As I’ve written before, the late nineteenth century was a period of profound transformation and anxiety for the Ottoman Empire. Faced with territorial losses, internal dissent, and the increasing encroachment of European powers, the state undertook sweeping reforms aimed at consolidating authority across an ethnically, religiously, and ideologically diverse imperial landscape.

Among these reforms, the development of new educational institutions played a central role, particularly those directed toward cultivating loyalty among the empire’s peripheral elites. The “Aşiret Mektebi”, or Imperial Tribal School, established in 1892 in Constantinople, was a quintessential example of this campaign. Founded with the explicit aim of educating the sons of Arab tribal sheikhs from the empire’s peripheral provinces (where the empire’s authority on-the-ground was less pronounced), the school embodied a unique experiment in Ottoman statecraft - a hybrid institution designed to fuse loyalty-building with civilisational tutelage.

While conducting research for the first chapter of my forthcoming book, I worked extensively with documents from the Prime Ministry Archive, which are physically located in Istanbul but are increasingly being digitised and made available online. One document, a letter, offers a unique window into this experimental institution.

The letter is dated 14 Teşrîn-i Evvel 1313 (October 26, 1897), authored by the school’s then-director Abdülmuhsin, and was addressed to the Ministry of Education. The purpose of the letter was to raise awareness of the fact that the school’s former shoemaker had not yet been replaced. Written in the ornate and deferential style characteristic of late Ottoman bureaucratic prose, the letter doesn’t just convey an administrative request for student shoes. It also sheds light on the somewhat ironic relationship between imperial ambition and infrastructural fragility – between a state that sought to present itself as benevolent and modern, and the material constraints that often undermined those aspirations.

At its core, the letter reinforces the importance that the Ottoman state placed on education as a tool of governance and cultural integration. By selecting the sons of influential tribal leaders for enrolment at the Tribal School, the state was not just providing instruction in reading, writing, and arithmetic; it was attempting to reorient the very sensibilities of its provincial notables. Students were to be immersed in Ottoman Turkish, taught loyalty to the Sultan-Caliph, and exposed to the cultural norms of the imperial capital.

Students were also increasingly educated in the French and German languages as well as military conduct, engineering, and agriculture, all of which were meant to bolster the state’s modernising agenda. The symbolic geography of this process – of bringing Arab youth from the periphery to the heart of the empire – also represented an act of cultural choreography. These young men were not just students; they were future intermediaries, expected to return to their communities as Ottomanised agents.

Yet the letter also reveals the limits of this project. The most pressing concern expressed by Abdülmuhsin was that students were being denied a basic necessity: shoes. Due to bureaucratic delays and apparent negligence in renewing the contract with the school’s shoemaker, both new and returning students had been left under-provisioned for months. This sole shortcoming (pun intended) later had other consequences: students were unable to leave the school grounds even during holidays as their footwear continued to degrade. This represents a serious failure that undermined the school’s entire disciplinary and symbolic regime. The ability to move freely, to appear presentable, to be incorporated into the routines of urban life – all were curtailed by the absence of a single vital item of material culture.

As a physical expression of identity and, at times, political or ethnoreligious allegiance, clothing already carries some political weight. Shoes, in this context, mediate between the student and the urban environment of Constantinople; they are part of the costume of transformation, marking the passage from tribal youth to Ottoman subject. Their absence signals a rupture in this transformative process, a kind of naked exposure of the empire’s fragilities.

The fact that the director felt compelled to write such a letter to the Ministry of Education also highlights a key feature of late Ottoman governance – its increasing centralisation and bureaucratisation. The Tanzimat reforms of the mid-19th century and their Hamidian aftermath (under Sultan Abdulhamid II) had given rise to a vast administrative apparatus that sought to regulate and oversee education, public health, infrastructure, and other elements of Ottoman societal infrastructure. Yet this apparatus often suffered from the very inefficiencies and contradictions it was meant to resolve.

The shoemaker’s contract had expired months earlier, and despite a previous petition submitted in July, no action had yet been taken. The ministry had either failed to respond or had been unable to act, suggesting a gap between the ideal of centralised governance and the patchwork reality of its implementation.

