By Eric Vandenbroeck and
co-workers
Turkey Part One
Ottomans, who largely
migrated from the Central Asian Turkic regions, managed to control other Turkic
rivals and their lands in Anatolia five decades after the collapse of Selcuk’s
state in 1299. Up to that date Ottomans can be characterized as a frontier
tribe against the Byzantine (now called Istanbul).
Throughout the
centuries elites in the Ottoman Empire, renamed Turkey, deployed Islam and its
divine writings as the primary source for the legitimization of the social
relationships between the rulers and the ruled, though there emerged some
sub-cultures like Bektashism which answered to the
worldly problems of the peasant populations. We will thus start with the
ideological consequences of this, and the rise of nationalism (Atta Turk) as
the successor of imperial religious order based on orthodox Islam. Because
today’s problems (example today’s election) in Turkey, such as secularism
versus political Islam, are inexorably linked to those centuries long
contradictory developments within the peoples’ common sense.
Since their land
grabs and wars mostly involved the Byzantine tekfurs
(regional governors in the Byzantine Empire) and lands around north western
Anatolia. This special feature increased their reputations among the fellow
Muslims as the warriors of Islam and its prophet, a reputation consolidated
during centuries long Ottoman rule over the lands of Middle East.
According to Majid
Khadduri, the sources of religious legitimacy in Islam were a) the word of god,
the holy book the Koran, (the revelation) and b) Divine wisdom of the prophet
and his companions ( Sunna) which entails the actions and thoughts of the prophet
about the religious and everyday life issues. Thus in Islam since the prophet
was accepted as the enforcer of the word of god, there are not any godly
attributions to him or any other leader (Khadduri, 1984). They are the
interpreters and enforcers of the divine law, namely the real leader of the
Islamic community is God and its words are the rules which should govern human
affairs.
At this point the
religious class ulema and how they provided legitimacy to the ruler’s actions
comes to the fore. Even though in Islam there is no clergy as found in
Christianity, in the interpretation of the word of god the religious ulema or
the learned scholars played a very important role. In Islam, different from
Christianity, the religious class cannot administer sacraments, pardon sins,
pronounce excommunication or in any other way mediate between man and God
(Mortimer, 1982). This issue brings us to the evolution of the interpretation
of the sacred teachings which themselves become the point of contention just
after the death of prophet Mohammad. Sunni sects believed that the successive
leader should be selected by the Muslim community through the principle of ijma
(consensus) close to the idea that the voice of the community is an echo of the
voice of God as is the case with Islam in Iran.
The Sunni doctrine
however maybe binjected an element of democracy, a
popular supervision process, into the idea of the divine ruler which, including
the Ottoman era requires from the ruler to seek consultation with all matters
concerning law and religion. On the other hand, Shiite doctrine was more
conservative in its interpretation of the revelation. According to Shiite
understanding the Imam of the Muslim community should come from the house of
the prophet. They believe only the imam can implement the divine justice since
he is the infallible. So they argued that the real imam should be Ali (nephew
of the prophet) since he is related to the house of prophet. The people who
were born in the prophet’s family were gifted by god with special qualities and
those make them immune to any human error. Since the first caliph (ruler) was
selected through the procedures of the Sunni doctrine most of the Shiite denied
the legitimacy of the first three successors to the Mohammad.
The fourth successor
Ali was their only legitimate ruler and the ensuing events after his
assassination up to the claiming of the leadership of umma by the Umayyad
dynasty, who ruled the Muslim community with an iron fist, as described in the
case study, brought the Shiite to the ranks of the opposition. Even
though this is a theological dispute it stamped its seal over the fate of
Islamic world since these variations in doctrines and their praxis in the real
world had played crucial roles in rebellions and religious revolutions that
have engulfed early Muslim history. (Zubaida, 1993).
See Case Study P.2: Sunni Ideology (Iran).
So if we return the
Sunnis and the Ottoman social formation, even in their heyday the requirements
of Sunni doctrine about consultation processes in decision making and
community’s right to elect their ruler was largely forgotten due to the
congruence of the material interests of the rulers and that of the religious
classes with the beginning of Umayyad dynasty. Disturbed by Shiite opposition
to its heavy handed rule, Umayyads made plans to bring the Sunni ulema to their
side. As one can assume from other historical experiences they achieved their
aim by inventing conservative interpretations of earlier Sunni doctrines.
The prominent ideas
that favor the ruler’s absolute authority over the subjects and curtailed the
effective questioning of his policies began first with the dispute about
whether men’s actions were predetermined by God or produced by man’s own
volition.
Most of the Shiites
who bore the brunt of the Umayyad oppression sided with the idea that most men
should be held responsible for their actions since that way they criticized the
established order. But Umayyads intervened and took a lot of Sunni ulema to
their side who supported the notion that the man’s actions were predicated by
God so if there are sufferings resulting from those predicated acts then we
cannot hold any man responsible. Moreover during the late Umayyad period the Murji’ites , an influential religious group, advocated the
idea that we as men can not know whose acts are good
or bad since on the judgment day God will determine what is just or unjust.
What they recommend to the believers was total suspension of judgment until the
judgment day.
They argued that even
if one thinks that someone’s actions are unjust and God absolves them, human
beings have nothing to say about that decision against the almighty. So through
this logic conservative scholars concurred with the day to day operations of
the established order. Also since Imam-Ghazali Sunni scholars tend to see only
anarchy and chaos in the absence of a powerful ruler which legitimized the many
acts of the ruling elite from Umayyads to Ottomans. This theological dispute
about the revelation was important because gradual integration of Sunni ulema
into the hegemonic block of the ruling class has effects on Islamic movements
and societies regards to people’s perception of the nation state and its
actions against the people themselves (Khadduri,
1984), (Cudsi, 1981).
Under the Ottoman
rule, the most important privilege that was provided to the ulema was tax
exemption, which in the case of ulema class, was defined in a broader way than
the other members of the military class. (Ipsirli,
2004).
