Hellenic Studies Program
New Elites, Old Regimes:
Trajectories of Imperial Change, 1700-1850
April 28-29, 2006
Friday, April 28
1:30-2:00 p.m. Welcome and Introductory Remarks
2:00-4:00 p.m.
Panel One: Ottoman Empire in Transition
Moderator: Molly Greene, Princeton University
Commentator: Petre Guran, Princeton University
2:00-2:15 p.m.
Ariel Salzmann, Queen’s University, Canada
2:15-2:30 p.m.
Antonis Anastasopoulos, University of Crete, Greece
“Strained Relations: Albanians as a Challenge to the Authority of ‘Established’ Elites in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Balkans”
Albanians (Arnavud or Arnebud in Ottoman sources) were one of the very few groups specified by an ethnic name in Ottoman state documents. The aim of this paper is to examine the role of Albanians as provincial elite figures who, much like everyone else, sought opportunities and developed strategies and networks which would allow them to acquire authority and wealth in the turbulent Balkans of the second half of the eighteenth century. In at least two areas in the southern Balkans – south-western Macedonia and the Peloponnese – Albanian domination became so pronounced and so threatening to their rivals that the Ottoman state ordered the expulsion of Albanians from these regions, and even organized military campaigns against them. The aim of the paper is to go beyond the traditional treatment of Albanians simply as brigands and mercenaries, and approach them as dynamic power figures who challenged the authority of ‘indigenous’, established power groups.
The paper will be based on a combination of Ottoman archival material and secondary literature
2:30-2:45 p.m.
Anna Stavrakopoulou, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
“Greek Phanariots and Their Struggle of Survival between Empires: Alexander Mavrokordatos (1754-1819), the Facts and the Slander”
The year is 1785 and the place cosmopolitan Constantinople: Alexandros Mavrokordatos, the newly appointed ruler of Moldavia is getting ready to depart for his province. An absolute priority before his departure is to organize his “task force” in the capital of the Ottoman empire, ie a group of people that will represent him at circles of influence in the high end of the administration. While his political affairs are being settled, various pending issues in his tempestuous personal life require immediate solutions too: between his influential estranged wife and his highly manipulative“devoted” mistress the balances are delicate. The man and his milieu represent the ideal target of G. N. Soutsos¹ theatrical libel “Alexandrovodas the Unscrupulous” (1785). This fiery political satire, apart from its successful plot and character development heavily influenced by Moliere, is a magnificent testimony of the ruthless struggle between Fanariot families to secure a slice of power from the Sultan.
This paper will examine Alexandros Mavrokordatos who, after his brief appointment in Moldavia, spent the rest of his life in Russia, under the protection of Empress Catherine the Great and her successors, within and beyond the libel of Soutsos.
Some of the main issues examined will be the multicultural exposure of the Phanariots, the conflict between followers of the Enlightened West and enemies of new ideas, along with the specifics that shaped the parameters of power that was shared among a handful of families.
2:45-3:00 p.m.
Christine Philliou, Yale University
“Circles of Power, Trajectories of Change: Phanariots, Janissaries, and Halet Efendi at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century”
The turn of the nineteenth century is often seen as the nadir of power for the Ottoman state, when “corruption” overtook centralized, institutional power. In my paper I explore two groups that were expanding at the interstices of state and society at this moment. These two groups are Phanariots—a new and expanding elite that reached into diplomacy, provincial government, trade, the Ottoman Court, and ecclesiastical politics at the Orthodox Patriarchate—and the Janissary Corps—an old military institution that had become a political and economic force with potential to destroy the central state. I examine them in turn as parallel, evolving structures, and consider the people (such as Halet efendi) and activities that linked the two in unlikely ways. I argue that, rather than write off this period and such groups as harbingers of decline on the eve of westernizing reforms and national revolutions, we can approach them as forces for change that grew out of the conditions of Ottoman governance.
3:00-3:30 p.m. Comments,Petre Guran
3:30-4:00 p.m. Responses and open discussion
4:00-4:15 p.m. coffee break
4:15-6:15 p.m.
Panel Two: Safavid to Qajar Empires
Moderator/Commentator: Abbas Amanat, Yale University
4:15-4:30 p.m.