This reflects a sort of imperial overextension in the late 19th century in which the ambitions of reform outstripped the empire’s fiscal and logistical capacities. This was especially true in institutions that, like the Tribal School, were both pedagogical and political. The school was supposed to shape a new class of loyal Arab intermediaries, but how could it succeed in this goal if it could not even secure new shoes?

Perhaps not quite with these specific anxieties in mind, Abdülmuhsin’s letter does help to capture both a moment of bureaucratic failure and also the fragility of the cultural hegemony the state was attempting to construct. At the same time, the letter is revealing in its tone and rhetorical strategies.

Abdülmuhsin did not issue demands or express overt frustration. Instead, he framed his appeal within the language of humble service and respectful deference. He referred to the students as “talebe efendiler” – a phrase that elevated their status and implied entitlement to proper care. He presented the problem as one of shared concern, implying that the wellbeing of these students reflected directly on the prestige of the Ministry itself. In so doing, he aligned his own role with the broader goals of the state, reinforcing the idea that the school’s function was not merely educational but also civilisational. This rhetorical posture reflected the ways in which late Ottoman officials, even at relatively low levels of the administrative hierarchy, understood themselves to be participants in a larger imperial project.

Their appeals were often couched in a language of loyalty and discipline as well as moral responsibility. But it also suggests a subtle form of critique – a way of drawing attention to the contradictions of imperial governance without challenging its legitimacy. The students’ confinement, the decay of their shoes, the inability to fulfil the school’s mission – all were positioned as problems that must be resolved for the sake of the state, not as indictments of the state itself.

The letter, sent in October 1897, was actually following up from a previous memorandum sent in July. While no action appears to have been taken following the first communique, the second letter appears to have sufficiently emphasised the urgency of the situation. The matter was forwarded to the Ministry of Education and the relevant procurement commission, and within a matter of days a new contract was awarded following a tender process. The successful bidder was identified as Nikolaki, a merchant registered as a “keresteci” (timber trader) operating from a room in the Vezir Han, a well-known commercial space in Istanbul. The contract was finalised on October 28, and delivery of the shoes was expected within days. The letter concludes with instructions to notify the relevant ministry and confirms that the items were due to arrive at the school by November 1.

At first glance, it may appear unusual that a timber merchant would be awarded a government contract for school shoes. However, within the late Ottoman economic context, this is not particularly surprising. Many urban merchants operated with a fluid sense of specialisation and often engaged in multiple lines of trade. A keresteci like Nikolaki might have maintained a business that extended beyond timber, perhaps managing or subcontracting to workshops capable of producing leather goods, including footwear.

Further, the tendering system in the Ottoman bureaucracy often functioned through informal networks and established relationships as much as through formal specialisation. Contracts were frequently awarded to those who were known suppliers, with demonstrated reliability or ties to state institutions. It is also notable that Nikolaki appears to have acted swiftly: the contract was finalised, the paperwork submitted to accounting, and delivery arranged all within a few days, indicating both efficiency and institutional familiarity.

Rather than a strictly sectoral procurement process, this reflects a more flexible and personalised commercial environment where trust, accessibility, and multi-functional trade roles shaped how state provisioning actually worked. Thus, while anxieties around modernity and imperial overextension would continue to challenge the empire over the following two decades, this brief episode appears to have been resolved without much fanfare.

This article offers a brief study of one moment in the late Ottoman period, framed by one school administrator’s appeal for shoes for his students. It reminds us that empire was not only enacted through high policy and military might but also through the mundane logistics of institutional life. The effort to cultivate loyalty among Arab tribal elites required not only a curriculum and a pedagogy but also contracts with shoemakers, stocked storerooms, and attention to the everyday needs of students. When these things failed, the entire edifice of cultural integration risked collapse.

More broadly, the letter invites us to reconsider the meanings of reform and modernity in the late Ottoman context. It is tempting to view the Hamidian educational reforms as top-down impositions aimed at discipline and control (and, indeed, they were). But they were also precarious, negotiated, and deeply dependent on the agency of individuals like Abdülmuhsin, who translated imperial vision into daily practice. His letter is a reminder that the everyday objects that surround and shape human experience are not neutral but carry meaning, enforce hierarchies, and continually participate in the creation of norms and expectations.