Int. J. Middle East Stud. 40 (2008), 47–67. Printed in the United States of AmericaDOI: 10.1017/S0020743807080087

Nadir Ozbek

P O L I C I N G T H E C O U N T R Y S I D E : G E N D A R M E S

O F T H E L AT E 19T H-C E N T U R Y O T T O M A N

E M P I R E (1876–1908)

This article lays groundwork for a more systematic history of the Ottoman gendarmerie(jandarma), here with special emphasis on the men in the corps and their workingconditions. The gendarmerie, which before 1879 reform the Ottomans called asakir-izabtiye, was a provincial paramilitary police organization established by bureaucratsof the Tanzimat state during the 1840s on an ad hoc basis.1 This force later acquireda more uniform and centralized character, becoming the empire’s principal internalsecurity organization. Through this paramilitary police institution, 19th-century Ottomanbureaucrats aimed to extend their authority into the provinces, which at that time couldbe described as only marginally under Ottoman sovereignty according to contemporarydefinitions of the term. From the late 18th century on, extending state sovereignty torecognized territorial boundaries emerged as a vital need for most European states aswell as the Ottoman Empire. Along with other modern military and civil institutions andmodern administrative practices, introducing various types of paramilitary provincialpolice forces enabled governments in Europe to enhance and extend their authority overterritories in which it had been limited. The gendarmerie thus emerged in both Europeand in the Ottoman Empire as integral to modern state formation and its technologies ofgovernment. Although acknowledging the Pan-European context of the gendarmerie’semergence and its theoretical ramifications, the present article is concerned more withthe Ottoman context within which this police corps was established, evolved, and tookon a uniquely Ottoman form.

In the Ottoman Empire and across continental Europe, the gendarmerie played avital role in the making of modern bureaucratic states. Yet, it is interesting to notethat, apart from Clive Emsley’s relatively recent book and articles, comparative andtheoretically grounded studies of gendarmeries are notably scarce.2 This deficiencyis even more surprising in the Ottoman case, considering the proliferation of studieson administrative reform of the Tanzimat era (1839–76) and the following periods.Early historians of Ottoman administrative reform, including Roderic Davison, BernardLewis, and Stanford Shaw, who produced their major contributions during the 1960s,

Nadir Ozbek is Associate Professor in the Ataturk Institute for Modern Turkish History, Bogazici University,Bebek, Istanbul, Turkey; e-mail: ozbekn@boun.edu.tr

© 2008 Cambridge University Press 0020-7438/08 $15.00

48 Nadir Ozbek

clearly appreciated the significance of introducing modern governmental institutionsto the provinces.3 Davison’s account of provincial inspections in the 1850s and otherexperiments that paved the way for the Provincial Law of 1864, for example, remainsan important contribution to the field.4 However, this early literature emphasizes mostlycivil-administration reforms. Although these historians acknowledged the importance ofmilitary reform and highlighted early attempts at establishing a modern standing army,they were not consistent in pursuing the development of military institutions. The gen-darmerie remained entirely outside their purview. As noted by Emsley, scholars’ nearlyuniversal indifference toward modern provincial policing practices and institutions mayreflect an urban bias in social and political theory, the traces of which can be discernedclearly in the historiography on modern state formation throughout the 19th century.5

Parallel to this tendency, one can also detect a partiality to central institutions ofgovernment, which might further explain historians’ disinterest in the gendarmerie.6

During the past couple of decades, however, new approaches have emerged, benefitingfrom sociological theories of “bringing the state back in.”7 Ottoman historians havebegun to borrow conceptual tools to analyze state formation, such as Michael Man’sinfrastructural power concept and Anthony Giddens’ notions of surveillance and admin-istrative power. They have been influenced also by Foucauldian concepts, particularlygovernmentality, an analytical tool that has enabled historians to explore disciplinaryaspects of modern politics through microtechnologies of power in the context of everydaysocial life.8

These conceptual tools have opened new vistas for students of Ottoman history whoare interested in modern governmental institutions and practices in provincial settings.Recent scholarship on this issue has made significant contributions to the field. Moreimportant, at least for this article, is the broader epistemological framework that informsthese new studies. The new literature has broadened the spectrum of historical agents toinclude a new cast of central and local, as well as domestic and international, actors. It hasalso complicated the analysis of modernity in general, and state formation in particular,as an outcome of social and political struggles and negotiations within this broadercast of agents. Historical sociology and Foucauldian view may encourage narratives ofmodern state formation as a progression of history without reference to actual historicalactors. Historians of the Ottoman provinces, however, have been careful to conceptualizegovernmental institutions not as abstract reifications but rather as political practices offlesh and blood historical agents. They have included a broad range of historical actorsin their narratives.

The present article contributes to this recent historiographical shift. It conceptual-izes the Ottoman gendarmerie not simply as an institution, but also as political andadministrative practices in everyday life in the provinces and the countryside. From thisperspective, the gendarmerie enables us to explore an understudied aspect of modernstate formation: human interactions within the context of quotidian politics.

Among other civil and military institutions and practices, the gendarmerie can becalled a major infrastructural apparatus of the Ottoman state in its efforts to extendcentral governmental authority to distant provinces. During the Tanzimat period, the firstact of an Ottoman governor, before introducing administrative reform, was to establisha gendarmerie regiment or company in that province. Other branches of governmentfollowed. These corps were engaged primarily with pacification of the countryside and

Policing the Countryside 49

with various tasks that had remained neglected or beyond the central government’sreach, such as military conscription, arbitration of disputes, and registration of lands andrevenues. Ottoman bureaucrats bundled all these tasks under the banner of restoring andmaintaining security and order. They sought to legitimize reforms by asserting that theywere acting in the best interest of local inhabitants, although they did not pay particularattention to indigenous suffering—or so the record suggests.

The extension of central government administrative apparatuses into provinces andrural districts, which one may term the “governmentalization” of the Ottoman state,could, from another perspective, be conceptualized as a kind of “colonization” of thecountryside, especially in view of the deeply rooted and often resistant local traditions ofsocial organization and governance.9 This latter perspective highlights the gendarmerieas a practice that reflected the central government’s new conception of law and justiceand that played a vital role in this detraditionalizing, deculturalizing, and thereforearguably colonial venture. In the Cukurova region, for example, the pacification andsedentarization of tribal confederations and the introduction of Tanzimat institutionsthrough military-like operations were reminiscent of other forms of historical colonialexpansion in their social engineering and resource-allocation effects. Cevdet Pasha,head of the reform division (Fırka-i Islahiye), with its extraordinary powers, revealinglytermed these implementations a “conquest” of the region.10 Similar to many historicalexamples of colonization, in such comprehensive reformist drives as this, military andcivilian aspects of administrative reform intermingled to such an extent that it would bedifficult, if not impossible, to distinguish them. This article considers the introduction ofthe gendarmerie and other administrative apparatuses of the modern state into provincesas integral to the “colonization of the countryside.” Such an approach helps us viewmore clearly the actual historical actors on the ground. It also helps us avoid a reifiedconception of the modern state and its formation as a natural progression of historytoward a state embodying a normatively defined rule of law.

The present article explores the history of the Ottoman gendarmes, the men in thecorps, within the larger administrative and institutional context of the late 19th-centuryempire. As noted above, although urban and rural policing institutions played an impor-tant role in 19th-century Ottoman history, there is no special study of these institutions,and little is known about their practices. Elements for such a historical study do exist,particularly regarding the police and gendarmerie; however, available studies, mostlyprepared by republican representatives of these same institutions during the 1930s and1940s, cannot be considered scholarly by contemporary standards. They are, however,useful reference works that provide detailed information about evolving laws and regu-lations defining these institutions.11

Over the past two decades there has emerged, especially among young scholars, anincreasing interest in the history of policing institutions and practices in the OttomanEmpire.12 Yet although dissertation proposals and projects in progress on such topicsas urban crime and punishment, surveillance practices, military institutions, and con-scription systems are clearly on the increase, the provincial police have received hardlyany attention. Indeed, 19th-century Ottoman historiography yields little on the practicesand institutions of rural social control or changing conceptions of crime and justice inthe rural milieu. In this respect, a study of the gendarmerie as a state institution activein the countryside enables historians to balance the previously mentioned urban bias in

50 Nadir Ozbek

the literature, and to articulate the dynamics of modern governance and administrativepolicies across the urban–rural spectrum.

