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Writing Ottoman history using the digitized U.S. consular archives NARA RG 59 (2/2): Some research directions into late Ottoman history, with particular emphasis on Ottoman Armenians.

This post follows a previous one that provided an overview of the NARA holdings and explained how to access them. The aim here is to give a general outline of the U.S. consular network in the Ottoman Empire, and then to suggest a few research directions, particularly with regard to Ottoman Armenians, who are very prominently represented in these archival collections.

 

Mapping the U.S. consular network from the reign of Abdülhamid II (1876-1909) to 1914

To begin with, the archives produced by U.S. consuls in the Ottoman Empire share many features with their French and British counterparts, namely the two most extensive networks of Western consuls1 in the Ottoman Empire. Mapping the consular network for which RG 59 records are available up to 1906 shows that, in addition to the three consulates general (Smyrna, Constantinople, and Beirut) as well as that of Jerusalem (which opened early), the Hamidian period saw the opening and operation of three consulates (Sivas, Erzerum, and Harput) in the six vilayets identified as “Armenian” at the Berlin Conference (1878).2 In addition, the two main ports (Trebizond, on the Black Sea, and Alexandretta, on the Mediterranean) connecting these inland regions to the rest of the world also had their own consular posts.

 

Fig. 1-a – U.S. consular posts (excluding consular agencies) in operation during the Hamidian period (1878-1909), based on RG 59 material available up to 1906.

Data published by the Levant Trade Review3 – the bulletin of the American Chamber of Commerce in Constantinople – provides an overview of the entire consular network (including consular agencies) in 1914. At a time when the Ottoman Empire had lost almost all of its Balkan territories, this network was structured around three consulates general (Constantinople, Smyrna, and Beirut), six consulates (Aleppo, Baghdad, Harput, Jerusalem, Mersin, and Trebizond) and nine consular agencies (Alexandretta, Basra, Damascus, Dardanelles, Haifa, Hodeidah, Jaffa, Samsun, and Tripoli in Syria).

 

Fig. 1-b – The U.S. consular network in 1914.4

 

RG 59 as consular archives among others

The RG 59 collection contains a wealth of documents related to trade and economic activities. These include ship registers, import and export statistics, price lists and economic intelligence concerning specific products or potential locations for investment, brochures published by various Ottoman authorities for the use of consuls and foreign economic actors, etc. The administration and protection of U.S. citizens residing in or transiting through the Ottoman Empire also feature prominently in this documentation. Finally, much material relates to the daily functioning of the consulates, especially recruitment of Ottoman employees, property deeds, acknowledgements of receipt of circulars, etc.

As in the case of the French “Correspondance Politique des Consuls”, we find, on the one hand, standardized documents consisting of pre-printed sheets sent out periodically (economic statistics, ship registers, lists of citizens residing in the consular district…), and on the other hand, documentation informing the Department of State of exceptional events (political news, epidemics, fires…) or more or less serious incidents (the murder of a U.S. citizen generates extensive documentation) affecting U.S. citizens or interests.

 

Fig. 2 Brochure in English by the Ottoman authorities.5

Fig. 3 Mustapha Chaush’s application form for a position as messenger at the Harput consulate and letter of recommendation from banker Harutiun Harputlian.6

 

Young Republic, young U.S. diplomacy in the 19th century Ottoman Empire

The first distinctive feature of these archives stems from the nature of diplomatic relations between the United States and the Ottoman Empire. France and Great Britain established diplomatic relations and maintained their respective consular networks in the Ottoman Empire from the early modern period onwards (the first capitulation treaties were signed in the 16th century). In the 19th century, these two powers were directly involved in the “Eastern Question”: their diplomats were key players in all peace conferences (which most often resulted in the loss of Ottoman sovereignty), while their consuls and economic agents played a leading role in the mechanisms of informal imperialism at work in the Ottoman lands.7

In contrast, the U.S. were a young and remote power in the 19th century, with a foreign policy characterized by isolationism.8  The first U.S.-Ottoman commercial and naval treaty was signed in 1830. A “chargé d’affaires” (promoted to resident minister in 1839) was appointed head of the U.S. legation in Constantinople in 1831. The U.S. diplomatic representation was not elevated to embassy status until 1906: initially a resident minister (1901-1906), John Leishman, became the first U.S. Ambassador to Constantinople (1906-1909).9 Overall, the RG 59 collection documents the activities of a fairly dense consular network at the end of the 19th century, which paradoxically represented a power with imperialist interests and ambitions that had nothing in common with those of France or Great Britain.

 

Fig. 4: Plan and photograph of the U.S. Consulate on the “Grande rue de Péra” (now Istiklal caddesi), 1896.10

 

Dual “colonies” – Missionaries and U.S. naturalized Ottoman subjects

Another distinctive feature of U.S. presence in the Ottoman Empire is the profile of its “colonies”. As Hans-Lukas Kieser notes, the Protestant missionaries of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) and their families – who settled over several generations from the 1820s-1830s onwards – were the main U.S. players in the Ottoman Empire and formed the core group of their “colonies”.11

In a register dated 188712 listing all U.S. citizens in the consular district of Constantinople (263 individuals, including children), a preliminary count of heads of families and single adult men (86, whose occupations are systematically indicated), shows that there were 44 U.S.-born citizens and 42 naturalized ones. The U.S.-born citizens were almost all ABCFM missionaries, or teachers in missionary schools. Among the 42 naturalized citizens, all non-Muslims,13 33 were Armenians. Several of them were doctors (around ten), merchants and traders (around fifteen), as well as specialized craftsmen, whom we can assume were well-established (engravers, watchmakers, tailors, etc.).

There is nothing exceptional about a “national” colony in an Ottoman port city being made up of expatriates and their local-born children, as well as naturalized Ottoman subjects. However, the case of the U.S. colony stands out by two aspects: firstly, in that the naturalized citizens seem to enjoy a monopoly on certain economic and commercial activities; and secondly, because, on the whole, they did not marry the “expatriates”, who were almost all Protestant missionaries.14 Unlike other “national” Levantine colonies, in which community boundaries were porous,15 the two groups were completely separate: we do not know of intermarriages between ABCFM missionaries and Armenians, whether Ottoman subjects or naturalized U.S. citizens. As a whole, the U.S. consuls therefore administered “colonies” made up, on the one hand, of expatriate missionary nationals and, on the other, of naturalized Ottoman subjects, the majority of whom were Armenian and clearly belonged to a socioeconomic elite.

 

Fig. 5 U.S. marriages in 1882.16

Fig. 6 A page from the 1887 register of U.S. citizens in Constantinople.17

 

U.S. consuls as key players in the Armenian-U.S. migration field from the 1880s onwards

From the 1880s onwards, a large-scale migratory field connected the Ottoman Empire to various American “young nations”, including the United States. David Gutman, author of the seminal work on the subject,18 estimates that 66.000 Armenians from the Ottoman Empire (around half of them from Harput and the surrounding region)19 emigrated to the U.S. between 1880 and 1914. Brazil, Argentina and Mexico were also places of emigration for Ottoman populations, notably Christians from the Arab provinces of the Empire.20 The consular networks of Latin American countries in the Ottoman Empire were insignificant, if not non-existent. Conversely, the U.S. consular network enables us to observe this migratory field from the regions of departure (Harput and Sivas, in particular) to the regions of settlement (the East Coast of the United States), via the ports (Trebizond, Samsun, Alexandretta, Constantinople, etc.) through which the migrants transited. Therefore, dispatches from U.S. consuls bear witness to several issues typical of migratory fields (issuance of travel documents, first departure of men later joined by their wives, remittances, border refusals for various reasons, etc.), precisely because consuls played a nodal role in these migrations and were constantly called upon to settle many challenging situations. This was particularly the case when the Ottoman authorities tried to prevent emigration during the Hamidian period (from the 1880s to the 1908 Revolution). The Ottoman authorities also tried to prevent the return of naturalized American-Armenians.21 In fact, it seems that the majority of U.S. “colonies” in Anatolia and Constantinople were made up of naturalized Armenians. This is particularly the case in Harput, the main region of emigration and return of Armenian citizens, where Consul Norton declared in 1901 that he was administering 16 “native born citizens” and 260 “naturalized” citizens.22

Fig. 7 Serop Aharonian, a naturalized citizen residing in Fresno, California, requests assistance from the Department of State to facilitate the immigration of his wife and children from Huseynik, near Harput.23

 

Fig. 8 U.S. passport delivered to the Constantinople consulate by Hetitia Azarian, who renounced his U.S. citizenship (verso) in order to resettle in the Ottoman Empire.24

 

Observing mass violence during the Hamidian period

Broadly speaking, the RG 59 collection lends itself very well to the study of events seen and, often, managed from the consulates since records are arranged in a purely chronological order up to 1906 (the 1906-1910 period is relatively brief, and the cases precisely dated). This allows for relatively easy searches for documentation on a particular event, as seen and experienced from several consular posts. Documentation can be found on any major event, whether local or imperial.25 In particular, the mass violence suffered by Armenians – about which a particularly stimulating body of works has recently been published26 – is well documented by U.S. consuls:

  • The “Hamidian” massacres and violence of the 1890s, which began in the Sasun mountains (1893-1894), then continued with explosions of violence in the towns and countryside of the Eastern Ottoman Empire and Anatolia during the Autumn and Winter of 1895-1896, as well as in Constantinople (in the Summer of 1896).
  • The 1909 violence in Adana, again directed against Armenians.27
  • In certain regions of the Ottoman East, notably the Van province and Sasun, violence was endemic in the decades 1890-1900, and its developments closely monitored by the consuls.

