Download PDF | Jane Hathaway - The Politics of Households in Ottoman Egypt_ The Rise of the Qazdağlis-Cambridge University Press (1997).
217 Pages
In a lucidly argued revisionist interpretation of society in Ottoman Egypt in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Jane Hathaway challenges the traditional view that Egypt's military elite constituted a revival of the institutions of the Mamluk sultanate. The author contends that the basic framework within which Egypt's elite operated was the household, a conglomerate of patron-client ties that took various forms and included many different recruits.
In this respect, she argues, Egypt's elite represented a provincial variation on an empire-wide, household-based political culture. The study focuses on the Qazdagh household. Originally a largely Anatolian contingent within Egypt's Janissary regiment, the Qazdaghs dominated Egypt by the late eighteenth century. Using Turkish and Arabic archival and narrative sources, Jane Hathaway sheds light on the manner in which the Qazdaghs exploited the Janissary rank hierarchy, while forming strategic alliances through marriage, commercial partnerships, and the patronage of palace eunuchs. This provocative study will have a major impact on the understanding of Egyptian and Ottoman history, and will be essential reading for scholars in the field, and for anyone interested in pre-modern history.
Preface When first undertaking this project, I profited from the advice and encouragement of L. Carl Brown, Mark Cohen, Michael Cook, Halil Inalcik, Norman Itzkowitz, Bernard Lewis, A. L. Udovitch, and, above all, Cemal Kafadar, whose insights continue to inspire me. I am also grateful to Abraham Marcus, who guided my earliest research on pre-1798 Egypt.
My colleagues in the Ottoman Egyptian subfield have been extraordinarily generous and supportive. I must single out Daniel Crecelius, Peter Holt, and Andre Raymond; though I may question some of the conclusions of their scholarship, I know very well that my own would not have been possible without theirs. Other colleagues who have offered advice both on the content of my research and on the process of preparing a book for publication include Philip Brown, Richard Bulliet, Stephen Dale, Carter Findley, Ulrich Haarmann, Victoria Holbrook, Eve Levin, Amy Singer, Ehud Toledano, and two anonymous readers for Cambridge University Press.
Ron McLean of Ohio State's Graphics Services department prepared the maps while the University Libraries' Rare Books and Manuscripts collection supplied the cover photographs. Asim Karaomerlioglu provided invaluable assistance with the index. Marigold Acland and her assistant Emma Mayes at Cambridge University Press have offered cheerful and expert guidance at every turn in the publication process. My research would not have been possible without the generosity of the directors and staff of the Ba§bakanhk Osmanh Ar§ivi, the Suleymaniye Library, and the Topkapi Palace Library and Archives in Istanbul; and Dar al-Kutub in Cairo.
The Bibliotheque Nationale, the British Museum, and Princeton University Library's Garrett Manuscript Collection provided microfilms of manuscripts in their collections. For grants that sustained me while I researched and wrote this study and began my revisions, I am grateful to the Fulbright Foundation-Council of International Education, the American Research Institute in Turkey, and the Institute of Turkish Studies. For their help in opening doors and acquiring research materials, I thank the Fulbright offices of Ankara, Istanbul, and Cairo; the U.S. consulate in Istanbul; and §ukru Hanioglu.
The process of transforming rough draft into book was further aided by a seed grant from the Ohio State Office of Research, as well as by a Special Research Assignment awarded by Ohio State's College of Humanities. Finally, I offer sincere thanks to Beshir and Stella, and to my mother, Meg Hathaway, who instilled in me the love of learning and made becoming an academic seem not only possible but desirable. There are, in addition, many others who have helped me in ways of which they, and perhaps I, were unaware.
Introduction This is the story of the rise of the Qazdagh household. To the extent that this household is familiar to readers outside the tiny circle of scholars of pre-nineteenth-century Ottoman Egypt, it is known chiefly as the group headed by the famous cAli Bey, the former military slave (mamluk) who in the late 1760s dared to assert Egypt's autonomy in defiance of the Ottoman sultan.
Alternatively, the household attracts notice as the party of predominantly Georgian mamluks whom Bonaparte found holding sway in Egypt at the time of his invasion in 1798. The prevalence of a regime of military slaves from the Caucasus region naturally evokes the Mamluk sultanate, which ruled Egypt before the Ottoman conquest in 1517. Thus it seems almost automatic, even to experts on the subject, to depict the regime over which the Qazdaghs presided as a reversion to the usages of the Mamluk sultanate. Yet the Qazdagh household was founded by a Janissary officer toward the middle of the seventeenth century.
Thus, what is missing from the foregoing appraisal of the household is an appreciation of the context within which the household emerged and developed in the century preceding cAli Bey's hegemony. This context is, in the first place, an Ottoman context, for the character of the Ottoman Empire's administration and Egypt's place within it underwent telling changes during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The Qazdaghs, furthermore, participated in a provincial Ottoman military culture whose transformations prepared the ground for the Georgian preponderance of the late eighteenth century.
I attempt here to provide a sense of this context by analyzing the Qazdaghs' evolution within the framework of Ottoman decentralization and the emergence of an empire-wide military and administrative culture based on households. Both the redirection of the empire's priorities and the composition and functions of households provide critical keys to understanding the course that the Qazdagh bloc followed. But in order to place the Qazdaghs squarely within this context, we must first place Egypt in the context of the Ottoman Empire during these critical centuries.
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