In Subversive Service of the Sublime State: Armenians and Ottoman State Power, 1844-1896.

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes how Ottoman Armenians understood, appropriated, and interacted with the 19th century Ottoman reform program known as the Tanzimat. While some scholars have treated Tanzimat reform internal to the non-Muslim communities of the empire as derivative to the larger story of Ottoman history, others have argued that these policies in fact fostered nationalism that eventually tore the empire apart. Arguing against these approaches, this dissertation demonstrates that reform internal to the Ottoman Armenian community was actually a constituent and integral part of the broader reform program in general, and its policies of state centralization in particular. For the Armenian community, the principle tool of reform and centralization was the Armenian National Constitution of 1860/63, which fully subordinated the country’s prelacies and monasteries to the Armenian Patriarchate of Istanbul. Implementing this brand of reform entailed challenging horizontal and vertical networks of power that traversed the empire. Analyzing the ensuing conflict produced by this implementation therefore reveals novel perspectives on the contours of the reform, which in turn offer a new archive for understanding major questions of 19th century Ottoman history, particularly the relationship between center and periphery, the location of non-Muslims in social and political structures, and the complexity of the imperial polity. Drawing on source material from three continents and composed in Armenian, Armeno-Turkish, English, Ottoman Turkish, and Russian, the dissertation deploys an interdisciplinary approach to describe and analyze how Armenian reform helped to transform the Ottoman state. The dissertation is divided into two parts, each consisting of three chapters. The first part, entitled “The Armenian Tanzimat,” describes the Armenian Constitution and the institutions it created. In order to function, these had to discipline and control actors who could circulate through sites of power and manipulate a legally pluralistic order that entangled Church jurisdiction with imperial law. The second part, “The Bishops’ Wars,” uses the decades-long conflict between bishops Mkrtich Khrimian and Boghos Melikian to better understand 19th century Ottoman political culture. Clashes between these two reassigned social capital in the provinces and produced new political networks that developed their own repertoires for accessing sites of power.