185 Muslims and 154,992 non-Muslims in the county. The demographic composition was reversed in the town of Vidin, the fourth largest town in the Danube Province: a survey from 1866 reported 51.6 per cent of the population as Muslim, 34.1 per cent as Bulgarian, 6.2 per cent as Roma and 8.2 per cent as Jewish (Petrov 2006: 76). In the nineteenth century, Vidin became an ‘important economic centre, stimulated by navigation on the Danube’ (Ivanova ‘Widin’).10 The changes in the political arena reflected this change as well. One of the better-known ayans11 of the whole empire, Pasvanoğlu Osman Paşa of Vidin, died in 1807, bringing a sense of ‘relief’ to the Balkans.12 His successor in Vidin, Molla Idris, did not cause much trouble for the imperial administration and was the last ayan to ‘control’ the region. From 1814 onward, the imperial centre directly appointed the region’s administrator. ‘When one looks at Vidin in the years following the death of Pasvanoğlu’, notes Zens (2004: 193), ‘there is very little evidence that the city was home to one of the most notorious ayans in the Ottoman state, apart from buildings and other public works that bore his name.’ Gradeva (2006: 149), on the other hand, notes that it was among the Janissaries and the rank-and-file Muslims that [Pasvanoğlu] earned his real and lasting fame. They created and circulated songs for him in which he emerges as a true hero. The age of nationalism had set in the Balkans. These interpretations, however, do not provide a framework that could foresee the uprising that happened only a few decades later in 1849, when Vidin served as the centre of a tax rebellion that involved up to 10,000 people and dozens of villages from the region (Aytekin 2012: 197–8). While there are some differences in the ways that scholars have explained the reasons behind the 1849 tax rebellion, overall they seem to agree that ‘the land tenure regime and the highly exploitative relations between cultivators and landlords in the Vidin area’ engendered a lot of discontent,  particularly among non-Muslims.13 At the centre of this problem were the large estates (çiftlik) owned by the ‘landlords’ (gospodar – Bulgarian for ‘master’). Large estates did not emerge in the nineteenth century. As early as the seventeenth century such estates became common in the Balkans and western Anatolia (Zens 2004: 20; McGowan 1981: 73–9; İslamoğluİnan 1987: 101–59). In Vidin, political-military developments contributed to the formation of these large estates. As Svetlana Ivanova (‘Widin’) notes, the county remained on the militarised Ottoman frontier line against various enemies until the end of the eighteenth century when it became the centre for Pasvanoğlu Osman Paşa’s highly charged secession movement. For Vidiners, as inhabitants of a highly militarised zone, these two centuries meant gradual accumulation of usufruct in the hands of a military class, which, during the military reforms of Selim III, chose to ally with Pasvanoğlu Osman Paşa against the imperial administration (Dimitrov 1972: 13–28). Thus, the particular land regime that led to the uprisings had been established prior to the nineteenth century, worked – for the most part – to the benefit of the military class, and was further intensified during Pasvanoğlu’s rule in Vidin when the Janissaries supported him in his resistance (Anscombe 2006: 120). The complaints about this land regime centred around three districts in Vidin (‘Adliye, Belgradcık and Lom).14 According to the 1874 provincial yearbook, there were 161 villages in these districts; only three had mixed Muslim and non-Muslim populations and twenty-five had Muslim-only populations; the remaining villages had entirely non-Muslim populations.15 The villages in these districts, not unlike the others, were highly segregated along religious lines. For the most part, the Muslim landlords did not live in the same villages as the actual cultivators. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the land was becoming ‘increasingly mobile, capable of being bought and sold’ because of higher monetisation in the economy and centralisation in revenue-extraction mechanisms (Adanır 2006: 167). However, by the mid-nineteenth century, elevated costs and diminishing returns had made these estates less profitable (Findley 2010: 109; Palairet 1997: 43–6). This meant that, particularly after the Land Code of 1858, more of these estates were ‘sold’ to the cultivators, some of whom had been living on those lands. The Vidin uprising happened in the midst of this institutional transformation. Following the uprisings, when this land regime (gospodarlık) was abolished, ‘the usufruct of the lands was transferred to the state’.16 After eliminating the peasants’ basis for claims on these lands (the usufruct rights), the imperial administration sought to collect lump-sum payments from the peasants in return for a title deed which would make the peasant  the legal owner of the property. A decree from the Supreme Council of Judicial Ordinances (Meclis-i Vala-yı Ahkam-ı Adliye) sent to Vidin on 13 May 1863 (NBKM, VD 96/38) indicates that even after fifteen years, cultivators refused to pay money to ‘buy’ the land they had been tilling. Unable to collect a lump sum, the Supreme Council decided that it would be easier to get the money from the cultivators by dividing it into small increments that would not exceed the amount of rent they used to pay to the gospodars. As the old right-holders lost their claims on usufruct, the cultivators in the region became de facto owners of land. The period of the nineteenth century prior to 1864 witnessed a significant transformation of the socio-economic structure in Vidin County. Pasvanoğlu and his supporters lost their political might during the first decades of the century while the imperial administration decided to abolish the gospodarlık regime in the immediate aftermath of the 1849 uprising. Vidin became a relatively more stable county with a different composition of the political elite, within which land ownership was still one of the more problematic issues. The settlement of Circassian and Tatar refugees in the region in the 1860s in the wake of the Crimean War further complicated the problematic nature of land ownership. In this highly charged environment, who took part in the politics of local administration and how they did so became a very important issue. This book focuses on this participation process. 





