This article focuses mainly on the period following 1879, during which the gen-darmerie grew to considerable size, with regiments in almost every province of theempire, and at the same time acquired a relatively more uniform character, especially ascompared with previous periods. As so little is known about policing institutions of theempire in general and its gendarmerie in particular, the next section provides context, abird’s-eye view of the early and mid-19th century and a brief chronology of the institutionin its early phase, that is, up to the reorganization of 1879. After that, I sketch a socialprofile of the men in the corps, including details about working conditions and wages, aswell as work stoppages initiated by gendarmes for various reasons. During the 1880s and1890s the recruitment of non-Muslims into the gendarmerie became an important aspectof administrative reforms launched in the eastern provinces, where Armenians consti-tuted a considerable portion of the population; this issue is examined in a separate section.

The relationship between the gendarmerie and the rural population, or gendarmes’daily interactions with ordinary peasants, remains outside the scope of this article. Thistopic, which obviously has potential for revealing much about 19th-century Ottomansocial history, entails a different set of research questions, theoretical conceptualizations,and sources.

H IS T O R IC A L S E T T IN G A N D C H R O N O L O G Y O F T H E O T T O M A N

G E N D A R M E R IE

The Ottoman gendarmerie was by no means a peculiar institution or administrativepractice. It emerged within the context of a sea change in political and administrativetechnologies across Europe. In historical terms, one can hardly overemphasize this Pan-European context extending from the late 18th to the mid-19th century. The FrenchGendarmerie Nationale, created in 1790 after the reorganization of the prerevolutionaryMarechaussee, provided the model for gendarmeries elsewhere. During the Napoleonicperiod and its immediate aftermath, gendarmeries were created in most of the Germanlands, for example, in Bavaria and Prussia in 1812. Emsley discusses these developmentsin the context of central governments’ attempts to extend their authority into provincesand to impose stricter supervision over them.13 In Italy the gendarmerie came into beingalongside unification, thus playing a leading role in building the unified Italian state.14 InRussia from 1811 onward, independent companies of internal security forces organizedmilitarily were responsible for pursuing deserters, runaway serfs, and criminals, and forprotecting public buildings. In 1825 Nicholas I brought together elements of variousinternal security forces and established the first Russian gendarmerie corps.15 In theHabsburg Empire, the gendarmerie was formed following the revolutions of 1848,although its institutional precedent dates back to the Napoleonic period.16

Antecedents of the Ottoman gendarmerie may be seen as early as the first years ofthe 19th century. A deployment of local military companies (nizam-ı cedid ortaları)in certain provincial centers in 1802, together with the creation of reserve army units(asakir-i redif taburları) in the provinces in the mid-1830s, could be considered asfirst steps toward building a centralized provincial police corps.17 Both initiatives hadbeen proposed as part of a major overhaul of the Ottoman military that spanned the

Policing the Countryside 51

last quarter of the 18th century and the first half of the 19th century, and that soughtincreased centralization deemed necessary for adoption of new warfare technologies.Both institutions were also to perform policing functions as part of their mandate tomaintain security and order in the provinces.

The Ottoman gendarmerie resembled gendarmeries elsewhere in Europe, where thistype of paramilitary policing force remained thin on the ground. Prussia, for example, hada force of 2,700 in 1848, which means roughly one gendarme per 12,000 inhabitants. By1890 that number had increased to just over 4,600 and to 5,600 at the outbreak of WorldWar I.18 The tiny Prussian gendarmerie stands at the high end of the spectrum. At theother, we have the Habsburg lands, where conscripts reached a peak of 18,985 in 1857,when the empire’s population stood at 30 million. On the eve of World War I, there were14,400 gendarmes for a population of almost 50 million in the Habsburg lands, whichmeans approximately one gendarme per 3,500 inhabitants.19 In terms of numbers, theOttoman gendarmerie appears to stand closer to Prussia, reaching a peak of 37,943 in the1870s, in an empire of approximately 27 million inhabitants, although the corps’ numbershrank to 26,507 following the 1879 reorganization.20 The Ottoman gendarmerie thusappears substantial on a per capita basis—roughly one gendarme per 1,000 inhabitants—despite its sparse distribution over the geographical extent of the empire.

As long as European gendarmeries remained small in size, states had no choice butto employ other forces available to them—regular and irregular, military and civilian.Governments relied on various combinations of regular army troops, gendarmeries,citizen militias, and civilian police to maintain everyday order and to contain popularunrest. Prussia, for example, relied on its army to deal with insurgencies throughout the19th century.21 The situation was similar in 19th-century Russia, where the governmentwas unable or unwilling to commit resources to reforming and enlarging its gendarmerieand police force and consequently relied heavily on military detachments to suppresspublic disorder.22 Even in Russian provinces with gendarmerie regiments, wheneverthere was a major disturbance, the government did not hesitate to employ other means,generally the military complemented by irregulars. Throughout 19th-century Prussia,Russia, Austria, and the Ottoman Empire, regular army units played a major role inmaintaining domestic order and security. As the gendarmerie is a paramilitary type ofinstitution, its use tended to confirm the military nature of policing across continentalEurope and the Ottoman Empire.

The need for more order and uniformity in the provinces, apparent since the reignof Mahmut II (1808–39), if not earlier, along with the need for an instrument againstdomestic-security threats before resorting to the nation’s regular army, eventually led tothe 1840 decision to create gendarmerie (asakir-i zabtiye) regiments and battalions.23

The gendarmerie underwent various reorganizations from the 1840s to 1879. Evenbefore the Provincial Law of 1864 set rules for a uniform provincial administrativesystem, the government took major steps in this direction at the initiative and under thesupervision of numerous provincial inspectors, of whom Cevdet Pasha was the mostprominent. The Provincial Law of 1864 and later the 1869 Gendarmerie Law wereimportant steps in setting the legal and administrative foundations of a uniform andcentralized gendarmerie corps.

In this period, placing gendarmerie forces under civilian administration ensured gov-ernment control of the provinces. Troop hiring and discipline was handled by the

52 Nadir Ozbek

directorate of police (Zabtiye Musiriyeti), and the command of gendarmes and theauthority to deploy them within the provinces rested with governors. During the 1870s,the Ottoman government tried its best to implement the existing laws and regulations,creating gendarmerie regiments and battalions in every province and district. Yet, in-creasing social and political disturbances; peasant uprisings with nationalist overtones,particularly in the Balkans and, later, in the eastern provinces; and budget difficulties,which intensified during the second half of the century, severely strained all initiativesfor creating and maintaining a uniform gendarmerie corps under civilian control. As aresult, the Ottoman domestic security apparatus lacked uniformity and remained patchyand paramilitary in nature for most of the 19th century.

Although evident throughout the century, the unevenness of this system manifesteddistinctive characteristics at various moments and in various parts of the empire. Duringthe mid-19th century, for example, Ottoman authorities frequently employed regulararmy units, the gendarmerie, or irregular units of armed men (basıbozuk) to ensureprovincial security. In some cases, as on the frontiers of Bosnia and Herzegovina inthe early 1860s, the government even continued to rely on a “military border” system:village inhabitants were permitted to bear arms and were held responsible for bordersecurity with the Habsburg Empire in exchange for tax and military exemptions.24

To maintain security and order in the countryside prior to the 1860s, the govern-ment authorized contractors as military chiefs (sergerde) and paid them an allowance.These military chiefs were responsible for hiring the men necessary to police thecountryside.

From the second half of the 1860s on, the government replaced these irregular forceswith gendarmerie. The new gendarmerie law had been drafted by a commission estab-lished at the Bureau of the Chief of Staff; members of the commission came from militarybackgrounds, except for Cevdet Pasha. As Cevdet Pasha complained later, the law theyprepared was based on military principles,25 meaning that large units of gendarmerieregiments, battalions, and companies were centered in provincial and district centers,leaving villages and rural districts vulnerable to abuses by irregular units.26 In OttomanBulgaria of the 1860s and 1870s, for example, the main cause of peasant complaints,various forms of protest, and widespread popular uprisings were abuses committed byirregular units and gendarmes. As is well known, the Ottoman government resorted tothese irregular forces to suppress the Bulgarian insurrections of 1876. This action onlyintensified the discontent.

Throughout the 19th century, the Ottoman police system as a whole retained its mili-tary character. Until the late 1890s the Ottoman government proved unable or unwillingto create extensive urban civilian police forces in the provinces. Only Istanbul wasfurnished with an urban police force of significant size. Although civilian police unitspatrolled in up to a dozen provincial centers from 1894 on, the total number of menemployed in all these civilian units in 1894 appears to be only 779, and gendarmes num-bered 26,507.27 The government preferred to locate paramilitary gendarmerie regimentsin provincial centers and not in small districts or villages. It left routine maintenanceof order in small towns, hamlets, and villages to the communities or, more often, toirregular units, like the Hamidiye Light Cavalry of the eastern provinces. The cavalryabused inhabitants of the region, Armenian or Kurdish peasants, and massacred manyArmenians during and after the 1890s.