Ottoman military band
Also, according to
Halil Inalcik, since the religious class determines
who would own deserted lands or lands involved in unsettled disputes,
throughout the Ottoman era the ulema class increased its power over the
political decision making by accumulating capital. In “Capital Formation in the
Ottoman Empire “, Inalcik noted that involvement in
Wakf (religious charities in the empire) investments immunized the ulemas’ property from confiscation by the authorities. The
authorities for their part were generally very tolerant regarding ulemas’ sharing of the best land with other members of the
military class since religious approval of their policies enhanced the degree
of their success. For example on the subject of interest payments which were
believed to be prohibited by sharia law, Muslim scholars in the sixteenth
century showed a very conciliatory approach even as they themselves took part
in taking interest. As the Ottomans were the followers of Hanafi school (a
prominent Sunni legal doctrine), one can see the examples of Hanafi jurists
helping creditors by arguing that complex causes which would benefit the
community in the end would also justify the practice of usury or interest. Thus
the Ottoman ulema interpreted the prohibition of interest principle in the
Koran in a very pragmatic and flexible way (Khadduri, 1984). Those actions
interestingly corresponded to the fifteen and sixteenth centuries in which the
Ottoman merchants were competing with European traders on the issue of credit
and trade. In the sixteenth century some influential members of the ulema class
engaged in silk manufacturing, overseas trade and lending money to the
merchants in cities like Bursa and Edirne. The religious class legitimized
these explicit interest payments by commenting that “they (those trades)
enlarged the total wealth of the Muslim population” which was approved by the sunna (actions) of the prophet (Inalcik,
1969:p97-140)(Inalcik and Quataert,
1994:p 66). As we will see in detail on the subject of the Timar system, the
concept of just society further consolidated the ulema’s role within the ruling
elite. So far I have tried to summarize the religious roots of the Ottoman
order, and the Sunni ulema largely constituted the conservative segment of this
element. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Alawis, Shiites
and Bektasis led the peripheral forces by
understanding revelation in a more critical and heterodox ways, a development
whose traces you can follow in religious disputes of today’s Anatolia.
In application of the
divine law the Ottoman jurist believed that the Sultan’s rule should be over
everyone else due to fear that dependence on private persons or mediating
institutions would create corruption as those private interests may interfere
with the divine justice. So this is a concept which takes the ruler as the
idealized emblem of the just society. Since the ruler was bounded by the same
divine law, peoples’ perceptions of Ottoman rulers’ performance were measured
with this yardstick, namely how justly the system treated its subjects.
Similarly to all medieval empires, the primary way of accumulation for the
Ottoman ruling elite was the concept of conquest. As was argued above, the
reputation of the dynasty as the frontier tribe against the infidels
religiously facilitated the implementation of war policies. Starting from 1413
under Sultan Mehmet the Ottomans managed to penetrate the Balkan peninsula and
the central European lands while abolishing the yoke of Western feudalism over
people during their conquests. In the empire those new lands were seen as new
wealth that can contribute to the overall wellbeing of the umma (Muslim
community).In that religious context those conquered lands were accepted as the
belongings of the Sultan as the theory of just order doubted the integrity of
the private powers that mediated between the ruler and the reaya.
Moreover, since these
lands were taken as a result of the power of sword the victories generally were
perceived as the absolute victory of jihadists over infidels which paved the
way to the argument that the Sultan has a right over the conquered land and
population as to what he can do with them, either taking them as slaves or
freeing them and granting them tenancy rights over the land. So one can say
that the empire’s modus operandi was to extend its power over as large an area
as possible, which benefited the empire’s budget through a very efficient
taxation system that replaced old feudal dues and allowed more flexible
relations of production.In that sense the Ottoman
system was in some ways, more progressive than the western or eastern feudalism
since in the empire the ultimate survival of the ruler’s authority was believed
to depend on the happiness of the inhabitants of the land, a fact which largely
explained the lighter taxes and dues that Ottomans established against the
background of heavy tax requirements of the Byzantine system.
The most prominent
group, the military class, was acting as the delegate of the Sultan in local
communities and it was exempted from taxes. They, the local begs and sipahis, were enforcing the Sultan’s authority by
supervising the production in land. But unlike feudal societies, the Ottomans
established the concept of state owned land (mirilands,
that composed 90% of the arable land) which gave the sipahis
and local begs the right to get a share of the harvest after the taxes that are
owed to the state were paid. The state regulated the relationships between timar-holder sipahis, local
military class members and peasants who actually cultivated the lands in a way
that always encouraged production. For example all the disputes between the
peasants and timarholders (whose services were used
in military expeditions by the state) were arbitrated by the State’s kadis( the
judges of the sharia law) by closely observing the general interests of the
State.
When the state
granting tapu rights to peasants it was not the full
ownership rights of the land but a certain kind of tenancy with enlarged
rights. Foremost in Ottoman society peasants can organize production without
the interference of the timar-holders except if the
peasant stopped grain production or tried to change the nature of the State
property rights over the land. (Inalcik and Quataert, 1994) (Faroghi, 1999)
But it does not mean that peasants have complete freedom, they could not
negotiate the terms of their lease with the state, and they could not sell
donate, endow, mortgage or change the original use by producing something
different than the grains that were decided by the state controllers. On the
advantageous side, peasants had the right to transfer the cultivation rights to
another peasant, bequeathing it to sons which created a sense of ownership
among reaya of the land that they were cultivating.
In earlier Roman Empire and Byzantine feudalism the systems disintegrated
largely because of the strict rules and dues that constrained the organization
of production, which gave absolute rights to feudal landowners over the
peasantry that in turn greatly reduced productivity and efficiency.
Under the Byzantine
system the peasant has no freedom other than taking some of the harvest for
his/her own physical reproduction. On the contrary, the Ottoman system granted
the peasant a freedom to organize production as long as she/he remained in the boundaries
of the State law that largely spurred productivity and efficiency. This was one
of the pillars of the Ottoman system due to its solution to the problem of
accumulation and increasing the amount of surplus value that the ruling class
could get. In a way the Ottomans installed a system which was an extension of
Byzantine mentality but with more flexible relations of production.
On another level by tying
the military class to supervision of the appropriate usage of state lands
(since during peace they survived with the income of timars
that they held over these lands) the rulers secured their affirmation of the
general order. They had a social status better than the reaya
but they had no absolute rights over the peasants which created a kind of
checks and balances system. In the case of local governors, the State
distributed timar rights by dispersing the timar lands of governors all around the subject territory
in a way to encourage them to deal with productivity in every corner of the sancak or vilayet that they were presiding over.
Another way to show
the ruling class’ emphasis on productivity, largely
before the eighteenth century, one can look at the granting of unused or
deserted lands to the members of military class in which the State strictly
required them to cultivate the subject land in a way which was beneficial to
the local economies. Since even lands that were granted for religious or
charity reasons, so called wakf lands, status would be reversed to a miri
(state owned) land if State controllers saw some wrongdoing on the part of the
title holder. Peasants were also given some comfort by their ability to pay
their share of taxes through cash payments. This practice also actively
encouraged them to become involved in the market relations, to sell their
product, which in turn helped the palace to achieve maximum wealth and
abundance for the capital city.
The inhabitants of
the capital, and their well being was very important
for the Sultan as the city symbolized the prosperity of the empire, a fact
which encouraged imports to the empire so that the ruling class never suffered
any acute shortage of commodities. The relative freedom of the Ottoman
merchants to invest in speculation and overseas markets and even their
encouragement by the palace in contradiction to their social status, not being
a member of tax-exempt class, can only be explained by the rulers’ obsession
with the ideal of abundance of commodities within the borders of the empire.
Furthermore, merchants’ dealing with other domestic and overseas traders was
largely facilitated by the convenient rulings of the ulema especially on the
subject of interest payments. Inalcik, Gibbs and
Bowen, wrote about the enormous amount of wealth that was accumulated by those
Anatolian merchants in places like Edirne, Bursa and Istanbul from earlier
centuries to the 18th century (Inalcik, 1969) (Gibbs
and Bowen, 1957). Those success stories also showed that, in contrast to the
traditional beliefs, those merchants were not only the members of minority
groups, but large number of Muslim traders were also involved.
One should not have
illusions about those facts due to the primary aims of the rulers and the
subjects. For example Ottoman merchants lagged behind the European merchants in
terms of using advanced forms of credit instruments such as transferring of
debt payment to a third party through letters of credit. Second, restrictions
on institutionalization of property other than in religious wakfs and constant
fear of confiscations by the state hampered the competitiveness of Ottoman
traders. So the aforementioned issue usually forced the influential merchants
to pursue and buy political power through their wealth which would increase
their social status in the eyes of the palace instead of venturing into
capitalist activities which would have aroused suspicion on the part of the
ruling elite as possible attempts by private individuals to carve a personal
autonomy for themselves independent of state power.
Then in a general
sketch we can summarize the Ottoman social classes as the Sultan, the religious
ulema, local begs and governors who were granted the use of much fertile and
productive lands( the definitive factor that determined this social status was the
imperial diploma that indicated the delegation of religious and executive power
of the Sultan to the members of this military and religious class) and timar holder sipahis who were
used by the ruling elite to supervise its miri lands, sustain local security
and in war times to join the military mobilization as the tax-exempted ruling
class. The remaining
population which was composed of reaya (peasants),
merchants and town artisans can be classified as the subordinated class, even
though there were striking inequalities among the members of this group. What
grouped them under same category was their duty to pay taxes to the State. But
sometimes during financially difficult times the ruling elite granted some
tax-exemptions to those merchants whose trade was necessary for the capital
market. (Mardin, 1969)
In terms of the
culture of these social classes there emerged a bifurcation between the
administrative classes whose culture generally associated with that of the
palace and that of the subjects. They used the Ottoman language and the
official Arabic and Persian words in their written transactions. Subjects
mostly communicated in the informal street Turkish. That division became
decisive due to the fact that Ottoman bureaucrats, who were trained by the
imperial schools, were forcefully adopted by the State, separated from their
families (devshirme method) and lost their
connections with their ancestors.
This created a slave
like bureaucrat whose everything (from family to social life) were the State
and its institutions. These men were also indoctrinated with the culture of the
palace which envisioned the creation of an impeccable Ottoman civilization as
the new successor of the earlier empires. In the above paragraphs we saw that
the Sultan’s understanding of the religious based just order requires a certain
kind of patrimonialism on the part of the ruling elite for the legitimization
purposes. This order was largely an inherited culture from the earlier Middle
Eastern empires so the ruling elite saw in using their language and status
symbols a benefit for the reproduction of the economic and political system.
For example, the emphasis on the abundance of commodities in the capital’s
market corresponds to the dynasty’s belief that the conspicuous consumption of
the ruling strata would signal to the subordinated groups the enormous power of
the imperial ruler as oppose to the ordinary man in the street. The scientific
resources, developed literature, state of the art schools and high level of
abstraction that the religious class achieved in their discussions of God’s
words all consolidated the gap between the palace and the provinces.
One another factor
that played a role in that cultural division was the disdain that the ruling
elite adapted against the Turkish tribal culture and its associated traditional
customs. First of all, rulers did not accept the fact that they were coming from
a Turkish tribe due to the fact that they did not believe that tribes can
create imperial civilizations. Second, the religious basis of the order and
Ottoman culture requires that the ruler treat all in the umma (Muslim
community) as equals within the perimeters of the just order. Third, the
Turkish tribal traditions largely reflected the heterodox understandings of the
relationships between men and God which affected most of the Anatolian
population and these were incongruent with the established interpretations of
the orthodox Sunni ulema class (Gellner, 1992), (Mardin, 1969).
Ernest Gellner
divided these as high Islam of the ulema, which fundamentally observes the
teachings of Koran word but word, and the low Islam of the public who
intermixed religious teachings with superstition and their everyday practical
activity. Alewites , closer to Shiites, in Anatolia
adapted unique praying procedures such as men/women’s joint participation in
religious rituals, which an example of the extreme heterodoxy of the rural
population. This was obviously perceived as heresy by the orthodox ruling ulema
and manifested itself as a policy when the successive governments decided to
struggle with these interpretations of Islam in 16th century and onwards.
As a culture, Turkish
tribes were traditionally nomadic and they did not display many of the
characteristics of a settled civilization. This was a result of the centuries
long wars between Turkish tribes and the main empires near their immigration
routes, the Chinese to the Byzantine. When the ruling class in the empire
looked back to this nomadic tribal heritage, their main perception was that a
culture which did not show any sign of status differentiation (communal
agrarian society) would not constitute the basis of a great imperial
civilization. Serif Mardin argued that Turkish nomads and tribes were renowned
for social features such as low social differentiation that has been
accompanied by a high degree of affectivity and particularism. The universalistic
goals of the empire clashed with the aforementioned tribal characters since as
argued before, the personal connections and private meddling in the empire’s
business were largely perceived as potential threats to the integrity of the
just order which at a certain degree required the formation of an impersonal
bureaucracy that could override the ties and restrictions of kinship (Mardin,
1969).
The most significant
aspect of this cultural division was that there was not any group or class that
could mediate between these two different cultures , unlike the Western
European bourgeoisie who came up with its own paradigm regarding life
(including Protestantism, the capitalist work ethic, demands for formal
equality in legal and political areas), Ottoman merchants, as the only
potential faction of the popular classes that could engender a rival ideology
against that of empire, were largely deprived of that opportunity due to the
strict palace control over people’s wealth and social status. Most of the time
Ottoman merchants were inclined to buy political power with their wealth as the
rulers rewarded political conformity. In their case the urban areas and towns
did not have the political autonomy or the privileges of their counterparts in
the West. Capital accumulation in the empire was diverted to the greater good
of the Ottoman Sultan, who constantly looked for any immediate private threats
to its rule and would cut them off before they generated any rival political or
economic power (Redfield, 1956).
In urban centers, the
craftsman and artisans were organized around corporations or Ottoman guilds to
regulate the internal and external trade whose ultimate aim was to ensure the
comfortable consumption levels of the ruling class. These guilds’ operations
were strictly controlled by government regulators in order not to impair the
balance between demand and supply, especially the unfettered flow of commodity
supplies was emphasized. This meant that the urban centers could not develop a
counter-culture to the empire since their demand and supply were arranged by
government in terms of fixed prices. Those controls and fixed prices posed
another obstacle for the development of capitalism since the urban guilds who
were dependent on the merchants for supplies of raw materials and external
market outlets fell into a disadvantageous position when the merchants
preferred to hide most of their commodities for black markets and European
traders. Because they could not raise their demand price or supply price without
government permission the power of the guilds was actually diminished. As I
argued above most of the merchants consolidated their relationship with
authorities by purchasing political power through their wealth, which often
resulted in authorities’ condoning their illegal dealings (Owen, 1981).
Another factor that
hampered the emergence of a possible counter-culture was the growing rivalry
between the merchants and the urban guilds due to disagreements between these
two groups regarding access to raw materials and the determination of the supply
prices. Historians point out the tendency in 16th-17th century Anatolia of
merchants increasingly associating themselves with the culture of the palace
while the urban guilds and craftsmen of central Anatolia opted for bektashi or sufi order life
styles (more on these later in the discussion of peasant revolts of 17th-18th
century). (Mardin, 1969)
But all of this
should not create the misunderstanding that those peasants and craftsmen in
Anatolia sharply differentiated themselves from the palace’s orbit.
According to
historians, the ordinary people also internalized firmly the inferiority of
their status and Turkish tribal culture since most of the time their yearnings
were to reach the status of those upper classes, not to abolish them. One
factor that can be counted as a facilitator of this social relationship or
imperial hegemony was the berat, an official imperial
document that immediately changed a person’s status from reaya
to the upper class and granted that subject tax-exempt status for his life which
amazed the Europeans by showing how easy status mobility was in the empire. But
the berat was more of an emblem of the Ottoman
bureaucracy’s effort to cope with the challenges of diffused and very
diversified populations’ demands (Inalcik and
Quataert,1994). Then one can assert that imperial rhetoric and its penetrating
power was relatively successful up to the late 17th century, the time when the
revolts started to occur within Anatolia and the remote corners of the empire.
Thus unlike the
rights and opportunities of Western European autonomous classes that composed
the bourgeoisie and its allies, the Ottoman population did not have any
mediating institutions that were organized in a way to contest the official
discourse while carving more freedoms and representation for the general
public. This was one of the reasons that caused the much quicker disintegration
of the empire’s control over its subjects when the Western powers’ gradual
military and economic success in those centuries began to cast its shadow over
the economic and political resources that were crucial to control for the
survival of the Ottoman ruling elite.
After the second half
of the 17th century, Ottoman policy of conquering lands and reproducing the
system faced an insurmountable obstacle. Europe, who was far behind Ottoman
military technology two centuries before, bridged that gap and began to surpass
the Ottoman way of military organization. As competitive capitalism and its
merchants brought revolutionary production techniques to European armies,
Ottomans were stuck with the old style janissary army. The real pillar of the
imperial system, its land tenure system, could no longer support the increasing
expenses of standing armies since the timar system’s
basic modus operandi was not the standing army but the seasonal army whose
local services to supervise the peasant production in state lands were crucial
for the amount of surplus that the central treasury could get.
In order to asses the situation more clearly one should point out the
different development patterns that the Ottoman empire and the West followed.
Both sides agreed that the main task of the State was to ensure the adequate
amount of gold and silver supply in their central treasuries. So, to that
effect Ottomans prohibited the export of those valuable metals like their
counterparts in the West. The striking difference was that from those
protectionist policies, the West created the notion of mercantilism which
depended on the balanced budget and trade surplus through the encouragement of
exports.
Those exportable
commodities and their competitive markets began to determine the economic
regulations within the West. On the contrary, Ottomans reached a different
conclusion from the same premise; they supported the importation of commodities
even in the face of trade deficits and discouraged exports for the sake of
abundance in the local markets. Thus, when the European states promoted a more
flexible and free market structure which increased the tax revenues and
economic power of themselves, Ottomans made their regulatory provisions over
internal markets stricter. New Ottoman regulatory practices aimed to curb the
influence of private individuals over what the authorities thought of as the
domain of the Sultan. In the empire, the primary concern of the ruling class
was the protection of the fiscal interests of the state and smooth inflow and
outflow of goods in the internal market. It did not occur to the administrators
that Europeans had devised a completely novel form of trade policy by
mercantilist exports, since every demand of the British, French and Venetians
in terms of capitulations from the empire were generously granted which put the
local production and merchants into a significant disadvantage against their
European counterparts. When the Ottomans finally understood the importance of
the protection of domestic markets against the foreign competition in the late
18th century, it was too late to reverse the situation due to the high level of
productivity and competitiveness of the Western techniques. The Western
governments, by assigning trade consuls to important Ottoman trade centers,
guaranteed the continuation of those generous open-market policies of the
empire which provided European Levant companies an opportunity to undermine the
position of local merchants since most of the time the taxation rates of
western goods in Ottoman territories were lower than that of European States (Inalcik and Quataert, 1994).
The second factor
that put pressure on the Ottoman economy was population movements and their
growth. As explained above, the main economic stimulus of the reproduction of
the system was the conquest of new lands by the Ottoman army which came to a
gradual halt in late 16th and 17th centuries. Most of the local population of
Anatolian towns and villages combined with the nomadic tribes that emigrated
from eastern parts of the empire (either because they were pushed by other
tribes, nomads or they had encountered severe harvest and weather conditions)
towards the west demanded new fertile lands and increased the pressure on the
existing ones. But on the contrary, the empire was losing most of its battles
and control over the distant parts of its territory.
The basic consequence
of lost wars was the significant decrease in the share of timarli
sipahis (local military class) in terms of arable
lands. Increasingly, possessors of local wealth transformed the state owned
miri lands into either private or Wakf (religious endowments but mostly
controlled by certain families) properties as a result of the social turbulence
that came together with defeat in foreign wars that left important amount of
miri lands unclaimed within Anatolia. To show this tendency better, one can
refer to Inalcik and Quartet’s study on economic and
social history of the Ottoman Empire for the population numbers of Anatolia and
their growth rates in the 16th century.
Inalcik and Quataert, 1994, show on
p28; how enormous the population pressure was over the resources in late 16th
century Anatolia. In addition to that, those regions like Karaman were renowned
centers for grain production and sheep breeding which supplied the crucial
parts of the empire’s agricultural taxes in terms of arable and fertile lands. Faroqhi and Braudel also mentioned the subdivisions of the
peasant farms in Anatolia as the State’s response to ameliorate the conditions
a little bit. But that kind of action in turn produced a reduction in family
household incomes, which depressed the overall purchasing power of the
population whose incomes from wages deteriorated compared to the rising food
and land prices. Readers should take into consideration the fact that Ottoman
peasants did not have the ownership rights of those timar
lands and as a result they could not necessarily benefit from rising food or
land prices as much as merchants or foreign traders. As to the town guilds and
craftsmen they were also subject to economic strangulation as their supply and
demand were strictly regulated by Ottoman bureaucracy which prevented them from
trying new competitive activities in the market. (Braudel, 1972), (Faroqhi, 1984) (Darling,1996)
Another element that
was affected by economic imbalance was the income of the religious endowments
which allocated most of their money into local infrastructure investments.
According to Inalcik’s study on capital formation in
the Ottoman Empire, the rates of interests that the money lenders (sometimes
including religious endowments and the local ulema class) charged to borrowers
generally surpassed three or four times the normal amount of 25 percent. In the
critical years between late 16th century to the early 17th century government
controllers found interest rates of 100-200 percent as ongoing rates among the
usurers and the peasants (Inalcik, 1969).
These developments
were linked and accelerated the decrease in government revenues from land and
trade which forced the government to resort to monetary measures to close its
budget deficit. Most of the empire’s revenues were fixed incomes in terms of monetary
values, though in reality those fixed revenues constantly lost value against
the rising price inflation of the 17th century. The Ottoman monetary system
used the akce as the basic unit of currency (which
contained 1.15 grams of silver per coin) in its conduct of internal and
external transactions until the first gold coin of the empire was minted after
1477. Minting gold coins (sultanis) manifested the
political tendency of the empire to successfully challenge the Western
presence, especially Venetian, in the Eastern Mediterranean trade. But all of
the aforementioned developments that created the financial strains of the
imperial system contributed to the administrative decision to debase the
Ottoman currency in a largely futile effort to cope with the problems of the
late 16th century. Sevket Pamuk argued that between 1585and 1690 the monetary
system disintegrated and the constant devaluation of the gold and silver
contents of the coins had taken place. At the same time the European traders
began to close this coin shortage by their own currencies that paved the way
for the basis of European economic penetration into the empire’s territory.
According to Pamuk, the average debasement rate of akce
coins was 0.8 percent a year between 1326 and 1914 but the most volatile and
turbulent years corresponded to the 17th century. The rates for the period
before 1585 displayed signs of monetary stability and trade expansion under the
control of Ottoman treasury.
As Pamuk, in Inalcik and Quartet, 1994: show on p 963, the depreciation
of the Ottoman currency reached its worst point in 1680s, a date when the
imperial armies witnessed their final and most decisive defeat against Western
powers before the gates of Vienna. Compounded with the problem of new
requirements for the military structure ( no longer could the sipahis, cavalry army, which itself was seasonal army, be
used against the standing armies of European powers) and urgent necessity of
cash payments , Ottoman government had to sacrifice the centuries long
tradition of the timar system on it’s
State owned lands.
For immediate relief
miri lands and peasant farms were converted into tax-farms (iltizams),
where the right to collect taxes was auctioned by the government in advance.
In this system, multazims (tax collectors) who paid the highest bid for a
regional tax unit obtained the right to collect local taxes as the
representative of the State in which they can keep the surplus that they could
get above the amount that was paid to the State. This facilitated the inflow of
cash into the Ottoman treasury but at the same time it undermined the perennial
implicit contract between the State and the population and the religious
sanctioning of the order, which was that the just Sultan always protects the
most vulnerable of the reaya against unnecessary
abuses.
Roger Owen, in his
analysis of the consequences of this significant shift in the Ottoman land
system argued, persuasively, that since these auctioned revenues should be
collected by men of authority and influence (a degree of authority that should
not defy imperial orders but at the same time should coerce the local
population into consent with enough powers) and given the fact that imperial
power was weakening in every front from economy to military , the obvious
result would be the increasing burden of the reaya.
First they should provide new services to those tax collectors and second since
the surplus after the taxes were paid was the property of the multazims, depending on the power relationships between two
sides, they forced peasants to produce more. They did this in a way that
largely contradicted with the old imperial system in which the peasants were
relatively free in terms of organization and methods of the production. As a
result the extra-economical, feudal, burdens and associated pressures increased
over the local population (Owen, 1981).
The tendency of
formation of new feudal enclaves within the empire began as local power lords found
new ways to consolidate their autonomy. By benefiting from developing European
trade they manipulated the amount of money that has to be paid to the State.
Due to the fact that the European prices were more attractive for personal
profit than the controlled market prices of the empire, they gradually kept
more and more of the product to themselves.
A significant portion
of taxable revenues from the land were diverted by local multazims
to recruit and arm retainers, and to build up network of clients and engage in
the type of conspicuous consumption calculated to impress the government (Owen,
1981). As expected, the flourishing local powers preferred to imitate the
culture of the palace and showed their new wealth through luxurious symbols (i.e imitation of Sultan’s palaces in their locality). This
largely vindicates the idea that I mentioned above that the strict control by
the government and perception of alternative and local, tribal cultures as
inferior models prevented the emergence of a counter culture from the newly
formed strata. This fact also supports the theory that in a social formation when
the newly formed groups could not surpass the old mode of production in terms
of innovativeness or efficiency, or in an ideological sense too, they tend to
replicate the historical experiences and cultural artifacts of the old ruling
elite in organizing the expropriation of the surplus value. (Moore, 1966), (Poluantzas, 1973)
On another level
since the State collected the auctioned taxes from local multazims
before the latter obtained the possession of the harvest or product, the
importance of the usurers and the merchants, who could lend money with interest
to local notables, increased. This further aggravated the situation of local
peasantry due to pressures to produce what the local multazims
demanded. Then also these lending practices and high interest rates that were
charged forced the collectors to be involved more in the market relationships,
in which, first the European merchant groups began to directly deal with multazims, bypassing the government, and as a consequence
gradually the relative freedom of the Ottoman peasants in organizing production
compared to the serfs in feudal Europe diminished. Owen argued that after 17th
century more and more the local multazims tried to
regulate village production along more lucrative and profitable lines of
production. An example of this can be given from the remote regions of the empire
such as Egypt and Syria where the crop production and where and how crops were
produced, was increasingly determined by the newly established alliances of
local multazims, their lending merchants and the
European traders who provided the markets for these goods. (Owen, 1981)
Thus, the
religious legitimization of the Ottoman land system and general order got a
striking blow as over time the religious class ulema became involved in illegal
dealings like making the selection of new religious leaders into a hereditary
practice, helping powerful private families to confiscate miri lands and
turning them into illegal wakf holdings. Religious judges kadis (assigned by
the imperial center) not only were involved in trade relationships with local
merchants, but also overlooked most of the rising complaints of peasants
regarding the unjust burdens of the new land holding system in which
systematically private interests gained the upper hand in terms of mediation
between the Sultan and the reaya. So the centuries
long Ottoman traditions of direct protection of the vulnerable by the Sultan
began to break down and created an impetus for local rebels that manifested
themselves generally in religious colorings but this time mainly closer to the
Shiite interpretation of Islam.
In this context the
main oppositional ideology that struggled against the mainstream orthodox Sunni
discourse was the Alevi and Bektashi organizations which were latent tendencies
among the Anatolian population since the 13th century. In order to answer the
question why these bektashi groups spearheaded the
opposition during 16-17th century revolts , one should look at the intersection
or mingling of the traditional cultures of the diverse population with the
desire to criticize the mainstream ideology of the day which still at the time
tried to legitimize the established order. Thus the economic troubles and the
associated suffering that the peasantry felt in those centuries has been
demonstrated above.
So when these
centrifugal forces experience the unjust dimension of the new iltizam (tax-auctioning) system through rising burdens of
extra-economical demands by the local notables, discontent manifested itself in
available cultural discourses and symbols. According to John Birge, Bektashi
and similar Mevlevi orders began to emerge in Anatolia after the collapse of Selcuks state in mid 13th
century, a time in which Anatolia was open to migration from the east, south
and north. As the Ottomans penetrated into the heartlands of the Byzantine
Empire, these nomadic groups came from outside and started to mingle with the
Persian, Greek and Arabic cultures and formed heterodox understandings of man’s
ways to reach God. On the one hand, the people’s lack of security and constant
wars directed them towards religious mysticism that emphasized the
transitoriness of human life. On the other, the same people also felt a strong
need to conquer foreign lands in the name of the true religion (Birge, 1965).
Beginning with poets
like Yunus Emre and religious leaders like Haci Bektashi Veli, Mevlana Cellaledini Rumi, the mevlevi and
bektashi discourses took roots among Christians, and
Muslims, coupled with Persian influences. What these people came up with was a
very different interpretation of the God-Men relationship, an ascetic life and
a mystic approach to the direct knowledge of God that largely surpasses the
interventions of the religious ulema class. In Birge’s words“As
orthodox canonist and professional theologians objected to this tendency to
“search the conscience” on the ground that the ultimate result would be in the
direction of heresy, organized bands of brotherhoods began to develop , based
on the fundamental idea that “ the fervent practice of worship engenders in the
soul graces, immaterial and intelligible realities , and that the “science of
hearts” will procure to the soul an experimental wisdom“ (Birge, 1965: p 13).
These passionate soul
searches created the idea that if man worshipped enough after a threshold he
can reach a direct understanding of the God, which ultimately brought the
notion that if Man can access to that direct knowledge, God could not be
something other than a mystical impression of man himself. As opposed to the
rigid scholastic interpretation of ulema, this popularly reachable ideal was
adopted by the local population who also increasingly turned to the Shiite
sources of critique of established order as a panacea to their helplessness
against the growing injustices emanating from the Ottoman center. These
brotherhoods and Shiite groups preferred to use street language, contrary to
the palace’s insistence on using official Arabic in its dealings. But one also
notes the fact that these popular discourses did not take any rebellious form
up until the late 16th century, they were mostly latent ideologies or popular
forms of implicit criticisms of the hypocrisy of the Sunni clerics (White,
1918), (Brown, 1927).
Starting with Haci
Bektashi Veli and Balim Sultan those Bektashi orders increasingly identified
themselves with the growing opposition to the rulers, first due to their usage
of common street Turkish as opposed to the palace’s official Arabic or Persian.
Many of the poets spoke of the ordinary peoples’ sufferings in an
understandable way which naturally raised eyebrows among the religious ulema.
Aside from their common language, bektashi seyhs (leaders) also adapted to the popular superstitions
and their associated myths which in ideological sense brought them closer to
the ordinary people’s mixture of centuries old local traditions and scholastic
Islamic teachings. That engendered a significant contrast with the way that the
orthodox ulema treated the common myths of the Turkish public. The Bektashis and village Alevis in
Anatolia were renowned for their humor and wit in which they criticized the
hypocrisy of the ulema class and its strict orthodox life style. Unlike
orthodoxy, they brought the concept of God to the level of the public and
through that they identified god as beauty in every human being. This kind of
ideology ostensibly proposed egalitarian social relationships between the
rulers and the ruled.
Moreover they
despised the ulema’s elevation of the knowledge of god as something unreachable
and unknowable by the average person, an idea which manifested itself in
Bektashi poems that made fun of the untouchable concepts of God in Sunni
literature.
As a Gramscian one
can argue that this criticism of people’s common sense through humor was a very
effective way of reaching people since in the 16th century even the soldiers of
Ottoman army were sympathetic to the Shiite and Alevi interpretations of religious
teachings (Birge, 1965) (Lewis, 1988). If one can remember the land system, the
timar soldiers who were constantly exposed to the
prevailing village culture, one assumes that soldiers were not very different
from the ordinary peasants in terms of cultural symbols or values that they
upheld.
Throughout the 17th
century, from Celali revolts to other little known
peasant rebellions against unjust taxation, corruption, devaluation of money
and increasing inflationary pressures on everyday life, Bektashi leaders played
important roles, whose poems and writings have been cited even today in central
Anatolia as the symbols of popular resistance to injustice.
For example, one of
the mysterious but widely cited Bektashi leader of those peasant rebellions was
Pir Sultan Abdal, a poet who lived in late 16th century around Sivas (a town in
central Anatolia). He was executed by Ottoman authorities for his rebellious
claims against the scholastic interpretations of god-human relationships and
his critiques against the multazims tax system. In
one of his short poems he expressed his hostility to the prevailing system as
follows;
“In Istanbul he must
come down: The sovereign with his empire’s crown.
Come, soul brothers, let’s band together, Brandish our swords against the
Godless,
And restore the poor people’s rights”. Source: Prof. Talat Halman’s web page in
Bilkent University.
As he was dragged to
his execution chamber he was said to cite poems that glorified the Bektashi
order’s discourse against the dominant powers. Especially his depiction of the
ruling class as the godless was a very radical accusation to the Ottoman powers
at the time. From here on we can look at what distinguishes Bektashi orders
from the other opposition movements, by looking at the most radical innovations
that they brought to the Islamic societies. The first one is the conception of
God within men as a symbol of beauty which directly put every man in the
highest place in religious ordering, and concomitantly argued for their
ultimate equality. In that vein Bektashis mostly used
the Shiite interpretations and myths since the Sunni discourse lent itself to
the dominant class for the legitimization of the established order.
Secondly most Bektashis were strict believers of the Shiite school so
they initiated mixed religious rituals, women and men together, which somewhat
recognized the dignity and personality of the women in a Muslim society, unlike
the orthodox Sunni canonical sources that denied any rights to women. This
factor forced them to organize their rituals in isolated and secret places due
to their radical idea of sexual equality and the elevation of the social status
of women in the empire. In addition to that Bektashis
introduced raki (a traditional Turkish drink) or wine into their ceremonies
which would be unthinkable in a Muslim ritual as its consumption is strictly
forbidden by religious sources (Birge, 1965). It was also an indication of the
mixture in Bektashi tradition of Christian, Persian, Turkish and Arabic
cultures in their social relationships.
