The following interview is a historical reconstruction based on archival research into Ottoman provincial administration during the 1879-1881 famine. Mehmet Efendi is a composite figure representing the experiences of mid-level tax collectors documented in British consular reports and Ottoman administrative records from the period. His responses reflect documented conditions, policies, and dilemmas faced by provincial officials, though he himself is—like his ledgers—a careful reconstruction of what existed.

I meet Mehmet Efendi in what passes for his office: a corner room in Muş's provincial administrative building where winter light barely penetrates the small window. The air smells of old paper and copper oxidation. On his desk sits a pile of coins—the depreciated currency that's become nearly worthless—next to ledgers recording debts that grow more impossible by the day. He's forty-three, a career bureaucrat who's spent two decades believing the Ottoman system could weather anything.

The winter of 1880-1881 is testing that faith.

You're a tax collector during a famine. That must be—

Mehmet: A special kind of hell? He laughs without humor. Though we don't call it a famine in the official correspondence. We call it "temporary agricultural difficulties" or "regional provisioning challenges." As if the words we use in Istanbul change the fact that people here are eating grass.

I've been doing this job for nineteen years. I know every village in this district, know which families pay early and which ones need until after harvest. I know the shepherds who move between summer and winter pastures, know how to calculate tax on herds I've never seen because I trust their count.

The system worked because it had flexibility. Room for reality.

Now I get dispatches from the capital demanding payment in gold or silver, and I'm sitting here with sacks of copper coins that lost half their value in six months.¹ The herders lost most of their animals in '79—you should have seen it, carcasses everywhere, the smell carried for weeks—and the ones who survived have nothing left to sell.

But Istanbul wants its revenue. In gold.

What happens when someone shows up to pay their taxes and all they have is copper?

Mehmet: I take it. I write it down in the official ledger. Then I pull out my personal notebook—the one I keep in my desk drawer—and calculate what they still owe in "real" money. Then I wait.

He gestures at a stack of correspondence threatening to slide off his desk

I have forty-three exchanges with the provincial governor's office about this exact problem. Forty-three. Each one more urgent than the last. I explain the currency situation. They say the treasury needs funds. I explain people are paying in the only currency they have. They say that's not acceptable. I explain again. They threaten to replace me.

Last month it was replacement. This month it's criminal charges for mismanagement of state funds. Mismanagement. As if I'm the one who decided to devalue the currency while demanding taxes in gold.

But you keep collecting.

Mehmet: What else would I do? Resign? Then they send someone who doesn't know these people, someone who'll enforce the letter of the law without understanding...

He stops, picks up one of the copper coins, turns it over in his fingers

There's a man, Hassan Agha, who has a small plot near the river. Good land, relatively. He came in last week to pay his land tax, brought everything he had. Copper coins wrapped in cloth like they were precious. The amount was correct for what he owed—if we were still using the old exchange rates. By the new calculation, he's paid maybe forty percent.

I took his money. I wrote it in the ledger as full payment. I'll deal with the discrepancy later. Maybe I'll make it up from my own salary. Maybe I'll find some administrative category to hide it under. Maybe the whole system will collapse before anyone audits the books carefully enough to notice.

Hassan Agha thanked me. Actually thanked me. For taking everything he had and pretending it was enough.

The British consul in the region wrote that "the drain of money to Constantinople is sapping the life-blood of the Empire."² Did you know that's how outsiders saw it?

Mehmet: He laughs, sharp and bitter. The British. Yes. They come through occasionally, write their reports about Ottoman mismanagement, then go back to their comfortable posts. They're not wrong, exactly. But they're not right either.

Constantinople isn't deliberately bleeding us dry—though it feels that way. The capital is desperate. The treasury is empty. The war debts from '78 are crushing us. So they squeeze the provinces, and we squeeze the villages, and the villages have nothing left to squeeze.

Here's what nobody writes in the dispatches: I understand both sides. I understand why Istanbul needs revenue. The empire is barely holding together. And I understand why the farmers and herders can't pay. They're barely holding together.

I'm the hinge between these two realities, and the hinge is breaking.

What does it feel like, being that hinge?

Mehmet: Some days I think I'm preserving something important. The Ottoman administrative system has survived for centuries because people like me make it work at the local level. We find ways to adapt the rules to reality. We're the ones who know that governance isn't about perfect enforcement. It's about maintaining enough order and legitimacy that people still believe in the system.

He's quiet for a moment

Other days I think I'm just postponing the inevitable.

The nomadic herders—mostly Kurdish families who've been moving through these mountains for generations—they lost everything in the animal plague.³ Everything. Their entire economy was built on those herds. Now what? They can't pay taxes on animals that don't exist. They can't transition to farming. They don't have the knowledge or the land or the capital.

So they're just stuck. And I'm the face of the government demanding payment they cannot possibly make.

