Formalizing Autonomy: Imperial Law in the Ottoman Balkans

• In Event: Legal History at the Margins of the Ottoman and Russian Empires

Abstract

In 1832, Greece became the first post-Ottoman state formally recognized by Europe. While Greece offered one possibly for reconfiguring sovereignty after empire, a far more durable administrative experiment emerged in the Ottoman Balkans in the 1820s and 1830s. In the aftermath of revolution, civil war, and European military intervention, European powers compelled the Ottoman state to extend administrative autonomy to Serbia, Wallachia and Moldavia, and Samos. The Ottoman state branded these provinces, and others formed in their image, as “privileged” or “exceptional” (eyâlet-i mümtaze) and counted them as an administrative variation within the empires. Each had individual agreements with Istanbul, but they shared one important commonality: all three provinces remained legally part of the Ottoman constitutional order, a status that was guaranteed in imperial decree and by treaty in international law. This paper examines how the Ottoman state develop new legal frameworks for managing European intervention in the empire. The Balkan autonomies offered test cases for how “exceptional provinces” would operate within the system of European security guarantees and within the empire. Focusing on Ottoman Serbia, this paper argues that that the system of administrative autonomy hashed out in the 1830s, was deeply productive of late Ottoman statecraft in the realms of the administrative law and international law.

Author

• Aimee M. Genell, Boston U