Rudi Matthee, University of Delaware
“Stability in Late Safavid Iran: Accommodation over Punishment”
My paper starts from the tension that exists in any empire between the need for including and accommodating its constitutive elements and the need for sanction and punishment for those elements that through wayward and separatist behavior threaten the system’s stability and integrity. I propose to analyze how this tension was worked out in the 17th century Safavid state. My main argument is that, whereas traditional Iranian and Safavid political theory emphasized sanction and punishment over inclusiveness, the latter was typically the favored approach toward the diversity that marked this complex state and the recalcitrance and rebelliousness that were among its inevitable features. The paper will end with a discussion of whether this “soft” approach prolonged the lifespan of the empire or hastened its demise.
4:30-4:45 p.m.
Kamran Scott Aghaie, University of Texas, Austin
“Public Religious Rituals and Institutions as Reflections of the Diversity of Elite and Sub-Elite Identities in Qajar Tehran”
This study of the transformation of identities in Tehran during the later years of the Qajar period (circa 1950-1920’s) will focus on how publicly performed Shi’i religious rituals and institutions served as a means for expressing and promoting social relationships and identities in Tehran. Ashura rituals are perhaps the most distinctive feature of Shi’i Islam, which is the overwhelmingly dominant form of Islam in Modern Iran. The rituals are based on a historical event in 680 C.E., called Karbala or Ashura, in which the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson Husayn was killed in a bloody massacre while rebelling against the Umayyad caliph Yazid.
By analyzing public Ashura rituals and institutions, this paper argues that throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a remarkable variety of alternative identities survived, evolved, and even came into existence for the first time. While these identities were affected by the propagation of state-sponsored Shi’ism, and later on of nationalism, they were independent identities that reflect complex processes of social transformation underway in modern Iranian society.
Public religious ceremonies and rituals are a good reflection of the complex transformations underway in the later years of the Qajar period. While the state promoted its own legitimacy, and elites increasingly promoted various forms of nationalist identity through public ceremonies and activities designed to promote a sense of civic pride and national consciousness, social events such as religious rituals were organized by various groups in society without the direct involvement of the state. These religious rituals, therefore, reflected very different objectives and concerns from those of the state and modernizing elites.
4:45-5:00 p.m.
Rula Abisaab, McGill University
“Rebellion, Millenarian Visions, and Shi’ite Traditionism in Safavid Astarabad”
In the late 16th century a group of émigré Arab clerics mostly with rationalist (usuli) Shi’ite leanings dominate the posts of Shaykh al-Islam and help legitimize the Safavid’s rule through a forceful use of ijtihad. This elite within the clerical ranks begins to assume aristocratic titles and own land. This elite, however, is ousted and replaced by an Iranian traditionist (akhbari) elite of the Persian aristocracy who undergo a critique, revision and also rejection of usuli Shi’ism. I would like to investigate the reasons and circumstances surrounding this development which was seen and presented in later Safavid chronicles in ethnic and proto-nationalist terms either as a victory for Iranian legal and theological creativity or in terms of an eclipse of more mystical and heterodox and philosophical leanings in Iran due to the Iranians’ adoption of an ‘Arab-based’ clerical Islam. There are important and complex features about this transformation that go beyond the question of proto-nationalism and deal with internal local history, such as the social history in Astarabad which was a major cradle for traditionist Shi’I thought.
5:00-5:15 p.m.
Jamsheed Choksy, Indiana University
“Emergent Sociopolitical Roles of Zoroastrians in Iran during Late Safavid Through Early Qajar Times”
The paper will focus on how and why the Zoroastrian community repositioned itself in relation to changing regimes and the Shi’ite majority, the extent of colonial involvement through both the Parsis of India and the British in facilitating and supporting such endeavors, and the consequences of those actions for the Zoroastrians and for other members of minority and majority groups within Iranian society during the transitional period from the disintegration of Safavid rule to the consolidation of Qajar authority.
5:15-5:45 p.m. Comments (Abbas Amanat)
5:45-6:15 pm Responses and open discussion
6:15-7:00 pm Reception
7:00 pm Dinner
Saturday, April 29th 10:00-5:00
10:00-10:30 a.m. Coffee and breakfast
10:30-12:00 p.m.
Panel Three: Mughal and British Empires in South Asia
Moderator/Commentator: Dhooleka Raj, Yale University
10:30-10:45 a.m.
