This chapter demonstrates the crucial role of geographic proximity in shaping agrarian and herding relations in the history of late Ottoman Kurdistan, including regional political economy, socioeconomic structures, and intercommunal relations. It argues that the region is marked by three distinct ecological zones, which differ from each other in terms of elevation, climate, vegetation, and both human and animal habitation. The chapter then shows the encroachment of the Ottoman state through the arrival of Tanzimat reforms and the multifaceted consequences this had in the region. Next, it illustrates a demographic portrait of the region, depicting how human beings brought different ecosystems into conversation with one another. It argues that pastoralism sustained the conversation between geographic zones into the nineteenth century, creating linkages and slippages between mountains, pastures, and plains, and defining the interaction between the three zones until these links began to weaken in the face of a series of environmental crises. The chapter concludes with a glimpse into five villages from different parts of the region.

“This chapter analyses the socio-economic and political structures and transformations of the Kurdish people from the Ottoman era through to the modern Turkish Republic, arguing that there is a symbiotic relationship between the Kurdish question and the de-development of the predominantly Kurdish domains. Adopting a longue-durée framework it combines key theoretical insights of the fields of critical political economy, development studies, international relations and comparative politics to develop an original account of the Kurds, ESA and Turkey’s Kurdish question. It delineates and examines the socio-economic and political developments, structures and transformations in ESA from 1514 to 2014. These transformations are then critically compared with those of other domains within the context of the larger geopolitical area of which these territories have been a part over the course of these five centuries. Resultantly, the chapter devises a novel periodization for the socio-economic history of ESA based on three distinct periods: development, underdevelopment and de-development, and posits that the relationship between these domains and the Turkish state is characterized by a unique socio-economic process: de-development.”

This chapter argues that one of the longest-surviving forms of local, indirect administration that actually predated the Ottomans were the Kurdish emirates. In most parts of the empire, the Ottomans, like the European governments, for example, relied on a system of indirect rule whereby the local magnates recognized the ruler’s suzerainty. The rise of the modern state and the expansion of its institutions diminished the need for what might be called a symbiotic relationship between the imperial centre and the peripheral power-holders like the Kurdish aristocracy. This practice of ending local autonomies, whereby central states abandoned their ‘confederal organization’ during widespread civil wars, allowed them to replace decentralized structures of politics with administratively and territorially cohesive regimes (Maier, 2006: 43). In Ottoman Kurdistan, the process of centralization and replacing the indirect rule of the Kurdish aristocracy with the direct rule of the government appointees was made possible by a parallel development: the making of the Ottoman-Iranian boundaries and the permanent division of Kurdistan that has been evolving for quite some time. The elimination of Kurdish dynasts, who hitherto held power at the borderland, facilitated the making of the boundary even as the making of the boundary facilitated their elimination.