This article is part of a larger project that focuses on “the way in which the specific problems of life and population were raised within a technology of government.”^[1] The broader framework focuses on the local articulations of the nineteenth-century Ottoman transformation, particularly following a number of administrative reforms after the mid-century. These reforms came at the climax of a transformation that began in the previous century and through which the Ottoman modern state was formed.^[2] This was not merely a transformation of the imperial structure; rather, the entire Ottoman social formation gradually became a “liberal-capitalist” one.^[3] The particular population I am studying is the inhabitants of the Vidin county, or Vidiners as I may refer to them. Analyzing the administrative reforms and the functioning of the institutions created by them at the local level of the county of Vidin, I argue that in the late-nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, we see the emergence of what I refer to as a “judicio-administrative sphere” at the local level. This sphere operated as a domain of negotiation within “Ottoman governmentality,” where local agents utilized the institutional framework of “politics of administration.”^[4]
I should note here that the primary concern of this article is not to define what “Ottoman governmentality” is, as much as to focus on the structure and the procedures of particular institutions in order to emphasize the connectedness of the judiciary and administrative spheres of provincial administration. With “governmentality” I refer to Foucault’s first definition (out of the three interrelated ones) of the term as “the ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target population, as its principal form of knowledge political economy, and as its essential technical means apparatuses of security.”^[5] A proper discussion of this ensemble in the Ottoman context would require a much broader investigation into how the Ottomans constituted and controlled an “Ottoman population” at different times and places.^[6] It would be naïve to presume that the composition of this ensemble was homogenous temporally, spatially or among different groups within Ottoman social formation. That is, I do not wish to argue that there was a homogenous “thing” called “Ottoman governmentality.” The ensemble that I am referring to here is defined perhaps best as a platform for “hegemonic processes”^[7] revolving around the exercise of “a very specific albeit complex form of power,” including, but not limited to, “bio-power.”^[8]
Just as it is not possible to explain the full complexity of Ottoman governmentality – a heterogeneous ensemble – within the confines of this article, a full articulation of “power relations” within the Ottoman Empire is not achievable here. However, because much of this discussion depends on a peculiar understanding of an ever-present “power” – which is not established on a “massive and primal condition of domination, a binary structure with ‘dominators’ on one side and ‘dominated’ on the other” – a brief discussion is necessary.
On the omnipresence of power relations, Foucault noted:

“It seems to me that power is “always already there”, that one is never “outside” it, that there are no “margins” for those who break with the system to gambol in. But this does not entail the necessity of accepting an inescapable form of domination or an absolute privilege on the side of the law. To say that one can never be “outside” power does not mean that one is trapped and condemned to defeat no matter what.
I would suggest rather (but these are hypotheses which will need exploring): (i) that power is co-extensive with the social body; …(ii) that relations of power are interwoven with other kinds of relations (production, kinship, family, sexuality)…; (iii) that these relations don’t take the sole form of prohibition and punishment,…; (iv) that their interconnections delineate general conditions of domination, and this domination is organized into a more-or-less coherent and unitary strategic form; that dispersed, heteromorphous, localized procedures of power are adapted, re-enforced and transformed by these global strategies, all this being accompanied by numerous phenomena of inertia, displacement and resistance; …(v) that power relations do indeed “serve”, but not at all because they are “in the service of” an economic interest taken as primary, rather because they are capable of being utilized in strategies; (vi) that there are no relations of power without resistances; the latter are all the more real and effective because they are formed right at the point where relations of power are exercised; resistance to power does not have to come from elsewhere to be real, nor is it inexorably frustrated through being the compatriot of power. It exists all the more by being in the same place as power; hence, like power, resistance is multiple and can be integrated in global strategies.”^[9]