Structure of the Book

The focus of Chapter 2 is the transformation of the Ottoman Empire into a liberal-capitalist social formation. This transformation was not limited to the nineteenth century and was definitely not a series of reforms imported from European countries. Rather, it was a consequence of inherent dynamics particularly associated with how people related to the means of production, and that began centuries earlier. By using Habermas’s ‘legitimation crisis’ and the formation of liberal-capitalist societies as a framework, this chapter provides context for the rest of the book. Chapters 3 and 4 describe the key organisational structure of the book: ‘the judicio-administrative sphere’ of provincial politics. One of the key arguments of this book is that there was a blurred line between the judiciary and administrative offices at the provincial level. Although the regulations that established these offices aimed to separate them, the particular nature of local notables’ involvement with them meant that they could not function apart from each other. I refer to this combined space of governance as the judicio-administrative sphere. Chapter 3 explores the provincial  administration as a key component of the nineteenth-century Ottoman reforms. Analysing the provincial regulations of 1864 and 1871, I describe the provincial administrative model designed primarily by Midhat Paşa in the course of his governorship of the region, focusing particularly on the administrative and judicial councils in the county of Vidin. This chapter underlines the importance of local notables in these councils and discusses the politics of election in the context of these councils. The analysis of the provincial judicio-administrative sphere continues in Chapter 4, concentrating on these councils’ functions. An examination of the attendance patterns of the council members reveals some irregularities in the way these councils operated. By looking at different organisations related to these councils, I elaborate on the complexity of the politics of administration in Vidin and its connection with the offices and practices of Ottoman governance. Chapter 5 examines several case studies from the copy register of Vidin’s county administrative council against other sources to reveal the political processes behind the council’s reports. A close reading of some correspondence reveal interesting patterns in the political strategies of those involved in the writing process and how they chose to write these reports. My perspective is critical of the state–society divide, as the case studies reveal a more complex ‘singular government of state and society’. The local administrative practices of the Ottoman modern state constitute an aspect of Ottoman ‘governmentality’ in which different agents (of this singular government) could and did participate to pursue their own goals.17 Chapter 6 explores the narrative function of the debates and correspondence associated with provincial governance. By looking at how the local agents problematised the refugee settlement process in provincial correspondence, I explore the parallels between provincial politics and the imperial transformation into a liberal-capitalist social formation, where a presumably autonomous market order determined the boundaries of governance. This perspective is essential in looking at the empire from the provincial level and challenges the presumed path of reforms as unidirectional from the imperial centre to the provinces. This book explores the context of Ottoman local governance during the liberal-capitalist state reformation. The processes explored here focus mostly on the individuals’ rights to the means of production; thus, many complaints and disputes coming from the provinces during the nineteenth century were concerned with property and taxation. These complaints, however, do not stem from a binary opposition between a state that coerces transformation and a society that opposes reforms. Such reductionism not only trivialises the complex nature of the local administration’s politics but also presents nineteenth-century Ottoman subjects as reluctant partners to a transformation that the imperial centre initiated. Focusing on the offices and practices involved in composing such complaints reveals some of the complex patterns and politics behind the ink on these reports. Neither the notables nor the less wealthy inhabitants of Vidin were unaware of what to make of nineteenth-century reforms. Vidiners knew quite well how to utilise these reforms and their associated institutions to protect their own interests. 




















 








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