About the Event
In this webinar, Nilay Özok Gündogan will examine the rise and fall of Kurdish nobility in the Ottoman Empire from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Focusing on one noble Kurdish family based in the emirate of Palu, a fortressed town in the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire, Gündogan provides the first systematic analysis of the hereditary nobility in Kurdistan between 1720 and 1895. The abolishment of the Kurdish nobles’ hereditary privileges and the confiscation of their landholdings in the 1840s triggered a five-decade-long conflict between Armenian financiers, Armenian and Muslim sharecroppers, the Kurdish beys, and an increasingly present Ottoman state over the fertile lands of Palu. Through exhaustive archival research in an untapped body of sources and examining the strategies and actions of these diverse groups, Gundogan reveals the complexity of this context which has been generally dismissed as purely ethnic conflict. This book gets to the heart of the historical transformations over a period of two hundred years that changed Palu, the stronghold of this noble family, from a diverse and economically affluent town into an ethnoreligiously homogenized, culturally conservative, and economically deprived place.