ABSTRACT
The notion of early modern empires as negotiated enterprises is a useful conceptual tool for historians engaged in the study of state-building across time and space. As such, a study of the administrative practice in these provinces allows us to gauge extent and limits of negotiation as a tool of power, and to examine local understandings and challenges to what constituted legitimate state prerogatives. The provinces of Basra and Mosul provide good and contrasting examples of the relationship between the centre and the provincial subjects because the political economy of these two provinces, ethnic composition of their populations. Historians of the Ottoman empire have viewed the seventeenth century as one of administrative chaos in which state intermittently issued a series of administrative measures to deal with restive provincial populations. There were no attempts on the part of the state to transform or challenge the fundamentals of the legal vision enshrined in the series of provincial laws issued in sixteenth century.
