Before Hashemite Rule: Ottoman Order and Local Order in Southeastern Syria

Abstract

The Ottoman Empire, in common with the other “gunpowder empires” that dominated Western Asia in the early modern period,¹ straddled two social formations, each grounded in a different ecology and economy. In the Arab East, there was on the one hand the urban civilization and settled life of the “tributary” core—a society of bureaucrats, notables, and ulema, buttressed by reservoirs of peasant agriculture in Egypt, the Levant, and Mesopotamia—woven together by the annual progression of the Meccan pilgrimage and the arteries of trade.² On the rural periphery of the empire, and outside the compass of the urban elite, lay an apparently anarchic, tribal world made familiar by the writings of Ibn Khaldun.³ The aridity of the climate made for a high ratio of armed tribesmen, particularly mobile pastoralists, to taxable peasants and reduced the agricultural surplus amenable to taxation or rent.⁴ Together with the limits imposed by pre-modern logistics on the “infrastructural power” of the state, this led to an escalation in the costs of central control and a forbidding environment for even the most predatory tax collector or despot.⁵