250 | The Province Goes to the Center
regional powerful magnates came to claim their stake in imperial governance,
even if he functioned at a smaller scale than the best-known examples. Past his-
torians influenced by modernization theory have discerned in this process the
perils of decentralization, through the loss of tight central control. More recent
studies, however, have demonstrated that the processes at stake were much more
complex and can reveal an important and convincing alternative perspective if
examined from vantage points different from that of center-province relations.
On a different level, and going beyond official discourses of legitimacy, the
self-consciously Islamic Ottoman Empire had no inhibitions about empowering
local non-Muslims and overlooked rampant corruption as long as the tax rev-
enues kept flowing and political and social stability was maintained. Once these
things stopped, then the central state intervened, not because of religious differ-
ence, but to ensure its surplus extraction capacity from the province. The state,
however, was not afraid to use the pretext of religious prejudice to depose a local
power magnate.
More astonishing than the means by which economic power is concentrated
are the limits of sustainability of these processes. The period immediately pre-
ceding was marked by Governor Abdülbaki’s amassing a personal fortune that
could have figured prominently as an item of the Ottoman budget. Hadjiyor-
gakis’s period included his aggressive profit-seeking behavior culminating in a
famine and a five-year period of revolts and instability with massive economic
repercussions. It also resulted in the immediate collection of outstanding debts to
one of the island’s biggest creditors (within a chronically cash-starved economy)
following Hadjiyorgakis’s execution. Following this period of instability, the re-
appropriation of Hadjiyorgakis’s assets resulted in the redistribution of economic
power and wealth. Finally, the Muslims and non-Muslims of the island were for a
long time held responsible for the debt of 1.27 million kuruş, which Hadjiyorgakis
had contracted in their name. With these factors in mind, one wonders how any
economy could still function, let alone produce a surplus.
In this sense, attention needs to shift from a framework of conventional
center-province relations that focuses simply on the interactions between the
Ottoman state and regional magnates. By delving into the possible extents and
limits of the economic sustainability of aggressive profit-seeking behavior, it is
possible to identify its effect on the reproduction of structures of legitimacy and
identity at both the local and the imperial levels. At what point does a particular
configuration of power, authority, and identity surpass the surplus-extraction ca-
pacities of the economy it is set in, to cause the collapse of a whole system of rela-
tions of power? Or to frame the question more precisely, if it took an event of the
magnitude of a speculation-induced famine for a revolt to take place, how exten-
sive were the boundaries of sustainability of the Cypriot economy, and what sort
of profit margins did it permit? The emerging question is not so much whether