Abstract
In A Provincial History of the Ottoman Empire: Cyprus and the Eastern Mediterranean in the Nineteenth Century, Marc Amyes negotiates with Cyprus’s positionality and provinciality to provide new ways of understanding the Ottoman Empire. Through Cyprus, Aymes shows the pivotal significance of engaging with a provincial history of the Ottoman Empire. To capture this provincial history, Aymes proposes a polygraphic approach, which is the act of drawing on multiple readings and writings about the provinces (p. 8). Interestingly, the reception to Aymes’s book has also been polygraphic, where there are at least four reviews by historians of Ottoman Cyprus, who celebrate this study that is ‘one of the first research monographs to be published in a Western language on Cyprus, related to the eventful decades of the first half of the nineteenth century (1820-64)’ (p. ix). To mark its recent paperback release, I will adopt a provincial take on this book by focusing on ways it reads and writes Cyprus within and from a postcolonial partitioned perspective met with spatial considerations. This review will engage with the ways Aymes’s pioneering book contributes new ways of understanding the Ottoman Empire and postcolonial partition studies, particularly through its address of Cyprus in relation to spatiality.
Between West and East or North and South, Cyprus is a strategically located postcolonial Mediterranean island that has always been in the process of production. Examples of this process include the Ottoman Cyprus mappings initiated by Piri Reis in Kitab-I-Bahriye (Book of Sea), Herbert Kitchener’s first comprehensive 1878–1881 British Cyprus map, the 1950s–1960s anti-colonial nationalists’ competing movements that remapped a Greek–Cyprus or Turkey–Cyprus and the 1974 geographical partition that is an affair of lands and properties. This spatiality has meant that Cyprus blurs the dominant ethno-religious, cultural and political binaries, boundaries and categories that have come to define Cyprus. Aymes’s book does not aim to read or write this history of Cyprus, so there is no historiography, Cypriotology or area study proper, but instead Cyprus is used as ‘a laboratory’ to test ideas so to understand how the Ottoman province functioned in the 19th century (p. 6); Cyprus ‘acts as a prism for questions relating to the entire Ottoman domain’ (p. 18) so to provide a provincial history of the Ottoman Empire. Although the book is not a historical study of Cyprus, the political and cultural history of colonisation, partition and conflicting identities implicitly figures as a backdrop throughout Aymes’s study. This spatial history is illuminated in Aymes’s opening comment on Cyprus, which draws on the Ottoman to British colonial encounters, through to his last closing comments on the 1974 partition of Cyprus. Between these opening and closing comments on Cyprus, Aymes engages with an array of key concepts and motifs – competing nationalist narratives, number games, name games, migration and movement, property, return – that have come to define postcolonial partitioned cases like Cyprus. In addition, for his understanding of the main concept of the ‘province’ or the ‘provincial’, Aymes draws on studies that have shaped the postcolonial field. This includes, for example, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (2000) Provincialising Europe, where Aymes does with the Ottoman Empire and Cyprus what Chakrabarty does with Europe and postcolonial India, providing a renewed thought regarding history-writing from and for the margins, so to capture diverse histories of human being, belonging and longing that pluralise the history of the Ottoman Empire. Aymes also refers to Björn Forsén and Giovanni Salmeri’s (2008) The Province Strike Back, a title alluding to Bill Ashcroft et al.’s (1989) The Empire Writes Back that refers to Salman Rushdie’s (1982) ‘The Empire Writes Back with a Vengeance’, which plays on the film Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back – all in the name of pointing to ways the colonial and postcolonial voices can and must write back and respond to the dominant voices in the colonial centre, so to create a new history for themselves and for the Empire.
The strength of the book is its adoption of this spatial provincial history approach that creates this new history of Empire, which is captured not only through its focus on a provincial case that is ‘one of the well-protected domains least studied by Ottoman historians’ (p. 6) but also through a polygraphy that draws on ‘“indigenous” documentation[s]’ (p. 9) and diverse narratives related to local figures in and around the province of Cyprus and the East Mediterranean. Thus, we actively experience the social and spatial practices of people in, of and from the region at the time without ethno-religious binaries, sectarianism and tensions that make up Cyprus and the region today; we perform between the city and countryside, the rhythms of local ‘Cypriot’ scale and Ottoman scale, and between Mediterranean, European and Levantine islanders, who collectively provide meaning of the provincial history of the Ottoman Empire. This history disturbs all homogeneous and univocal categorisation, particularly through a polygraphic writing and reading of Cyprus as related to key local figures that shape the book. Thus, this study of Cyprus enables what Aymes calls the Ottoman model and space, which offers ‘multiple layers of belonging’, wherein the Muslim, Christian, Mediterranean, European and Levantine are all equally valid, in a sort of commonwealth, a melting pot, a Janus of many faces that is multi-ethnic, multicultural and multidenominational. Through Cyprus, we live through a complex web of forces and codes circulating and colliding in and out of the Ottoman world (p. 180); through the province, Ottomaness is reworked so that official centres undergo a process of un-titling and decentring that redefine the Ottoman Empire.
