Richard E. Antaramian

Brokers of Faith, Brokers of Empire

Armenians and the Politics of Reform in the Ottoman Empire

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

"This book argues against the dominant historical view that Ottoman Armenians were united in resisting empire. Drawing on underused Armenian sources and archives, Richard Antaramian reveals the critical role the Armenian Church and clergy played in the implementation of the Ottoman state's reform efforts during the mid-nineteenth century Tanzimat era. Antaramian rethinks conceptions of the Ottoman state in terms of center and periphery, offering a networked model of empire in its place. This orients us to a view of a more dynamic political space, which has implications for understanding the Ottoman Empire, nationalism in the Middle East, and empires in general"--

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 224
• Erscheinungstermin: 2. Juni 2020
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 153mm x 228mm x 18mm
• Gewicht: 356g
• ISBN-13: 9781503612952
• ISBN-10: 1503612953
• Artikelnr.: 57168264

Autorenporträt

Richard E. Antaramian is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Southern California.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Introduction: Introduction
chapter abstract
The introduction lays out the book's principal overarching argument: the
Ottoman reform programs that commenced in the late eighteenth century and
continued throughout the nineteenth centralized the state by denying
different political claimants their share of sovereignty. The empire is
better understood not as a spoke-and-hub-without-the-wheel that kept
geographically delineated peripheries apart from one another but rather as
a tapestry predicated on dense overlapping networks through which
sovereignty was both exercised and shared. The reorganization of imperial
governance bid to transform that dense networked world into a
top-down/center-periphery model atop which the central government would
preside. The reform of non-Muslim communities transformed them from
spaces-woven into the imperial tapestry through their religious
institutions-into millets that were challenged to pull those religious
institutions out of the informal and semiformal relationships that
underwrote the shared and networked world of imperial governance.
One: The Constitution
chapter abstract
This chapter discusses the Armenian Constitution, a document originally
introduced in 1860 that delineated how the Armenian community would
participate in Ottoman imperial governance. The Constitution, like other
reform initiatives that targeted non-Muslims in the middle of the Ottoman
nineteenth century, is typically presented as something that spurred the
rise of lay elites engaged in class struggle, which led to the
secularization of the community and its subsequent nationalization. Chapter
1 instead presents the Constitution as fundamental to the shifting
organization of Ottoman imperial governance that reset the partnership
between the Armenian community and the state. In particular, it politicized
the Armenian Church by making it an agent of state centralization. Armenian
clergymen thus found themselves forced to choose sides in a struggle
between a centralizing bureaucracy and the elites it sought to dislodge.
Two: The Ottoman Diocese
chapter abstract
Chapter 2 advances a framework called nodal governance. The fiscal
restructuring of the eighteenth century produced a networked world of
Ottoman imperial governance in which multiple forces in imperial society
shared power and the benefits of imperial rule. The institutions of the
Armenian Church acted as nodes in this setting, conduits through which
Armenian financial capital flowed to help suture the empire as a polity.
This extent to which Armenian institutions were embedded in this world is
brought into relief by the efforts of the reformers to reorganize the
community as an empire-wide diocese. These efforts effectively challenged
the community to withdraw its institutions from the networked world of
imperial governance and integrate them into the imperial bureaucracy, thus
committing Armenian reformers to use their own ecclesiastics to aid the
introduction of a center-periphery binary in Ottoman governance.
Three: Peripheralization
chapter abstract
Chapter 3 argues that the ideology of the Tanzimat was not Ottomanism but
rather legal centralism. The introduction of the millet system in the
nineteenth century therefore belonged to an effort to eradicate a pluralist
legal order of things that privileged a number of actors throughout the
Ottoman Empire, include high-ranking members of the Armenian clergy who had
benefited from nodal governance and the connections it had afforded them to
regional power brokers and Armenian financial capital. Those high-ranking
clergymen thus blended a number of methods to reject the centralization of
the state and the community and the loss of connections that this would
entail. These methods included the invocation of ecclesiastical tradition
and networking strategies-namely, brokerage and closure. The conflict
between clergymen in the context of reform politics transformed network
structures, leaving the Armenian community peripheralized in imperial
governance and society.
Four: Ottomanism
chapter abstract
Chapter 4 addresses the question of Ottomanism. Rather than an ideology,
the chapter argues that Ottomanism is best understood as a repertoire of
action or cultural tool kit. Historical scholarship on Ottoman reform has
comfortably framed the centralization policies as a contest between the
imperial state based in Istanbul and provincial actors who resisted its
implementation. This has led historians to overlook the important fact that
provincial Armenian reformers on the ground, particularly those among the
clergy, fought on the front lines of state centralization. Unlike their
metropolitan counterparts, these clergymen were steeped in the culture of
the Church and the provinces and blended those resources with the new
politics of empire to pursue centralization as part of a cultural toolbox
that bridged center and periphery. State-building and centralization thus
became key elements of Ottoman Armenian political thought in the second
half of the nineteenth century.
Five: A Catastrophic Success
chapter abstract
The book's concluding chapter covers the final years of Bishop Mkrtich
Khirmian's public life in the Ottoman Empire, which included a term as
patriarch of Constantinople (r. 1869-1873) and ended with internal exile to
Jerusalem in 1885. The sixteen-year arc covered in this chapter explains
how Armenian reformers found themselves the victims of their own success.
Khrimian and other provincial reformers not only enthusiastically
participated in the reform programs, they successfully cut the threads that
connected their community to other forces in imperial society. However,
this precluded their ability to communicate with other sectors of that
society. Reform initiatives that had won the approval of the government a
few years prior were now viewed as subversive and seditious. It was the
Ottoman state, which began punishing reformers, that ended the partnership
with the Armenian community. Armenian politics, however, would remain
oriented toward Istanbul.
Conclusion: Conclusion
chapter abstract
The conclusion describes the dilapidated state in which the Armenian
community was left as a result of imperial reform. The introduction of the
millet system resulted in not only the peripheralization of Armenian in
imperial governance or the loss of their ability to communicate with other
sectors of imperial society but also the surrender of their social capital
and claim to imperial sovereignty. An impoverished Armenian community could
only look on in despair as the establishment of new connections and
relationships to carry on the work of imperial governance excluded them.
Cut from the imperial tapestry, Armenian reformers found themselves under
siege, with prominent clergymen either killed or imprisoned. The state
understood any Armenian effort to reform imperial society as a challenge to
the new status quo and power-sharing arrangements, and thus responded with
increasing brutality; these culminated as widespread massacres of Armenians
in the 1890s.