"Bedouin Bureaucrats: Mobility and Property in the Ottoman Empire"– A Session of the Eurasian Empires Workshop

The Stanford Humanies Center and History Department  present:

Nora Barakat (Stanford) in conversation with Dr. Ussama Makdisi ( UCBerkeley) on her Book: Bedouin Bureaucrats: Mobility and Property in the Ottoman Empire as a session of the Eurasian Empires Workshop.

Nora Elizabeth Barakat is Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University.  Her research focuses on the legal, social and economic history of the Arabic-speaking regions of the late Ottoman Empire, the Modern Middle East and the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean worlds.  Her first book, Bedouin Bureaucrats: Mobility and Property in the Ottoman Empire, came out with Stanford University Press in 2023.  Nora’s current book project explores the intersections between the history of capitalism and late Ottoman civil law and their twentieth-century legacies from the Eastern Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf.Prof. 

Dr. Ussama Makdisi is Professor of History and Chancellor’s Chair at the University of California Berkeley. He was previously Professor of History and the first holder of the Arab-American Educational Foundation Chair of Arab Studies at Rice University in Houston.  During AY 2019-2020, Professor Makdisi was a Visiting Professor at the University of California at Berkeley in the Department of History. In 2012-2013, Makdisi was an invited Resident Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin).  In April 2009, the Carnegie Corporation named Makdisi a 2009 Carnegie Scholar as part of its effort to promote original scholarship regarding Muslim societies and communities, both in the United States and abroad.  Makdisi was awarded the Berlin Prize and spent the Spring 2018 semester as a Fellow at the American Academy of Berlin.

The Eurasian Empires explores the connected and comparative history of empires from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. The workshop combines histories of global and regional imperial formations including the Russian, Ottoman, Safavid/Qajar, Uzbek, Mughal, Chinese, Dutch, Portuguese, British, French and Spanish empires. In the 2023-24 academic year, the Eurasian Empires workshop will engage with studies in economic and social history under the overarching theme of “Empire, Capital and Space” including sub-themes of agrarian space, urban space, and oceanic space. 

Bedouin Bureaucrats examines how tent-dwelling, seasonally migrating Bedouin engaged in processes of Ottoman state transformation on local, imperial, and global scales. Narrating the lives of Bedouin individuals involved in Ottoman administration, Nora Elizabeth Barakat brings this population to the center of modern state-making. For this workshop, we will discuss Chapter 4 of the book, which reveals the contradictions and crises that defined standardized bureaucracy from its inception. Bedouin resisted Ottoman land policies that defined the interior landscape as "empty" and aimed to reallocate interior lands to refugees and capitalists in the 1890s and 1900s. The social and political influence Bedouin bureaucrats had built through their involvement in land and tax administrations helped them navigate violent conflicts over land and the subsequent imprisonment of Bedouin men, complicating the imperial regime's efforts to create a state effect through standardized administration. Chapter 4 also details the creation of a new Ottoman category of "state domain" as land under exclusive state ownership in a competitive environment of individuated holdings. In this environment, Bedouin continued to trade in state domain land using historical forms of written contract, creating a noncompliant and unofficial market that persisted into the twenty-first century. The chapter will be pre-circulated to those who register for the workshop. You can register for the Eurasian Empires Workshop on this link.