This chapter makes four historical interventions. First, It argues that the relief program of the Ottoman central state during the continuum of crisis aimed to maintain agriculture, cities, and the army, but not pastoralists. Although pastoralists lost millions of herd animals, their source of food, financial capital, and sociopolitical power, available historical documents indicate that the Hamidian government did not distribute grain or flocks to pastoralists, and neither did they lend money to rebuild their herds, as they did for peasants. It is unclear whether this was a deliberate policy of the state in order to turn pastoralists into taxable agriculturalists. What is clear is that the traditional Ottoman famine relief policies contributed to mounting ecological and economic disequilibrium between peasants and pastoralists in times of crises and to irreversibly expanding this imbalance in the political ecology of Kurdistan in the post-crises period by triggering displacement, migration, and proletarianization among pastoralist communities.

This chapter develops my theory of regime-contingent sovereign default by focusing on two strategies of mass politics:voting and revolt.I argue that partitioning citizens into urban versus rural agents aligns closely with traditional accounts of groups with advantages in these two strategies:specifically, urban citizens are generally considered to enjoy advantages for protest activity, whereas rural citizens have frequently been identified as crucial swing voters.After noting that these groups differ in their preferences for food price policy, I link the pressure from urban revolt to sovereign default in autocracies, particularly those that import a great deal of food.Conversely, rural electoral pressure often leads to large farm price supports which can be difficult to remove during fiscal crisis, suggesting that more rural democracies (especially those that export a great deal of costly food) should be more likely to default.The chapter concludes by also considering variation within regimes:electoral autocracies are argued to dilute the sole focus of autocrats on urban areas, whereas contentious democracies should lead to reduced emphasis on rural voters.