Clearly Cyprus is a pivotal and powerful site of ‘trans-action’ that hosts fragmented and plural histories, and cultural and ethno-religious differences within and between people, places and energies that rewrite and reread the Ottoman Empire. In this process, however, Cyprus is partially transformed and reproduced into a lab for testing without proper identity and identification, where it is suggested that Cyprus is an inconsequential case study that can be replaced by any other province such as Lebanon, Syria and Egypt. This is shown particularly in and through Aymes’s statement that the ‘the goal was to study a region of the Ottoman Empire, irrespective of which it was’ (p. 9) and ‘Cyprus as one amongst the many “provinces” making up this vast empire’ (p. 2). Some discussion on why Cyprus has been selected and how Cyprus is important for this study, possibly in light of the aforementioned spatial history – the cultural and political history of occupation, partition and conflicting identities – that figures in the book, would have confirmed fully that Cyprus is not a dispensable case study for Aymes. Such discussion would have also provided clarity on Aymes’s definition of being and becoming ‘Cypriot’ in Ottoman Cyprus as proposed in the preface – for example, ‘Ottomans-turning-Cypriot and Cypriots-turning-Ottoman – in sum, Ottomans- cum-Cypriots’ (p. ix) – and addressed in chapter 2, which is, unfortunately, vague without proper elaboration, specification and clarification.
In the introduction, Aymes elaborates on definitions with focus on the provincial history approach that will be taken in the book. Aymes defines polygraphic history or polygraphy (p. 8) among multiple other concepts, which enable a provincial approach or take on history. Here Aymes provides numerous definitions, starting with the ‘province’ to ‘polygraphy’ to ‘an-archive’ to ‘accent’, which become rather overwhelming and demanding, leaving one rather bewildered when introduced to a statement such as ‘adhering to vernacular accentuation following as closely as possible the polygraphy that the provincial an-archive require of us’ (p. 17) that sums up the next chapter (chapter 1) of the book.
In chapter 1, titled ‘The nation-as-history’, Aymes discusses nationalist historiography with focus on the notion of millet and the nation, which questions the transition and translation from religious to ethnic to national formations. Aymes points to the significance of national writing of history and writing national history, negotiating ways the provinces can claim the right to read and write their own histories so to create a different Ottoman Empire. This also resonates with the motif of competing nationalist narratives that subsequently dominated postcolonial partitioned cases.
In chapter 2, titled ‘Ottoman entanglement’, Aymes focuses on ‘discovering what provincialization is about in practical terms, the accent is placed on questioning the ins and outs of the term province as it may apply to Ottoman realms’ (p. 17). For this, Aymes elaborates on multiple trade networks within and between Cyprus and the surrounding eastern territories, and we experience provincial history through the indigenous documentation related to the stories of the Governor of Cyprus, Mehmet Aga, and the dragoman Georges Lapierre. These figures enable us to think of identity formation as and through the notion of ‘Ottoman-turned-Cypriot’ or ‘Ottoman-turned-Damascenes’ (p. 44). Such fluid notions of identity relate to postcolonial partition understandings of hybrid and synchronic identity formation, which links further to the next chapter.
In chapter 3, ‘Eventful synchronicities: the scales of the “Eastern Question”’, Aymes focuses on ‘the synchronous dynamics that formed the fabric of the Ottoman long nineteenth century’ (p. 17) with the following question: ‘To what extent did the lives of Cypriots of the time partake in rhythms pulsing through the Ottoman Empire as a whole?’ (p. 57). In this chapter, Aymes explores the ways the people on the island negotiate rhythms – places, people, time and energies – in relation to the Eastern Question. Aymes summarises the Eastern Question as the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire into the sick man of Europe, and the Ottoman Empire as gobbled up by colonial and national desires of Western powers. To clarify the islanders’ negotiation with these rhythms, Aymes discusses the dynamics of transport, postal and news networks met with discussion on documentation related to the Lefkosaian Kocabasi (‘headmen’), Aci Kirgeki and Abeydo, which collectively show the ‘continuity linking the areas of communication at the local Cypriot scale (from Lefkosa to Baf to Leymosun) with those at the Ottoman scale (from Lefkosa to Istanbul to Smyrna)’. In this way, Aymes reveals that the ‘Province is the combination of heterogenous space-times, running from the most local to the pan-Mediterranean’ (p. 68). This significance of spatiality is expanded further and fully in the next chapter.
