The Kurdish Nobility in the Ottoman Empire: Loyalty, Autonomy and Privilege

This book explores the rise and fall of Kurdish nobility in the Ottoman Empire, challenging a spatial-geographical bias in Ottoman-Middle East history. It demonstrates the complex social, economic, and political background to massacres and pogroms targeting the Armenian population of Palu before the Armenian Genocide.

Format: Hardback
Length: 368 pages
Publication date: 31 December 2022
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Studies the making and unmaking of the Ottoman Empire's Kurdish nobility.
Challenges a long-standing spatial-geographical bias in Ottoman-Middle East history by bringing Kurdish and Armenian histories back into the Ottoman imperial framework.
Presents the first study to use the framework of hereditary nobility to examine Kurdish elite formation and its decline in the Ottoman Empire.
Demonstrates the complex social, economic, and political background to massacres and pogroms that targeted the Armenian population of Palu before the Armenian Genocide.
Provides a much-needed bottom-up historical perspective to Kurdish and Armenian historiographies.
Uses an array of sources that includes Ottoman, British, and American archival documents and interviews conducted with the Palu beys' descendants.
This book narrates the rise and fall of Kurdish nobility in the Ottoman Empire from the sixteenth through to the nineteenth century.
Focusing on one noble Kurdish family based in the emirate of Palu, a fortressed town in the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire, it provides the first systematic analysis of the hereditary nobility in Kurdistan.
The book centres on the crucial moment in the 1840s during which the Ottoman state set out to abolish the hereditary privileges of the Kurdish beys, confiscating their large landholdings and setting the stage for a conflict over the fertile lands of Palu that would last nearly six decades.
This tug-of-war between Armenian financiers, Armenian and Muslim sharecroppers, the Kurdish beys, and the Ottoman state ended in 1895 with a series of massacres against the Armenian population of Palu.
Through exhaustive archival research in an untapped body of sources, this book sheds light on the impact this conflict-filled process had on the intercommunal relations.

Weight: 678g
Dimension: 241 x 162 x 26 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781399508612