The omnipresent and heteromorphous power, described as such, allow us to see the bureaucratic transformation of the Ottoman Empire in a different light than the conventional historiography on the Empire. Milen Petrov aptly points out that “historical accounts of the Ottoman Tanzimat period in general and of nineteenth-century Ottoman Bulgaria in particular follow one of two mutually exclusive paradigms.” The first one, which he calls the “doom and gloom paradigm,” emphasizes the incompatibility of the Empire with the “modern” era. On the other hand, in the second one, Ottoman institutions and practices often represent “a golden age of inter-ethnic and inter-confessional harmony and a healthy, hands-off approach to local self-government that has been proven superior to any subsequent alternatives.”^[10] In both scenarios, members of “society” have little to no agency in dealing with a “state” that is destined to a downward spiral, with its bureaucrats and institutions, into the abyss of the modern age. I would argue that the transformative power in nineteenth-century Ottoman Vidin was not limited to a state that sought to modernize a reluctant society through prohibition and punishment. The Vidiners were not a homogeneous and passive community on the receiving end of the transformative power of state officials and institutions. Investigating the provincial administrative structure can provide us insight about their power potential.
Modern-day Vidin is a city located in the northwest corner of Bulgaria, where the borders of Romania and Serbia meet along the Danube. Under Ottoman rule this city, conveniently located on the Danube, typically served as a center for a larger administrative unit expanding further south and east into, what is today, Bulgaria. This study focuses on the structure and functions of two councils that administered this larger administrative unit, the county of Vidin, bordered with the Iskar River to the east, the Stara Planina mountain range to the south and west and the Danube River to the North. In connection with a provincial regulation issued in 1864, the boundaries of Vidin County were redesigned to include the districts ‛Adliye (modern-day Kula), Belgradcık (Belogradchik), Berkofça (Berkovitsa), İvraca (Vratsa), Rahova (Oriahaovo), and Lom (Lom). Fertile soil, moderate climate, temperatures and precipitation, made these lands suitable for agricultural production, mostly cereal and fodder crops, vegetables, fruit and grapes. An Ottoman survey published in 1873 indicates that 81% of the population lived in rural areas.^[11]
The County was predominantly non-Muslim in the 1860s and 70s – with a Muslim population below 20%. This fits with what Petrov identifies as the general character of the western counties of the Danube province.^[12] The demographic composition was reversed in the town of Vidin – fourth largest town in the province – where, a survey of 1866 reported 51.6% of the population as Muslim, 34.1% as Bulgarian, 6.2% as Roma and 8.2% as Jewish.^[13] Overall, the Danube Province and the Vidin County, as part of this province, were regions where diverse ethnic groups lived together and interacted with each other both at the urban and rural levels. “Even historians espousing the… view… that the multi-ethnic and multi-religious urban environment in the province may have served to reinforce, not suppress, separate ethnic identities[,] have been forced to admit that these identities were not “exclusive” or incompatible with a sense of belonging to a wider Ottoman society.”^[14]
I chose 1864 as the beginning period because the particular institutions analyzed in this work – the county administrative and judiciary councils – were founded by the provincial regulation of 1864 and remained active until the Ottoman rule in Vidin County de facto ended in 1878. The provincial councils related to the Ottoman Empire’s institutional transformation during the long nineteenth century (1789-1922) in two significant – and interrelated – ways. First, they provided an essential framework to which different financial and scribal units of the new administrative model could be linked. These subdivisions included lower level administrative councils – such as the municipal council (meclis-i daire-i belediye) – survey offices – such as the land office (arazi kalemi) – and financial institutions – such as agricultural credit funds (menafi‘-i ‛umumiye sandığı) or orphans’ funds (emval-ı eytam sandığı). The latter two offices, were essential in relating administering of a population with economy.^[15] They also contributed to the definition of a broader framework, in which the state was not the only prevailing force in a binary relationship between “the dominators” and “the dominated,” but different agents utilized these institutions for their own ends.^[16]
Agricultural Credit Funds were established by Midhat Paşa during his tenure as the governor of the Danube Province in 1863 to extend credits to farmers in need.^[17] At the end of 1867, the total accumulation of the Agricultural Credit Fund in the Danube Province was 20 million kuruş, (the equivalent of ₤178,571.4).^[18] This corresponded to approximately ten percent of the total amount that the Ottoman state collected in taxes and fees from this province in the solar financial (Rumi) year of 1283 (13 March, 1867-13 March, 1868), and to roughly a quarter of the tithe from the agricultural produce in that year according to the annual yearbook of the province.^[19] While the rapid increase in the amount collected might be partially related to the economic upswing in Bulgarian agriculture in the 1860s,^[20] the success of the Agricultural Credit Fund in the Danube Province led to its spread throughout the empire.^[21] The agricultural credit funds were “not only a first attempt to organize agricultural credit in the Ottoman Empire but also one of the first such attempts in Europe.”^[22] These funds were precedents of the Agricultural Bank (Zira‘at Bankası) established in 1888.
Arguably another Ottoman attempt to institutionalize banking was the establishment of Orphans’ Funds to “hold safe” the money bequeathed to juvenile orphans until they would come of age. The local Funds were provincial extensions of the imperial Authority for the Supervision of Orphans’ Properties (Emval-ı Eytam Nezareti). The Hanafi tradition holds that an orphan “who has not yet reached puberty but who is clearly of rational judgment, may, if his guardian so authorizes him, enter into commercial transactions.”^[23] This tradition gave significant advantage to the guardians, most likely the relatives of the orphans; and thus, limited the availability of the inheritance money to other potential debtors. When the first yearbook of the Danube Province (Salname-i Vilayet-i Tuna, vol. 1.) was published in 1868, the Orphans’ Funds (together with the Agricultural Credit Funds) were listed as components of the provincial administrative structure. They served as banks, into which the inheritance monies of the orphans and other physically and mentally-challenged persons would be deposited and lent to borrowers at a certain interest rate, until the guardianship over the orphan’s assets ceased.^[24] According to the provincial yearbooks, the sum accumulated in the Orphan Funds at Vidin increased from 1,406,358 guruş (£12,557) in 1868 to 2,298,400 guruş (£20,521) in 1876 – and only 35% of this amount was physically present; the rest was loaned out to ind ividuals.
The second way the new provincial councils helped with the Ottoman Empire’s institutional transformation was by disseminating the “textually mediated organization,” in conjunction with the growth of “a public sphere of state administration.”^[25] The councils not only included provincial notables as members, but also served as primary offices which the local populace frequented with their petitions. With frequent elections and a significant number of hierarchically-ordered official staff, they performed as a representation of the Ottoman State at the local level with the essential task of mediating between the imperial state and local communities. Vidiners serving in these councils or submitting complaint letters and requests to the councils, were agreeing to identify themselves as “individuals,” that is, as part of a “social entity” defined in relation to the modern Ottoman state.^[26] In doing so, these councils contributed to the prevalence of a common language of administration across different groups.^[27] Furthermore, with their processes and procedures, these councils served as an apparatus for a “marginalistic integration of individuals in the state’s utility.”^[28] The presence of the council as an institution that organized and classified people and their possessions according to their potential benefit or harm to the state also forced the people to use similar terms in defining themselves and others in their communications with the councils.
Overall, these councils constituted a significant component of “a single government of state officials and local elites”^[29] and in what follows, I will delineate the provincial structure of such a government. A brief discussion of how these councils relate to Ottoman governmentality is followed by a summary of the structure of these councils and their tasks. Understanding the representation of these institutions in the official print will help us assess the position of these councils in the “textually-mediated organization of the state” in the nineteenth century Ottoman Empire. A discussion and analysis of the election procedures to these councils will explicate how the administrative framework in this particular context allowed a “singular government of state officials and local elites” to operate.