In chapter 4, ‘Europe absorbed: territorial imprints’, Aymes shows how the ‘Ottoman and their European neighbours inhabited a common world, which had not, pace modernist orientalist, become a thing of the past’ (p. 17). Aymes captures this common world through engaging with Europeans in Cyprus as related to the notion of place and space in various ways. Aymes moves from the city to the countryside, particularly from Larnaca to the villages of Limya and Trikamo, focusing on the significance of textual space – for example, the census recordings, un/written laws and maps – met with physical place, such as the actual ciftliks, properties and land owned by the Europeans. For this discussion, Aymes again focuses on local figures, such as Mehmed Aga and Georges Lapierre, while elaborating fully on European families, like Matteis, who are defined as the Europeans of Cyprus. The chapter ends with discussion on identity formation, focusing on European and Ottoman crossings so to define the Levantines of Cyprus as ‘fully-fledged Ottomans and fully-fledged Europeans’ (p. 126). Aymes reconciles these two identities, especially blurring the rigid binary between them through questioning the ‘terms’ used to address identity issues. Aymes proposes the use of the term Ottomaness, so ‘what is Ottomaness?’ over ‘what is an Ottoman?’, which enables a move away from the term being considered as a substantive category of analysis and social substance, beyond a question of whether an individual is or is not an Ottoman, and a move towards it being considered as an epithet that reflects on what is Ottoman about an individual’s profile, on the hues of Ottomaness, thus enabling a process where the ‘hues of Europeaness and Ottomaness go together’ (pp. 126–127). Throughout this chapter, Aymes focuses on property, number games and name games as related to Ottoman Cyprus, which are key motifs that dominate, determine and define postcolonial partitioned Cyprus today, and these motifs are expanded in the fifth and final chapter.
In chapter 5, ‘A departing world’, Aymes aims to go beyond East and West or Islam and Christendom divides by describing these processes as ‘composite ones, not as dichotomous imitation or teleological exceptionalism’ (p. 17), particularly through focusing on movement, migration and hybridity. Through the notion of firar etmek, Aymes discusses emigration of local Greeks of Cyprus in and around 1821, so to point out that this movement is not so much a result of a national move towards the Greek war of independence but more of an economic move away from poor administration and poverty in Cyprus. Furthermore, Aymes elaborates on number games, land survey, ownership and deed holders in dialogue with the motif of return, to argue that the official attitude towards the locals was that their departure was considered a momentary accident, that they were treated like they never really left, because they would all return. Aymes moves further beyond nationalism and towards ‘pluralism’ through focusing on multiple criss-crossing timelines, enhanced through discussing processual identity of the apostate, renegade and the linobambakoi in relation to local figures, such as Mehmed Aga, Georges Lapierre, Hursid Aga, Giacometti Mattei and Theodore Achiles. This enables Aymes to ‘detect traces of pluralism that nationalism fails to extinguish. And an additional dimension to these multiple timelines is that they follow the rhythms of a Mediterranean unravelling any scripted divisions into ‘imagined communities’ (p. 156). Through these local figures, Aymes captures a pluralism in relation to transcultural identities, where they are, for example, Turk and Greek, Muslim and Christian, Damascene and Cypriot, Andreas Solomonides and Hursid Aga, ‘muslimised and Hellenised’; here, the ‘and’ is not taken as link between the two worlds, but as a broad and undefined zone of intersection – an overlap, that is. Through these key figures, Aymes reveals ways they shape a community that thinks beyond categorisation (p. 167); these key figures ‘personify a nameless community of provinciality – one for which there is no single term’ (p. 169).
In this pioneering book, Aymes provides a provincial history of the Ottoman Empire that celebrates heterogeneity and difference, particularly through a polygraphy of Cyprus as related to multiple local figures – Mehmed Aga, George Lapierre, Hursid Aga and Giacometti Mattei. Through Cyprus, we experience a complex network of belonging, longing, rhythms, codes and decodes circulating and colliding within and through the multi-ethnic, multicultural and multidenominational Ottoman space. To borrow Aymes’s closing statement, this ‘provincial history of the Ottoman Empire successfully captures the symbolic and technical tools that are synchronically produced and reproduced by the very fact of changing – local – hands. This book captures fully the province as a site of “trans-action” that enables us to bring to light the non-congruent temporalities and territorialities which form the tangled skein of the provincial Mediterranean’ (p. 183).