[This is a review published by the Arab Studies Journal Spring 2024 issue, which is now available for purchase. Click here to subscribe to Arab Studies Journal.]

Historians of the late Ottoman Empire have long contended that Bedouin were opposed to standardized administrative state-making or victims of increasingly colonial forms of governance in eastern Anatolia and Arabic-speaking provinces. In her groundbreaking new book, Bedouin Bureaucrats: Mobility and Property in the Ottoman Empire, Nora Barakat turns this conventional wisdom on its head and shows how tent-dwelling, seasonally migrating people actively participated in Ottoman state transformation, reform of property regimes, and capitalist development. Instead of finding a history of intractable differences, Barakat traces how Bedouin contributed to Ottoman state-making and carved out local power that allowed them to protect communal interests. By registering land, aiding in taxation, participating in legal proceedings, and mediating between the central government and their communities, local headmen and middling administrators contributed to making the Syrian interior more legible and productive. Although they did not fit into official schemes of government administration, they were in effect what Barakat terms “Bedouin bureaucrats”: active participants in Ottoman governance and often the face of imperial administration.

Moving between the local and imperial, the book skillfully explores how Ottoman imperatives to retain and expand sovereignty translated into projects to develop and cultivate land in the Syrian interior. Barakat shows how the Ottomans “joined other imperial polities in attempting to fill landscapes they defined as legally empty, closely managing land and its human inhabitants and incorporating both into territorially bounded grids of administrative law” (4). These changes were connected to global financial crises in the 1870s and movements toward enclosure. Specifically, Barakat argues that attempts to preserve and expand sovereignty led to two major developments. First was the project of making “state space,” a term she draws on to describe “the landscape within a territorially conceived and hierarchical administrative and judicial apparatus and a theoretically uniform and bounded grid of property relations” (4). Second was a shift from layered forms of sovereignty toward a “nationalizing empire,” where “lawmakers and officials attempted to integrate formerly lightly governed landscapes and their inhabitants into a more cohesive, standardized, and ultimately . . . national territorial landscape” (5). Bedouin bureaucrats were integral to both projects.

The book centers the political economy of the region and draws on Arabic and Ottoman Turkish sources, including chronicles, shari‘a court records, land registers, and imperial records. Barakat begins by introducing readers to the Syrian interior and members of the Wiraykat family of the Adwan Bedouin who traveled to Salt (in today’s Jordan) to register rights to land they cultivated during the summer. Later in the study, Barakat follows the family into the twentieth century and examines how land they registered in 1879 served as collateral for loans and other commercial transactions. It is just one of many accounts that upend how we understand relationships between tent-dwelling nomads and the Ottoman state in the eastern Mediterranean. 

The first two chapters provide a history of long-standing relationships between the Ottoman state and Bedouin communities, challenging the idea that the region was a tribal frontier prior to nineteenth-century reforms. Chapter 1, “Beyond the Tribal Frontier,” reconstructs relations between the central government and Bedouin communities that provided security for overland trade and pilgrimage routes between Damascus and Mecca. This chapter is one of several that take up questions of shifting and layered sovereignty. Barakat shows how the Bani Sakhr enjoyed administrative control in the eighteenth century, while being in a “geographically amorphous Ottoman ‘sphere of submission’” (27). Their position in pilgrimage administration and dense networks allowed them to acquire political capital they would later mobilize to resist more direct state intervention. In chapter 2, “Commercial Capital in the Syrian Interior,” Barakat explores how the global wheat boom prompted camel-herding communities to pursue agriculture. As Bedouin leaders established a regional land market and generated extensive wealth, Ottoman modernizers sought to usurp their administrative sovereignty and integrate these frontiers more fully into state space.

The next two chapters investigate political renegotiations between the central government and Bedouin, as well as projects of mapping “tribes” and land. Through meticulous research in court and land records, chapter 3, “Producing Tribes and Property,” considers the interconnected projects of making standardized state space and administrative categories, and the role of Bedouin in each. Chapter 4, “Bureaucracy in Crisis,” illustrates how Bedouin bureaucrats became more directly involved in trade and local politics and used their social and political influence to resist state encroachment. When the central government defined their lands as “empty”—often a first step toward settling Circassian and Chechen refugees—Bedouin bureaucrats were able to defend community rights. Their power derived from both older forms of political and social capital and the networks they built through tax collection and legal proceedings. Bedouin also resisted the state’s claims to the exclusive right to allocate and register land by creating an unofficial land market. We see in the conclusion to the study how these administrative categories continue to inform politics in Jordan and Palestine/Israel. 

