The Politics of Households in Ottoman Egypt: The Rise of the Qazdaglis.

• Author: TOLEDANO, EHUD R.
• Position: Review

The Politics of Households in Ottoman Egypt: The Rise of the Qazdaglis. By JANE HATHAWAY. Cambridge: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1997. Pp. xvii + 198.

Jane Hathaway has written an excellent book that puts the entire field of Middle Eastern studies in her debt. Books are too often styled by their authors or publishers as "revisionist," but in this case, there can be little doubt that the work under review is indeed original, innovative, and highly stimulating. Skillfully using new source materials, in both Arabic and Ottoman Turkish, Professor Hathaway offers a new interpretation of the socio-political scene in Ottoman Egypt from Selim I's occupation to the end of the eighteenth century. She bravely takes on received wisdom in the field, questions basic notions laid down by two generations of leading writers, and makes us reconsider our most cherished ideas about Janissaries, Mamluks, beys, agas, and households. Hathaway's narrative is authoritative and elegant, solid and imaginative.

In the following pages, I shall briefly outline the scope of the book, and move on to explore some of the arguments made by the author. While so doing, I shall put forth several comments, mostly critical, and offer a few improvements to the views advocated by Hathaway. I wish to stress, however, that all my points of disagreement do not detract in any way from the invaluable contribution the author has made in her present book. My reservations notwithstanding, The Politics of Households in Ottoman Egypt is certainly required reading for anyone interested in Ottoman history, early modern Egyptian history, and Middle Eastern elite history in general.

The book is almost evenly divided into two parts. The first deals with the political, social, and economic transformation that took place in Egypt from the defeat of the Mamluk sultanate at the hands of the Ottomans to the French invasion. It follows the establishment of the Ottoman administrative structure in the province, the dominance of the regiments, and the rise of the beylicate. Throughout, the prevailing theme is the emergence and ultimate hegemony of the Kazdagli (spelt Qazdagli by Hathaway) household, It is in the five chapters of this part that the author deconstructs the prevailing view that the beylicate in eighteenth-century Egypt was a reincarnation of the Mamluk sultanate, that the basic unit in that socio-political order was a recreated Mamluk household, and that politics in that period consisted in a struggle between the officers of the Ottoman regiments (ocak) and the Mamluk beys. It is here, too, that the rise of the Kazdaglis to hegemony is competently chronicled, and the new evidence is convincingly presented and discussed.

Part II looks at the social and economic aspects of what Hathaway terms Kazdagli household-building strategies. One chapter is devoted to marriage alliances and the role of women in the household, in which we learn that women--as we have now almost come to expect--were more important than previous studies of the period suggest. Another deals with property and commercial partnerships within and between households, revealing the sources of household wealth, in this case agricultural tax farms and the Yemeni coffee trade. A fascinating chapter brings to light the imperial networking of the Kazdagli household, a web of patronage links in the capital, Istanbul, based mainly on a mutually beneficial bond with serving and retired chief black eunuchs at the imperial palace.

Hathaway should be especially commended for her use of sources and exceptional historiographical awareness. Modern writers on the Ottoman Middle East fall into three broad categories: those whose perspective is that of Istanbul, the central government, the Ottoman archives and chronicles, and who are familiar with the relevant scholarship in Turkish; those whose perspective is that of the particular province they deal with, the local chronicles and archives of the [Shari.sup.-[subset]]a courts, and who are familiar with the relevant scholarship in Arabic; finally, those scholars who try to combine both perspectives. It is to the latter category that Hathaway belongs, using sources both in Arabic and Ottoman Turkish, both from Egypt and from the central archives. She is also fully versed in the scholarship in Arabic and Turkish.

Another rare quality is the author's keen awareness of historiographic pitfalls--mainly the tendency to read the sources as "mines of facts," rather than as "text." That is, the pervasive and simplistic approach that culls information from the sources in order to construct a narrative strewn with "facts," rather than cope with the political, social, economic, and cultural agenda--often hidden or even unconscious--that are embedded in any cultural product, such as a text, which includes archival evidence. Hathaway's approach yields many invaluable insights into the complex realities of Ottoman Egypt; she makes her way deftly through the conundra of narratives--regimental, beylical, those of the central government, and of local elites.

Briefly--and obviously too crudely--put, Hathaway's main argument is with one of the main elements of the Orientalist paradigm (my term), namely the notion of Ottoman decline in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries...