STUDIES ON OTTOMAN SOCIAL AND POLITICAL HISTORY

SOCIAL, ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL STUDIES OF THE MIDDLE EAST AND ASIA(S.E.P.S.M.E.A.)(Founding editor: C.A.O. van Nieuwenhuijze)

Editor REINHARD SCHULZE Advisory Board Dale Eickelman (Dartmouth College) Roger Owen (Harvard University) Judith Tucker (Georgetown University) Yann Richard (Sorbonne Nouvelle)

VOLUME 81

STUDIES ON OTTOMAN SOCIAL AND POLITICAL HISTORYSelected Articles and EssaysBY

KEMAL H. KARPAT

BRILLLEIDEN BOSTON KOLN 2002

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Karpat, Kernal H. Studies on Ottoman social and political history : selected articles and essays / by Kernal H. Karpat. p. cm. (Social, economic, and political studies of the Middle East and Asia; 81). ISBN 9004121013 1. TurkeySocial conditions1288-1918. 2. TurkeyEconomic conditions1288-1918. 3. TurkeyPolitics and government. I. Title. II. Series. HC492.K38 2002 256.1'015dc21 2002023960

Die Deutsche Bibliothek - CIP-Einheitsaufhahme

Karpat, Kemal H. : Studies on ottoman social and political history : selected articles and essays / by Kemal H. Karpet. - Leiden ; Boston ; Koln : Brill, 2002 (Social, economic, and political studies of the Middle East and Asia ; Vol 81) ISBN 90-04-12101-3

ISSN 1385-3376 ISBN 9 0 0 4 1 2 1 0 1 3Copyright 2002 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorisation to photocopy itemsfor internal or personal use is granted by Brill provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910 DanversA'IA01923, USA. Fees are subject to change.PRINTED IN THE NETHERLANDS

CONTENTS

Copyrights and Permissions Introduction

ix 1

I. Ottoman Transformation & DemographyMigration The Transformation of the Ottoman State, 1789-1908 The Ottoman Parliament of 1877 and its Social Significance The Ottoman Emigration to America, 1860 1914 The Ottoman Adoption of Statistics from the West in the 19th Century 27

75 90

132

Jewish Population Movements in the Ottoman Empire, 1862-1914Kossuth in Turkey: The Impact of Hungarian Refugees in the Ottoman Empire, 1849-1851 The Ottoman Demography in the Nineteenth Century: Sources, Concepts, Methods Ottoman Urbanism: The Crimean Emigration to Dobruca

146

169

185

and the Founding of Mecidiye, 1856-1878The Ottoman Family: Documents Pertaining to its Size The Social and Economic Transformation of Istanbul in the Nineteenth Century

202235

243

VI

CONTENTS

Some Historical and Methodological Considerations Concerning Social Stratification in the Middle East Muslim Migration

291 311

II. The Social Restructuring, NationalitiesNationalism

The Land Regime, Social Structure, and Modernization in the Ottoman Empire The Social and Political Foundations of Nationalism in South East Europe after 1878: A Reinterpretation Ottoman Relations with the Balkan Nations after 1683 The Balkan National States and Nationalism: Image and Reality The Ottoman Rule in Europe From the Perspective of 1994 The Civil Rights of the Muslims of the Balkans Nation and Nationalism in the Late Ottoman Empire The Memoirs of N. Batzaria: The Young Turks and Nationalism Ottoman Views and Policies Towards the Orthodox Christian Church Millets and Nationality: The Roots of the Incongruity of Nation and State in the Post-Ottoman Era The Status of the Muslim under European Rule: The Eviction and Settlement of the Qerkes Romanian Independence and the Ottoman State

327

352 385

434

473

522 544

556

586

611

647 676

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Vll

III. Ethnicity & Identity

The Hijra from Russia and the Balkans: The Process of Self-Definition in the Late Ottoman State The Ethnicity Problem in a Multi-Ethnic Anational Islamic State: Continuity and Recasting of Ethnic Identity in the Ottoman State The Ottoman Ethnic and Confessional Legacy in the Middle East Ottoman Migration, Ethnopolitics and the Formation of Nation States in South East Europe and Israel Ottoman Immigration Policies and Settlement in Palestine Yakub Bey's Relations with the Ottoman Sultans: A Reinterpretation Social Environment and Literature: The Reflection of the Young Turk Era (1908-1918) in the Literary Work of Omer Seyfeddin (1884-1920) Glossary Index

689

712

730

752

783

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822 847 849

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COPYRIGHTS AND PERMISSIONS

We thank the following publishers for reproduction permission and cite below the name and date of publication (and page numbers if requested). "The Transformation of the Ottoman State, 1789-1908," Int. Journal of Middle East Studies (Cambridge), 3:3 (1972). "The Ottoman Parliament of 1877 and its Social Significance," Proceedings of the First Int. Conference of South East European Studies. Sofia, 1969. "The Ottoman Emigration to America, 1860-1914," Int. Journal of Middle East Studies (Cambridge), 17:2 (1985). "The Ottoman Adoption of Statistics from the West in the 19th Century," Transfer of Modern Science and Technology to the Muslim World, ed. E. Ihsanoglu. Istanbul: IRCICA, 1991. 'Jewish Population Movements in the Ottoman Empire, 18621914," The Jews of the Ottoman Empire, ed. Avigdor Levy. Princeton: Darwin Press, 1994. "Kossuth in Turkey: The Impact of Hungarian Refugees in the Ottoman Empire, 1849-1851," Proceedings of CIEPO, Vol. 8. Ankara: Turk Tarih Kurumu, 1994. "The Ottoman Demography in the Nineteenth Century: Sources, Concepts, Methods," Economie et Societes dans I'Empire Ottoman: Jin du XVIP-debut du XXe siecle, eds. P. Dumont and Jean-Louis BacqueGrammont, Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1983. "The Ottoman Family: Documents Pertaining to its Size," Int. Journal of Turkish Studies (Madison, Wisconsin), 4:1 (1987).

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"Ottoman Urbanism: The Crimean Emigration to Dobruca and the Founding of Mecidiye, 1856-1878," Int. Journal of Turkish Studies (Madison, Wisconsin), 5:1 (1984-85). "The Social and Economic Transformation of Istanbul in the Nineteenth Century," Bulletin. Association International d'Etudes du SudEst Europeen (Bucharest), 12:2 (1974). "Some Historical and Methodological Considerations Concerning Social Stratification in the Middle East," Commoners, Climbers and Notables, ed. C. A. O. van Nieuwenhuijze. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1977. "Muslim Migration: Response to Aldeeb Abu-Sahlieh," Int. Migration Review (Staten Island, New York), 30:1 (1996). "The Land Regime, Social Structure, and Modernization in the Ottoman Empire," Beginnings of Modernization in the Middle East: The Nineteenth Century., eds. William R. Polk & Richard L. Chambers. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1968. "The Social and Political Foundations of Nationalism in South East Europe after 1878: A Reinterpretation," Der Berliner Kongress von 1878, eds. Ralph Melville & Hans-Jurgen Schroder. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag GMBH, 1982. "Ottoman Relations with the Balkan Nations after 1683," Balkanistica. Occasional Papers in Southeast European Studies (Columbus), 1 (1974). "The Balkan National States and Nationalism: Image and Reality," Islamic Studies (Islamabad), 36:2-3 (1997). "The Ottoman Rule in Europe From the Perspective of 1994," Turkey Between East and West, eds. V. Mastny & R. C. Nation, Boulder: Westview Press, 1996. "The Civil Rights of the Muslims of the Balkans," Asian and African Studies (Haifa), 27 (1993). "Nation and Nationalism in the Late Ottoman Empire," Institute for International Seminars, Hebrew University, Jerusalem (1993).

COPYRIGHTS AND PERMISSIONS

XI

"The Memoirs of N. Batzaria: The Young Turks and Nationalism," Int. Journal of Middle East Studies (Cambridge), 6:3 (1975). "Ottoman Views and Policies Towards the Orthodox Christian Church," Greek Orthodox Theological Review (Brookline, Massachusetts), 31:2 (1986). "The Status of the Muslim under European Rule: The Eviction and Settlement of the Cerkes," Journal of the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs (London), 1:2 & 2:1 (1979-80) pp. 7-27. "Millets and Nationality: The Roots of the Incongruity of Nation and State in the Post-Ottoman Era," Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire, eds. Benjamin Braude & Bernard Lewis. New York: Holmes & Meir Publishers, Inc., 1982. "Romanian Independence and the Ottoman State," Southeastern Europe (Bucharest), 5:1 (1978). "The Hijra from Russia and the Balkans: The Process of Self-Definition in the Late Ottoman State," Muslim Travellers, eds. Dale F. Eickelman & James Piscatori. London: Routledge, 1990. "The Ethnicity Problem in a Multi-Ethnic Anational Islamic State: Continuity and Recasting of Ethnic Identity in the Ottoman State," Ethnic Groups and the State, ed. Paul Brass. London: Groom Helm, 1985. "The Ottoman Ethnic and Confessional Legacy in the Middle East," Ethnicity, Pluralism, and the State in the Middle East, eds. Milton J. Esman & Itamar Rabinovich. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988. "Ottoman Migration, Ethnopolitics and the Formation of Nation States in South East Europe and Israel," The Great Ottoman and Turkish Civilization, Vol. 1, ed. Kemal Cicek. Ankara: Yeni Tiirkiye, 2000. "Ottoman Immigration Policies and Settlement in Palestine," Settler Regimes in Africa and the Arab World, eds. I. Abu-Lughod & B. AbuLaban. Wilmette, IL: Medina University Press International, 1974.

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COPYRIGHTS AND PERMISSIONS

"Yakub Bey's Relations with the Ottoman Sultans: A Reinterpretation," Cahiers du Monde russe et sovietique (Paris), 32:1 (1991). "Social Environment and Literature: The Reflection of the Young Turk Era (1908-1918) in the Literary Work of Omer Seyfeddin (18841920)," Islamic World From Classical to Modern Times: Essays in Honor of Bernard Lewis., ed. C. E. Bosworth. Princeton: Darwin Press, 1989.

INTRODUCTION

This volume consists of articles of various lengths on issues related to the social and political history of the Ottoman state. Some of the articles, based on original archival sources, were written as independent studies; others were chapters that conformed to the general themes of larger works; a few were commentaries on other colleagues' publications. In other words, these writings do not revolve around a single topic or a single Ottoman historical phase, although the nineteenth century prevails. Yet, as the table of contents indicates, they can be classified into three broad categories, namely, the Ottoman socio-political transformation, the population movements, notably immigration-migration, and finally, in the Balkans and elsewhere, the formation of nation-states, which was accompanied by the change of religious identities into political ones and the emergence of nationalism. In essence, the writings in this volume deal with the transformation of the late Ottoman state that culminated in the rise of modern Turkey. That transformation also has been elaborated upon, with a synthesis of lengthy new materials, in a recent publication that covers roughly the period from 1850 to 1918 and so includes the rise of the Republic.1 Other relevant information may be found in a number of my books published at various dates.2 In addition, several of my review essays discuss the conceptual and methodological issues related to Ottoman history and Republican Turkey.3

1 Kemal H. Karpat, The Politicization of Islam: Reconstructing Identity, State, Faith and Community in the Late Ottoman State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 2 I can cite only a few, such as An Inquiry into the Social Foundations of Nationalism in the Ottoman State (Princeton: Princeton Research Monographs, 1973); The Ottoman State and Its Place in World History, ed. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974); Ottoman Past and Today's Turkey, ed. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2000); Ottoman Population, 1830-1914 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985); The Turks of Bulgaria: The History, Culture and Political Fate of a Minority, ed. (Istanbul: The Isis Press, 1990). 3 See, for instance, "The Rise of Modern Turkey," Journal of Military History, 65 (2001): 771-75, which treats the historical process through which the military gained control of the state in Ottoman and Republican Turkey. It is a commentary based on M. Nairn Turfan, Rise of the Young Turks: Politics, the Military, and Ottoman Collapse (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2000) and Andrew Mango, Atatiirk: The Biography of the Founder of Modern Turkey (New York: Overlook Press, 2000).

2

INTRODUCTION

These articles (and the others in forthcoming volumes about modern Turkey) are based on certain views and assumptions that sometime mentioned explicitly but most often are implied indirectly in the body of the work. The occasional overlappings in the ideas expressed in the articles stem from a continuous search for the correct view and approach concerning the actual course of Ottoman history and the rise of modern Turkey. The premise underlying all the ideas expressed is that, except for the differences in political regime, there is a close causal relationship and continuity between the Ottoman state and the Republic. To some extent, the views expressed in this introduction reflect the different perspective that my own personal experience has enabled me to develop on Ottoman history and its relation to modern Turkey. I was born into the Turkish Muslim community of northern Dobruca, which became frozen in its cocoon of Ottoman culture and tradition after Russia unexpectedly gave it to Romania in 1878 in exchange for southern Bessarabia (today part of the Odessa oblast of Ukraine). As a result, I had the extraordinary advantage of being reared culturally in a traditional Ottoman-Muslim environment, which called itself Turkish, while being exposed at school to a Romanian intellectual and political outlook. At that point in its history the Romanian elite was capitalizing on its Latin (Roman) linguistic legacy (against the Magyar and Slavic contenders in Transylvania and Bessarabia, respectively) and taking France, its main political supporter, as its model of modernity. Thus the Romanian educational system offered me in my formative years a Western (French) outlook on history, society, culture and democracy to reconcile with my Muslim Turkish background. At the same time, I gained some insight into the debates among Romanian traditionalists or authenticity seekers, modernists, Westernists who wanted to create an entirely Western-oriented Romania, populists, elitists and socialists.4

4 Romanian intellectual life flourished in the 1920s and 1930s under a relatively liberal system that culturally and politically accommodated the large non-Romanian groups whose lands became part of Greater Romania after 1918. Transylvania, Bessarabia (today's Moldavia), Bucovina, South Dobruca, and parts of Banat were incorporated into Romania in 1918 and forced it to become, temporarily, a fairly tolerant multi-ethnic, multi-religious state. During this period Romania produced world-known writers, artists and scholars. Some of them were of non-Romanian stock, including a number of Greeks, Jews and Slavs, but identified themselves as Romanians, for instance the historian-Ottomanist Nicolae lorga of Greek origin.

INTRODUCTION

6

Because the state-government was Romanian, the only "authentic" citizens were those who identified culturally, linguistically and historically with everything Romanianreal and imaginaryand belonged to the Orthodox Christian Church. The Uniate Catholics of Transylvania were the true pioneers of Romanian nationalism, but eventually, like the Magyars, Bulgarians and Russians, were not considered "real" Romanians. The Muslim community, most of whose members spoke a broken Romanian, were definitely outsiders, however loyal they were as citizens. My Romanian was unaccented and fluent so I could pass as a true Romanian, but preferring to define myself as "Turk," I automatically was classified as belonging to an inferior human category and destined to remain an outsider unless fully assimilated into the Romanian ethnic community. Nevertheless, I was deeply dissatisfied that my own community was guided by an extremely conservative religious elite that prevented its youth from adapting to changing circumstances. As did ninety percent of my fellow educated Muslims, I admired Mustafa Kemal Atatiirk of Turkey. Not only did we feel an ethnic affinity to him and to Turkey, but we especially nurtured the hope that his reforms would be emulated by our Dobrucan community.5 In contrast to Turkey, however, the Muslim community of Romania was largely secularized and managed to become simultaneously Muslim, Turkish and modern.This relatively liberal development of Romania came to an end with the rise of the xenophobic fascist Iron Guard of Ion Z. Codreanu in the late 1930s. Espousing Romanian "authenticity" in everything, it was the enemy of all non-Romanians especially Jews, Magyars and Turks. Many of Codreanu's followers became socialists and communists in the years after 1945 and puppets of the U.S.S.R., which occupied the country from 1944 to 1958 and launched a Russification policy. The "liberation" of 1964^67 under Nicolae Ceausescu was followed by a grassroots populist Romanian nationalism that claimed the Romanians were descendants of the pre-Roman (and non-Latin) Dacis and Gets and other "authentic" native groups and tried to assimilate other nationalities. Now there is a return to the Latin roots. 5 Romanian Muslims continue to struggle with modernism, traditionalism and the effort to remain culturally Turkish Muslims in a non-Muslim national state. Today Turks, Jews, Russians, Bulgarians, Armenians and Greeks are all seeking to revive their cultural legacy. Recently the Muslims tried to do so by commemorating the centennial of the Seminary of Mecidiye closed by Ceausescu for "lack of students" in 1967. At a conference convened in July 2001 to revive the seminary as a local, native Turko-Tatar Muslim institution, most participants were descended from the Tatars of Crimea who had settled in Dobruca in the 1850s and thereafter. Actually the cultural life of Mecidiye and Dobruca (where most of the 85,000 Muslims of Romania live) is dominated by Ataturk Lisesi, soon to become a college financed by Turkish sources.

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INTRODUCTION

Romania's schools had provided me an excellent knowledge of Ottoman history,6 although it, of course, reflected Romanian antiTurkish biases, which were at least less severe than their Bulgarian and Greek counterparts. The Turks were portrayed, for example, as "cowards" who lost every military encounter with the Romanians. Eventually such continuous humiliation, more than any other factor, compelled most Muslim intellectuals to weigh remaining "Turks" and emigrating to Turkey against living in Romania as minorities and facing the humiliation. In the late 1940s, after I had chosen emigration, the Romanian version of national history concerning the Ottoman period and the Romanians' relations with the West was reshaped to conform to the Russian-Soviet viewpoint. The Russians of 1877/8 were credited with liberating the Balkans from the yoke of the Turks (not the Ottomans), and the Soviet army was depicted as freeing the same area from German Nazi occupation.7 My own understanding of history and my approaches to its study were shaped by all the internal and external cultural and political factors that affected the fate of Romania as well as by the Eurocentric and ethnic views of Balkan history that associated the Ottomans with the Turks. At the same time, my status as a "Turk" belonging to an "inferior" minority, as the Romanians saw it, raised my ethnic consciousness and awakened my intellectual curiosity about the ways which the ruling Muslim majority had been turned into a despised "alien" minority. (I remember a girl admonishing her woman friend for lowering herself to talk with a Turk, that is me.) In the end, my struggle to maintain my identity as a Turk and my search for the causes that had reversed my community's status synthesized themselves into an objective, detached and impersonal view of human events and history. Early in my life I decided to

6 For a general view of the Ottoman historiography of Romania, see my review article, "Romania and the Ottoman Empire: A Historiographical Review," The Turkish Studies Association Bulletin, 24:1 (2000): 129-35. 7 This view is epitomized in the case of the Wallachian uprising of 1821, which was led by Tudor Vladimirescu, a commander of the panduri, local militia, and directed against the Phanariots. Vladimirescu was killed by Alexander Ipsilanti, a Russian officer of Hellenic origin who had led the Crimean branch of the Greek revolt of 1821. Ipsilanti's "revolt" and his army melted away in a matter of months after Vladimirescu's murder. Yet, the Soviet version held that the Greek Revolt of 1821 represented the Russian-inspired rise of the entire Balkan population against Ottoman rule, an interpretation that placed the Russian czar next to Stalin as a "liberator" of the Balkan Christians.

INTRODUCTION

0

study Ottoman-Turkish society and history but to avoid succumbing to national pride while preserving my ethno-cultural identity. My experience in Turkey strengthened this decision. Coming to modern Turkey around the end of the World War II, I had to pass the "olgunluk" (baccalaureate) exam in order to qualify for admission to the university so I studied the history textbooks used in the three-year Use (high school) cycle. The history courses I had taken in Romania covered in a systematic, consecutive manner the history of the Greeks, Romans, Western Europeans and finally the Romanians as part of a global process. The Turkish textbooks, by contrast, glorified the "national" heritage and presented history as a series of disjointed events without linking the Turks to either the West or the East. True, Romanian historiography ignored Asia and Islam and portrayed the Ottomans (who always were called Turks, as in other Balkan and European countries) in a very unfavorable light, but it had a consistency and an intellectual logic of its own that the Turkish textbooks lacked. The mandatory Inkilap (reform) courses taught in the university were essentially a panegyric to the War of Independence, 1919-22, to the reforms and especially to the reform leaders. Although most students were sincerely republicanist, Kemalist and modernist they remained generally apathetic to the course, as students still do.8 Concerning the Ottoman era, the textbooks condemned the sultans and their ministers as reactionary, backward despots opposed to science, civilization and modernity. Above all, the texts charged, the Ottomans used Islam to perpetuate both an evil state of affairs and the ignorance of the people in order to keep themselves in power. The difference between the Ottomans and the Republic corresponded so clearly to the distinction between the "evil" and the "good" that few students ever raised questions. These particular courses on reform, instituted by the government in 1934 to indoctrinate the youth with Kemalist ideas, exemplified a general school of historical thought the Republic had based on the rejection of the Turks' Ottoman past. The categorical rejection of everything Ottoman became a behavioral

8 For a relatively new and more sophisticated version of the textbooks used for these reform courses, see Toktamis, Ate, Turk Devrim Tarihi (History of the Turkish Reform) (Istanbul, 1979), whose latest edition was published in 2000. See also his Yaasin Cumhunyet (Long Live the Republic) (Istanbul, 2000), which contains nine public lectures that represent well the old Kemalist ideology.

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INTRODUCTION

characteristic of the Turkish modernist intelligentsia. Any good aspects of that era had to be appropriated and praised as Turkish or else the student expressing such a favorable view of the past would be branded reactionary and anti-Kemalist. The six hundred years of Ottoman history obviously received low priority, but some dedicated scholars still pursued their work. After the introduction of the parliamentary democracy, a series of publications on the Ottoman era began to appear, including the multi-volume history of Turkey published by the Turkish Historical Society. At that point, it became glaringly apparent that there was no Ottoman-Turkish school of historical thought that could provide a sense of historical continuity while taking into account the innumerable changes. In other words, there was now self-evident need for a theoretical framework to encompass both the entire course of Ottoman history and the transformation of the multi-ethnic, multireligious Ottoman state into a series of national states including the Republic of Turkey. The subsequent attempts to meet that need have produced a number of books criticizing the old approach to both Ottoman and Republican history and advocating new ones but without much result.9 At first sight, the sad state of Turkish historiography can be attributed to the founders of the Republic, who cut off all of the Turks' links to their Ottoman past and proclaimed the Republic as a totally new socio-political and cultural entity. Supposedly established according to the model of a Western nation-state, the Republic was to be based on the Turkish ethnic stock, or race, although purity of race in Turkey is difficult to find. In part, this national blueprint was inspired by the teachings of Ziya Gokalp, who had rejected history as an obsolete discipline in the belief that sociology would be the only social science in the future. Gokalp regarded the Ottomans merely as a ruling class without a national culture and identity that had used the Turkish nation for its own political purposes. In his view Ottoman cosmopolitanism prevented the development of true Turkish nationalism and statehood. Originally Gokalp considered all Turkic ethnic groups to be part of one nation, but after 1916 he abandoned this Pan-Turanic view and

For example, the Tarih Vakfi (History Foundation) has held a series of conferences and published numerous books on the subject.