COUNCILS AND OTTOMAN GOVERNMENTALITY

Studies on the structure and the functioning of these councils at the local level have so far been limited.^[30] Establishment of these councils has often been considered a significant component of the Tanzimat reforms, and they have been often framed within that context: provincial extensions of the modern Ottoman state with a foreign-influenced, ambitious, yet underfunded reform policy.^[31] Including local notables as members, these councils were supposedly designed to increase local participation to the Ottoman reforms and to ease their application at the local level.^[32] Certain scholars argue that this was an inevitable consequence of an underfunded and weak imperial bureaucracy during the nineteenth century reforms of the Ottoman Empire.^[33] I would like to distance myself from these perspectives on two levels: first, I believe perceiving the nineteenth century transformation of the Ottoman Empire in terms of a “state vs. society” polarity is not entirely useful for understanding aspects of this transformation at the local level; second, and in relation to the first one, the new institutions were not simply “imposed” by the agents of the empire on opposing local populace in the provinces. In reading the local documents from the Vidin County, what I find indicates that the boundary between state and society is not always clear and that not only imperial designs do not always work at the local level, but also the empire seems to be aware and accepting of that.
I would argue that the county administrative council and the council of appeals and crime in Vidin, with their associated subordinate offices, appointed and elected personnel and institutionalized practices and procedures, can be seen as functional components of Ottoman governmentality – as the ensemble that allowed a complex form of power to exist. In that sense, the councils cannot be considered as the tool of the Ottoman state or Vidiners alone. They were not just the provincial expansion of the Tanzimat state, nor did they serve solely as a platform for social resistance to the reforms alone. They served as domains for a variety of politics – politics of ethnicity, confession, class and the like. Seeing this transformation process in a “state vs. society” binary presumes that the modern state, as one of the institutional configurations of modernity, evolved in the Ottoman context despite a society resilient to change. Available provincial documents suggest first, that certain Vidiners were influential members of these councils; and second, that several different agents used the practices and procedures of the council to devise their own “strategies.”

THE COMPOSITION AND FUNCTIONS OF THE COUNCILS

The local councils were not unprecedented prior to the 1864 provincial regulation. Tax collection councils (muhasıllık meclisi), established two decades prior to the administrative councils, are often considered predecessors to the latter.^[34] Yet, administrative councils and councils of appeals and crime were more sophisticated than their predecessors in terms of the organization of their subdivisions; and how they commanded the judicio-administrative sphere in provincial administration. The tax collection councils did control the administrative sphere to a certain extent, but they had very limited power over the judicial sphere.
The 1864 regulation explained the administrative council’s responsibilities as follows:

“The administrative council will be in charge of implementing matters pertaining to civil and financial affairs, police, revenue-collection, public works, property transfer, and agriculture, and will not interfere with legal affairs.”^[35]

Within this framework, responsibilities of the administrative council included tax collection, the funding and maintenance of public buildings, roads and bridges; investigating and arbitrating real property disputes that involved communally or state-owned pasturelands; supervising the management of state-owned mines, forests, customs and monopolies, appointment of state employees in counties, districts and villages and investigating claims of improper conduct; authenticating religious conversions, overseeing the distribution of payments for state bonds and retirement pensions and so on and so forth. In addition to these, explaining the imperial reform policies to public, to oversee their application and to hear and report complaints from the local inhabitants were among the duties of the administrative council.
Article 37, defined the judge (hakim) as the judicial authority on the secular and shar‘i courts, and article 40 defined the council of appeals and crime as a “secular” institution:

“This council of appeals is charged with the investigation, hearing, and supervising of suits that can be separated and identified as legal (kanuni) and regulatory (nizami) cases apart from [the following]: first, the particular cases that pertain to Muslims and thus need to be heard in Shar‘i courts and likewise cases that pertain to non-Muslims and are heard in their spiritual administrations; and second, issues that relate only to commercial affairs and are heard at the council of commerce.”^[36]

At the county level, both councils were composed of appointed and “elected” members. The county administrative councils, as defined in the 1864 regulation, were chaired by the sub-governors of the counties (mutasarrıf-ı liva).^[37] The appointed members were the judge of the shar‘i court (hakim al-şer‘), the religious leader(s) of the region (müftü-i belde for the Muslims and re’is-i ruhani for the non-Muslims), the accountant (muhasebeci), and the director of correspondence (müdür-i tahrirat). Complementing these appointed members were an equal number of “elected” ones (a‘za): two Muslims and two non-Muslims. The council of appeals and crime, on the other hand, was chaired by the judge of the shar‘i court and had six “elected” members.
A month prior to the 1864 regulation, in October 13, a commission under the leadership of the famous nineteenth-century Ottoman bureaucrat Midhat Paşa authored a special Regulation for the Danube Province, which was almost identical to and served as the prototype for the empire-wide regulation.^[38] The only significant difference between the prototype and the empire-wide reforms had to do with the number of elected members in the administrative council: While the number of the appointed members remained the same, that of the “elected” members declined. In the earlier regulation there were six “elected” members – three Muslims and three non-Muslims – as opposed to four in the empire-wide regulation. The elected members, who might be more likely to represent local interests in instances where imperial policies contradicted with them, constituted the majority in the prototypical body.^[39] The regulation of 1864 eliminated this advantage by reducing their number to four. Typically, majority ruled in these councils; therefore, this play in numbers significantly challenged the power potential of the elected members in the decision-making process as against the appointed members representing the Ottoman state.^[40]