Mridu Rai, Yale University
The King’s Old Clothes: Fashioning a “Traditional” Ruler for Kashmir in British India
My paper will examine how processes of state-formation within the context of mid-nineteenth century colonial India produced notions of princely elites with a “traditional” right to rule even over populations with whom they established “new” political connections. It will do so specifically by examining the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, recently created in 1846, that was given a peculiar age-old-derived legitimacy that could be devised only under the aegis of a colonial reconstruction of new elites as representative either as natural leaders or as leaders to-be-made-natural.
10:45-11:00 a.m.
Munis Faruqui, University of California, Berkeley
From Khanazad, to Turani, to Dakhni: Nizam-ul-Mulk Asaf Jah and the end of Empire in early 18th Century South Asia
The slow unraveling of the Mughal Empire at the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th Century—largely brought on by administrative mismanagement, corruption, incessant warfare, and poor leadership—forced the empire’s political elite to confront the toughest of choices: should they continue to fight to protect the power and authority of the Mughal emperor or should they begin preparing for a new dispensation that would likely spell the end of effective Mughal rule? Among those who were faced with this dilemma was a Mughal nobleman who came to be known as Nizam-ul-Mulk Asaf Jah. His response? A two-decades long journey that took him from being a staunch defender of the integrity of the Mughal Empire to a divisive defender of ethnic Turkish interests and, finally, a proponent of an inclusive Dakhni identity that became centrally identified with Hyderabad, the princely state he founded in the 1720s. Using the storied career of Nizam-ul-Mulk as its backdrop, this paper aims to highlight the skill with which former Mughal elites harnessed newly emergent political, economic, and social forces accompanying the collapse of the Mughal Empire to transition to even greater wealth, power and position during the first decades of the 18th Century.
11:00-11:30 a.m. Comments Rifa’at Abou-El-Haj and Dhooleka Raj)
11:30-12:00 p.m. Responses and open discussion
12:00-1:00 p.m. Lunch
1:00-3:00 p.m.
Panel Four: Latin American Colonies and Republics
Moderator: Stuart Schwartz, Yale University
Commentator: Meri Clark, Western New England College
1:00-1:15 p.m.
Jeremy Adelman, Princeton University
Empires and Aftermaths: Decolonization and World History
This paper will examine the different ways in which empires have given way to new nations, locating the processes of social and political change in the late 18th and early 19th century in a larger global and temporal perspective. I will try to show how the “American” revolutions figured into a more general 18th century movement to change Roman models of empire, culminating in the 1830s. I will compare this to the next round of European imperial breakdown, from 1919 to the early 1960s, focusing on the African cases. A hypothesis I will explore is how the case of Greek independence represents the bridge between these two epochal moments in the history of modern empires.
1:15-1:30 p.m.
Arlene Diaz, Indiana University
From Aristocrats to Landowners: The Masculine Struggles for Political Leadership in Venezuela, 1777-1830
By the late eighteenth century, the erosion of the social, political, and economic power of the colonial aristocracy opened new spaces for a non-white, non-aristocratic group of educated and landowning males to contest political power in Venezuela. This process was further crystallized during the civil wars of independence in that country from 1811 to 1830. This paper analyzes how Venezuela transitioned from Spanish colony to independent republic and takes into account masculine struggles for racial inclusion and for domination at the state level. During this turbulent transition, it is clear that contending parties responded to their very local and personal needs and not necessarily to a project of nation building.
1:30-1:45 p.m.
Natalia Sobrevilla-Perea, Yale University
The Peruvian Army in the transit from colony to republic
During the first years of the republic, the government of Peru was dominated by military leaders who gained prominence during the process of independence. Most of them had been trained in the Bourbon militias and had only switched allegiances to the patriots after Chilean and Argentine forces disembarked near the capital. The war against the Spanish monarchy lasted four years and although it was mostly led by external participants a group of middle ranking officers remained at the core of what later became the Peruvian army. This paper will seek to understand what were the continuities and changes in the Peruvian army in the transit between the colony and the republic and to what extent is it possible to talk about the army as a corporation, a new power group that predominated in the post colonial period. It will focus on the membership and social networks established within it and the possibilities for social mobility that it gave those who were part of it.
1:45-2:15 p.m. Comments Meri Clark
2:15-2:45 p.m. Responses and open discussion
2:45 -3:15 p.m. Coffee break
3:15-5:00 p.m.
Roundtable and open discussion
Abbas Amanat|
Stathis Kalyvas
Stuart Schwartz