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INTRODUCTION

7

focused mainly on the Anatolian Turks. In contrast to Gokalp, Yusuf Akcura, the other principal ideologue, maintained to the end that all Turks were part of one nation.10 Preoccupied with strengthening the ideological foundations of the Turkish national state and inspired by Gokalp's and Akcura's views, the government castigated the Ottoman past, disseminated its own versions of Ottoman and national history through textbooks and official pronouncements. The new Turkish history, while based on a factual knowledge of Ottoman or Republican history, lacked a truly conceptual and theoretical dimension. It consequently did not encourage the critical and analytical approaches that could define the forces behind the establishment, evolution and transformation of the Ottoman state and the birth of the Republic." Any student of Ottoman history knows the result was an overabundance of theories that provided tantalizing insights into the origins of the early Ottoman state without any satisfactory explanation of its latter evolution.12 The textbooks described the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when the Ottoman state was in its ascendancy, as Turkish but portrayed the later centuries as periods of Ottoman chaos, stagnation and decay. As usual, history was personalized. The first period of peaceful, orderly and secure development was attributed to "good" Turkish rulers, the second period to "bad," incapable Ottoman sultans. Republican history, however, did preserve one legacy of Ottoman chroniclers, barely mentioning the fact that the Ottoman state and society underwent continuous economic, social, cultural and administrative change caused by interacting internal forces. The Ottoman chroniclers were so preoccupied with the person and deeds of the ruling sultan, they overlooked numerous internal forces that resulted from stimuli beyond the will or control of the sultan. Well into the twentieth century, Ottoman historiography lacked a concept of state in the modern sense of the word. Instead, it envisaged the state as the patrimonial domain of the dynasty and not as

These issues are discussed at length in Karpat, The Politici^ation of Islam, chapters 15-17. 11 For a pioneering work that has analyzed a number of these issues, see Suraiya Faroqhi, Approaching Ottoman History: An Introduction to the Sources (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 12 These have been collected and analyzed in Cemal Kafadar, Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

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INTRODUCTION

a whole consisting of territory, people and an administration geared to serve the subjects. Historically as well, identities and loyalties, legitimized primarily by faith had secured allegiance to the sultan not to the state, land or ethnic group. Although the term "state" figured prominently in the official name Devlet-i Ali-i Osmani (the Sublime State of the Ottomans), it had the meaning of patrimony as opposed to a political comity. After the mid-1850s, Ottomanism had introduced the idea of a territorial state (which made the individual a citizen of the state, rather than the subject of the sultan) and had sought to make allegiance to the vatan (fatherland) a higher duty than the personal obedience to the sultan, but the idea of Ottoman statehood barely struck any roots. As Sultan Abdiilhamid II complained, Ottoman administrators now followed their own opinions and wishes to the neglect of state goals and policies, for they lacked the impersonal notions of state and policies. While the neighbor (and enemy) Russia had developed a basic concept of statehood and a corresponding internal and external expansionist policy thanks to such fathers of Russian historiography as Nikolai M. Karamzin (1766-1826), Nikolai Pogodin (1796-1826), and N. A. Polevoi (1796-1846), none of the illustrious Ottoman chroniclers, including Paazade Kemal, I. Pecevi, and Naima, felt the need to develop a concept of impersonal state. The first attempt to approach Ottoman history as a whole from the viewpoint of the state originated with the Ottoman Historical Society (Tarih-i Osmani Encumeni) established in 1909 and headed by Abdurrahman eref, the court chronicler. As this society, retaining most of its original members, evolved into the Society for the Study of Turkish History and finally into the current Turk Tarih Kurumu (Turkish Historical Society) in 1932, in the process the old Ottomanists were left out. With state backing, the Society attempted in the early 1930s to create a Turkish National School of History, but failed despite the leadership of such prominent scholars as M. Fuat Kopriilii. Kopriilii who had sought unsuccessfully to secure a place for the Ottomans in the history, joined the opposition at the first opportunity in 1945. The calculated effort to cut off the Turkish nation's cultural and historical links to its Ottoman past and connect it with its distant Central Asian roots followed blueprints issued and canonized by the state and its bureaucracy. When it failed, the absence of a native Turkish (and Ottoman) historical school of thought opened the way

INTRODUCTION

9

for the easy penetration of European ideas and interpretations concerning even the most basic aspects of Ottoman and Turkish history, society and culture. As a result, wholesale acceptance of Western ideas began in the late Ottoman state and accelerated in the Republic. Although Western scholarship employed superior techniques of research and organized its material for systematic conceptual and logical argumentation, most Turkish historians ignored those Western conceptual and methodological approaches. Instead, they appropriated the European interpretations of their own history and society as the final truth. Because the historiography of the Republic relied on secondary European sources, it credited relations with Europe for the Ottoman transformation and provided an inaccurate picture of the Ottoman stand on various international issues.13 For the same reason, attempts by some Turkish scholars, such as the late Niyazi Berkes, to utilize native sources in order to view late Ottoman cultural history from inside have been criticized as one sided, "nationalistic" and deficient.14 The ideas and the discussion of my own intellectual-political experience in the preceding pages were intended to provide a context for the topics analyzed by the articles included in this book. In selecting those articles, I have regarded the Ottoman era and the Selc.uk period as forming an original and interrelated historical, cultural, artistic and political whole, or in a word, a civilization of its own. A civilization, in my view, has distinct intellectual, philosophical, ethical, artistic and political characteristics, specific modes of organization13 There is not yet an in-depth Turkish account of the history of the late Ottoman state. For an inside picture of Ottoman foreign policies, see F. A. K. Yasamee, Ottoman Diplomacy: Abdulhamid II and the Great Powers, 1878-1888. Istanbul, 1996. 14 The book in question is Niyazi Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey. Montreal, 1964. I have been critical of Berkes' ideological approach and his stand favoring extensive state intervention in modernization while ignoring the civilian input and the individualistic orientation of the Ottoman reform movement. However, I fully appreciated Berkes' efforts to demonstrate that the Ottoman modernization was essentially an internal process, generated by ideas and social groups rooted in the Ottoman view of the world as well as their own values and group interaction. Berkes was simultaneously a modernist and Westernist and an elitist-socialist nationalist. In more ways than one, he was alienated both from his own grassroots society and from Western economic liberalism, although he appreciated liberalism's democracy and individual freedom. Politically speaking, Berkes did not believe in parliamentary democracy but adhered to the nineteenth-century Ottoman elitist notion that Turkish society was not suited to a grassroots democracy. Believing it needed the guidance of an enlightened elite, if not a despot, Berkes admired Mahmud II, the originator of the anti-traditionalist statist reforms of the early nineteenth century.

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INTRODUCTION

and its own material culture (architecture, food, dress, etc.) with corresponding tastes, values and outlooks. The fact that the Ottomans did not acquire sufficient consciousness of their distinct civilizational characteristics (aside from a few references) to analyze and write about themas did the Hellenes or the Europeansdoes not mean that they lacked such characteristics. Nevertheless, scholars long regarded the Ottoman civilization and its Selfuki predecessor as derived solely from Islam either in Arabic or Persian garb, even though the Ottoman Islam always possessed distinctive regional and ethno-cultural characteristics. Islam was the Turks' most durable link to their Central Asian origins and to the Arabo-Persian world, but the unique Turko-European characteristics of the form of Islam that developed in Rumeli and Anatolia were from the very start the real "national" feature of the Ottoman state.15 The question to be debated is why the Ottomans did not seem to be aware of their own artistic, literary, and architectural achievements, many of which surpassed their Arabic, Persian and Byzantine models.16 The early Turks had shown some interest in their ethnic identity and "national" solidarity (the Orhun inscription) and in writings such as the Diuan-ii Liigat-it-Turk of Mahmud Kasgari, which described the Turks as a distinct linguistic and cultural entity, so the standard answer is that the Ottomans immersed themselves so much in Islam as to forget their ethnic identity. But this explanation cannot be accepted at face value. Rather, the Ottoman government purposefully ignored the Turkish features of society and state and emphasized their Islamic characteristics in the second half of the fifteenth century in order to consolidate the Balkan conquests and integrate the newly converted Bosnians, Albanians et al. into the

See, for instance, David Shankland, Islam and Society in Turkey (Cambridgeshire: Eothen Press, 1999). 16 In the last quarter of the nineteenth century the idea of territorial statehood began to strike roots, and some reformist intellectuals began to see themselves as Turks descended from the founders of the Ottoman state. Claiming that the Ottoman state had always had a Turkish character, they talked about an Ottoman-Turkish civilization. A memorandum addressed to the sultan criticizing "modern" architects, who were not aware that the Ottoman masters Kasim, Musa and Sinan had combined Roman and Byzantine with Arabic and Persian styles "and created a new Ottoman architectural style science," is reproduced by R. Yiicel Ozkaya, "II. Abdiilhamid'e Sunulan Giizel Sanatlar Hakkmda Bir Layiha" (A memorandum about fine arts submitted to Abdiilhamid II), Osmanh Tarihi Arafttrma ve Uygulama Merkezi Dergisi (Ankara), 4 (1993): 645-85.