But from the late
16th century Ottoman sultans and their grand vezirs
(equivalent of prime minister) began to exterminate this “heretic” order from
the surface of the empire. Historical records showed that up to 40,000 Bektashis were killed and many more of them were imprisoned
due to their subversive activities throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. That
was also a sign of the weakening hegemony of the orthodox religious discourse
that had under gird the system this far since ascending coercion meant that the
ruling class replaced political persuasion with the naked domination.
As the rulers of the
empire tried to erase the traces of this religious opposition to their
establishment, one should also be aware of the fact that Bektashis
as the bearers of the counter-hegemonic project failed to win this necessary
ideological war. One of the main factors that contributed to their failure was
the hierarchical and paternalistic organization of the order. The highest rank
members of the order, the Bektashi babas (fathers),
generally controlled almost every detail of the rituals and members’ practices.
So even though Bektashis seemed progressive in terms of gender
relationships, their gatherings were never organized by the initiatives of the
local people, let alone women.
This points out the
fact that their opposition simply reproduced the existing paternalistic
structures of Middle Eastern religious orders, which did not necessarily
enhance the individuality of the members or enrich their understanding of the
established order. Lack of individuality in the Ottoman peasant opposition
discourse, unlike the secular opposition to the feudal order in Western Europe,
meant that opposition to the feudalistic ties of the old order was reduced.
The second point
about the failure of religious opposition to the empire was that they did not
have any credible alternative to the old mode of accumulation, the Ottoman timar system. They just voiced a criticism of injustices
when the old order evolved into a more privately dominated land tenure system.
The communal structures of Bektashi villages did not have any connection with
other territories of the empire, which mostly rendered the reproduction of
their culture very local. That can also remind us of the reluctance of the
Ottoman rulers to embrace Turkish tribal culture as the representative or high
culture of the empire. This localism coupled with the lack of a more productive
alternative accumulation system resulted in an imitation of the old order’s
everyday practices within a different religious interpretation. What I try to
emphasize is there was not any substantial transformation in Bektashi life
style; they remained cosmetic changes in religious rituals. At the end as Serif
Mardin argued, the common man in the Ottoman Empire was also steeped in norms
and socialization processes which would be characterized as authoritarian in
the West (Mardin, 1969), (Barkey and Van Rossem, 1997).
19th Century Reforms and Ottoman Bankruptcy
When the 19th century
approached, historians pointed out the stagnation of the Ottoman economy as the
central government, whose ability to control distant regions of the empire
faded away with the emergence of local notables or multazims
collectors, faced mounting difficulties against the new European concept of a
conscript army as opposed to its dependence on mercenaries in fighting. The
major reasons behind this stagnation and difficulties can be categorized as
follows; According to Owen, first the lack of security greatly reduced the
productivity levels in agriculture as most of the peasants moved towards the
mountainous and less fertile regions in order to protect themselves from either
nomad excursions into their fields or constant wars, and local fighting, could
not produce as much as they did in the past.
Second the extension
of private property rights into the miri (state) lands and local notable
families’ hiding real production numbers from the government regulators
effectively decreased the empire’s revenues from tax-farming. In the remote
regions of the empire like Damascus, Aleppo, Iraq and Arabia, local power
figures carved out for themselves spaces of autonomy both in trade and
politics, a development which peaked with the Ottoman governor M. Ali pasha’s
independent administration in Egypt. He even went as far to declare wars
against the center, though these challenges were warded off by the help of the
British and French (Owen, 1981). For example even the ulema class was involved
in appropriation of miri lands into private religious wakfs (religious
charities) whose primary aim was manipulated to provide permanent resources for
private families with hereditary rights.
Third, as the private
property and markets enlarged their territory in the empire (these markets were
not the harbingers of any capitalist development but mostly showed the signs of
increasing European trade) the sources of capital and credit gained crucial
importance to finance local infrastructure investments. Even peasant weddings
were subject to the outside credit flows. This fact created a link or
convergence of material interest between the local elite who expropriated the
agricultural surplus, urban merchants (mediators) and the European commercial
companies due to the reason that there were significant margins of profit
available for the Europeans to lend money to the Ottoman local elites. Most of
the time these local connections created successful urban centers near the
agricultural surplus and in that way they integrated the activity of collecting
the local surplus with immediate low-level industrial production such as
furniture, textiles and pottery. (Owen, 1981) (Pamuk, 1987)
European merchants
increasingly adapted themselves to the local competitive conditions, customer
tastes, and preferences. Statistics from the era showed the ascending power of
European local consuls in determining the conditions of the mutual trade as the
local merchants gradually lost their competitive strength against cheaper and
more efficient Western commodities. Roger Owen asserted that in 1820‘s Beirut
only 3 out of 34 merchants were Muslims and all the others had some kind of
European protection.
The striking thing about
all of these developments was the response of the Ottoman elite who continued
their policy of strict economic regulations of Ottoman exports to overseas. The
outdated logic of the ruling class to create balance between supply and demand
through rigorous supervision over urban guilds largely eliminated any seeds of
private capitalist enterprise. Another factor that accompanied the central
government policy was that some of the local merchants, after losing in
competition with Europeans, immediately turned inwards to intra-regional trade
to compensate their losses suffered from the open markets. Closed system of
urban guilds and associated political favors sometimes prolonged their
commercial life. That was an interesting sign for the future of Turkey since
the path of dependent development for both the state and foreign allies
gradually began, resulting in some ambitious reform programs of the Ottoman
government in economic and military policy (Findley, 1980).
The Ottoman
government initiated its reform program with military renewal and after 1807
they sped up the process of transition from the mercenary style army of the timar land system to a conscript army, called Nizam-i-Cedid who, from their organization techniques to their
uniforms closely resembled that of the rivals of the empire. One factor that
quickened the process of army renewal was Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition which
threatened the crucial resources of the empire in the Middle East. The second
factor that spurred the demands for a construction of new naval power was the
increasing strength of the British Navy in the eastern Mediterranean sea.
Through these policies the Ottoman government aimed to revitalize urban
industry through giving them the task of constructing new ships, guns,
armaments, and also the textile sector that produced uniforms for the army.
Education reform that
paved the way for the opening of European style schools in engineering,
military, public administration constituted the second leg of this major policy
shift. In addition to that, government sent scores of young students to
training programs in Western Europe to create a qualified next generation of
civil bureaucrats for the State. Interestingly, those students came back with
liberal reform-minded critiques of the Ottoman system which would strike the
last blow to the State.
In agriculture, as
the new conscript army furthered the fiscal pressures on the Ottoman finances,
the central government decided to overhaul its taxation system in rural parts
of the empire. They established government-salaried positions to collect local
taxes rather than depending one hundred percent on local multazims.
