CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | Kozanoglu, Okan |
|---|---|
| Title | Governing from the Margins: The Emergence of Provincial Press in the Ottoman Empire (1865-1871) |
| Summary | This study examines the emergence of the provincial press in the Ottoman Empire in the 1860s, specifically the period between two provincial laws from 1864 and 1871. While recent literature on the nineteenth-century Ottoman press often focuses on the Hamidian period and major print hubs like Istanbul, Izmir, Thessaloniki, or Beirut, few studies explored the emergence of provincial newspapers and the impetus behind their appearance, often dismissing them as merely “official” media outlets. This study challenges such categorizations by highlighting the role of governors in establishing printing houses and introducing newspaper enterprises across the empire. It argues that the provincial governors in the 1860s instrumentalized the press as a means of self-fashioning to secure political legitimacy before the provincial people and to demonstrate their allegiance to the Sublime Porte. This study further argues that the primary motivation behind the use of these media outlets by provincial administrations stemmed from the central government’s rising reliance on provincial governors in the face of nationalist separatism. By combining the records of administrative correspondence and a selection of provincial newspapers from the 1860s, this study reveals that the provincial newspapers aligned their narratives with the political and moral virtues of Ottomanism while positioning the governors as the forerunners and guardians of the Tanẓіmāt reforms. Vilifying or discrediting specific groups, activities, and concepts also helped them craft their narratives around order and progress. This study also emphasizes that the rhetoric strategies in these newspapers contributed to the centralization process from a performative sense, which enriches a more nuanced understanding of centralization and local administration in the mid-nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire. |
| Supervisor | Wilson, M. Brett; Radway, Robyn Dora |
| Department | Historical Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/kozanoglu_okan.pdf |
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