THE PRESENTATION OF THE COUNCILS AND THEIR ASSOCIATED OFFICES IN PRINT

A number of lower-rank offices and commissions – several of which were created in the course of the general reforms in the long-nineteenth century – were connected to the judicio-administrative core represented by these two councils. I will use the way these subdivisions and affiliated offices were organized on the pages of the Danube Province’s yearbooks (salnames) – that began to be published only four years after the province was founded – to explain the structure of provincial administration at the county level to emphasize the difference of the new councils from the earlier tax collection councils. I will limit my focus only to the pages with information regarding the offices in the county.
From 1868 to 1877, ten provincial yearbooks were published by the government’s printing house in Ruse. While there is little information on the price of the earlier volumes, the price of the 1871 (1288) Danube provincial yearbook was 8 kuruş.^[41] The first imperial yearbooks were published in 1866. These yearbooks were sold at six kuruş per volume initially; eventually their price was reduced to five kuruş.^[42] With one kuruş in the Istanbul wholesale market of 1851, one could buy approximately 4 pounds of soft wheat – the kind used for making bread.^[43] Apparently, the yearbook, with the wealth of information included in it, was not extremely expensive for those who wanted to have a reference copy. The price cut and the continuous publication of these yearbooks are indicative of the Ottoman State’s intention to publicize such information.^[44]
In 1866, almost two decades after the first imperial yearbook, the first provincial yearbook came out. This first volume covered Bosnia Province. Two years later, Danube Province followed suit with a yearbook published in its capital, Ruse. The preface to this yearbook apologizing for possible errors in a work that the local government struggled to do perfectly, emphasizes the significance of publishing statistics. An extended, eleven-page list of the “significant days” (eyyam-ı meşhure) of the year and the exact prayer times on these days (taking up almost ten percent of the whole yearbook) follows this preface. As the prayer times are determined according to the position of the sun in the course of the day, the time of the five daily prayers in Ruse would be different in different seasons; they would also differ from the prayer times in any other place at a different longitude or latitude. The preface, not surprisingly, takes note of this. Stating the exact latitude of Ruse (43˚5΄ north), the preface warns readers that this reading is the basis for calculating the prayer times. Following the list of significant days is a chronological account of the history of humankind, with special emphasis on the Ottoman Empire. The chronology begins with the birth of the prophet Adam according to the lunar Muslim calendar (6216 before the Hijra) and continues up until 1846, when the Rüşdiye schools were founded. Curiously, the second entry in this chronological account is the birth of the prophet Adam according to the “European” (Avrupalılar) tradition (4581 before the Hijra). These two tables are indicative of the efforts of the Ottoman state in creating the “homogenous, empty time” that Benedict Anderson emphasized as crucial in imagining communities.^[45]
The provincial yearbooks present structured information and thereby contribute to the creation of a “public sphere of state administration.”^[46] In their pages, the yearbooks not only inform us about the names of people involved, but also contextualize those names in a visual hierarchy within a many-tiered institutional structure. Such presentation of provincial institutions needs to be contextualized as part of a broader transformation. Anthony Giddens relates the nineteenth-century rise in the amount of cheaply available printed materials directly to the “enlargement of the sphere of the political”:

“The growth of a “public sphere” of state administration is inseparable from textually mediated organization. The discursive arena thereby opened up is quite mistakenly described if it is regarded as one in which “free speech” is in principle possible. It is not primarily speech which is at issue, however important debating chambers might become. Rather it is the “intertextuality” of the exchange of opinions and observations via texts that are “freely available”… that marks the decisive shift in the lurch towards a new form of state.”^[47]