Policing the Countryside 53

As reflected in its internal security system, the Ottoman state had limited capacityto “colonize” its hinterlands. It is true that beginning in the 1840s, the Ottoman statesucceeded in extending its rule to the empire’s many regions by establishing gendarmerieregiments in every province. As this corps remained thinly spread, the government alsoresorted to other means, such as regular troops and irregular units.

The aftermath of the Russian–Ottoman war of 1877–78 constituted a radical turningpoint in the development of the empire’s policing institutions. In accordance with theCyprus Convention and then the Berlin Congress of 1878, European powers pressuredthe empire to carry out comprehensive reforms in finance, policing, prisons, justice,education, and public works. Whereas the reform program, known in diplomatic circlesas “the administrative reforms in European and Asiatic Turkey,” appears to be a responseto European demands, it also reflected the Ottoman government’s genuine desire tointroduce, strengthen, and fine-tune modern administrative practices in the provinces.From the European perspective, at stake was the status of Armenians in eastern Anatolia,Bulgarians, and other Christian subjects in the empire’s remaining European provinces.Having emerged from complex, and to some extent interrelated, external and internalconditions, the reform program proposed, for example, a reasonable representation ofChristians in the administration, including the provincial security forces.

The reform plan included a critical reorganization of the gendarmerie (asakir-izabtiye). It also revamped the government’s method of tax collection in order to re-lieve the gendarmerie of regular responsibility for this task. The rationale for thisseparation of functions stemmed in part from the poor reputation that the corps hadacquired for extorting harvest produce from peasants, especially at tax time. Althoughtax collection had not been its primary mission, the gendarmerie had, over time, turnedinto the government’s de facto internal revenue collection agency, a role that distractedthe force from its primary duty of maintaining order and security. In 1879 the Ottomangovernment moved quickly to establish the Gendarmerie Department (Jandarma Daire-iMerkeziyesi), under the jurisdiction of the chief of staff, and attached gendarmerieunits to this new administrative apparatus. For its part, the civilian directorate of police,which had administered the gendarmerie until 1879, was converted into a modern policeforce (under the new name, Zabtiye Nezareti) responsible for policing urban centers.The Ottoman gendarmerie had served as a paramilitary police organization under thecivil authority of the Interior Ministry and the provincial governors, at least on paper.After the 1879 reorganization, the gendarmerie became a police organization under thecommand of the chief of staff. As we shall see below, however, these changes, aimed atintroducing modern governing methods into distant provinces, were circumscribed bylimitations of the treasury. In addition, the complex international and domestic politicalcontext of the late 19th-century empire shaped not only the gendarmerie’s organizationbut also the everyday experiences of the rank and file, as illustrated by the followingsnapshots of life in the gendarmerie corps in the post-1879 period.

T H E M E N IN T H E G E N D A R M E R IE C O R P S

From an ordinary Ottoman subject’s point of view, a position in the gendarmerie wasfirst and foremost a way to earn a living. Impressive numbers of young men enlistedin the corps from the establishment of the first gendarmerie units in 1840 through

54 Nadir Ozbek

numerous reorganizations throughout the century. Indeed, the figure of 38,000 in servicein the late 1870s arguably serves as an indicator of the significance that this employ-ment opportunity represented to young, indigent Ottomans. This corps represents asignificant population within the Ottoman workforce, meriting a social history of itsown.

Seen from the institutional or “social control” perspective, disciplinary organizationssuch as the urban police and the gendarmerie fulfilled functions espoused by the admin-istrative elite. The gendarmerie was doubtless a mechanism for carrying out the rulingelite’s policies in the provincial context. Experiences of individual gendarmes indicatethat the corps was more than a tool, however; they also illustrate complexities of late19th-century Ottoman society and politics. Following is a social profile of late-Ottomangendarmes, with the help of such details as selection criteria for the corps and dailyworking conditions.

Two major factors restricted employment opportunities and depressed working con-ditions offered by the gendarmerie: the number of men seeking employment in thecountryside and the state treasury’s capacity to finance a force of 30,000–40,000. Mas-sive migrations from the Balkans and the Caucasus in the latter half of the 19th centurygenerated favorable labor market conditions for the government. Yet, chronic budgetaryproblems that intensified in the 1870s and after constrained the government’s ability toadequately finance the gendarmerie reform initiatives described previously. The resultwas onerous working conditions for men in the force.

Two sources—namely, published regulations for enlistment and archival informa-tion on recruits—shed light on the background of the young men who served in thegendarmerie.28 The regulations did not set particularly strict requirements, thus grantingauthorities discretionary powers in line with a pragmatism and flexibility observable inthe management of the corps as a whole. Rules for entry were drawn up as early asthe 1840s, then reviewed and systematized in 1869 and 1870.29 Still, selection criteriafrom the 1840s to the 1870s provided no more than a few details on preferred traits orcharacteristics, and subsequent gendarmerie regulations of 1880 and 1903 offered onlyslight changes to these.30

In principle at least, the gendarmerie was open to individuals from all social groupsregardless of religious or ethnic identity. The 1869 regulations, for example, state onlythat entry was restricted to men between the ages of twenty-one and fifty,31 with theprovision that those under twenty-five should not exceed a third of the total.32 Thesecriteria changed only slightly over the next decades. The 1903 regulations, a verbatimtranslation of French law, changed the age range, to twenty-five to forty-five.33 Sub-sequent regulations made more dramatic modifications. As of 1910, for instance, onlymen between twenty and twenty-six were accepted.34 No strict rules governed health andfitness. Regulations stated that applicants should be healthy, physically fit, able-bodied,and not shorter than 166 cm (about 5 feet 4 inches). These requirements, interestingly,did not apply to those with reading and writing skills.35

According to a rule dating from the 1840s, the ideal gendarme was single and in thecase of a widower, did not have children.36 This rule remained on the books until aslate as 1910.37 Rigorous working conditions and low pay probably explained such arule, although it was likely among the most lightly enforced. Gendarmes often enoughdiverged from this ideal: not only were married men accepted into the force, but they

Policing the Countryside 55

also were allowed to visit their families at home once a week.38 For officers there wasno requirement as to marital status and number of children.

The term of service for the rank-and-file gendarme was two years, after which itcould be renewed on a yearly basis. This limited tenure was more likely to have beenstrictly enforced because keeping a man in the force for an extended number of termswould result in demands for pension rights; officers in the zabtiye and the gendarmeriebenefited from pensions at retirement, as did their counterparts in the regular army corps.Yet some enlistees did manage to remain in the corps for years; a gendarme of Izmir,for example, in active service up to an advanced age, is described as having a whitemustache and heavy eyeglasses.39 Although money was deducted from gendarmerieofficers’ pay to finance retirement funds, the rank and file did not have this social rightas their employment was not considered permanent. Officers earned their right to apension at thirty years of service, although the officer or his wife or children were alsogranted pension rights in the event of work-related disability or loss of life.40

As gendarmes embodied the state and its law in the everyday life of peasants, from theofficial perspective a gendarme should first and foremost command respect. Authoritiessought to prevent individuals of “doubtful” character or background from entering theforce. Although this criterion was most likely applied informally, a handful of other,more concrete requirements filtered out men with questionable reputations or criminalrecords. For example, regulations barred candidates with a parent or sibling convictedof homicide.41 In practice, however, enforcing this requirement was probably difficultbecause, as will be discussed, archival records reveal a number of cases of convictedcriminals serving in the gendarmerie.

Most gendarmes appear to have been illiterate. The tasks of the gendarmerie didnot require literacy, and regulations were tailored accordingly. Given the absence ofuniversal primary education in the 19th-century empire, authorities had little choice inthe matter. Literacy was rewarded, however: the rare candidates who possessed basicliteracy skills were clearly preferred to those who did not. Knowledge of OttomanTurkish was compulsory, but those who also spoke the language of one of the empire’sethnic communities were preferred—understandably, because the gendarme’s dutiesinvolved direct interaction with polyglot rural communities.42 According to a reportfrom Sivas, the corps in 1903 announced a search for individuals fluent in Armenian andwith translation capabilities.43 In Syria under the governorship of Midhat Pasha, newgendarmes were required to be literate in Arabic and Turkish.44

One of the more interesting sought-after characteristics that emerged from regulatorydocuments was distance: a gendarme was supposed to be a stranger to the region hepoliced. The Ottoman government apparently achieved partial success in this regard.Although statistics on recruits’ geographical origins are scanty at the moment, availabledocuments suggest that a sizeable proportion of corps members were recruited fromthe province in which they served. Data on the Beirut police corps, for example, revealthat thirty-four of the sixty-two policemen serving in Beirut in 1894 came from theprovince of Damascus, whereas the remaining recruits hailed from provinces rangingfrom Belgrade to Baghdad and from the Danube to Cyprus.45 Was this cosmopolitanisma reflection of the corps or of the civilian population of Beirut? In either case, it mayimply that Ottoman authorities preferred men without strong local bonds but did notalways have that option.