 

Consulates were much more than observation posts, as naturalized Armenians were among the victims (assassinations, property looted or destroyed), and U.S. missionaries also suffered losses, particularly of property. Consuls therefore played a pivotal role, informing the Department of State, investigating the facts and even coordinating humanitarian action.

 

Fig. 9 Detail of a Sasun district map and some data on violence committed in 1904 around Andok, in a survey by Consul Norton.28

 

Fig. 10 Cipher for telegraphic communications of the Erzerum consulate.29

These few suggestions are by no means exhaustive.30 In any case, these archives should be read as the product of social actors, not mere foreign or “extraterritorial” observers watching at events from behind the gates of their consulates. These were definitely actors maintaining multiple connections to the powers and populations of their consular districts, whose spheres of action were not limited to trade.31 One may observe their capacity for action, but also, and above all, the agency of the populations that fell within the orbit (and, sometimes, under the jurisdiction) of these consulates. In this sense, these collections, like others, open a window on 19th-century Ottoman society.

 

 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Amy Reitar, archivist at NARA, who generously took the time to explain to me by email the access procedures and organizational principles of RG 59. I am also grateful to David Gutman for our exchanges on these same records.

My thanks also go to the members of the La Fabrique Consulaire network, in particular Silvia Marzagalli and Jörg Ulbert (see the bibliography he prepared), who kindly shared with me bibliographic references on U.S. consuls.

 