15

INTRODUCTION

11

Ottoman Islamic society. In M. Fuat Kopriilii's words, this amounted to the Muslim internationalization of the Ottoman state. The Turkishness of the Ottoman state was ignored as a matter of state policy until it was reaffirmed, again for state reasons, late in the nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth. Paradoxical as it may appear, this deliberate disregard for the ethnic character of the population and the use of faith as the uniting bond applied to both the Muslims and the Christians; the Orthodox identity superseded ethnicity in the Balkans even when challenged later by ethnic national statehood. Until then, the rejection of local and regional elements in favor of the universal facilitated the rise of the Ottoman civilization despite the apparent preponderance of Islamic characteristics. Because the government did not enforce any creed on any part of the population, the local folk culture often disguised itself in religious forms and expressed itself in the terminology of the faith. Without planning or even realizing it, the Ottoman state thus promoted Muslim and Christian religious uniformity at the top while allowing ethno-linguistic diversity of every kind to flourish at the bottom. The same situation prevailed in Western Europe, where the Roman church created cultural unity after the downfall of the Roman Empire but maintained the ethno-linguistic diversity of its subgroups. In sum, one can claim that the Turks were the main architects and representatives of a homo Ottomanicum that emerged in the Balkans, Anatolia and the Fertile Crescent while each area felt the direct impact of the Ottoman rule. The purpose of this introduction is merely to point out that a fully formed civilization, even if not systematically denned, is internalized by its adherents and creates its own forms of social and behavioral expression. Civilizations coexist when they encounter each other as long as neither has the means to impose its will and creed on the other. When the balance shifts in favor of one party, however, the weaker civilization may adopt institutions, practices and ways of life from the other without losing its own identity or will to survive as a distinct cultural entity. The Ottoman state maintained relations with the West from its inception until its very end. While equal in power, the Western and Ottoman civilizations coexisted, although they remained alien to each other, perhaps because their different religions made their civilization appear inimical. After Western superiority was achieved in the

12

INTRODUCTION

economic and military fields, chiefly in the nineteenth century, European political influence increased in the Ottoman state. Many scholars attribute Ottoman reform and the eventual adoption of European institutions to the Turks' tacit recognition of the superiority of Western civilization and the inferiority of their own. In fact, the Ottomans and, except for a few so-called Westernists, most of the Turks in the Republic never believed their culture was inferior; they merely acknowledged its economic underdevelopment. Nineteenth-century Ottoman intellectuals agreed that the West had advanced in technology, administration and organization but that their society was morally and ethically superior to that of Europe, and only the positivist Young Turks did not include Islam in that favorable assessment. Ziya Gokalp, the father of Turkish nationalism, modernism and secularization, still defended the superiority of the Turkish culture, distinguishing culture, which was unique, national and could not be borrowed, from civilization, which consisted of the positive sciences and technology and was international or common to all, regardless of origin. Reforms began late in the eighteenth century as an Ottoman initiative to strengthen the central government and its army in order to control the ayam, the tax collectors. By then, the ayam already had taken de facto possession of the state lands they administered as the central government was weakened by losses in wars with Russia and Austria from 1781 to 1817. In other words, the reforms in the Ottoman socio-political system were based primarily on the internal needs and goals of that system and were not reproductions or imitations of "superior" Western counterparts. Even in the Republic, when the West was accepted as the model on which to build the Turkish nation-state and many leaders praised anything Western without knowing what it was, the overwhelming majority of the population remained adamantly faithful to its own values, ways of thinking and behaviors. This situation was reflected in the sayings "We will become modern in our own way" and "New on the outside and old inside." Most of the articles in this collection, therefore, seek to identify the chief domestic forces of transformation by looking from the inside at the social, political and cultural changes that took place in the Ottoman state after the late eighteenth century. This approach does not downplay the impact of outside, Western influences but tries to place them in the proper perspective. In reality those outside influences

INTRODUCTION

13

interacted with the domestic forces in a dialectical manner, often producing new institutions and practices different from the external models. For instance, the sura-yi Devlet (State Council), which was created in 1867 to direct the legislative reforms and also acted as a supreme court, frequently is considered the first official attempt at achieving public representation largely in order to satisfy the European governments. Actually, although modeled after a French counterpart that dealt mainly with administrative disputes, the sura derived from the Supreme Judicial Council and the Advisory Council established by Mahmud II in 1838 to provide advice on reforms. A succinct history of the Devlet sumsi confirms that the Ottomans created some new Western-inspired institutions through their own initiative and also preserved some of their own old ones. After the Advisory Council was eliminated, the Supreme Council became the source of major legislation and worked with the Council of Ministers and a special body (Meclis-i Hass-i Umumi) in passing reform measures. The members of these Councils were basically old-type Ottoman bureaucrats who were forced to attend the meetings and were asked not to interrupt any speaker regardless of his humble origin or position. In order to circumvent difficulties caused by these old bureaucrats and to expedite the enacting of reforms, another new body, Meclis-i Ali-i Tanzimat (The High Tanzimat Council) was created in 1854 to deal mainly with legislative matters.17 Ultimately all the Councils were merged into the Devlet umsi. Overtime, the jura's role was curtailed in the struggle between the conservatives of Mahmud Nedim Pasa (grand vizier 18712, 18756) and the reformists headed by Mithat Pas,a (d. 1884) but it still survives in Turkey mainly as a court, like the French Conseil d'Etat, charged with settling administrative disputes. Indeed, the ura now is the equivalent of the classical Ottoman Divan, the decision making body headed by the sultan or a grand vizier, and although ura implies broader participation both names are translated into English as "Council." The history of almost every major Ottoman state institution and practice, reflects a combination of old Ottoman ways with new ones

For a full account of these institutions and their Turkish names, see Stanford J. Shaw, "The Central Legislative Councils in the Nineteenth Century Ottoman Reform Movement Before 1876," International Journal of Middle East Studies, 1:1 (1970): 51-84 and his History of the Ottoman Empire and Modem Turkey, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 76-82.

17

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INTRODUCTION

created according to domestic needs and pressures, and sometimes European models. This generalization includes the army and even the religious institutions, which lost most of their judiciary functions to secular courts under Abdulhamid II, regarded as the most Islamic sultan. A continuity in essence despite any changes in form characterizes the Ottoman institutions of the reform era. Consequently the army, organized as a new institution in 1843 after adopting technical services such as engineering is considered both the oldest surviving Ottoman institution and the most modern, secular, technologically oriented and Westernized body.18 Underlying all the institutional transformations, however, landownership remained the basic factor throughout Ottoman and early Republican social and political history. The rakaba (property title) belonged to the state while tasarruf, the use of the lands known as arazi-i miri or memleket, was governed entirely by a set of secular regulations. Although the mtilk (private) and vakif (pious foundation) lands were subject to the eriat (religious law) and thus theoretically immune to state confiscation, the state was free to regulate the status and use of the miri lands, which comprised about 80 percent of all cultivable lands from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Because the state, including the sultan, the government and all the dignitaries, derived most of its income from the produce of the miri lands, those beneficiaries naturally sought the utmost revenue from them. In fact, the early Ottoman state was a massive apparatus established to supervise the cultivation of the land by tenants and the collection of our (tithe), of other taxes generally known as avanz and of fees related to land transactions. The tenants were called ray a, or producers of food, and regardless of their faith or ethnic origin they could keep the land in their family under specific conditions and the payment of tapu (fee) when the land passed to heirs. They could not, however, sell or mortgage the land and in some cases had to cultivate specific crops and sell them to the state at predetermined prices.19 The need of the state and its sustaining bureaucracy for land revenues forced continuous change in the land administration. First the large feudal holdings of the Uf beys (lords of the marches) were trans-

See Karpat, Politicization of Islam, pp. 170-2, 1913. In addition to my article in this collection, works discussing the land problems can be found in Qaglar Keyder and Faruk Tabak, eds. Landholding and Commercial Agriculture in the Middle East (Albany: SUNY Press, 1991).19

