Like their contemporary rivals, the Ottomans mounted their hegemonic authority across diverse territories by integrating indigenous communities into imperial bureaucracies in late-Ottoman interior Syria, today comprising Jordan and Palestine. In Bedouin Bureaucrats, Nora Barakat eloquently narrates this particular history by incorporating the Ottoman term, the tent-dwellers, rejecting the notion of backward, violent tribes often articulated in conventional historical and anthropological literature.

By utilizing a diverse range of sources, including Sharia court records, property registers, Ottoman Legal Codes, provincial reports, and oral accounts, Barakat explores how various influential tent-dwelling men effectively ingratiated themselves into the provincial governance structure, becoming the representatives of “administratively defined [category of] ‘tribes’ (p. 4).” Here, Barakat introduces a new term, the state space, which constitutes “the landscape within a territorially conceived and hierarchical administrative and judicial apparatus and a theoretically uniform and bounded grid of property relations.” (p. 4) By emphasizing the recognition of this nomadic community and its space as an administrative unit, Barakat primarily investigates the transformative consequences that took place between the Tanzimat state (1839–1876) and the Hamidian period (1876–1908) in interior Syria. What is most interesting, gaining entrance into the Ottoman bureaucratic hierarchy delivered legitimacy and power, allowing Bedouin Bureaucrats to effectively maneuver within the shifting economic, social, and political environment, a process that contributed to the entrenching of economic inequalities and social hierarchies within communities. Although Barakat is cautious about classifying this crucial political change, her findings suggest that by becoming a bureaucrat of an administratively defined territory, one could argue that these Bedouins effectively became the state within their territories and over their subjects during this period.

Bedouin Bureaucrats is organized around five chapters and a conclusion. Chapter One brings the Bedouins back into Ottoman state-making in the late eighteenth century, emphasizing their diverse economic networks, and specifically their involvement in managing pilgrimage administration in the early modern Ottoman Hajj. Barakat successfully narrates how Bedouin groups’ management of pilgrim pathways helped expand their economic power with Ottoman, British, and French trading partners. Pilgrimage administration enriched some Bedouin communities by facilitating access to luxurious commodities such as coffee from the Indian Ocean World and firearms from Europe, while strengthening their ties with the Ottoman government as they became tax-farming (mukaata) contractors.Footnote ¹ Competition for both tax-farming contracts and trade in firearms resulted in the transformation of the economic and social fabric of the region, intensifying violent clashes between Bedouin communities as they were the ones that regulated the Ottoman sphere of submission, marginalizing others who were considered to be their competitors.

Chapter Two investigates the grain trade through the lens of global capitalism. It considers how Bedouin groups, specifically the ‘Adwan, expanded their authority in the Balqa plains of interior Syria during the high days of Tanzimat reforms by gaining land rights through the Ottoman Land Code of 1858 and exporting a large amount of grain. Barakat explains how Tanzimat reformists had a “vision of uniform Ottoman state space that excluded pastoral practices, part-time farming, and rural mobility.” (p. 79) The Bedouins understood this vision, exploiting opportunities to slowly infuse themselves into the state space. During the wheat boom, for example, the ‘Adwan leaders manipulated human and environmental resources by instrumentalizing sharecropping system as well as “enslaved labor” to expand their economic power in agricultural sector. Besides collecting taxes from the villages, they also developed a new “contract-based” transportation service with European travelers to escort them to the Holy Land (p. 77). A major outcome of these developments was widening inequality between Bedouin leaders and other Bedouin groups, and regular resort to violent military campaigns by the state.

