‘Cattle Thieves’: Refugee Settlement, Ottoman Governmentality and Biopolitics

Abstract

This chapter explores the narrative function of the debates and correspondence associated with provincial governance around a particular problem: refugees. During the second half of the 19th century, more than a hundred thousand refugees came to Ottoman Bulgaria because of Russian expansion to the Caucasus. A great majority of these refugees were Circassians. This wave was contemporaneous with other demographic movements: over ten thousand Bulgarian Christians who had left for Russia as part of a population exchange between Ottomans and Russians returned back and had to be re-settled, several thousand Muslim families left a recently independent Serbia for Ottoman Empire. The refugees came at a point of economic growth in Ottoman Bulgaria and many were settled in the Vidin County. By examining how the local agents problematised the refugee settlement process in provincial correspondence, this chapter analyses the parallels between provincial politics and the imperial transformation into a liberal-capitalist social formation, where a presumably autonomous market order determined the limits of governance. This perspective is essential in looking at the empire from the provincial level and challenges the presumed path of reforms as unidirectional from the imperial centre to the provinces.