An Ottoman age of experiments

Empire by Law: The Ottoman Origins of the Mandate System in the Middle East, Aimee M. Genell, Columbia University Press, £35

International lawyers from the late Ottoman Empire would hardly recognise the 21st century’s received wisdom about their political world. In hindsight, the Ottomans always seem to have been living on borrowed time. The years between the 1770s and the First World War reveal a polity apparently doomed to failure, incapable of defending itself against either the relentless incursions of Britain, France and Russia that severed Istanbul’s control of outlying imperial lands or the European powers’ unwelcome interventions in the empire’s domestic affairs. Istanbul accepted, negotiated, and sometimes promoted a series of local autonomy arrangements – in Mount Lebanon, the Balkans, Egypt, Jerusalem, Mecca, Crete and Yemen, among other lands – to fend off the professed concerns of European powers, especially regarding the welfare of Ottoman minorities. For subsequent generations, these imposed devolution deals are simply a prelude to the empire’s dismemberment.

In Empire by Law: The Ottoman Origins of the Mandate System in the Middle East, historian Aimee M. Genell tells a different story. Ottoman local governance experiments in the so-called ‘privileged provinces’ (eyalet-i mümtaze) were less symptoms of weakness than indications of flexibility and resilience, the significance of which prompted a distinctive new body of jurisprudential reasoning. By the 1880s, Ottoman lawyers were arguing that these idiosyncratic autonomy arrangements were a perfectly normal feature of a healthy empire. Were South Africa and Canada, for example, any less parts of the British imperial order because their constitutional ties to London differed from those of other territories?

Even in the case of Egypt – which many historians describe as enjoying de facto independence for much of the 19th century – we have been too quick to dismiss the enduring ties to Istanbul, Genell argues. What does it mean to speak of the Ottomans’ ‘nominal sovereignty’ in Egypt, after all, in a ‘nineteenth-century world of competing empires, where sovereignty was always fragmented, marked by overlapping jurisdictions, and, in so many places around the globe, barely felt?’

Although the ‘privileged provinces’ emerged as an Ottoman solution to contain the centrifugal pressures of proto-nationalism, uneven sovereignty was not a 19th-century innovation. Egypt, along with its linked dependencies of Syria and the Hijaz, had notably enjoyed a high degree of autonomy since the Ottomans conquered its Mamluk rulers in 1517. In exchange for submitting to the authority of the Ottoman Sultan, Egypt was excluded from more invasive forms of taxation and property rights practised elsewhere in the empire. Cairo essentially ran its own budget and simply sent an annual remittance to Istanbul, which, given the vast wealth of Egypt, soon became vital to the imperial treasury.

Egypt’s centuries-long experience of autonomy was then used by the Ottomans as a model for other ‘tributary’ provinces from Algeria and Tunisia to Kuwait, Baghdad, and Basra; Christian-majority provinces in southeastern Europe followed a similar pattern. The empire, in Genell’s account, was ‘an amalgam of different polities, all absorbed and assimilated into the imperial machinery of the state on a case-by-case basis’.

Cairo’s connections with Istanbul were robust. The fiscal and political relationships of tribute persisted into the 19th century, despite the military campaigns of Egyptian governor Mehmet Ali to carve out more space in the empire for his dynastic aspirations. These ties even survived the 1882 British occupation, at which point Cairo’s annual financial tribute to Istanbul was immediately earmarked for Ottoman debt repayments. While Ottoman legal experts could assert that a foreign occupation did not necessarily breach Ottoman sovereignty given previous iterations of local autonomy, British diplomats were quick to interpret such contortions as an indication of second-rate, degraded governance, closer to ‘suzerainty’ or feudal vassalage than the sovereignty of modern states. Although Ottoman positivists had argued that, by joining the Concert of Europe in 1856, the Sublime Porte had crossed the threshold to international recognition, the European great powers moved the goalposts to exclude Istanbul from the so-called family of nations.

The signature move in Genell’s argument comes in the second half of the book, when she suggests that the uneven domestic sovereignty of Egypt and the privileged provinces provided a Trojan horse for European interests. Instead of the usual suspects, such as Mount Lebanon, Genell turns first to the intriguing and under-studied case of Kuwait, where a local autonomy arrangement modelled on Egypt patched up the Ottoman and British dispute over territorial claims. Genell then makes the more counter-intuitive case that these precedents also lay the basis for the post-First World War Mandates that assigned responsibility for governing several of the empire’s most important Arab-majority provinces to Britain and France.