56 Nadir Ozbek

For those serving in their province of birth, authorities paid attention not to assign arecruit to his natal village or neighborhood, where he might come under the influence offriends and relatives. Counterbalancing this consideration was the benefit of a recruit’sfamiliarity with sociocultural and other features of the province he patrolled, includingknowledge of the terrain. In addition, stationing gendarmes at a reasonable distancefrom friends and relatives was thought to be good for morale.46 The flexible, pragmaticapproach reflected in such arrangements appears to be strongly in evidence for all typesof policing institutions, not only in the Ottoman Empire, but also in other contemporarystates throughout the 19th century.47 In addition to semilocal recruitment, Ottomanstapped other sources, such as immigrant populations. Important among these wereCircassians, who reached the empire in great numbers particularly during and after the1877–78 crisis, settling in various regions and providing manpower for the gendarmerie.In Transjordan, the gendarmerie was composed of both locals and recruits from otherparts of Syria. Here, Circassian and Chechen settlers, many of whom had had formalmilitary training, were represented in large numbers.48

The Transjordan case illustrates the strong possibility that employing refugees in thecorps was a timely and, considering the numbers, not insignificant means for integratingthem into Ottoman society. Charged with reorganizing the zabtiye corps in accordancewith the gendarmerie reform law of 1879, Syrian Governor Midhat Pasha sought to varythe ethnic composition of the heavily Kurdish corps. He succeeded in attracting manynon-Kurds, including more than 100 Syrian Christians and several Jews.49 EmployingCircassian immigrants in the gendarmerie was not unique to Ottoman Transjordan orSyria. In Bitlis, authorities established a new force of flying (seyyare) battalions in1904, enrolling about 250 gendarmes and officers, almost all of whom were Circassianimmigrants. Their deployment in a region in which Kurdish Hamidiye Light CavalryRegiments’ feuds and raids had become problematic suggests intentional use of a groupthat may have been considered more capable of checking the turbulence of the Kurdishtribes.50 Indeed, Ottoman authorities frequently employed Circassian gendarmerie reg-iments in eastern Anatolia to quell disorder during the 1890s, despite indications thatthey joined in massacres of the region’s Armenian population.51

As already noted, these cases point to a pragmatism regarding recruitment and de-ployment. Aside from this general insight, however, laws and regulations provide onlyscant information for sketching a profile of “the average Ottoman gendarme.” Evidencetestifies to a considerable degree of idiosyncrasy in recruitment practices. It appearsthat the majority of gendarmes in the sixth battalion of the Baghdad regiment, stationedon the border with Iran, were convicted criminals, murderers, and fugitives of Iranianorigin.52 This is just a more striking example among several others showing the induc-tion of individuals with criminal records, who did not always make reliable recruits.For example, a group of brigands from Yemen employed in the Trablussam corps (inLebanon), along with some local Druze, ended their gendarme careers by desertingthe corps.53 Irregularity, it appears, was more the rule than the exception. Given theempire’s geographical expanse and variety of political and social conditions, we mightview this irregularity as a kind of norm, reflecting, on the one hand, the government’slimited means to implement new governmental techniques consistently throughout itsdistant provinces, and, on the other hand, the diversity of backgrounds and everydayexperiences of men working in the zabtiye and gendarmerie.

Policing the Countryside 57

W O R K IN G C O N D IT IO N S A N D W A G E S O F T H E G E N D A R M E S

Gendarmerie work was not intended to be long term, and labor market conditions andthe pay likely determined rank-and-file recruits’ attitudes toward the job. We can hardlyexaggerate the state treasury’s financial difficulties during the period under study. Inthese years, when public security concerns rose to alarming levels in most parts ofthe empire, available zabtiye forces fell short of meeting the challenge. Although flushwith potential recruits, the government could not even meet its primary commitments,including salaries of regular government employees and army officers, a large portionof the government’s total expenditures. These conditions obviously limited authorities’ability to recruit men of the desired quality and quantity for the zabtiye and gendarmeriecorps.

The government did not impose a single-wage scheme but rather left this decision togovernors and provincial administrative councils; thus, zabtiye and gendarme salariesvaried from one province to another. Fixed standards of remuneration would havebeen unrealistic because local labor market and price conditions fluctuated dramaticallyfrom one region to another. Although practical for Ottoman authorities, this practicecomplicated the historian’s job, as statistics on zabtiye and gendarme wages for the 19thcentury are scattered and inconsistent.

Archival sources provide some wage information. In Konya province, for example,the salary of an ordinary foot gendarme was 75 piastres a month in 1880. A corporal waspaid 81 piastres and a sergeant 98 piastres. The wages of zabtiye officers were somewhathigher: a second lieutenant received 137 piastres and a lieutenant 225. Captains andmajors earned 362 and 725 piastres, respectively. In addition, ordinary zabtiyes werepaid 45 piastres, lieutenants and captains 90, and majors 555 piastres in lieu of breadrations. The cavalry zabtiyes’ salary schedule was about 20 percent higher. They alsoreceived, depending on their rank, 250 or 325 piastres for a bread allowance and upkeepof their horses.54 In Kastamonu, another Anatolian province, figures from the same yearappear similar to Konya’s. In this province, a foot soldier zabtiye received 79 piastresa month and a cavalry zabtiye 98.55 In Syria in 1879, foot-soldier gendarmes received80 piastres and cavalry gendarmes 130.56 Konya can be regarded as a typical province,with the wages offered there representing what an average gendarme could make for hisservices: 4.8 piastres a day, bread rations included.57 By comparison, a construction day-laborer in Konya normally earned 7 piastres a day, making the gendarme’s take-homepay seem small indeed.58

The life of a gendarme thus appears to have been difficult, not only because his salarywas low, but also because it was frequently delayed or paid in small installments.59

During the period in question, salaries of all types of government employees were oftendelayed for months. In Kozan in 1880, for example, the government’s budgetary straitswere painfully obvious: the district governor, other high bureaucrats, and zabtiyes didnot receive their pay for six months.60 In Maras province, gendarme salaries arrivedsixteen months late in 1900.61 Although these examples may seem dramatic, in someprovinces salaries were in arrears not for months but for years. Consider, for instance,the story of one Ali Sabri, a sergeant in the Kosovo gendarmerie regiment, who in 1901petitioned authorities that he had not been paid on a regular basis for about ten years. Healso complained that he had received no compensation for maintenance of his uniform

58 Nadir Ozbek

for the prior two years.62 Similar examples abound in archival sources. In Tekfurdagı,again in 1901, salaries were apparently not disbursed for eighteen months.63 In Pristine,both foot and cavalry gendarmes went nine months without pay; failure to collect theannual tax in this district may have caused the delay.64 In Cezair-i Bahr-i Sefid (theAegean Islands) in 1902, salaries were delayed about twenty months.65 The frequencyof these complaints apparently did not decrease in the years that followed.66 A case inpoint is Ahmet, son of Mehmet, a sergeant major in the gendarmerie at Kırcaali. Hissalary had not been paid for eight and a half months. Losing hope, Ahmed and hisfriends proposed to authorities that they be paid not in cash but in an equivalent valueof maize.67

Given that gendarmes earned low, uncertain wages while entrusted with considerableauthority to collect taxes, it is hardly surprising to learn of cases in which they abusedtheir positions.68 Observers pointed out that irregularity of income was the major causeof gendarmes’ ill behavior toward villagers, a problem that frequently occurred dur-ing routine patrols. Gendarmes were generally quartered with local inhabitants duringpatrols or when stationed in a given locality. Housed and fed at villagers’ expense,they distributed receipts more or less regularly for what they received, although inmost cases these receipts fell short of reflecting what was actually provided and wereseldom, if ever, reimbursed.69 The government’s financial difficulties, which resultedin insufficient salaries and nonpayment of the gendarmerie and regular troops, thusencouraged corruption and all manner of irregularities. Contemporary observers fre-quently reported from the field that low and uncertain salaries made it difficult forauthorities to attract the “respectable” individuals that an ideal Ottoman gendarmerieneeded.70

The financial difficulties of the last two decades of the 19th century not only made lifein the corps difficult for ordinary recruits, but they also constrained the government’s ef-forts, launched in 1879, to modernize the gendarmerie. In most provinces the old asakir-izabtiye system persisted throughout the 1890s, but the gendarmerie model remained adistant vision. In Sivas, Mosul, and Adana, for example, the new gendarmerie corpswas not established even by 1896.71 Bingazi was still relying on its zabtiye in 1898, butthat year in Yemen the reorganization had just been initiated.72 Even in some provincescloser to the capital, such as Ankara and Hudavendigar, the new model had not beenimplemented by 1902 and 1903, respectively.73 Again, in Basra and Iskodra, asakir-izabtiye corps remained intact as late as 1903.74 Through the late 1880s, the provincialsecurity force resembled a patched-up, make-do version of the old system. With financialand other problems hampering reorganization and reconstruction, the government wasforced to implement its plan one region at a time rather than overhauling the system asa whole simultaneously.

