Herrschaft und Loyalität in der spätosmanischen Herzegowina

The violent escalation of the so-called "Eastern Question" between 1875 and 1878, which started with the rebellion in Herzegovina and found an end at the Congress of Berlin, is dealt with in historiography mainly under the aspects of "national liberation" or the politics of the Great Powers. The habilitation thesis which this book is based deals with the circumstances previous to these dramatic years. But it operates a different kind of approach: the main focus is on understanding the changes in power and loyality relations in one of the many multi-confessional, multi-ethnic regions of the late Ottoman Balkans: Herzegovina. Although also very early of Ottoman rule in the region are considered, the focus is on the last decades of Ottoman rule in the region, i.e. roughly the period between the 1830s into the 1870s. As a consequence of the increasingly "modernist" and "western" oriented Ottoman reform policy after 1839 (known as the Tanzimat) many power relations were newly settled - not only on the level of the state but also regionally and locally. In Herzegowina, for instance, the traditional political control of the provinical notables was broken and new forms of "administrative power" were established. Legal and economic reforms deeply affected local social relations. The starting point for the analysis is the assumption that people do not have only one loyalty and social identity, but usually have many bonds to their social environment; and that these bonds are not static but can alter as a consequence of social processes and in different situations. In particular, the following two basic principles become very obvious in this book: The everyday multiplicity of loyalties (the coexistence of kin, patronage, status or confessional loyalties, also across social or confessional groups), The great impact of violent crises, during which the above mentioned multiplicity narrowed significantly. Power and loyalty are analysed in this book embedded in the complexities of everyday life. The book offers insights into three rural localities - one Orthodox, on Catholic, one Muslim - as well as a reconstruction of urban developments. These investigations are linked closely to the history of the province (Herzegovina, resp. Bosnia- Herzegovina) but also reflect the context of the general power developments in late Ottoman times. Local and regional history as well as the history of the empire, are therefore not analysed separately, but - with a particular focus on the loyalty structures in the Herzegovina province - as closely intertwined.