The fall of the Kurdish emirates
Ottoman centralisation destroys the last semi-independent Kurdish principalities, ending centuries of Kurdish self-rule.
- A Modern History of the Kurds — David McDowall, I.B. Tauris (2004)
- Agha, Shaikh and State: The Social and Political Structures of Kurdistan — Martin van Bruinessen, Zed Books (1992)
- Kurdish Notables and the Ottoman State: Evolving Identities, Competing Loyalties, and Shifting Boundaries — Hakan Özoğlu, State University of New York Press (2004)
In the nineteenth century the Ottoman Empire set about modernising and centralising, and the autonomous Kurdish emirates stood in its way. One by one they were crushed: Soran, ruled from Rawanduz by Mir Muhammad, in the 1830s; Botan, whose ambitious emir Bedirkhan Beg was defeated in 1847; and Baban, centred on Sulaymaniyah, around 1850. Iran later did the same to the principality of Ardalan on its side of the border.
- A Modern History of the Kurds — David McDowall, I.B. Tauris (2004)
- Agha, Shaikh and State: The Social and Political Structures of Kurdistan — Martin van Bruinessen, Zed Books (1992)
Kurds remember Bedirkhan as a hero who tried to unite Kurdistan, but his forces also massacred Assyrian Christians in Hakkari in the 1840s, and Assyrians remember him very differently.
- A Modern History of the Kurds — David McDowall, I.B. Tauris (2004)
- The Kurdish National Movement: Its Origins and Development — Wadie Jwaideh, Syracuse University Press (2006)
The emirs’ fall did not bring order. It left a vacuum that tribal chiefs (aghas) and Sufi sheikhs filled, and the sheikhs, able to rally tribes across feuds, became the most powerful leaders. In 1880 one of them, Sheikh Ubeydullah of Nehri, led a large revolt across the Ottoman–Iranian border and spoke of the Kurds as a separate nation. Historians often date the first stirrings of Kurdish political nationalism to him.
- Agha, Shaikh and State: The Social and Political Structures of Kurdistan — Martin van Bruinessen, Zed Books (1992)
- The Kurdish National Movement: Its Origins and Development — Wadie Jwaideh, Syracuse University Press (2006)
- Kurdish Notables and the Ottoman State: Evolving Identities, Competing Loyalties, and Shifting Boundaries — Hakan Özoğlu, State University of New York Press (2004)
- A Modern History of the Kurds — David McDowall, I.B. Tauris (2004)
- Agha, Shaikh and State: The Social and Political Structures of Kurdistan — Martin van Bruinessen, Zed Books (1992)
Why it matters today
With the princes gone, power in Kurdish society passed to tribal chiefs and religious sheikhs, a pattern still visible in Kurdish politics, where leading families and tribal loyalties matter. The defeated emir Bedirkhan Beg's descendants became pioneers of Kurdish nationalism.