From 1879 through the 1890s, wages fell into arrears and the state reduced thenumber of men employed in the zabtiye and gendarmerie forces. Archives hold numerouscomplaints from provincial governors about the insufficiency of security forces undertheir authority and requests for additional mounted recruits. In response, the governmentin most cases proposed a reduction in gendarmes’ salaries to generate savings foradditional hiring. This occurred in Midilli, where an ordinary policeman’s salary was300 piastres per month. Here, local authorities were counseled to offer a new recruit200 piastres, enabling them to hire additional men.75 In Iskodra, before the gendarmerie

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reform was put into application, the number of zabtiye recruits was reduced by meansof forced retirement.76

G E N D A R M E S A N D W O R K S T O P PA G E S

To protest low wages and poor working conditions, recruits had few options beyondresigning from the corps, an option that was exercised often enough to make the dropoutrate a severe problem for provincial authorities. Budget constraints paralyzed officialsjust when they needed to double the forces under their command to restore public secu-rity. Governors sent telegram upon telegram to Istanbul requesting immediate paymentsbut with little effect. Under such circumstances, it is not surprising to find lucklessgendarmes complaining to authorities, abandoning their posts, and even speaking ofmutiny. In Baghdad, for example, unpaid wages were the reason gendarmes gave fordeserting their “arms and posts” in 1903, and this force eventually dwindled to a pointthat seriously jeopardized public security in the province. The provincial administrativecouncil decided to call in regular army troops where needed.77

The government’s decision to make a 40 percent cut in the budgetary allowance forthe gendarmerie in 1897 marked a turning point. Adverse repercussions became evidentin following years. In Adana and Aleppo, for example, a large majority of recruitsabandoned their posts in 1899.78 In the province of Syria in 1902, police officers andzabtiye recruits drifted off one after another, leaving ten policemen and 200 zabtiyes.As the governor explained in a memo to the Interior Ministry, only four or five menper district remained in the province, making policing all but nonexistent.79 Anotherdocument from the same year indicates that the situation in Aydın was not much different.After encountering difficulties in tax collection, local authorities tried to delegate thetask to gendarmes, but the majority resigned after months without pay.80

Authorities’ response to deserting gendarmes reflected, in most cases, realism andexpediency, if not tolerance. In the case of Aleppo mentioned previously, the InteriorMinistry stated that it was normal for a man to give up his post when not remuneratedregularly.81 This pragmatic response implies acknowledgment of the legitimacy of gen-darmes’ protests to a certain extent. Central government authorities in Istanbul orderedthe bureaucracy to find a way to immediately disburse gendarmes’ salaries in orderto secure their return to provincial regiments. Although authorities in Istanbul took aforbearing, perhaps paternalistic, approach to most deserters, in some cases, for instancein Adana in 1902, they sent strict orders that protest leaders be identified and properlypunished. In a carrot-and-stick case from the same year, two of nine gendarmes whohad been summoned from Catalca for service in Istanbul refused to abide by the orderon the grounds that they had received no more than half the salary promised during theprevious month of Ramadan.82 This time an investigation of the two gendarmes wasordered but only following full payment of their wages.83

A R M E N IA N S IN T H E G E N D A R M E R IE A N D T H E H A M ID IA N

R E G IM E

During the 19th century, Ottoman administrators faced a difficult dilemma, torn betweenthe need to mold a universal Ottoman citizenship implying civil equality of all Ottoman

60 Nadir Ozbek

subjects, on the one hand, and ambivalence regarding non-Muslim participation in publicadministration, particularly in the military and internal policing structures, on the otherhand. Principles regulating Muslim and non-Muslim roles in government services, bothcivil and military, had already undergone significant changes following the Tanzimatedict of 1839 and especially the reform decree (islahat fermanı) of 1856, proclaimed inthe aftermath of the Crimean War. As a result of these imperial edicts, non-Muslims wereadmitted to employment in Ottoman public administration in greater numbers than hadbeen the case in the past. In 1855, the government announced that non-Muslims shouldserve in the military. No significant progress was made in this area until 1909, when non-Muslims were officially proclaimed liable to military conscription.84 Although severalstudies focus on the status of non-Muslims in the military, to date none in any languageexamine their role in the Ottoman gendarmerie corps.

Prior to 1879, authorities did not categorically reject non-Muslim participation in thegendarmerie corps, although they remained highly skeptical about admitting these groupsinto the military. For example, when the reform division introduced administrative reformin Zeytun, local gendarmerie companies were filled half by Muslim and half by Armeniansubjects.85 Although known to doubt the efficiency of non-Muslim military service,Cevdet Pasha was the person behind this arrangement in Zeytun. After the Russian–Turkish war of 1877–78, Armenian participation in the gendarmerie took a decisiveturn. By signing the Treaty of Berlin in 1878, the Ottoman government committed itselfto implementing reforms in the eastern provinces in which Armenians constituted asignificant segment of the population. These reforms intended to protect Armeniansfrom Circassians and Kurds and to secure their representation in local government.The treaty further required representation of non-Muslims in local police forces andgendarmeries in proportion to their percentage of the total population.86

Bringing Armenian subjects into the gendarmerie proved particularly complex. Al-though a few Ottoman officials in both central and local governments made sincereattempts to bring an equitable proportion of Armenians into the corps, they encoun-tered hardships. An empire-wide government survey conducted in 1894 to establish theproportion of Armenians and other non-Muslims in the police force and gendarmerierevealed that little had been accomplished in this regard. As the “administrative re-form in Asiatic Turkey” principally concerned the Armenian minority, official statisticscompiled from the survey allocated one column to this ethnic group but bundled allother non-Muslim subjects into another. According to this source, the number of menemployed in the gendarmerie was 26,507, of whom 77 were Armenian and 771 werenon-Muslim recruits from other ethnic communities.87

Many factors contributed to this poor Armenian showing. British counselors in theregion described local Armenian indifference to the corps, for example. According to anobserver, one reason for this lack of enthusiasm was that “the importance of gendarmerieservice for the Armenian nation was not understood by the lower classes.”88 Yet non-Muslim elites in general voiced concerns about inadequate representation in local courtsand local administration, including the gendarmerie.89 The survey results indicate thatthe Armenian elite’s advocacy apparently failed to persuade lower-class Armenians toenlist in the corps.90

We may assume that the government’s incapacity to provide for maintenance andsalaries was another factor behind Armenians’ lack of enthusiasm. Local authorities

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in the eastern provinces, for example, frequently complained of payment irregularities,which, they said, explained the Armenians’ disinterest, resulting in officials’ inabilityto meet quota goals.91 This was a problem not only in the eastern provinces, but alsocloser to the capital, and poor pay might have been as much a deciding factor aspayment irregularities. The governor of Izmit, for example, blamed low wages.92 Thegovernor of Adana, where salaries were paid regularly, echoed that assessment.93 Otherprovinces made the same complaint: it was reported that in Bitlis the only option wasto employ Muslims in positions meant for Christians as long as the force suffered fromlow salaries and lack of regular payment.94 Another memorandum from Bitlis explainedthat most non-Muslims there were craftsmen or otherwise employed in some profession,indicating that the issue was complex and not a matter of ethnoreligious identity alone.The memorandum concluded that the only way to attract this segment of society was tooffer better pay.95

As mentioned previously, Ottoman authorities were divided regarding the employmentof non-Muslims, particularly in the gendarmerie. In contrast to the reform minded, someofficials opposed the use of Armenians in the security force. For example, Saadettin Pasa,who was responsible for investigating the disturbances and massacres of 1896 in Vanprovince, held that Christian gendarmes had been giving less than satisfactory service; heaccused them of insubordination and of disobeying orders in failing to arrest Christiansuspects.96 Saadettin Pasa’s unfavorable view notwithstanding, authorities expressedwillingness to employ Christians in Anatolia and Rumelia although preferably on thebasis of merit rather than according to their proportion of the population.97

Regardless of whether Ottoman officials were in favor of Armenian participationin the gendarmerie, the Hamidian regime’s security concerns and policy preferencesregarding eastern Anatolia complicated the situation. Gendarmerie reform was underway but making little progress due to financial difficulties. The regime consequentlyrelied on the Fourth Army Corps stationed in the region and, beginning in 1890, onHamidiye Light Cavalry regiments. Both forces were put under the command of ZekiPasha, who was sent to the region by Abdulhamit II, with extraordinary powers.98 Thus,the policing of the provinces and countryside in the east was left once more to themilitary. The Hamidiye regiments operated mostly as irregular militias. Moreover, mostof the gendarmerie units were populated by Circassian immigrants, who were apparentlyresponsible for considerable disturbances in the region.