Chapter 5, “Taxation, Property, and Citizenship,” traces how Bedouin became politically active and were reimagined as potentially loyal Ottomans (similar to Muslim refugees). In addition to highlighting the importance of property ownership and administration to preserving and extending Ottoman sovereignty, Barakat documents how state fears of non-Muslim property ownership in frontier regions created space for Bedouin to acquire power through land sales. While Bedouin bureaucrats did not have seats at the proverbial table in provincial politics, they were nevertheless crucial to the exercise of Ottoman power. The chapter offers a compelling new way to understand political participation in settings that Ottomanists have long ignored. It also intervenes in debates about subjecthood and citizenship that have centered on questions of nationality and extraterritoriality or elite provincial politics. The “right to participate in the practices of self-governance,” Barakat argues, was one way that “the question of political rights went beyond and preceded constitutional politics to encompass the representative governing councils created by the Tanzimat, which became extremely powerful during the Hamidian period, especially in the realm of property relations” (207). By demonstrating their active engagement with property regimes and local government, Barakat shows that Bedouin bureaucrats were part of a political domain extending beyond local notables and merchant elites. 

By situating the study in a framework that encompasses Imperial Russia and the United States, Barakat also contributes to deexceptionalizing the Ottoman Empire. The choice of these two polities is predicated on their being expanding contiguous empires and “imperial nation-states,” where “law-makers and officials attempted to integrate formerly lightly governed landscapes and their inhabitants into a more cohesive, standardized, and ultimately, if highly contested, national territorial landscape” (5). This is a productive approach, and Barakat is careful to tease out what was unique about the Ottomans in their increasingly aggressive developmentalist schemes and approaches toward governing frontiers. She shows, for example, how unlike Kazakh nomads or Native Americans, Bedouin bureaucrats preserved control of most of their lands, maintained seasonal mobility, increased legal connections to the interior, and assumed administrative roles. A determining factor in their ability to do so was the absence of a “middle ground” between distinct legal traditions (114–15). Unlike in Russia or the United States, Barakat argues that nomadic communities and the Ottoman central government shared a specifically Islamic legal lexicon governing commercial and legal affairs, which temporally predated the Ottoman polity and geographically spanned the Indian Ocean world. Barakat’s findings suggest that this religious framework mediated relationships among centrally appointed reformers and government officials and the local bureaucrats they relied on to defend imperial sovereignty—particularly against non-Muslim powers and their protégés. It is not clear, however, if this was the case in other provinces or if the region and communities examined in the study were exceptional. 

Barakat’s global approach to mobility, property, and sovereignty also informs the legacy of Bedouin bureaucrats’ political participation and the extent to which the Ottomans were a colonial power. Barakat traces how the category of “the nomadic tribe” informed British and French rule and how colonial regimes opted to label land in contested regions as “empty” and under state domain. Despite these continuities, Barakat identifies a rupture in how European powers created separate legal regimes for Bedouin and moved from integration toward displacement and more extractive metropole-colony relationships. From the vantage point of the interwar mandate era, she distinguishes Ottoman imperialism from European colonialism and contends that the historiographical focus on Ottoman Orientalism obscures the integrative nature of Ottoman rule in the Syrian interior. Here, the reader is left wondering if Barakat might have extended her emphasis on the “deeply uneven processes of modern state formation” (272) to the similarly uneven nature of Ottoman colonialism and unrealized aspirations versus outcomes in the project of making state space.

Bedouin Bureaucrats succeeds in changing how we see Bedouin communities’ role in state transformation and their role as citizens of the empire. It is an erudite contribution to understanding connections between sovereignty, property, and legal reform well beyond the Ottoman context. Barakat seamlessly weaves the stories of the mobile men at the heart of the book into narratives of imperial and global change. Instead of the visions of all-too-familiar reformers and provincial governors for an “orderly village-based and settled countryside” (103), she provides a fuller picture of how tent-dwelling nomads and seasonally migrating people negotiated relationships with and were part of the making of Ottoman state space. The book is suitable for upper-level seminars and graduate courses and will be of interest to scholars of late Ottoman history, the modern Middle East, political economy, and comparative empires. It is necessary reading for anyone interested in the local and global forces that have shaped property rights, political participation, and governance in the modern Middle East.