In the postwar lull of the Armistice, Genell points out, Ottoman officials interpreted Wilsonian principles of self-determination as entirely in keeping with the constitutional formula of the privileged provinces. The 12th of Wilson’s 14 Points, which spoke of the need to assure non-Turkish nationalities of the empire an ‘absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development’, could readily be interpreted as an extension of well-established Ottoman practices of devolved administration. From this perspective, provincial autonomy seemed to offer a credible path to preserving the Ottoman Empire as a viable sovereign order in the wake of the Great War. In this telling, 1919 was not the end of the line for the Ottomans: members of the imperial elite could still envisage a range of plausible futures besides dismemberment.

In making this argument, Genell vividly portrays the rich world of Ottoman legal discourse. Rather than passively absorbing European determinations, Ottoman lawyers, scholars and journalists constructed legal arguments, debated the fine points of international treaties and delved into technical issues of governance and administration in both specialist texts and the empire’s vibrant newspaper scene. Genell’s impressive archival research also allows her to reconstruct how contemporary actors interpreted the political moment they lived in, and how they rationalised the options before them. These insights are especially valuable when considering historical junctures of great magnitude, such as the empire’s military defeat in the First World War, the eventual outcome of which appears inevitable only in retrospect. For those caught inside such maelstroms, Genell’s work reminds us, history still branches in several directions.

Empire by Law is a welcome addition to the revisionist scholarship on the late Ottoman Empire – arguably the most fertile subfield of modern Middle Eastern history over the last 20 years – which has collectively dismantled familiar characterisations of the polity as the ‘Sick Man of Europe’. Historians have demonstrated, mostly convincingly, that old paradigms of terminal decline were politically motivated; earlier assumptions of economic stagnation similarly outpaced the available evidence.

The new historiography highlights how the Ottomans successfully navigated the global turbulence of the Age of Revolutions of the 1760s to the 1840s without succumbing to revolutionary ruptures on the scale that transformed absolutist France and fractured the British and French empires, for example. It also emphasises how the crisis of late Ottoman debt was as much a by-product of recurrent international financial crises in the late 19th century as it was of feckless borrowing. Genell’s book usefully adds sovereignty to the concerns of these new Ottomanists, showing how the empire’s apparent loss of authority could also generate novel constitutional forms, legal arguments and political possibilities.

The problem of revisionism, though, is that it can overcorrect. In rejecting older narratives of inexorable Ottoman decline, the newer historiography sometimes risks understating the very real asymmetries of power and European coercion that made the empire’s predicament increasingly acute. Istanbul’s lawyers might well insist that the British occupation of Egypt could be fully reconciled with legal definitions of Ottoman sovereignty, for example, but what did such jurisprudential gymnastics mean for how power was exercised on the ground? If practically every variation of tribute, legal supremacy, external intervention and administrative quasi-independence is compatible with Ottoman sovereignty, then the concept of sovereignty surely becomes too stretched to falsify. Categories of practice only rarely map straightforwardly onto categories of analysis.

The subtitle of the book – The Ottoman Origins of the Mandate System in the Middle East – promises rather more than Genell ultimately delivers. Empire by Law is principally an account of how Ottoman officials and lawyers sought to reconcile increasingly differentiated forms of rule with continuing claims to imperial sovereignty. As the argument develops, Egypt and the relationship between Istanbul and Britain come to dominate, while Iraq and much of the Levant – the territories in which the mandate system would actually be imposed after 1918 – recede from view. Local political actors are similarly hard to find. Autonomy appears mainly as something negotiated by imperial officials, diplomats and jurists rather than contested by those who lived under it. France, meanwhile, is almost entirely absent.

These omissions do matter if the book is making a genealogical claim rather than identifying a family resemblance. Establishing the Ottoman origins of the mandate system requires some account of how these practices travelled into both British and French imperial strategies and were subsequently refashioned in Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq. Genell convincingly reconstructs an Ottoman history of fractured sovereignty; the connection between that history and the mandates themselves remains more suggestive than demonstrated.

Genell’s larger achievement is nevertheless considerable. Empire by Law shows that the late Ottoman Empire was not simply losing sovereignty to encroaching European powers, but was actively reworking what sovereignty could mean in the face of external pressure, territorial differentiation and legal pluralism. Ottoman officials and lawyers developed arguments that made autonomy compatible with empire, and fractured authority compatible with continuing claims to rule. These insights deserve to travel well beyond graduate seminars on late Ottoman history. If the book does not quite establish the mandate system’s Ottoman origins, it does show that the forms of divided sovereignty associated with the post-1918 Middle East had a much longer and more complicated imperial prehistory. Sovereignty has always been more uneven in practice than it appears in theory.