Accumulating Power

Accumulating Power offers a new way of thinking about belonging, sovereignty, and empire – and how the meanings of being "Ottoman" changed with the intersection of capitalism and imperial reform. Ottoman subjecthood and loyalty transformed around the turn of the twentieth century with the emergence of an international system and intensification of commodity production. Imperial belonging was conditioned by new discourses around community, increasing material conflict, and the new tools, forms, and ideologies of the modern state. People displayed their "Ottoman-ness" in how they coped with these novel political economies and shaped them to their own ends. With this book, Camille Lyans Cole traces Ottoman belonging through the making of a region, the Gulf of Basra – centered on the port city of Basra, extending to southern Iran and Kuwait – where people, water, commodities, ideas, and money all circulated. Here, elites' desire to claim Ottoman-ness often arose at points of friction between regional ways of life and the transforming structures of the territorializing modern empire-state. Cole centers the lives of six individuals, tracing how each contributed to the material and political worlds of the Gulf of Basra. Through these microhistories, Cole reveals how elites used "technologies of the state" – bureaucratic instruments, discourses, and symbols – to accumulate wealth, capital, access to resources, and imperial status and to declare their own Ottoman-ness.