Although their “freely available” nature can be questioned, the Tanzimat era witnessed a boom in official publications of the Ottoman Empire. In February 17, 1851, the imperial printing house (Takvimhane-i ‛Amire) published a 142-page volume of codes and regulations, which appears to be one of the earliest attempts by the imperial government to collect its codes and regulations in printed, bound volumes during the Tanzimat period.^[48] Almost a decade later in 1863, a larger volume of 586 pages came out under the title Düstur.^[49] Immediately following the table of contents, a cover page explains that the title’s meaning is “a collection that comprises laws and regulations” and notes that the particular volume is an extended version of the previous volume from 1851.^[50] The next extended edition took only three years; a much larger, 904-page Düstur came out in April 17 1866.^[51] Seven years later, Düstur became a regularly published series of volumes of Ottoman laws. The modern Turkish Republic adopted the title and is still publishing Düstur series as officially published volumes of laws today.
Acknowledging Max Weber’s emphasis on the codification of law in state formation, Giddens adds that “laws had long been in some part written but in the preceding scribal culture their influence was necessarily limited and diffuse. Printed codes of law, within an increasingly literate culture, made for the increasing integration of ‘interpreted’ law within the practice of state administration and for a much more consistent and direct application of standardized juridical procedures to the activities of the mass population.”^[52] The case of the Ottoman Empire was no exception. As official lawbooks, Düstur was intended to be used as a reference. It was designed to compile new laws and regulations and amendments to the existing ones after the beginning of the Tanzimat reforms in1839. All the prototypical volumes of 1851, 1863, and 1866, and the first volume of the regularly-published official lawbooks (1872) had the imperial decree of Gülhane as their first text. The closing of the definition on the cover page of the 1863 volume emphasized that the referential character of the compilation was going to be maintained, since future laws and regulations would be added to future editions of this volume. The Ottoman state not only printed these volumes but also distributed them to different parts of the empire^[53] and had them translated into the languages of non-Ottoman-speaking populations.^[54] The provincial yearbooks were a significant component of the increased textual representation of the Ottoman state, and the judicio-administrative sphere of the counties were represented in them.
In the yearbooks of the Danube Province, each county’s judicial, administrative, financial and the military institutions occupied three pages. Regardless of their inability to portray the intricacies of the judicio-administrative sphere, within which Ottoman governmentality functioned, these pages reflected the state’s acknowledgment of the personnel with whom it operated. On the right and left sides of the first page of all the counties in all the volumes, we have the core institutions of the judicio-administrative sphere: the county administrative council and the council of appeals and crime. The administrative council’s members are grouped into two: the appointed members and the elected ones and are listed in that order.^[55] The council of appeals and crime have one appointed chief, the judge of the shar‘i court and several elected members (mümeyyiz).^[56] The clerks and the interrogators (müstantık) of this council are listed right below its elected members. Concluding the first page, in all the volumes, are the head (re’is), permanent, temporary (da’imi and muvakkat) members, and the clerks of the Vidin commercial court.
The second page lists the financial and the scribal units that functioned in close connection with the core institutions listed on the first page. In the top row are the departments of accounting (right) and correspondence (left) that functioned under the supervision of the accountant and the director of correspondence – both members of the administrative council. The other departments listed on this page included (in the order they were placed on the page) the municipal council (meclis-i daire-i belediye), agricultural credit funds (menafi‘-i ‛umumiye sandığı) and orphan funds (emval-ı eytam sandığı), commission of surveys (tahrir komisyonu), land office (arazi kalemi), and survey office (tahrir kalemi).
The military and the policing institutions follow on the top of the third page: the artillery battalion council (kal‛a topçu taburu meclisi) and the police battalion council (zaptiye taburu meclisi). Right below them are other subordinate administrative offices such as the office of customs (rüsumat), telegram (telgraf) and quarantine (karantina). Especially in the later years, the teachers of the advanced primary school (rüşdiye)^[57] would also be listed on this page. The information regarding each county would be concluded by a list of the foreign nationals working in either consular or commercial (such as the ferry administration) posts.