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INTRODUCTION

15

formed in the fifteenth century into timars (fiefs) administered by sipahis appointed from the center. Then, in the late sixteenth century the state began to turn the timar lands into malikhanes and fiftliks (estates or farms). Throughout these same centuries the modes of cultivation, land distribution and tax collection changed constantly as the government searched for more revenue. Meanwhile, there was little change in the concept that the property of the miri lands belonged in perpetuity to the state while the tenants had only cultivation rights, but there was constant tension among the government, the land administrators and the tenants over demands to commercialize agriculture and the desire of each party to increase its share of land on revenue.20 The tensions in the agricultural sector that were the constant features of the Ottoman state became the key forces for reform in the second half of the nineteenth century. Ultimately the land issue pitted the government and its bureaucracy against both the local-provincial administrators of the land and the tenants who actually worked the land. The government, by nearly sanctifying its property rights to the land, created a statist culture that impregnated every aspect of social life. Supplemented by an emphasis on communal solidarity, unity of faith and absolute obedience to the sultan (the shadow of God on earth), this statist culture prevented the clash of interests among the state, the land cultivators and the administrators from coming into the open. It did not, however, prevent the land administrators, who were the local notables from achieving actual control of the land in the period 1770-1815. The administrators forced the government to turn their control of the land into a dejure right through the Sened-i Ittifak (Pact of Alliance) of 1808 between the government and the qyans, or country notables, meaning land administrators and tax collectors now were supported by their respective communities. The Pact recognized the notables as owners of the state lands that they formerly had controlled as appointed administrators. The Ottoman government cancelled the Pact and began a systematic liquidation of the ay am in 1815 but never regained full control of the land. The Land Code passed in

20 For the seventeenth-century drive to commercialize agriculture, see Suraiya Faroqhi, Towns and Townsmen of Ottoman Anatolia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Bruce McGowan, Economic Life in Ottoman Europe: Taxation, Trade and the Struggle for the Land, 1600-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

16

INTRODUCTION

1858 could not prevent the slow, inexorable privatization of the state lands or the rise of local elites and their acquisition of political power in local, regional and state affairs.21 In other words, it could not halt the growing impact of the market economy of the West, which brought the Ottomans into the world economy. The articles in this collection, therefore, discuss in addition to land problems, the key roles of the qyans, the esraf (community leaders who replaced the ayans), the new agrarian Muslim middle class and the other local notables in the control of their communities. These new elites in the countryside represented the local and the ethnic, and their children especially became defenders of these concepts. Analysis of the ay am and other notables is a fast developing field of Ottoman studies that offers excellent material not only on the course of Ottoman history but also on the importance of domestic forces as agents of change.22 Nevertheless, I consider the "elites of the modernization age," that is, the intelligentsia and the new type of bureaucrat educated in modern schools, of equal importance with the ayam. Modern education, which expanded rapidly at all levels during the reign of Abdulhamid II trained new elites who relied on cultural capital instead of on landownership. Although many members of these elites were the offspring of country notables, they used new modes of thought to achieve their social and political status. Consequently understanding the social and political developments in the late Ottoman state and the Republic requires understanding the newness of the elites as well as their local and regional roots. The elites educated in modern schools who were responsible for the Young Turks' revolution and for the Republic's reforms were not only Westernists but also included conservatives and Islamists who regarded their changing society according to their own ideological perspectives. What they all shared was a new critical, rationalist and dialectical manner of thought that gave even tradition and traditionalism modern forms.21 In the nineteenth century, as the land was privatized the government apparently gave huge tracts of land to its top officials as a malikhane. On my last visit to Turkey (July 2001) I became aware of a fairly large number of court cases initiated by the descendants of these Ottoman officials claiming the land given to their forefathers as administrative estates as their own personal property. The cases involved lands in the Silivri (old Selembria) area some 50 miles west of Istanbul. 22 Some of the many scholars who have done valuable work on Ottoman notables are Yuzo Nagata, Yticel Ozkaya, Avdo Suceska, Bruce Masters, Richard van Leeuwen, Dina R. Khoury, Ehud Toledano and Martin van Bruinessen.

INTRODUCTION

17

Throughout these articles the communal-religious organizations of the Ottoman population, that is the millets for the non-Muslims and the cemaats for the Muslims, are emphasized as the key units of sociopolitical organization. The religious community was both the basic form of organization and the source of identity for all the ethnic groups in the Ottoman state, for religious identity was fused into an ever-present, unofficial ethnic identity among non-Muslims. Although most of the non-Muslim millets were ruled at the top by their patriarchs and synods, their main constituent groups, such as the Serbs, Bulgarians, Armenians, Chaldeans, and Nestorians possessed their own "national churches." For instance, the Orthodox Patriarchate, known as Greek, played a key role in maintaining a sense of the universality of its faith by relying on local priests from the non-Greek ethnic groups. The religious, cultural, educational and, in family matters, legal autonomy granted to the non-Muslim communities embodied in the Patriarchate helped consolidate the supremacy of the Orthodox ecumenical Greek Patriarch without assimilating the nonHellenes. In the second half of the eighteenth century, however, the Orthodox Patriarchate did seek to Hellenize the non-Greeks, producing the first ethnic reaction to Orthodox ecumenism and igniting the ethnic nationalism of the Balkan Christians, who eventually turned it against their Turkish rulers. In the Ottoman bureaucracy, the Orthodox Patriarch ranked seventh on the list of dignitaries in the state establishment. He and other Christians who performed askeri (state) duties were, like Muslim dignitaries, exempt from paying taxes. As Halil Inalcik has pointed out, a fairly large number of timar holders in the Balkans in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were Christians, although some later converted to Islam in order to preserve their estates. In any case, the sustaining economic basis of this communal arrangement remained the land as the properties of the Christian churches and monasteries were considered to be va.kifa.nd so exempt from taxes and confiscation by the state. A substantial number of the articles in this book deal with the rise of the national states or with the changes of identity and the rise of nationalism, first among the non-Muslims and then among the Muslims. To be sure, the rise of nationalism ultimately led to the disintegration of the Ottoman state, but a new socio-political process was set in motion in the eighteenth century by the collapse of the classical state-controlled land system of timars, ciftliks, etc. That

18

INTRODUCTION

collapse, in turn, can be traced both to the intensification of internal and external trade after capitulations, or rights to trade in Ottoman territory, were granted to France in 1536 and later to England and also to the economic burden resulting from wars with the Hapsburgs and Iran. Initially the search for revenue forced the Ottoman government to encourage overseas trade ventures that led in the seventeenth century to the emergence of a group of rich Greek merchants, sometimes with Ottoman dignitaries as their business partners. Some of these Greek merchants became after 1711 the Phanariots who ruled Moldavia and Wallachia on behalf of the Porte and later promoted neo-Byzantinism. Although the Patriarch's support for neoByzantinism evoked the ethnic reaction that caused its demise, the neo-Byzantinism must not be associated with Greek nationalism. In fact, the two clashed despite Greek efforts to incorporate the Ecumenical Patriarchate into its own nationalist ideology. After 1815, in another aspect of its continuing quest for revenue, the Ottoman government involved an increasing number of civilians from the lower classes in land administration, and it was over land that national states and nationalism arose in the Balkans. The Serbian revolt of 1804, the first of the so-called nationalist uprisings in the Balkans, was actually a reaction of the Christian peasants to the usurpation of their lands. Because the usurpers were Janissaries, who seemed to prefer the steady income of landowners to sporadically paid state salaries, the Serbian social uprising soon became a political revolt. With help from Russia, the first Serbian autonomous state was created in 1815 under Milos Obrenovic. From the viewpoint of this study, however, the long-range socio-economic repercussions of the revolt are far more important. Faced throughout the Balkans and Anatolia with the disobedience and revolt of many local qyans, such as Osman Pasvanoglu of Vidin, the Ottoman government attempted to win the loyalty of the Christian peasants in Bulgaria and Serbia by making them the actual owners of the land they had cultivated for centuries as state tenants. A clause in the Tanzimat Rescript of 1839 guaranteed individuals the right to private property. It was meant to reassure Christian peasants in the Balkans that their private rights over the land would be respected. This privatization of the state lands was a true social revolution, allowing the Christian peasants to cultivate, dispose of or develop the land according to market demands and their own best interests. While the peasant still paid the usual taxes to the state, he

