ORIENTE MODERNO Oriente Moderno 97 (�0�7) �56-�69 brill.com/ormo The Reşwan Kurds and Ottoman Tribal Settlement in Syria, 1683-1741 Stefan Winter Université du Québec à Montréal
[email protected] Abstract The Reşwan were one of the most important tribal confederations in the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth century. Yet their history remains almost completely ignored, while the few contemporary authors who refer them almost invariably fail to mention that they were Kurds. This article seeks to retrace the history of the Reşwan confed- eration and particularly their place in the Ottoman imperial tribal settlement (iskan) scheme of the eighteenth century. Drawing on both Ottoman chancery documents and local şeriat archives, it seeks to show that the Reşwan enjoyed relatively good rela- tions with the Ottoman authorities and a high degree of integration with other groups in northern Syria and Mesopotamia, with individual members attaining high office in the region. While the Reşwan name has virtually disappeared, members of the con- federation in Turkey today still trace their origins to the Syrian settlement initiative. Keywords Ottoman – Kurds – Syria – tribes – archives The study of the Kurds and Kurdistan under Ottoman rule, as Christopher Houston has recently noted, remains dominated by statist and nationalist perspectives: concentrated overwhelmingly on either the Kurdish emirates of eastern Anatolia and their integration into the Empire in the sixteenth century or on the reassertion of Ottoman central control during the Tanzimat reform * Paper presented at the “Kurds and Kurdistan in [the] Ottoman Period” conference at Salahaddin University, Erbil (KRG/Iraq), 16-18 April 2013.