The Kaymakam of Rumelia's 'Record Book of Complaints.

AuthorKarateke, Hakan T.

Grievance Administration (sikayet) in an Ottoman Province: The Kaymakam of Rumelia's 'Record Book of Complaints' of 1781-1783. Edited by MICHAEL URSINUS London: ROUTLEDGECURZON, 2005. Pp. xii + 190.

This edition is the first book in the "Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt" series, established in 2001, whose subsequent volumes will continue to feature among the publications of the Royal Asiatic Society. The blurb at the beginning of the book states that the series' aim is to publish "Ottoman documents and manuscripts of historical importance from the classical period up to 1839." It would not be unjust to characterize this work as an amalgam of meticulous scholarship and less-than-careful editorship. While its introduction of thirty-plus pages provides an admirable discussion of the circumstances surrounding the composition of this register and a thorough evaluation of its contents, the second part, comprising the transliterated text and an English translation of the register, unfortunately gives several instances of imprecision.

Although classified as a "sicill" (commonly a "court" register) in the National Archives of Macedonia in Skopje (kadiski sidzili--Bitola, no. 64), this register, as the editor points out in the introduction, is not a court register, but a sikayet defteri, or register of complaints, submitted between September 1782 and January 1783 by the populace of the Bitola/Manastir region to the kaymakam, or deputy governor, of Rumelia. However, the register is composed of two sections, and the majority of the complaints are recorded in the second, longer section. The first part, which is only two folios long, contains complaints of a fiscal nature, as well as eight petitions whose dates, March 19 to March 27, 1781, predate the rest of the register. The register itself, as well as the circumstances in which it came into being, brings to light several novel questions about Ottoman provincial administration and therefore deserves a lengthy discussion.

First, it is unusual that a register of complaints be kept in the province by a deputy governor. In fact, to date no other register listing complaints collected by a provincial governor himself (vali), who may have functioned as a kind of "court of appeals," potentially overturning the verdicts of the judges (qadi), has surfaced. The ultimate court of appeals was, as we know, the sultan's palace in Istanbul, and registers of complaints do exist in the central archives in Istanbul. Hence the register at hand is unique in this respect, and as such provides fresh insights into the nature of the institution of appeals. Ursinus reasons that the absence of provincial registers of complaints elsewhere in the Empire could be due to the fact that the complaints "may have escaped recording in a specific register, or else may have escaped bureaucratic regularization altogether" (p. 9). He further argues that since the governors in office at the time when these complaints were compiled were not present in Manastir, but on campaigns, or on their way to their post and detained by extraordinary circumstances, most probably the deputy governor in Manastir kept the register for the purpose of reporting the incidents to his superior when the governor returned to his post (p. 17).

As the editor himself suggests, such a presumption would normally...

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