With the global financial crisis of the 1870s, intra-imperial competition, and the loss of the Ottoman-Russian War of 1877–78, an increasingly anxious central administration decided to follow another form of governance in the Bedouin territories in interior Syria. Chapter Three examines the relationship between the state and Bedouin leaders during this shift, focusing on how the Hamidian administration assigned various administrative roles to “midlevel Bedouin leaders.” This policy led to Bedouin bureaucrats becoming highly influential in the administration of landed property by the 1880s (p. 118). As headmen, a “legally standardized position,” Bedouin leaders permanently entered the Ottoman low-level provincial bureaucracy, earning considerable social prestige, political power, and material wealth. Unlike the Tanzimat state, which situated villages as the smallest administrative unit and organized military campaigns against pastoralists in Cilicia and Ottoman Kurdistan to forcefully resettle them, the Hamidian state developed a new approach. Based on loyalty rather than violence, the Hamidian state defined the tribe as an administrative unit and allowed the allocation of land to “individual tent-dwelling Bedouin as members of administratively defined tent-dwelling tribes.” (p. 120) Although Barakat argues that integrating Bedouin leaders into state space as headmen was “unique” (p. 121), similar policies were common in Ottoman Kurdistan during the high days of Tanzimat reforms in the 1860s. The uniqueness of this example is more about timing rather than structure.

In Chapters Four and Five, Barakat examines the last two decades of Ottoman administration in interior Syria. Chapter Four focuses on shifts in land ownership during the 1890s when Ottoman officials began to view the historical pastureland of Bedouins as empty land. As a result, interior Syria became a geographic space where Ottoman, British, and Zionist policies intersected. For instance, the Ottomans implemented a demographic engineering policy by resettling Muslim refugees and executing infrastructural projects, such as constructing the Hijaz railway. Ottoman aggression toward the resettled refugees predestined the loss of Bedouin lands. To protect their communal rights to the land, the Bedouin leaders utilized the bureaucratic power they had developed within the Ottoman governing hierarchy and relied on a web of economic and political networks built over the past decades as headmen. Simultaneously, the British and Zionists collaborated to invest in land ownership, circumventing Ottoman regulations regarding foreign land purchases in Palestine and its surrounding areas. During this period, Ottoman officials perceived Circassian and Chechen refugees as loyal groups that could be harnessed to counter the threats posed by foreign actors and to strengthen Ottoman sovereignty. As these policies were enacted, the state began categorizing “legally unused land as a state domain.” This marked a significant shift in the state’s approach to land ownership. By the 1890s, state officials classified the central treasury of the empire as “a privileged competitor for landownership among smallholders and capitalists: state domain became the state’s private property.” (p. 161)

Chapter Five analyzes how the perception of Ottomans evolved toward the Bedouins as the central administration began to see them as potentially loyal subjects against foreign aggression for land ownership in Palestine and Syria. To protect Ottoman sovereignty in the region, the central government needed Bedouins. By carefully reading the state’s fears and anxieties, the Bedouin bureaucrats maneuvered to better manage movable and immovable properties. By showing how the introduction of “individual property registration” brought a new term, “the man of property” (p. 204), into the political realm of interior Syria in the 1870s and 1880s, Barakat eloquently scrutinizes the notion of citizenship, political representation, and the right of self-governance through the category of the man of property. Thus, by the early twentieth century, “the man of property had become a distinct marker of status, an elite group with unique claims of Ottoman citizenship.” (p. 205)

While emphasizing the specificities of Ottoman policies in interior Syria, Barakat also engages with global imperial politics, connecting the Ottoman Empire to American and Russian colonial strategies targeting indigenous peoples in the nineteenth-century world. Though the level of engagement with these cases is not as thorough as promised in the book’s introduction, Barakat’s comparative lens offers useful insights. For example, the author shows how Bedouin bureaucrats sustained their sovereignty over their lands by sharing a “legal space” with urban-based capitalists that sustained “a mutually recognizable forms of contract” that had been established prior to the Ottoman direct ruling attempts. It was the “administrative inclusion of Bedouins as potential Muslim property-owning citizens in the context of an imperial nation-building” that distinguished Ottoman policies with their American and Russian counterparts based on the “exclusion of Native Americans and Khazakhs on both racial and religious grounds from the emergent American and Russian polities.” (p. 261). It would be these differential strategies that would shape the future of these communities.

As a contribution to the existing literature, Barakat offers a valuable and comprehensive account of state formation in interior Syria, tracking how the indigenous people of the region, the Bedouin Arabs, instrumentalized the legal and institutional practices of the Ottoman government to make their own claims of sovereignty. The book sets a new bar in demonstrating how indigenous inhabitants shaped the modern Middle East’s social and economic fabric alongside the state(s) and its laws.