State, bureaucracy and power in the Late Ottoman Empire (1908-1913)

This study explains power relations in the civil bureaucratic apparatus through the controlling mechanisms of appointing and dismissing state cadres. The struggle to control the bureaucratic apparatus during the first five years of the Second Constitutional period suggests an alternative narrative that challenges the existing literature on political history which describes power relations among the political elite only in terms of dominating the government and parliament. Alongside governmental and parliamentary conflicts, this study concerns the extension of power relations to the state apparatus through bureaucratic cadres. This approach is possible if the state is considered as neither a monolithic nor a unitary organization, as functional and institutional approaches to state theory do. Instead, such an approach must break from the modernization paradigm on which the literature of bureaucracy, including the late Ottoman bureaucracy, has long been based. Rather than focusing on grand narratives over long historical periods, this research evaluates short periods of time that were formed by everyday struggles among the actors who comprise history itself. This is evident when the complex struggles among different political and non-political actors to shaping state cadres are considered. For this reason, this dissertation puts to two antithetical practices – appointments and dismissals – under the microscope. Gubernatorial appointments and the mass purges (tensikât) are reviewed from this perspective.