Overall, the gendarmerie did not generate a sense of shared Ottoman citizenship. It wasnot effective even in fulfilling its policing duties. The Porte was able to keep the easternprovinces under control only by resorting to a three-tiered security system: regularmilitary troops, a gendarmerie that employed often rowdy Chechen and Circassiannewcomers to Ottoman lands, and Kurdish tribes incorporated into the Hamidiye LightCavalry. However, the fallback, ad hoc security and policing technologies employedcould hardly be termed infrastructural.

C O N C L U S IO N

This brief look at rarely studied Ottoman provincial police organization and its quotidianpractices seeks to contribute to the literature on policing institutions as well as to bepart of the effort to rectify a general urban bias prevalent there. It provides a general

62 Nadir Ozbek

view of the social and political dynamics of the empire as background for the provincialpolice corps’ emergence and describes working conditions for gendarmes. Despite itstribulations, the gendarmerie was a major late-empire institution, performing a range oftasks in outlying regions as part of the central government’s ambitious reform initiative.A study of this institution, particularly the extent of its penetration into the hinterlands,sheds light on the Ottoman state’s governing capacity in its later days—which, to readthis evidence, appears reduced indeed.

From the early 19th century, the Ottoman government sought to establish a well-ordered and functioning provincial policing institution, implementing various adminis-trative reforms as part of this venture. The gendarmerie was introduced during a periodin which the central government needed to extend its authority to frontier regions of theBalkans, eastern Anatolia, and Syria. This process can be conceptualized in theoreticalterms as a deeper “governmentalization” of the Ottoman state, a kind of colonizationof provinces and countryside, incorporating those distant lands into the modern admin-istrative apparatus of the Tanzimat state. Introducing new technologies of governmentwas simultaneously a response to the threat that these vast territories occupied by large,ethnically mixed populations might pull away from the empire.

For Ottoman authorities, this possibility was tangible not only in peripheral regions,but also in the heartland. In the early 1860s, for example, Cevdet Pasha feared that theCukurova region, then controlled by seminomadic tribal confederations, and the adjacentprovinces and districts inhabited by a sizeable population of Armenian subjects, mightacquire autonomous support of some kind. Although it is likely that Cevdet Pasha wasoverestimating the likelihood of this outcome—while no doubt seeking to legitimizethe reform division’s local activities, which were brutal by any measure—we shouldstill note how alert he was about the possibility of an autonomous Armenia, and Britishsupport for it, at such an early date.99 It is clear that, even in its early years, officialsintroduced the Ottoman gendarmerie in response to the specter of these centrifugalforces at work in the empire’s more remote lands, in addition to the need for routinerural policing.

Early reactions to the Tanzimat in the Balkans mostly took the form of peasant protestsand insurgencies that lacked claims to nationality. During the final quarter of the century,however, things changed as Bulgarian and Armenian nationalisms built up momentumin the Balkans and eastern Anatolia.100 After the Russian–Ottoman war of 1877–78, thegendarmerie became further intertwined with social and political conflicts not only inthe Balkans, but also in the eastern provinces.

Likewise, we cannot isolate the history of the gendarmerie from the massive mi-grations into the empire after 1877–78 as immigrants settled in eastern provinces andserved in the corps in various, mostly insecure parts of the empire. Commercializationof the economy in the eastern provinces, disputes over land and resources, emergenceof powerful Kurdish tribes who found themselves in struggles for land and revenue thatcaused conflict and turmoil among inhabitants of the region—all of these should befactored into the history of the Ottoman gendarmerie.

The Ottoman Empire bears some resemblance to the 19th-century Habsburg Empirein terms of ethnic mix and difficulties experienced in coaxing this mix into a uniform,imperial citizenship transcending ethnic, confessional, and national identities. As CliveEmsley has noted, Habsburg Empire gendarmes helped foster devotion to the emperor

Policing the Countryside 63

and respect for his law.101 In a similar vein, the Italian carabinieri, like their Frenchcounterparts, played a significant role in making peasants into Italians. Although theOttoman gendarmerie was not nearly as ambitious in citizenship-building efforts, thegovernment, even during the Hamidian period, favored a more unified Ottoman iden-tity. Known for its so-called Islamic dispositions, the Hamidian regime also employedvarious techniques aimed at building loyalty to the sultan and at unifying diverse localcommunities around a paternalistic and patriotic discourse.102

The employment of non-Muslims in the gendarmerie during the post-1879 period,which could be seen as an aspect of turning the Ottoman ethnic and confessional mosaicinto a unified identity, was destined to remain on paper, however. As the 19th centuryproceeded, the Ottoman gendarmerie retained its purely military character, ensuring itscentral position in the government’s struggle against forces pulling peripheral regions ofthe empire away from the center and apart from one another. In this regard the Ottomangendarmerie diverged from its counterparts in France and Germany where, during thelast third of the century, economic development and urban growth led to changes inpolicing structures along with a shift in the gendarmerie’s mission and activities. In thisperiod, particularly in Germany, the gendarmerie was used mostly for suppressing laborrevolts in industrial cities,103 and the Ottoman gendarmerie remained an apparatus forquelling peasant disturbances that, from the government’s perspective, might turn intoseparatist nationalisms.

In another sense, the Ottoman gendarmerie proved incapable of shaping a uniform,imperial Ottoman citizenship. Gendarmerie recruits bore many resemblances to regularsoldiers, among these relatively short terms of duty. Moreover, the Ottoman gendarmeriewas thin at best on the ground, and the government was far from sufficiently materiallyempowered to provide operational wages for the men on a regular basis. At first blush,the zabtiye and gendarmerie corps, consisting of around 20,000–30,000 men at anygiven point in the late 19th century, provided employment opportunities for Ottomanyouth with few or no alternatives. Yet given the government’s financial difficulties,which regularly resulted in months of delay for salaries, work in the gendarmerie, notsurprisingly, lacked appeal. Working conditions in the corps were tough, the job was notpermanent, and salaries were frequently low or paid late or not at all, all of which drovethe luckless gendarmes to protest the authorities, abandon their posts, and even makenoises of mutiny. This review indicates that further study of the living conditions andeveryday practices of the gendarmes, especially if supplemented by more informationon gendarmes’ interaction with peasants, may open the way to qualitative rethinking ofkey issues of late Ottoman history.

N O T E S

Author’s note: I am indebted to Tracy Lord for her assistance in bringing the text into standard English.I also thank five anonymous IJMES reviewers for their useful comments and suggestions. This article wassupported by the Bogazici University Research Projects Fund, through project 05HZ101.

1A word on terminology: I most often use “gendarmerie” as a generic term to indicate the provincialparamilitary police organization of the Ottoman Empire before or after the 1879 reform program. Before1879 the official name used was asakir-i zabtiye; when the zabtiye corps was reorganized in 1879, the termjandarma was adopted. However, financial difficulties slowed down the reorganization of the zaptiye regimentsinto jandarma force, leaving some zabtiye regiments intact until as late as 1906. In time, however, the new

64 Nadir Ozbek

name, jandarma, came to replace the old term zabtiye. Ahmed Cevdet Pasa, one of the leading statesmen ofthe time, used either jandarma or asakir-i zabtiye to name the new provincial policing institution, showing noapparent preference between the two terms in the late 1870s. Ahmed Cevdet Pasa, Ma»ruzat (Istanbul: CagrıYayınları, 1980), 77–79.

2Along with various journal articles cited when relevant, Clive Emsley’s book covers gendarmerie invarious countries across Europe: Clive Emsley, Gendarmes and the State in Nineteenth-Century Europe(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 1–9.

3Roderic H. Davison, Reform in the Ottoman Empire, 1856–1876 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UniversityPress, 1963). Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968).Stanford J. Shaw, Between Old and New: The Ottoman Empire under Sultan Selim III, 1789–1807 (Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971).

4Davison, Reform in the Ottoman Empire, 142–51.5For a critique of this urban bias in literature on policing institutions, see Emsley, Gendarmes and the

State.6In English there is only one study that specifically focuses on the Ottoman gendarmerie. See Glen Wilfred

Swanson, “The Ottoman Police,” in Police Forces in History (1975), 39–56.7See, for example, Eugene L. Rogan, Frontiers of the State in the Late Ottoman Empire: Transjordan,

1850–1921 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Yonca Koksal, “Coercion and Meditation: Cen-tralization and Sedentarization of Tribes in the Ottoman Empire,” Middle Eastern Studies 42 (2006): 469–91.

