ABSTRACT
This chapter takes up the wrenching changes that engulfed the Arab provinces during the seventeenth century, a period of crisis throughout the Ottoman Empire, and indeed throughout much of the world. An earlier generation of historians regarded this period as the onset of the empire’s “decline,” drawing on the writings of Ottoman intellectuals of the era who believed that the empire was in peril. Today’s historians recognize that this “decline literature” reflects the intellectuals’ discomfort with social changes. Yet the crisis was quite real, resulting in widespread military revolt and peasant migration in Anatolia and, to a lesser extent, in the Arab lands. A common feature of the crisis era was administrative decentralization, which in the provinces led to the emergence of administrative households headed by provincial governors and military commanders. In the major Arab cities, localized Janissary households dominated while in more peripheral regions, entrenched local families and subprovincial governors carved out spheres of influence, in some cases clashing with the imperial government. In Yemen, a new line of Zaydi imams ousted the Ottomans entirely. The crisis ebbed with the rise of the reforming grand viziers of the Köprülü family, who staffed the provinces with members of their own household.