INTRODUCTION

19

now regarded himself as an independent producer, free to sell his crops to the best bidder, usually a co-national and co-religionist. The Christian notables, who for centuries had acted as the local agents of the Ottoman government, rapidly became rich agricultural entrepreneurs trading in the produce of their fellow Christians and Muslims. In many areas of the Balkans, however, the Muslimsnotably the Turks in Bulgaria and Macedoniabecame daily workers on the lands of the Christians. In urban areas the new bourgeoisie specializing in foreign trade also included some Jews but mostly Greek, Armenian or Arab Christians. As the Ottoman government tried to make the Tuna (Danube) province, encompassing most of Bulgaria and portions of Serbia and Romania, a model of reform in the 1860s, it stimulated the rise of more local notables who were Christians. A number of them, known as gorbacts, sided with the Ottoman government when nationalist uprisings began in the 1860s and 1870s, yet in the end they supported or were forced to support their own rebel co-nationalists. The Muslim reaction to this Christian bourgeoisie nurtured by policies of the "Islamic" government took the form of a Muslim nationalism directed initially against Europeans and their local Christian proteges and finally against the Ottoman administration. The new type of native intelligentsia that emerged among both Christians and Muslims stemmed from the development of a modern educational system and the establishment of a series of political and administrative bodies (the provincial councils). Acceptance of a Western-type constitution and the convening of a Parliament in 1876-77 enabled local notables to take a direct part in the administration of their own towns and cities and the country as a whole. Their rise to positions of political influence was accompanied by the growth of local culture, a sharpening consciousness of local needs and an awareness of the world at large that encouraged new aspirations as well as regional and ethnic identities. Although nationalism was the inevitable result of the local culture and ethnic consciousness that grew out of local conditions, the impact of Western nationalism on the Balkan Christian and Muslim elites must not be minimized. The Western schools of linguistic nationalism represented by the philosophy of Herder and the political teachings of Albert Sorel, to mention just two examples provided an intellectual format for the Balkan intelligentsia to air their grievances, expectations and demands. Often the children of the Ottoman Christian

20

INTRODUCTION

bourgeoisie, the leaders of the Balkan nationalists were educated in the West, where their sense of ethnic, political and cultural identity first absorbed, then prevailed over, their old religious identity. The ethnic culture and the native language thus became the sources of national political identity and national culture for the Balkan Christian nationalists and the nation-state became their ideal model of political organization. At the same time, because for centuries religion had been the main source of identity for the Orthodox of the Balkans, the nationalists still regarded it as necessary for identifying themselves with Western civilization and distancing themselves from Muslims, even Muslims of their own race, language and culture. Turkish nationalism, probably the first example of Muslim ethnic nationalism, was both a reaction to and a copy of the various types of Balkan ethnic nationalism. In Western Europe ethnic identity had emerged slowly after the eleventh century as the cultural and secular identity of ethno-linguistic groups whose kings were seeking some autonomy from papal religious authority. The ethnic culture of the French, Germans and English consequently was shaped by literary works of universal stature long before the emergence of the nation-states and political nationalism. This humanistic literature valued the individual and retained many spiritual aspects of the religion while condemning its interference in the lay affairs of society. In the Ottoman state, by contrast, the basic source of individual and group identity was religion, which was embodied in the community. Islam and Orthodox Christianity accepted the supremacy of the state and the community as long as they abided by the faith. Legally and philosophically, the state and its religious institutions did not recognize an autonomous sphere of individual rights. In this case, the clash between the West and the East derived not from a clash of civilizations but from different views concerning the individual. To put it very simply, in the Ottoman state (and the Orthodox Church) the individual was just the means to attain higher goals, often defined by the state, but in the West the individual and his/her well being had become the ultimate goal. The dominant literature of the Ottoman Christian elites consisted mainly of religious writings. Meanwhile, the folk literature as well as the language, which would become the cultural foundation of the nation-state, remained undeveloped and local until nationalist intellectuals, such as Vuk Karadic and Koraes, used the folklore and one of their "national" dialects to develop a national literature and Ian-

INTRODUCTION

21

guage. Because the works of these intellectuals were politically oriented, they were destined to remain limited in scope and depth. Yet they provided the ideological ingredients for a rapidly developing xenophobic nationalism whose chief targets were the Muslims. The best example is the Mountain Wreath written by Njegos (the Shakespeare of the Christians) near the middle of the nineteenth century. The anti-Muslim nationalism of the Balkan Christians was powerfully reinforced by the relationship they felt to Western civilization through their common faith and by the economic prosperity of Europe, which they attributed to its Christian faith and national statehood in government. As a result, they regarded the Ottoman state as an alien, backward government that by imposing an Islamic rule and culture on Balkan society, had prevented its development in tandem with Europe. They called the Slavic, Greek, Vlach and Albanian-speaking Muslims, who were natives of the Balkans "Turks" (a name still synonymous with Muslims today) categorizing them as "intruders" along with the Turkish-speaking natives whose ancestors had settled in Bulgaria, Thrace, Dobruca and Macedonia from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Thus religion in ethnic garb became the source of political identity and was used to justify driving out "alien" Muslims in order to establish "pure" national states. As the "cleansing" of the Muslims that started with the Serbian revolt of 1804 continued throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, some 9 million Muslims from the Crimea, Caucasus, Crete and the Balkans were uprooted from their native homes and forced to emigrate to Turkey. According to reliable sources some 3-5 million Muslims were killed.23 Because another factor behind the Muslim cleansing and the discrimination by the nationalists was the need to establish a strong majority for the dominant titular population, largescale dislocations of population have continued. Muslim nationalisms, especially the Turkish one, developed in large measure as a defensive reaction against the atrocities, but this subject is only marginally studied in the articles in this book. Although the Muslim nationalisms of the Arabs, Indonesians, Pakistanis, et al. began in reaction to European imperialism, Turkish nationalism, despite its anti-imperialist dimensions, started as a self-defensive measure

23 Justin McCarthy, Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821-1922 (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1995).

22

INTRODUCTION

in case the aspirations of the Greeks, Serbians and Bulgarians led to a "cleansing" of the Turks, as they in fact did. The Freedom Society, a nationalistic organization that produced the Young Turk revolution of 1908, was established in the Balkans at Salonica. Most of its members belonged to the Balkan Muslim communities of Turks, Albanians, Vlachs and Slavs. The Freedom Society formally joined the Union and Progress Society, which was the main organization of the Young Turks in Paris, and after the revolution, most of the leading government positions were taken by the "Turkish" nationalists from various Balkan Muslim ethnic groups who had established the Freedom Society. As Muslims, they had faced two alternatives: either to emigrate to Anatolia, much of which was claimed by Armenians and Greeks, or to establish their own national state and quickly use any possible means to strengthen it against attack. Armenians, Greeks, Arabs and Macedonians also emigrated, forcibly or voluntarily, to the United States, Russia and other countries. In the nineteenth century Russia had set the example of using ethnic cleansing as a national security policy by ousting the Muslims from Crimea after 1856, supposedly for having helped the Allies in the war of 1853, and then reasserted it after 1862 by evicting Muslims from the Caucasus in order to prevent local revolts, such as, that of seyh Shamil that had kept the czar's armies busy for half a century. As a result a large number of subsequent Muslim and non-Muslim forced migrations were driven by military and security considerations. In some of the newly independent states of the Balkans the titular national group was either in the minority, as in Bulgaria and Dobruca, or it faced a variety of linguistically and religiously alien groups it could not trust. For instance, after the Balkan War Serbia took possession of Kosovo and Macedonia, where the ruling Serbs were an insignificant minority. In south Macedonia Greece found a large number of Turks and Bulgarians, whom it evicted or exchanged for Greeks in Turkey and Bulgaria. In Yugoslavia after 1918 and in Bulgaria Catholics encountered discrimination and mistreatment as did Jews throughout the Balkans but not to the same extent as the Muslims. A substantial number of the articles in this collection deal with migration in and out of the Ottoman state but do not focus on the extraordinary role migration played in the transformation of the late Ottoman state and the rise of modern Turkey only because that

INTRODUCTION

23

significant impact has been studied elsewhere in detail.24 To summarize it briefly, by drastically changing the population balance in favor of the Muslims, migration turned the old society of Anatolia, where the bulk of the population was of Turkic stock, into the true Ottoman ethnic and linguistic mixture that has become the presentday Turkish nation.25 This mixing of the migrants and natives in a new demographic and cultural mould was facilitated primarily by their shared past as Ottoman subjects and their common faith. Few migrants settled in the Arabic-speaking countries and not just for economic or climatic reasons. Rather they felt alien to the Arabs (as do many of their descendants) and entirely at home in Turkey. Migration also furthered the privatization of state lands as the new migrant owners brought large tracts of fallow land under cultivation. The resulting growth in agricultural production then increased tax revenues and bolstered the income of the rapidly rising agrarian Muslim middle class of Anatolia. The new modernist intelligentsia and the officers corps contained numerous sons and grandsons of migrants, who thus became part of the new ruling elite. Recalling the loss of their original homelands, the migrants and their offspring, many of whom were well educated and belonged to the local aristocracy or notables, played major roles in the rise of both the Turkish national state and the contemporary state. In short, the articles assembled here undertake a closer study of the internal forces at work in the Ottoman state in order to provide a more accurate understanding of Ottoman history and a more authentic view of the Ottoman past and contemporary Turkey.

