The Politics of Taxation and the “Armenian Question” during the Late Ottoman Empire, 1876–1908

Abstract

AbstractThis article explores the social and political context of the Ottoman Armenian massacres during the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II focusing on the empire's tax regime. Although important research has been done on the massacres of 1894–1897, little has been written on the role the tax regime and collection practices played in preparing the context for increased state and communal violence in the “six provinces” (vilayat-ı sitte)—Erzurum, Van, Bitlis, Mamretülaziz, Sivas, and Diyarbekir—where the great majority of Ottoman Armenians lived. Political and social historians have paid little attention to the Ottoman state's administrative practices in Eastern Anatolia, particularly its tax collection practices, as part of the larger context of the “Armenian Question.” Perhaps Ottoman economic and financial historians have been reluctant to consider tax collection as politics. In any case, key linkages between the tax regime and the social and political catastrophe it helped to create have been missed. In this paper I establish a bridge between social and political history and fiscal history. I analyze tax collection as everyday politics to offer a new window into the political disturbances in the empire's six provinces populated mostly by Armenians and Kurds. The study of the Ottoman tax system as an instance of state administrative practices at the quotidian level, rather than as merely a legal and institutional apparatus, illuminates the complicated realities of the late Ottoman state and society, and the “Armenian Question.”