Policing The Countryside: Gendarmes of The Late 19th-Century Ottoman Empire(1876-1908)

his article lays groundwork for a more systematic history of the Ottoman gendarmerie (jandarma), here with special emphasis on the men in the corps and their working conditions. The gendarmerie wich before1879 reform the Ottomans called askir-i zabtiye, was a provincial paramilitary police organization established by bureaucrats of the Tanzimat state during the 1840s on an ad hoc basis.' This force later acquired a more uniform an dcentralized character becoming the empire's principal internal security organization. Throught his paramilitary police institution 19,th-century ottoman bureaucrats aimed to extend their authority into the provinces, which at that time could be described as only marginally under Ottoman sovereignty according to contemporary definitions of the term.