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Chapter Summary

One particularly useful concept for the purposes of this chapter that has emerged from recent debates is ‘Ottomanization’, which refers to a different and possibly stronger degree of integration between the imperial center and the provinces than had been the case under the 150-year-long ‘classical’ centralist regime. ‘Ottomanization’ has come to denote the emergence of an integrated elite through the incorporation of local people into the administrative and distributive networks of the central state and ‘naturalization’ of the members of the Ottoman officialdom into local societies. Officials became local by establishing themselves economically where they had been appointed, and locals became Ottoman by acquiring stipends, posts and tax farming contracts. The Ottoman state in the seventeenth century was liberal in distributing status and privilege than it had been a century before, and the inflation of the ʿaskeri ranks was not simply due to illegitimate penetration of ambitious and unruly subjects.

Keywords: ʿAyntab; ʿaskeri membership; imperial center; military hierarchy; ottomanization; population survey; seyyidization; tax privilege