THE POLITICS OF ELECTIONS

Because of their role in politics of local administration, being an elected member of the local councils meant a lot to the local political actors. The provincial regulation of 1864 acknowledged the significance of being a member by making the nomination to these positions conditional on high amounts of annual income tax paid – and also “good character” and “literacy” – and limiting the tenure of service for the elected members to two years – although people were allowed to serve for more than a single term – and defining a complicated two-stage election procedure which would prevent people from serving in these councils for extended periods. (As explained below, at the end of their two-years term, a nominated candidate’s chances of being re-elected to these councils were approximately 10 per cent.) Council membership meant power for those who were elected and were able to maintain their positions, regardless of how difficult it was to achieve and maintain it. The imperial regulations also emphasized rotation of the appointed members of the provincial administration. The proper functioning of the modern bureaucratic state’s local branches in the Ottoman context was established on the principle of frequent rotation of its appointed and elected members. The anonymity of the provincial administrators would, in principle, prevent accumulation of undue power in the hands of the select few. While frequent rotations of provincial officials took care of the appointed members, a detailed election process was designed to prevent local notables from becoming permanent members of the provincial administration.
The 1864 regulation defines the initial election of the four members of the county administrative council.^[58] In order to get elected one had to be nominated by a special committee. The appointed members of the council – the judge of the shari‘a court, the religious leader(s), the accountant, and the director of correspondence – constituted this nominating committee (meclis-i tefrik), which selected three times the number of appointed members as candidates for election (3x4=12). Theoretically, in these nominations, maintaining a fifty-fifty ratio of Muslims to non-Muslims was important. (This ratio depended on the actual composition of the population. In places where there were few or no members of either population, it was not observed.) The names of these twelve candidates were then distributed to all the district administrative councils in the county. Members of each council picked two-thirds of these twelve candidates – i.e., eight members – and reported their names to the nominating committee. After receiving responses from all the districts, the nominating committee determined the four candidates who had received the most votes among the various district administrative councils and sent their names to the sub-governor. The sub-governor then picked two of the names and sent the final list to the governor for approval. (At the province level the final list would have to be approved by Istanbul. Such an elaborate “election” system guaranteed that those who were not desired by the center were not elected at the province level. Yet, at the county level, the imperial government did not have a direct say. Istanbul could influence the “election” process only through the leverage of its governors.)
The sub-governor’s selection concluded the first election, which determined all four members who were to serve in the first year the council was established. Every year, through the same complicated process, half of the existing members were replaced in the county administrative councils. In these subsequent elections, the initial list sent to the districts contained only six names, as opposed to twelve. The district administrative councils selected four out of these six. The county administrative council then determined the four candidates who had received the most votes among the various district administrative councils. Finally, the sub-governor chose two names out of the four to submit to the province for approval. Re-election of those who completed their terms was permitted. This seems to have allowed for some stability in the composition of the councils’ “elected” members.
A member’s re-election, however, was not a simple process. He had to be re-listed by the county nominating committee, selected by the district administrative councils, and favored by the sub-governor, who selected the final two council members. Finally, he had to receive the governor’s approval. In a county like Vidin, with six districts, even when an ex-member’s name appeared on the initial list, the chances of his being chosen as one of the top four at the county level were fairly low. (If a candidate’s name appeared on the initial list sent to the districts, chances that his name would be on the list of the four submitted to the sub-governor were 22%). Moreover, he would still need to be selected by the sub-governor and approved by the governor. This complex mechanism made the re-election of council members difficult and threatened the stability of any two-party alliance between the sub-governor and elected members. It limited the power potential of members and sub-governor alike, since the sub-governor could not guarantee that a member he considered an “ally” would be selected by the district administrative councils. Thus, theoretically, one might expect a high level of turnover in the membership of these councils due to the difficulty of remaining an elected member. How did this work in practice?
The provincial regulations of 1864 and 1871 define the nominating committees as composed of the appointed members of the administrative council of the county. The local registries confirm that indeed this was the case for Vidin. The second round of elections, where the district administrative councils reported back to Vidin with two-thirds of the nominated candidates, appears not as straightforward in practice. A rough draft of a report sent to the provincial administration on April 2, 1876, sheds light on problems with the second round of the election process.^[59] The report takes note of a dispute between two camps that were supposed to elect eight names out of the twelve that the nominating committee decided upon – four out of six per council. The nominating committee did not send the list to the district councils. Instead, three to four members from the administrative and judicial councils (idare meclisi and meclis-i de‘avi) of each district came to Vidin to elect two-thirds of these twelve candidates. These electors (intihabcı) met the electors from the head district, Vidin. However, the lists of names offered by the district council members did not match those offered by the electors from Vidin. The gathering in the head district is not mentioned as an unusual incident in the report. This indicates that it might be a practice that was familiar, if not customary. However, since they could not agree on a common list, it was necessary to draft the report.
The report’s details present a clearer picture of the dispute. The number of electors in each group appears to have been rather uneven. On the one hand, twenty-one electors from the six districts, all of them members of the district councils, represented a larger body of electors who remained in their districts. On the other, eight electors from the central district, Vidin, which served as the center of the whole county, represented “61 electors from the villages and towns around Vidin.” There is no detailed explanation in the report of who these 61 electors are, only that they are from the neighborhoods and villages of Vidin district.^[60] It is likely that the 61 electors were notables from villages within the district of Vidin and that they agreed upon eight representatives in order to elect the council members for that year. It is not possible to know the details of local politics in this election; nevertheless, it is clear that the eight representatives from Vidin had a significant influence on the process. Even the majority from the districts could not exert authority over the Vidin representatives. They were able to insist on a list somewhat different from the one supported by the other 21 electors, and this disagreement led to the report.
Who were these notables that represented the town of Vidin and its surrounding villages in this contested election process? Based on their names, at least five out of the eight representatives were non-Muslims. Three of the five had the names of their villages clearly identified: Yovan Ağa of Slanatruna, Karin Dimitri Ağa of Helvacı, and Yovan Orta of Bregova. All three villages – Slanatruna, Helvacı, and Bregova – occupy a narrow strip to the north of Vidin. That some representatives used their village names together with their own names implies either that the other representatives were from the town of Vidin, or that they were familiar to the members of the administrative council to whom the report was addressed. Of the remaining five, Süleyman Efendi identified himself as the former Muslim religious leader of the region (müftü-i sabık). Another, Anastas Hacı İliya, was a member of the council of appeals and crime for three consecutive years between 1868 and 1871. (Hacı İliya’s family members, his son and his son-in-law, were on the candidate lists for the same council a number of times in the following years, as well.) A third representative from the town of Vidin, Aleksandri Nikolço Ağa, appears as one of the eight candidates chosen by the 21 council members from the districts to serve on the county administrative council.
This does not appear to be an all-Muslim or an all-Christian composition, nor is this a geographically-even distribution of representatives from the Vidin district – there are no representatives from the southern villages. The body or representatives, which would elect the candidates for provincial administrative and judicial councils in the second round, seem to reflect more the local power balance. Considering the fact that the body of representatives from Vidin included people from the villages of Slanatuna and Helvacı, it is not surprising that the list of candidates approved by the representatives features one candidate from these two villages.^[61] The connection between local politics and the composition of these councils is also confirmed by the fact that the candidate lists compiled by both representative groups have a number of names in common who served in the councils for extensive periods and who were prominent notables in the entire county (more on that below). Perhaps the significant point here is not the absence of an obvious logic to the way these representative bodies were constructed or that they submitted to the higher-ranking provincial administrators to resolve their disputes. Instead of framing this dispute as local obstinacy against a rigorous state, I would like to see this case as one in which members of a “single government of state officials and local elites”^[62] carry out their strategies. In that sense, the election process and its associated discussions are an articulation of the local power balance in the context of the modern Ottoman state.