He pulls out a ledger, opens it to a page dense with names and numbers

Look at this. This is my record of who's actually paid, who's promised to pay, who's fled the district entirely. That last category is growing. People are leaving—heading to Syria, to Iraq, anywhere they think might be better. I don't blame them. But every person who leaves is one less taxpayer, which means more pressure on those who remain, which means more will leave.

It's a spiral.

Do you ever tell Istanbul the truth about what's happening here?

Mehmet: I try. I write detailed reports about the drought, the currency crisis, the animal mortality, the population flight. I cite specific numbers. How many households, how much revenue lost, how many animals dead. I think if I just explain it clearly enough, they'll understand.

But here's what I've learned: Istanbul doesn't want to understand. Or they can't afford to.

Because if they acknowledge the full scope of the crisis, they'd have to change policy. Reduce tax demands, provide relief, admit the system isn't working. And they can't do that without undermining their authority everywhere else. If Muş gets tax relief, why not Van? Why not Diyarbakır? Why not every province?

So instead they send back letters saying I need to "exercise greater diligence in collection" or "explore alternative revenue sources."

Alternative revenue sources. From what? The rocks?

What happens when you can't meet the quotas?

Mehmet: That's the question that keeps me awake.

I've been a loyal servant of the state my entire adult life. I believed in the Ottoman system. Or I did. I believed that despite its flaws, it was the best framework for holding together this impossibly diverse empire. Muslims and Christians, Turks and Kurds and Arabs and Armenians, farmers and herders and merchants, all under one administrative umbrella.

But this crisis is revealing something I didn't want to see.

He closes the ledger carefully, as if it might break

Next month, I have to submit my annual report. I'll write that collections are down due to "temporary conditions" and that I "anticipate improvement in the coming year." I'll use all the right bureaucratic language. I'll make it sound like a minor setback. Not a systemic failure.

Maybe I'll keep my job for another year. Keep pretending this is all sustainable.

Or maybe they'll replace me with someone younger, someone who still believes the rules matter more than the reality. Someone who'll enforce the gold payment requirement strictly. Who'll seize property when people can't pay. Who'll break what's left of the social contract between the state and its subjects.

I don't know which outcome I'm hoping for anymore.

If you could tell the people making policy in Istanbul one thing they don't understand—

Mehmet: You can't tax what doesn't exist.

It sounds obvious, but they don't grasp it. They see numbers on paper—this district should generate X amount of revenue—and they think if it's not happening, it's because of corruption or laziness or mismanagement. They don't understand that the underlying reality has changed.

The climate has changed. The animal herds are gone. The currency is worthless. The people are leaving.

You can't administrate your way out of that. You can't write enough regulations or hire enough tax collectors or threaten enough punishments. At some point, you have to acknowledge that the world the system was designed for no longer exists.

But acknowledging that would mean admitting the empire is in trouble far deeper than anyone wants to say out loud. So instead we maintain the fiction. I send my reports, they send their demands, and we all pretend this is normal administrative business.

He stands, walks to the window overlooking the town square

The tragedy is that this could have been different. The Mughal Empire—I've read accounts—they had systems for tax flexibility during droughts and famines.⁴ They understood that preserving the tax base meant sometimes forgiving taxes. But we've forgotten that wisdom. Or we can't afford it anymore.

I used to think I was good at my job because I collected the revenue efficiently. Now I think I was good at my job because I knew when not to collect it. But that kind of judgment, that kind of local discretion—it's being squeezed out of the system. Everything is becoming rigid, mechanical, desperate.

He turns back from the window. Outside, the afternoon call to prayer begins. He doesn't move to leave.

I have three more appointments today. Two farmers who owe back taxes. One merchant who's trying to negotiate a payment plan. I'll listen to their stories. I'll take what they can give. I'll write it in my ledgers. I'll send my reports to the capital.

And tomorrow I'll do it again.

Footnotes

1. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journal-of-middle-east-studies/article/climate-of-confessionalization-famine-and-difference-in-the-late-ottoman-empire/C95EC4D2A17A7A5095821BC37C66CD5F ↩

2. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journal-of-middle-east-studies/article/climate-of-confessionalization-famine-and-difference-in-the-late-ottoman-empire/C95EC4D2A17A7A5095821BC37C66CD5F ↩

3. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journal-of-middle-east-studies/article/climate-of-confessionalization-famine-and-difference-in-the-late-ottoman-empire/C95EC4D2A17A7A5095821BC37C66CD5F ↩

4. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/european-journal-of-sociology-archives-europeennes-de-sociologie/article/empires-famine-and-the-significance-of-the-political-economy-of-colonialism-from-the-mughal-empire-to-british-colonial-rule-in-india/8412E24F05772E53C6149D92570B5A6F ↩