8See, for example, Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha’s Men: Mehmed Ali, His Army and the Making ofModern Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Mine Ener, Managing Egypt’s Poor and thePolitics of Benevolence, 1800–1952 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003); Nadir Ozbek, “ThePolitics of Welfare: Philanthropy, Voluntarism and Legitimacy in the Ottoman Empire, 1876–1914” (PhDdiss., Binghamton University, 2001).

9For more on the concept of “colonization of the countryside,” see Stephen P. Frank, Crime, CulturalConflict, and Justice in Rural Russia, 1856–1914 (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1999). Fora similar approach, see Clive Emsley, “Peasants, Gendarmes and State Formation,” in National Histories andEuropean History, ed. M. Fulbrook (London: n.p., 1993), 69–93.

10Ahmed Cevdet Pasa, Ma»ruzat, 183.11Examples of such compilations include Dervis Okcabol, Meslek Tarihi (Ankara: Polis Enstitusu, 1939);

Hikmet Tongur, Turkiye’de Genel Kolluk Teskili ve Gorevlerinin Gelisimi (Ankara: T. C. Icisleri BakanlıgıEmniyet Genel Mudurlugu Yayınları, 1946); and Halim Alyot, Turkiye’de Zabıta: Tarihi Gelisim ve BugunkuDurum (Ankara: Icisleri Bakanlıgı Yayınları, 1947).

12Noemi Levy, “L’ordre dans la ville: Istanbul a l’epoque d’Abdulhamid II” (Memoire de DEA, EHESS,2005); Hasan Sen, “The Transformation of the Politics of Punishment and the Birth of Prison in the OttomanEmpire (1845–1910)” (master’s thesis, Bogazici University, 2005); Ferdan Ergut, “State and Social Control:The Police in the Late Ottoman Empire and the Early Republican Turkey, 1839–1939” (PhD diss., New Schoolfor Social Research, 2000); Cengiz Kırlı, “The Struggle over Space: Coffeehouses of Ottoman Istanbul, 1780–1845” (PhD diss., Binghamton University, 2001).

13Emsley, Gendarmes and the State, 208.14Ibid., 206.15Ibid., 239. Emsley, “Peasants, Gendarmes and State Formation,” 69–70.16For more on the Habsburg gendarmerie, see Clive Emsley and Sabine Phillips, “The Habsburg Gen-

darmerie: A Research Agenda,” German History 17 (1999): 241–50, 241.17Musa Cadırcı, “Ankara Sancagında Nizam-ı Cedid Ortasının Teskili ve ‘Nizam-ı Cedid Askeri Kanun-

namesi,’” Belleten 36 (1972): 1–13; Musa Cadırcı, “Redif Askeri Teskilatı,” in Yedinci Askeri Tarih SemineriBildiriler I (Ankara: n.p., 2000), 47–57; Musa Cadırcı, “Anadolu’da Redif Askeri Teskilatının Kurulusu,” DilTarih Cografya Fakultesi Tarih Arastırmaları Dergisi 13 (1974): 63–75.

18Emsley, Gendarmes and the State, 209. In Russia there were 4,000 men in the gendarmerie corps, ibid.,241.

19Ibid., 227.20For the number of men in the Ottoman gendarmerie, see BOA (Prime Ministry Ottoman Archives),

Y.PRK.UM (Yıldız Perakende Evrakı Umum Vilayetler Tahrirat), 31/1, 1312.CA.2 (1 November 1894);Y.PRK.DH (Yıldız Perakende Evrakı Dahiliye Nezareti Maruzat), 2/94, 29.Z.1305 (6 September 1899). For

Policing the Countryside 65

the population of the Ottoman Empire, see Kemal Karpat, “Population Movements in the Ottoman State in theNineteenth Century,” in Ottoman Population, 1830–1914, Demographic and Social Characteristics (Madison,Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 60–86.

21Emsley, Gendarmes and the State, 214.22Frank, Crime, Cultural Conflict, and Justice, 8.23Ali Sonmez, “Zaptiye Teskilatının Kurulusu ve Gelisimi” (PhD diss., Ankara University, 2005).24Ahmed Cevdet Pasa, Ma»ruzat, 77.25Ibid., 78.26Ibid., 79.27BOA, Y.PRK.UM, 31/1, 1312.CA.2 (1 November 1894).28The rules of selection—described in manuals, leaflets, and booklets—were available to prospective

recruits and recruited gendarmes. For such a booklet, see for example Huseyin Husnu, Jandarma EfradınınHidematına Rehber (Istanbul: n.p., 1326).

29Prior to the 1869 codification, the government issued various regulations in 1846, 1861, and 1864. Forthese regulations, which have not captured the attention of researchers and are not available in Dustur, seeVeli Sirin, Asakir-i Mansure-i Muhammediyye Ordusu ve Seraskerlik (Istanbul: Tarih ve Tabiat Vakfı, 2002).For the 1869–70 regulations, see “Asakir-i Zabtiye Nizamnamesi: 3 Rebiulevvel 1286/13 Haziran 1869,” inDustur Birinci Tertib, 2: 728–33. “Asakir-i Zabtiyenin Vezaif-i Askeriyyesi Hakkında Talimatname: 15 Sefer1287/17 Mayıs 1870,” in Dustur Birinci Tertib, 2: 734–40. “Asakir-i Zabtiyyenin Vazife-i MulkiyyelerineDair: 11 Rebiulevvel 1286/21 Haziran 1869,” in Dustur Birinci Tertib, 2: 740–46.

30For the 1879 and 1903 regulations, see Alyot, Turkiye’de Zabıta. A memorandum on gendarmeriereform and draft regulations may be found in BOA. Y.A.HUS (Yıldız Hususi Maruzat), 159/76, 25.L.1296(22 October 1878).

31“Asakir-i Zabtiye Nizamnamesi: 3 Rebiulevvel 1286/13 Haziran 1869.” The previous regulations of1846 and 1861 set the age limit between twenty-five and fifty. See “Asakir-i Zabtiye Teskilatının Kurulusu.”

32Alyot, Turkiye’de Zabıta, 97.33Ibid., 150.34Husnu, Jandarma Efradının Hidematına Rehber, 8.35Ibid.36BOA, A.MKT (Bab-ı Ali Evrak Odası Sadaret Evrakı Mektubi Kalemi), 225/42, 1265.11.1 (18 Septem-

ber 1849); BOA, A.MKT, 225/53, 1265.11.1 (18 September 1849); BOA, A.MKT, 225/90, 1265.11.3(20 September 1849).

37Husnu, Jandarma Efradının Hidematına Rehber, 8.38“Asakir-i Zabtiyenin Vezaif-i Askeriyyesi Hakkında Talimatname: 15 Sefer 1287/17 Mayıs 1870.”39Ebubekir Hazim Tepeyran, Hatıralar, 2nd ed. (Istanbul: Pera Yayınları, 1998), 126–34.40Alyot, Turkiye’de Zabıta, 96.41Husnu, Jandarma Efradının Hidematına Rehber, 8.42Ibid.43BOA, DH.TMIK.S (Dahiliye Nezareti Tesri-i Muamelat ve Islahat Komisyonu), 46/61, 1321.R.5 (1 July

1903); BOA, DH.TMIK.S, 60/22, 1323.S.2 (2 October 1905).44Max L. Gross, “Ottoman Rule in the Province of Damascus 1860–1909” (PhD diss., Georgetown

University, 1979), 281.45These provinces were Adana, Baghdad, Belgrade, Edirne, Iskodra, Izmit, Karahisar, Kerkuk, Cyprus,

Malatya, Mardin, and the Danube Province in Bulgaria. BOA, Y.PRK.UM, 30/60, 1312.RA.101 (11 September1894).

46For the application of this criterion in the province of Izmit in 1903, see BOA, DH.TMIK.S, 45/53,1321.S.24 (22 May 1903).

47In the late 19th-century Habsburg Empire, for example, just under a third of each gendarmerie regimentconsisted of local men. Emsley and Phillips, “The Habsburg Gendarmerie.”

