Ottoman modernization and municipalities: The case of Van (1847-1915)

As a result of the wars that took place between the Ottoman and Safavid states, the city of Van, which precisely entered into the Ottoman rule after 1548, is one of the best examples that different ethnic and religious structures showed the will to live together in the Ottoman civilization until the First World War. The city of Van showed great resistance to the Tanzimat structuring, one of the biggest historical intersections of the Ottoman Empire in the modernization process, and the Tanzimat Edict, declared in 1839, was able to cover Van in 1847 with a delay of eight years. After this date, within the process of general administrative transformation, which is one of the main pillars of Ottoman modernization, it entered into the historical process of its modernization phase with the reorganization of provincial administration and establishment of municipal administrations. During this period, the city of Van experienced major changes in economic, political and sociological terms. The main purpose of this thesis is to illuminate the sociological and political changes in the modernization of the multicultural city of Van by focusing on the establishment and development of local administrations during the Ottoman modernization process. In this context, the economic and urban development performance of Van was one of the main pillars of our study. Documentary research method has been used in this study, which is discussed from the perspective of historical sociology. The findings we obtained in the case of Van shed light on the general reflections of Ottoman modernization in the eastern provinces.