That issue engendered an encounter between the central government and the local
notables (ayans), which resulted with the
reinstallation of central government control over the remote regions of the
empire. But one issue that was striking was the fact that the corruption in
bureaucracy
was so widespread that most of the time newly appointed local government
officials either opted to collaborate with local ayans
or their local power could not cope with the material and political resources
of these people (Kasaba, 1988).
At that juncture from
1820s to 1856 government tried to please foreigners and the ethnic minorities
with its reform packages. In 1820 and 1838 Anglo-Ottoman trade convention was
signed to regulate the trade practices of British merchants within the empire.
As a result of the treaty British merchants had the opportunity to break up the
internal protective tariffs of the Ottoman state, which completely gave them a
free hand in the domestic trade. Concerning the British exports to the empire,
the export tariffs were raised from 3 to 5 percent, even though the rate of
British tariffs for Ottoman exports remained 12 percent (Owen, 1981), (Davison,
1963).
Most of the time in
trade disputes those (tourist and immigrant) merchants who still got the
protection of a European power just bypassed the domestic courts and demanded
treatment as if they were the foreign merchants. Those decrees also guaranteed
the private property rights of the merchants and exempted them largely from the
jurisdiction of Sharia (religious courts). Though these decrees can be
evaluated as progressive in matters of civil law and the development of the
concept of the individual in the Ottoman legal system, they ended up as
manipulation tools of the European powers and were sources of resentment by the
local Muslim population who saw in them nothing but a discriminatory practice
against Muslims. For example in those years when the British did not pay
anything for internal tariffs, Muslim merchants had to pay those internal
tariffs to the central government in the absence of any foreign protector above
them (Ozyuksel, 1993).
Nevertheless Ottoman
reforms, failed in crucial matters such as industry and agriculture.
In industry the rate of development in European machinery and capital
productivity was very much ahead of that of the Ottoman industry. As the years
went by, rational bureaucrats saw the futility of insisting on production of
ships and guns in Turkish docks.
Secondly, the rising
power of European competition turned the local entrepreneurs both inland and
toward small scale production which both narrowed the local markets and the
chances of any large scale Ottoman capital accumulation. In agriculture as I
argued above, the power of local ayans and ulema
mostly diverted the government funds into their private coffers and conspicuous
consumption. State’s efforts to promote private property in land through
decrees contradicted the attempts to solve the increasing financial problems of
the central government to control rural surplus value through reestablishing
state authority over the miri lands.
Case Study: How The Demise of the Ottoman
Empire.
Under those
contradictory pressures, coupled with the despair that the military felt
against its rivals in the Balkans and other territories, the budget deficits
required one form or another foreign debt, a stratagem to which ultimately they
resorted during the Crimean war against the Russians. Actual consequences were
deeply grave for the central treasury. As Roger Owen says, the first foreign
loan was borrowed from the London House of Dent, Palmer and Co in the sum of
2,514,913 British pounds. The interest was 6 percent. (Owen, 1981: p 101)
Starting with this loan the Ottoman treasury resorted to foreign loans many
times in the next two decades in order to even finance short term public debts.
Until the 1875
declaration of bankruptcy the Ottoman government needed almost limitless amount
of money for its infrastructure projects, from railroads, irrigation and
investments in agriculture to the Europeanization of the army. Also local ayans were willing to borrow money at rates between 30 to
50 percent a year, which was a very profitable rate for the Western companies.
As developing capitalism pushed interest rates lower and increasing competition
drove rate of returns down in most of Europe, Ottoman governments’, State
guaranteed, borrowing seemed a very attractive option for institutional
investors in Britain or France.
In the domestic
field, if one looks at the projects that the foreign loans were spent on, a
bigger portion of those loans went to repayment of principal and interests of
the debt itself. The second major item in treasury’s agenda was the cost of
rising rebellions throughout the Balkans against the empire and their
financing. The ever growing costs of controlling the alienated populations of
Balkans, who were under the influence of nationalistic aspirations of 1789
French revolution, forced the treasury to refine its taxation system.
Nevertheless, the corruption on the local and central level associated with
lack of discipline on Ottoman finances (in the 19th century, the ministry of
finance could not control palace’s expenditures) created a vicious circle in
which central government chose a dangerous path of clearing long term debts’
interest through short term borrowing at higher interest rates. The trajectory
of the Ottoman foreign borrowing and the treasury’s general revenues and
expenditures, this state of affairs could not continue forever. In 1875 the
Ottoman government declared that it could not service half of its nominal debt
in cash, and so decided to issue new short term bonds to compensate that
portion of its creditors. (Source, Owen, 1981: p 104-106)
The informal
declaration of the bankruptcy resulted in the creation of Duyun-u
– Umumiye (a collecting agency with foreign creditors
on its board) which conditioned the central government to share all its
revenues with this body in order to decrease its indebtedness. In 1881 this
decision was the final nail in the coffin of the empire as it provided enormous
controlling powers to the foreigners over the State’s finances. As mentioned
above the European educated new young bureaucrats quickened their attempts to
find a novel ideology that could replace the populations’ loyalties to the
Islamic pretexts with a loyalty to the nation and its territorial state without
destroying the centuries old social cohesion that composed the fabric of the
empire. The voices of young Turks and Turkish nationalism with their more
disintegrating tendencies began to be heard in the empire, especially in the
Arab provinces. (Roshwald, 2001), Palmer, 1992)
Then, as we will see,
the emergence of the Turkish nationalism on the one hand largely as a reaction
to the spreading ethnic minority identity demands, and on the other hand due to
the growing realization among the Ottoman bureaucratic elite that the Islamic
based Ottoman concept of “Just Order” was no longer a reliable pillar to
control the restless masses of the Empire. One of the biggest weaknesses of new
Turkish nationalism and its ideology was it depended upon a conceptual mixture
of Islam and Turkishness which tried to exclude Islam’s power from the public
sphere, meanwhile separating its minorities on the basis of their religious
identity. This understanding of modernization both imitated (technically and
politically) and refused (morally) Western civilization at the same time. This
fact derived from the economic circumstances that were prevailing during the
formation process of the Turkish republic. The leadership cadre, mostly the
members of the Committee of Union and Progress, composed of civilian and
military bureaucrats were supported by merchants, artisans and Kurdish
landlords in the South East. They gathered this coalition of interest by
ethnically homogenizing Anatolia through the expulsion of Armenian and Greek
population of the country. So the disparity between the French style civilizing
nationalism and Germany’s reactionary interpretation of it was obvious in the
Turkish example. Like Germany, Turkey’s modernization and state formation
initiatives were instigated from above by the state elites and differed from
the French and English ones through the nonexistence of capitalist market
relationships and an industrial bourgeoisie.
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