Tribal Women and Empire-Building: Female Bedouin Leadership and the Ottoman expansion in the Arab Countryside, 1840-1914

The tribal societies of the Ottoman Middle East underwent significant transformations from the latter half of the nineteenth century onwards, shaped by a complex interplay of the global trends, Ottoman centralization, and the resulting urban-rural intertwinements. While the available scholarship has addressed these developments, it is difficult to claim that they provide adequate contextualization of the female tribal agency. This talk will argue that the women of the Arab tribes played remarkable roles in the adaptation of their communities to Ottoman modernization, using the example of three sheikhas (wives, sisters and mothers of tribal chiefs). They contributed to evolving imperial policies in a negotiating direction. It will focus on how these  sheikhas emerged in the political, social, and judicial spheres of the urban and rural Middle East to defend their community's interests. In addition, this talk will discuss how the tribal female leadership contributed to the development of the new political and social tools indicating how they actively participated in the tribal resistance against the Ottoman expansionism in early decades of the Tanzimat reformism and the processes of negotiations that followed and resulted with the integration of the tribal groups in the new system of the governance.

Talha Çiçek is an associate professor at the School of History, University College Dublin. Formerly, he was the British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow at SOAS, England, and Humboldt Experienced Research Fellow at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin. He is the author of the two books, War and State Formation in Syria: Cemal Pasha’s Governorate during World War I (Routledge, 2014) and Negotiating Empire in the Middle East: Ottomans and Arab Nomads in the Modern Era, 1840-1914 (Cambridge UP, 2021). Currently, he is working on the history of the Arabian horse in a global context and leading an ERC Consolidator Grant entitled "Global Capitalism and Rurality: Agency, Commodification and Socio-Ecological Transformation of the Middle Eastern Countryside, 1870-1945".