This lecture will discuss the Ottoman Tanzimat era through the lenses of the Armenian Patriarchate Archives along with the Ottoman Archives. It will argue that while Tanzimat has long been portrayed as a progressive period that granted rights to all peoples of the empire, in fact it set the mold for policies of oppression which pushed Armenians out of their native lands and would be reutilized time and again. Among the various forms of oppression described by 19th century Armenians from throughout the empire in the Patriarchate Archives, a prominent example is angarya, forced labor which was demanded by the local authorities and power holders. Coupled with abusive and oppressive taxation policies instituted during Tanzimat, Armenian peasants were turned into migrant workers; a phenomenon that heavily affected Armenian families in the provinces for the worse. This talk will demonstrate that forced labor coupled with abusive taxation was a tool of Ottoman temporal and territorial governance that continued to be implemented throughout the 20th century.

Talin Suciyan is Associate Professor (Privat Dozentin) of Turkish Studies at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Outcasting Armenians: Tanzimat of the Provinces is her recently published second book, which was her habilitation thesis accepted by her home university LMU Munich in 2019. She received her doctoral degree in 2015 with her book The Armenians in Modern Turkey: Post-Genocide Society, History and Politics (I. B. Tauris), which has been translated into Turkish (Aras Publ., 2018), German (De Gruyter, 2021) and soon will be released in Russian too. Her research focuses on Ottoman inter-communal relations, unevenness, non-contemporaneities, gender, peasantry, Armenian literature of the Ottoman provinces, and medical practices of the 19th and 20th century Middle East.