48Rogan, Frontiers of the State in the Late Ottoman Empire, 67–68, 75.49Gross, “Ottoman Rule in the Province of Damascus,” 267, 80–82.50FO (Foreign Office), 424/206, no. 39, Vice-Council Heathcote to Sir N. O’Conor. Bitlis, 19 March 1904.51On one occasion, Zeki Pasa, the marshal commanding the army corps of Erzincan, refused one of his

officer’s proposals to restore order in Sasun with a troop of Circassian gendarmerie he had organized. ZekiPasa was on the scene with a large force of regular troops. By Graves’s account, things had gone from bad to

66 Nadir Ozbek

worse, culminating in a massacre of some 3,000 Armenians in the district of Talori. Sir Robert Graves, StormCentres of the Near East: Personal Memories 1879–1929 (London: Hutchinson and Company, 1975), 144.

52BOA, DH.TMIK.S, 34/103, 1319.R.27 (13 August 1904).53BOA, DH.TMIK.S, 27/45, 1317.C.16 (22 October 1899).54FO, 424/106, no. 146, Captain Stewart to Lieutenant-Colonel Wilson. Antalya, 18 February 1880.55FO, 424/106, no. 100, Report on the General Administration of the Vilayet of Kastamonu. 17 December

1879.56FO, 424/91, no. 21, Report upon the Gendarmerie and Police of Syria by Vice-Consul Jago. Damascus,

8 October 1879.57For the calculation, twenty-five work days a month is assumed.58In Istanbul a construction laborer received 8 piastres a day. It was around 7 piastres in Anatolian provinces.

Sevket Pamuk, Istanbul ve Diger Kentlerde 500 Yıllık Fiyatlar ve Ucretler, 1469–1998: 500 Years of Pricesand Wages in Istanbul and Other Cities (Ankara: Devlet Istatistik Enstitusu Yayınları, 2001).

59FO, 424/106, no. 61, Report on the Vilayet of Konya. Konya, 25 October 1879.60FO, 424/106, no. 89, Captain Cooper to Lieutenant-Colonel Wilson. Adana, 7 January 1880.61BOA, DH.TMIK.S, 30/72, 1318.R.13 (11 July 1900).62BOA, DH.TMIK.S, 33/103, 1318.Z.5 (26 March 1901).63BOA, DH.TMIK.S, 36/4, 1319.N.3 (14 December 1901).64BOA, DH.TMIK.S, 35/107, 1319.S.27 (9 December 1901).65BOA, DH.TMIK.S, 37/55, 1320.M.27 (6 May 1902).66For example, in 1906, due to the months of salary arrears, the gendarmerie battalion in Sulaymaniye

deserted the force. BOA, DH.TMIK.S, 63/8, 1324.R.11 (4 June 1906).67BOA, DH.TMIK.S, 33/22, 1318.N.7 (29 December 1900); BOA, DH.TMIK.S, 33/38, 1318.L.9

(30 January 1901).68FO, 424/106, no. 100, Report on General Administration of the Vilayet of Kastamonu. 17 December

1879.69FO, 424/106, no. 13, Report by Captain Clayton on Reforms in Van. Van, 1880.70FO 424/106, no. 270, Report on the Administration of Justice in Anatolia. C. W. Wilson, Lieutenant-

Colonel, 29 June 1880.71BOA, DH.TMIK.S, 1/64, 1314.C.11 (18 October 1896); BOA, DH.TMIK.S, 3/18, 1314.C.17 (23 Novem-

ber 1896); BOA, DH.TMIK.S, 45/28, 1321.S.14 (24 July 1896).72BOA, DH.TMIK.S, 18/70, 1315.Z.8 (30 April 1898); BOA, DH.TMIK.S, 21/58, 1316.C.29 (14 Novem-

ber 1898).73BOA, DH.TMIK.S, 38/7, 1320.S.18 (27 May 1902); BOA, DH.TMIK.S, 45/44, 1321.S.20 (18 May

1903).74BOA, DH.TMIK.S, 45/22, 1321.S.12 (10 May 1903); BOA, DH.TMIK.S, 49/1, 1321.B.16 (8 October

1903).75BOA, DH.TMIK.S, 46/43, 1321.R.26 (22 June 1903).76BOA, DH.TMIK.S, 49/1, 1321.B.16 (8 October 1903).77BOA, DH.TMIK.S, 45/45, 1321.S.20 (18 May 1903).78BOA, DH.TMIK.S, 23/63, 1316.L.16 (27 February 1899). Of the numerous salary cuts that affected

the civil bureaucracy in this period, that of 1897 was the most general. See Carter Findley, Ottoman CivilOfficialdom: A Social History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 300.

79BOA, DH.TMIK.S, 39/32, 1320.R.25 (1 August 1902).80BOA, DH.TMIK.S, 40/33, 1320.S.17 (19 November 1902).81BOA, DH.TMIK.S, 23/75, 1316.L.22 (5 March 1899).82BOA, DH.TMIK.S, 23/68, 1316.L.19 (2 March 1899).83BOA, DH.TMIK.S, 36/22, 1319.L.16 (26 January 1902); BOA, DH.TMIK.S, 36/62, 1319.Za.24 (4

March 1902).84Carter Findley, “The Acid Test of Ottomanism: The Acceptance of Non-Muslims in the Late Ottoman

Bureaucracy,” in Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society, Volume 1:The Central Lands, ed. Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis (1982), 339–68; Ufuk Gulsoy, Osmanlı GayriMuslimlerinin Askerlik Seruveni (Istanbul: Simurg, 2000). For a study focusing on Armenian participation inpublic administration, see Mesrob K. Krikorian, Armenians in the Service of the Ottoman Empire: 1860–1908(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977).

Policing the Countryside 67

85Ahmed Cevdet Pasa, Ma»ruzat, 185.86For a brief summary, see Krikorian, Armenians in the Service of the Ottoman Empire, 5–11. For a

more detailed account, see Musa Sasmaz, British Policy and the Application of Reforms for the Armeniansin Eastern Anatolia (Ankara: Turk Tarih Kurumu, 2000); Ali Karaca, Anadolu Islahatı ve Ahmet Sakir Pasa(1838–1899) (Istanbul: Eren Yayıncılık, 1993).

87BOA, Y.PRK.UM, Yıldız Perakende Umum Vilayetler Tahriratı, 31/1, 1312.CA.2 (1 November 1894).88FO, 424/91, no. 171, Lieutenant Chermside to Sir A.H. Layard. Tarsus, 26 November 1879.89FO, 424/106, no. 86, Vice-Consul Jago to Sir A. H. Layard. Damascus, 10 February 1880.90From 1908 to 1914 Armenian intelligentsia of Sivas and Harput subscribed to an Ottomanist patriotism

and tried to encourage local Armenians to serve in the Ottoman military. See Ohannes Kılıcdagı, “TheBourgeois Transformation and Ottomanism among Anatolian Armenians after the 1908 Revolution” (master’sthesis, Bogazici University, 2005).

91BOA, DH.TMIK.S, 9/38, 1314.Z.18 (20 May 1897); BOA, DH.TMIK.S, 4/8, 1314.B.3 (8 December1896); BOA, DH.TMIK.S, 10/90, 1315.M.14 (15 June 1897).

92BOA, DH.TMIK.S, 7/35, 1314.N.23 (25 February 1897).93BOA, DH.TMIK.S, 12/33, 1315.S.24 (25 July 1897).94BOA, DH.TMIK.S, 24/2, 1316.Z.4 (16 March 1899).95BOA, DH.TMIK.S, 24/75, 1316.Z.20 (1 May 1899).96Sami Onal, Sadettin Pasa»nın Anıları: Ermeni-Kurt Olayları (Van, 1896), 2nd ed. (Istanbul: Remzi

Kitabevi, 2004), 104.97BOA, Y.PRK.AZJ (Yıldız Perakende Arzuhal ve Jurnaller), 31/105, 9.Za.1312 (4 May 1895).98Janet Klein, “Power in the Periphery: The Hamidiye Light Cavalry and the Struggle Over Ottoman

Kurdistan, 1890–1914” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2002). For the Hamidiye, see also Selim Deringil,“The Ottoman Twilight Zone of the Middle East,” in Reluctant Neighbor, Turkey’s Role in the Middle East,ed. Henri J. Barkey (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Institute of Peace Press, 1996), 13–23.

99Ahmed Cevdet Pasa, Ma»ruzat, 123.100Even during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, peasant protests were far from being articulated claims

to nationality. In these provinces of the empire, government practices such as modern population registrationand census counting were key to the formation of national identities. See Ipek K. Yosmaoglu, “CountingBodies, Shaping Souls: The 1903 Census and National Identity in Ottoman Macedonia,” International Journalof Middle East Studies 38 (2006): 55–77.

101Emsley, Gendarmes and the State, 234–35.102Nadir Ozbek, “Philanthropic Activity, Ottoman Patriotism and the Hamidian Regime, 1876–1909,”

International Journal of Middle East Studies 37 (2005): 59–81.103Emsley, Gendarmes and the State, 220–22.