  1. There are no comprehensive lists that would allow us to compare the various consular networks in the 19th century. France and Great Britain appear to have maintained a number of consulates general and consulates relatively similar to that of the U.S. network; however, their dozens of vice-consulates and consular agencies formed a much denser network. Persia and Russia, neighboring powers, maintained their own networks. It is difficult to determine whether the U.S. consular network was denser than that of the medium-sized European central powers (Italy, Germany, Austria-Hungary) on the scale of the Ottoman Empire. As far as Eastern Anatolia is concerned, it seems that the U.S. consular network was the third “Western” network, behind that of France and Great Britain. []
  2. Convened in the wake of the Russo-Turkish War (1877-1878), the Berlin Conference resulted in the treaty of Berlin. In addition to the loss of once-Ottoman territories (Balkans, Eastern Anatolia), one of the main provisions of this treaty committed the Sultan to implementing reforms aimed at guaranteeing the security and political representation of Armenians in the six vilayets where they formed a large minority (Bitlis, Diyarbekir, Erzeroum, Mamuret-ul Aziz / Harput (today Elazığ), Sivas, and Van). The Berlin Conference of 1878 is generally regarded as the starting point for the “Armenian question” in the Ottoman Empire. []
  3. The bulletin of the Constantinople Chamber of Commerce is online for the period 1911-1931. The entire collection can be downloaded via the American Research Institute in Turkey’s digital library. []
  4. Data source: “American Consular Officers”, The Levant Trade Review, 1914, vol. 4 no. 3, p. 2. American Research Institute in Turkey, Istanbul Library, online on DLIR (accessed March 24, 2025). []
  5. NARA, RG 59, Constantinople, T194-11, 1874. []
  6. NARA, RG 59, Numerical File, M862-290, “case” 3040, 1906. []
  7. For a general overview of relations between the European powers and the Ottoman Empire, and works addressing French imperialism in the Ottoman Empire and the Mediterranean, see François Georgeon, “L’Empire ottoman et l’Europe au XIXe siècle”, Confluences Méditerranée, 2005, N°52, n°1, pp. 29-39. ; Jacques Thobie, Intérêts et impérialisme français dans l’Empire ottoman: 1895-1914, Paris, Impr. nationale, 1977.; Alexandre Massé, Un empire informel en Méditerranée. Les consuls de France en Grèce et dans l’Empire ottoman : images, ingérences, colonisation (1815-1856), Paris, Classiques Garnier, 2019; David Todd, Un empire de velours. L’impérialisme informel français au XIXe siècle, Paris, La Découverte, 2022. []
  8. The Monroe Doctrine advocates non-intervention in European affairs and a concentration of U.S. diplomatic action on the American continent. Hans-Lukas Kieser, Nearest East: American millennialism and mission to the Middle East, Philadelphia , Temple University Press, 2010, pp. 35-37. []
  9. David Shavit, The United States in the Middle East: a Historical Dictionary, New York, Greenwood Press, 1988. []
  10. NARA, RG 59, Constantinople, T194-20, 1896. []
  11. H.-L. Kieser, Nearest East, op. cit., p. 37. On the other hand, from the early modern period onwards, Europeans, chiefly the French, who settled in the “échelles du Levant” were mostly private economic players. They were joined in the 19th century by more modest European immigration. See Malte Fuhrmann, “I would rather be in the Orient”. European lower-class immigrants into the Ottoman lands”, in Ulrike Freitag, Nora Lafi, and Florian Riedler (eds.), The city in the Ottoman empire: migration and the making of urban modernity, London, Routledge, 2011, p. 227‑240. []
  12. NARA, RG 59, Constantinople, T194-17, 1887. []
  13. Among the 9 non-Armenian naturalized, there were Greeks, Sephardic Jews, and a few people whose ethno-confessional affiliation cannot be determined with certainty from onomastics. []
  14. ABCFM missionaries usually got married before they left for their missions. Children of missionaries, usually born and raised in the Ottoman lands, often found spouses (often children of other missionaries) during their higher education in the U.S. Marriages between ABCFM missionaries and Armenians (whether naturalized or not) were rare and, it seems, very much resented by missionaries and their hierarchy. []
  15. Marie-Carmen Smyrnelis has shown how, in the case of Smyrna, French Levantines, in all their diversity, tended to ally themselves (matrimonially) with local élites according to very specific affinities. Marie-Carmen Smyrnelis, Une société hors de soi : identités et relations sociales à Smyrne au XVIIIe et XIXe siècles, Louvain, Peeters, 2005, p. 126. []
  16. NARA, RG 59, Constantinople, T194-15, 1882. []
  17. NARA, RG 59, Constantinople, T194-17, 1887. []
  18. David Gutman, The Politics of Armenian Migration to North America, 1885-1915: Sojourners, Smugglers and Dubious Citizens, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2019. []
  19. This certainly explains why the consular posts of Erzerum and Sivas were closed in the 1900s, while Harput (which opened late, in 1901) became the main and even the only (in 1914) consular post on the Armenian plateau. []
  20. There were also Armenians in Latin America, as well as Syrian-Lebanese and Palestinians in cities on the East Coast of the USA. See Céline Regnard, En transit: Les Syriens à Beyrouth, Marseille, Le Havre, New York, Paris, Anamosa, 2022. []
  21. The aim was to prevent the resettlement of large numbers of Armenians, who were largely outside Ottoman sovereignty because of their U.S. citizenship. The authorities also feared the return of revolutionaries (Dashnak and Hentchak), whose banned organizations were based abroad. David Gutman, “Armenian Migration to North America, State Power, and Local Politics in the Late Ottoman Empire”, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 2014, vol. 34, n°1, p. 176‑190. []
  22. NARA, RG 59, Harput, T579, 1901. []
  23. NARA, RG 59, Numerical File, M862-334, 1906. []
  24. NARA, RG 59, Constantinople, T194-24, 1904. []
  25. The Young Turk Revolution of 1908, for example, gave rise to large-scale public demonstrations in most Ottoman cities. The Numerical and Minor Files, 1906-1910 provide access to a wealth of documentation, both in quality and quantity, from various consular posts in the Ottoman Empire. []
  26. Boris Adjemian and Mikaël Nichanian, “Rethinking the ‘Hamidian massacres’: the question of precedent”, Contemporary Armenian Studies, 2018, no10, pp. 7‑18. ; Jelle Verheij, Armenian massacres of the Hamidian period, 1894-1897: an empirical enquiry, Phd diss, Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam, 2022. []
  27. Bedross Der Matossian has used NARA RG 59 and RG 84 in his recent book: Bedross Der Matossian, The Horrors of Adana: Revolution and Violence in the Early Twentieth Century, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2022. []
  28. NARA, RG 59, Harput, T579, 1904. []
  29. NARA, RG 59, Erzerum, T568-01, 1896. []
  30. Other directions can be followed, for instance by focusing on economic history, or by looking at other Ottoman regions. The rich documentation dispatched by the consuls in Beirut and Jerusalem opens up many possibilities, for example concerning the first Zionist settlements in Palestine at the turn of the century. In addition, amongst the 19 microfilms of dispatches sent by the consuls at Algiers, no less than 15 cover the last half-century of Ottoman administration of Algiers (1785-1830). []
  31.  Ferry de Goey, “Les consuls et les relations internationales au XIXe siècle”, Cahiers de la Méditerranée, no 93, 2016, p. 61‑75. []

OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
matthieugosse (28 mai 2025). Writing Ottoman history using the digitized U.S. consular archives NARA RG 59 (2/2): Some research directions into late Ottoman history, with particular emphasis on Ottoman Armenians. Consoli. Consulté le 8 mai 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/140w5


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