DIFFERENT CONTINUITIES

Despite the mathematically low likelihood of getting re-elected, the provincial yearbooks reveal that in the ten-year period between 1868 and 1877, certain members of these councils (Ma‘ruf Ağazade Ahmed Bey) served for as long as nine years. Others, such as Sevastaki Ağa (Sevastaki Ivanov Gunzovyanov), Hacı Tahir Ağa and Zayko Ağa (Tseko Vanchov) served for 6 years. In fact, the same group of local notables played key roles in regional politics well before the first provincial yearbook was compiled in 1868, some of them were members of the same extensive families, and some, including Muslim ones, continued to serve in rather important local and national commissions even after Bulgaria became independent and even were involved in the drafting of the Turnovo constitution.
The July 19, 1865 issue of the newspaper Dunav reports the establishment of an orphanage (ıslahhane) for orphans and poor children in Ruse. The donors from the region include not only Ahmed Bey but also Zayko Ağa. An interrogation report dated June 23, 1865, bears the seal of Sevastaki Ağa as an examining clerk at the council of appeals and crime, with three clearly identifiable letters, C İ Г, representing his full name, Sevastaki Ivanov Gunzovyanov (Севастаки Иванов Гънзовянов).^[63] Even prior to the decree of 1864, the seals of Ahmed Bey and Zayko Ağa are prominent on a report regarding the bakers of the town and indicate their position as members of the tax collection council that preceded the administrative council.^[64]
With a language that is typical of the pro-independence newspapers that were published outside the Ottoman Empire, the author of an anonymous article from the Bucharest-based newspaper Svoboda asks who should be blamed for the 500 years of Ottoman brutality: “Whom should we accuse? Who is to blame?”^[65] The “Turcophilic” Sevastaki Ağa provides the author with a convenient representative of those “who wish to feed themselves alone, just like the Turks, and are ready to live comfortably.” “Sevastaki,” the reporter continues, “has big mansions naturally full of wealth: silk curtains, velvet cushions and pillows, sultans’ portraits, etc.” Svoboda was one of several newspapers whose reporters associated regime change with the elimination of the local notability, the chorbadzhia, who worked with the Ottoman government. The regime change, however, did not eliminate the names that I have been discussing so far.
Genadi Vulchev’s recent work is helpful in explicating not only the family lineages of some of the prominent local notables mentioned so far but also the important role played by succeeding generations of these families under the Bulgarian administration.^[66] A significant detail one cannot detect from the yearbooks and the candidate lists is that Sevastaki Ağa (Sevastaki I. Gunzovyanov, 1825-1898) was married to Efimia Shishmanova, who was a younger sister of Ekaterina Shishmanova, mother of Hacı İliya Efendi (Ilia T. Tsanov, 1835-1901) who served in the councils for several years.^[67] Hacı İliya’s brother, Nako Ağa (Naicho Tomov Tsanov), was a member of the council of appeals and crime later. Their father, Tomaki Tsanov, worked for the Ottoman administration and died in exile in “Asia Minor.”^[68] The prominence of these individuals and families continued well after Bulgaria became independent in 1877. Zayko Ağa (Tseko Vanchov) represented Vidin in the Second General National Assembly (Obiknoveno Narodno Subranie) of newly-established Bulgaria in 1881.^[69] Both he and Ma‘ruf Ağazade Ahmed Bey (Akhmed Beg Marufov) were members of the municipal council and among the 38 people who donated 8131 Leva to the municipality in 1883.^[70] The impact of these people on the local judicio-administrative sphere transcended the major changes of 1877. Not only did they retain their prominence after the regime change, but they were also able to integrate themselves into the new regime. Ma‘ruf Ağazade Ahmed Bey, who was not only affiliated with the former regime but also a “Turkish Muslim,” was appointed by the Russian imperial commissar Prince (Kniaz) Dondukov-Korsakov to the Constituent Assembly in Veliko Turnovo in 1879.^[71] Together with Hacı İliya Efendi, he was one of the 229 members who drafted the Turnovo Constitution that served Bulgaria from 1879 to 1947.^[72] Much of this continuity is predictable, however, not compatible with a framework that perceives the Tanzimat reforms as being imposed by the state on a resilient society.
In addition to this temporal continuity, the local notables’ role in the provincial bureaucracy created a special sphere where administrative and judiciary functions merged. These members switched between councils: Ma‘ruf Ağazade Ahmed Bey, for example, was listed as the an elected member of the council of appeals and crime in the first three volumes of the yearbooks, his name is listed under the administive council for the next three volumes, he appears to take a year off, as his name is not listed on the seventh volume as a member of either councils, and then he is listed as a member of the administrative council in the remaining three volumes. Another member, Sevastaki Ivanov Gunzovyanov (or Sevastaki Ağa) is listed in the council of appeals in the first four volumes and swithces to the administrative council in the next two. The provincial regulation of 1864 emphasized a separation of judicial affairs from the administrative affairs. The formation of two seaparate councils with separate rules and procedures should be understood in this light. This separation was emphasized again when, in 1871, a second provincial regulation detailed – but did not change – the provincial administrative structure.^[73] By serving in one council for consecutive terms or by switching from the administrative council to council of appeals and crime, local notables established an organic link between the administrative and judicial spheres of the modern Ottoman state in Vidin. A member of the administrative council in one year could be elected for the council of appeals and crime in the next – blurring the lines that the regulations drew between the administrative and judicial tasks of provincial administration and creating a “judicio-administrative sphere” in Vidin. It is within this sphere that local agents pursued their strategies.
A third point regarding continuity in these councils has to do with the rotation of their appointed members. The 1871 register of the Vidin County administrative council is replete with reports of clerks within the region reassigned from one post to another. The rotation of high-ranking administrators – such as the governor of Danube Province, the sub-governor or the judge of Vidin County – was a principle of the administrative framework introduced in the course of the nineteenth century.^[74] According to the yearbooks, the longest that a judge or a sub-governor served in Vidin’s judicio-administrative sphere was three years. While certain members of the councils served for nine years from 1868 to 1877, the governor of Ruse changed ten times.^[75] The frequent replacement of lower-rank clerks, on the other hand, appears to be a result of resignations caused by low pay, bad working conditions, and work overload. To make matters worse, an appointed member had to be replaced by someone with experience in a similar post leading to the vacation of another post, since those who had the required experience were usually office-holders elsewhere.^[76] The administrative regulations not only required clerks to provide guarantors for their performance but also insisted that these guarantors be checked and verified as alive and still “valid” twice every year. This created a highly dynamic and at times very problematic appointment system; furthermore, it may not be wrong to assume that local notables who served for longer durations in their posts – and who were better acquainted with the power dynamics within their region – would be more advantageous than a new appointee to the councils. In fact, cases regarding disputes among different members of administration within Vidin county, support such an assumption.
For example, according to a report from the summer of 1871, the head official of the ‘Adliye district imprisoned several Tatar immigrants and their animals. Vidin’s administrative council sent Matyaş Ağa, an elected member of the council of appeals and crime to investigate the reasons for his actions. According to this report, the district head official had ordered the arrests to punish the Tatar immigrants after they refused to let him use their horses to collect and carry the wheat tithe of another group of immigrants, the Circassians living in a separate neighborhood. The tithe, collected in kind, needed to be ground before it could be sold. The Tatar immigrants reportedly had beasts enough to assist in carrying the Circassian immigrants’ wheat. Matyaş Ağa apparently noted that the town was composed of three neighborhoods, each of which kept its grain in different piles after it was threshed but before it was separated from the chaff. “Because of this,” he reported, “each neighborhood should be considered a village. Furthermore, it was “an old principle and ancient tradition” that each neighborhood took care of grinding its own wheat tithe.
Matyaş Ağa deemed the head official’s high-handed attitude as “quite inappropriate” and noted that it reflected his unwillingness to follow the precepts of the administration in Vidin. The examining clerk from Vidin apparently added that the head official was making ordinary matters unnecessarily difficult, thanks to his punitive and aggressive attitude. Toward the end of their report on the matter, Vidin’s administrative council noted that interrogations were being carried out in the district to determine who might have provoked the alleged crimes committed by some Circassians against a notable from the Circassian community, Hacı Mirza Bey. This obscure final allegation hints at the district head official’s probable involvement and seems to be included in support of Matyaş Ağa’s account, which resembled the charges he leveled against Berkofça’s district head official.
There is no reason why we should take Matyaş Ağa’s word, or that of Vidin administrative council’s report based on his assessments as an accurate account of what happened in ‘Adliye. However, the report offers a good case of how opposition to the appointed administrative cadres could come from within the judicio-administrative sphere. Taxation schemes fashioned power relations between institutions of state and governed populations and were essential procedures of Ottoman governmentality. The district head official’s alleged actions imply that he was assuming a level of authority that emphasized the effective collection of taxes over the “traditional” organization of society along ethnic lines. By legitimizing the head official as responsible for tax collection, the Ottoman administrative framework authorized him to articulate a power relationship among the members of the community. The head official seems to have suggested that as an administrator, he was entitled to use the available resources of the community to accomplish this task of tax collection, but the Tatar immigrants did not share this vision and challenged his understanding of the power relations.

CONCLUSION

The early roots of the transformation of the Ottoman social formation into a liberal-capitalist one aside, local power relations became an integral part of a new “judicio-administrative sphere” that emerged as a consequence of the provincial regulations of 1864 and 1871.^[77] The administrative and judicial councils were at the center of this sphere. The local notables, through their persistent presence in these councils, contributed to the creation of a “single government of state officials and local elites”^[78] and blurred the lines between the judicial and administrative spheres of local administration that these regulations tried to impose. What is more interesting perhaps, is the fact that these notables were not trying to conceal their prominence from the imperial administration which, according to the conventional readings of the provincial regulations, tried hard to curb their influence. The fact that their names were included in the yearbooks suggest that not only a “state vs. society” split did not exist, but also the local members of Ottoman administration felt absolutely no need to conceal their involvement with the state. We need to see the formation of these councils not simply as imperial impositions on a resistant society but as a consequence of a broader institutional transformation that began earlier than 1864 and lasted even after Bulgaria became independent. This broader transformation is the formation of a “political technology of individuals,” a project that focuses on “the way in which the specific problems of life and population were raised within a technology of government.”^[79]
So what happens if we try to see these councils from this perspective? What might we gain by leaving behind the state-society division and the assumption that institutions such as these councils were imposed on a population who either sheepishly accepted or stubbornly resisted them? First, we would be able to see conflicts and disputes within the councils from a better perspective; second, we would be able to read the reports coming from such institutions not simply as the observations of an imperial institution but as summary accounts of a hegemonic power balance in the provinces. Which means, when examined thoroughly and read against other sources, these reports can, allow us to see how members of the local populace used the administrative framework to advance their own agendas. Third, this perspective, I believe, would give us a complimentary, if not better, understanding of the nineteenth century transformation of the Ottoman Empire as compared to perspectives that emphasize the power of the imperial center and perceive the transformations of the local administrative framework merely an extension of the bureaucratic transformations at the imperial level.