See Karpat, Ottoman Population and especially Politicization of Islam. I have dealt at much greater length with the effects of migration on the restructuring of society and on the culture and identity in a work to be published by the History Foundation in Istanbul in 2002.25

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IOTTOMAN TRANSFORMATION & DEMOGRAPHYMIGRATION

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THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE OTTOMAN STATE, 1789-1908

1. Introduction

The study of the Ottoman state in the latter part of the eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth demands a broader analytical framework than hitherto used if its transformation and the social and political history of the Middle East, the Balkans, and even North Africa, which were parts of the Ottoman state at one time or other, are to be properly evaluated and interpreted. Most of the studies on the modernization of the Middle East deal with the nature and intensity of outside stimuli, that is to say, the European impact, and much less with the forces within the Middle Eastern society which conditioned the response to these stimuli. In addition, the history of the Middle East and the Balkans in the nineteenth century has been viewed and interpreted from rather dogmatic national viewpoints. Consequently, the changes in the social and political structures of the Ottoman empire, and the profound impact of these changes on the nature of the emerging national states in the area, have often been ignored or interpreted in line with the writers' ideological and national biases. Such interpretations have resulted not only from a certain unwillingness to shed one's cultural and religious outlook on history but also from insufficient knowledge of the social history of the Ottoman state. From the very start it is necessary to recognize the essential fact that the Balkan and Middle Eastern societies, and their socio-cultural-economic structure in the Ottoman era, were subject to transformation through the impact of internal forces long before massive European influence accelerated this transformation. Already by the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuriesthat is, almost during the height of its powerthe Ottoman empire faced serious social dislocation as indicated by Hasan Kafi Bosnevi (Akhisari) (1544-1616) in his Usul al-hikemfi nizam al-alem, and later, in 1630, by Koci Bey in his Risdle. The process of transformation in cultural systems different from that of the West must be viewed as operating at several levels in

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MIGRATION

accordance with internal and external stimuli. In the Ottoman empire the process of change operated in the social-economic sphere within the context of the four social estates. Originally change revolved around the well-defined functions of these estates and was predictable since the forces of transformation remained constant. But beginning in the sixteenth century, after the addition of new forces of change, the third and fourth estates of the merchants and craftsmen, and food producers (peasants and husbandsmen) broke out of the traditional social arrangement and of the predictable cycle of transformation. Eventually, this structural change undermined the socio-economic foundations of the first and second estates; that is, the men of the sword and of the pen,1 and reshaped their ancient political-cultural functions. It was in this social environment that a new group of communal leaders arose. Their history, hardly studied at all, epitomizes the transformation of the Ottoman empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We have referred and still refer to this group as the ayam in order to describe the Muslim sections of the middle class. We use this term in a rather symbolic fashion since the meaning, functions and power of the qyans changed continuously in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.2 The often-used term 'notables' or esraf with respect to this class refers actually to the groups which emerged late in the eighteenth century as a consequence of the transformation in the socio-economic order.3 Usually the title ay an was conferred by government while esraf were recognized as such by individual communities as a consequence of social stratification. The relations of the ayam with the bureaucratic order and their conflicting group ideologies formed, we believe, the central dynamics of the internal transformation which occurred in Ottoman society in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Both groups were in turn' For this ancient social arrangement see E. I. J. Rosenthal, Political Thought in Medieval Islam (Cambridge, 1962). Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, The Nasirean Ethics, tr. G. M. Wickens (London, 1964). 2 For a more extensive treatment of the ay an and for bibliography see Kemal H. Karpat, 'The Land Regime, Social Structure, and Modernization in the Ottoman Empire', Beginnings of Modernization in the Middle East, William R. Polk and Richard L. Chambers (eds.), (Chicago, 1968), pp. 69~90. See also article 'Ayan' in Encyclopaedia of Islam (new edition) and Herbert L. Bodman,Jr., Political Factions in Aleppo 1760-1826 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1963). I. H. Uzuncarili, Meshur Rumeli Ayanlanndan Tirsinikli Ismail, Yihkoglu Suleyman Agalar ve Alemdar Mustafa Pa fa (Istanbul, 1942) and Avdo Suceska, Ajani (Sarajevo, 1965). 3 For a view of esrq/s in Syria see Albert Hourani 'Ottoman Reform and the Politics of Notables', op. cit., Beginnings of Modernization . . ., pp. 41-68.

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subjected to external influences in varying degrees of intensity, and at different levels of activity, and responded independently and often in conflict with each other to the multifaced stimuli from outside. Faced with this situation, the Ottoman political system, based on a series of balances, began to disintegrate while creating at the same time the need for a new system. Indeed, the system's inability to answer the challenge, coupled with the evolution of the social structure into political states along cultural-religious lines, stood as major causes accounting for the disintegration of the Ottoman state, but not before it made valiant efforts to cope with the situation. The government's ultimate answer to this situation began as an attempt at integration through centralization under Selim III, and eventually culminated in the establishment of a Turkish national state. It is clear from the above that our treatment of the transformation in the Ottoman state is based on a historical-functional view of structural change. Consequently, we shall study, first, the different patterns of stratification among the Christian and Muslim inhabitants of the Empire, and especially among their respective leadership groups. Secondly, we shall view this stratification as conditioned in good measure by a new set of economic forces stemming in part from the Industrial Revolution and the free market economy of the West. Thirdly, we shall consider the transformation of the political system as a functional response to the economic stimuli, to the diversified social structure and to the resulting need for a new type of regulatory action. In other words, we shall proceed from the hypothesis that the differentiation of the political system and the rise of a new political cadre are related to the social differentiation and to its underlying causes: changes in occupations, in ownership patterns, income levels, and cultural-political values.

2. The Dichotomy of Social Structures and Political Tension in the Ottoman Empire

The military reforms undertaken by sultans Mustafa III (1757-74) and Abdiilhamit I (177489), despite the great importance attached to them by scholars as the formative bases of a new elite, as the first channels of communication with the West and as the foundations of new modes of thought, had in reality a more modest goal, namely to assure the survival of the state against external and internal

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challenges. Advanced technology, an economic system relying increasingly upon industry, new techniques of government and of study culminating in military power constituted the backbone of external, Western challenge. The search for autonomy in the provinces and a series of conflicting demands for order and security and regulatory action, couched often in moralistic and religious terminology, made up the internal challenge. Actually this latter challenge was a by-product of Western technological, economic and intellectual forces which reflected themselves upon everyday life in society in the form of expanded trade, change in land tenure, and intensified communication. The ensuing dichotomy between society and government, long in the making in the Ottoman state, was rooted in the following situation. Society developed and differentiated into new occupational groups with new thoughts and demands corresponding more or less to the technological and economic stimuli, and expected a change in government functions accordingly. But the government, consisting of the throne and the central bureaucracy and considering itself synonymous with the state and subject to its own traditions of authority, was unable to understand and cope functionally with the problems created by change. Nevertheless the bureaucracy attempted to educate itself in the rudiments of functional government, to acquire a blue print of modernization in its frequent but superficial contacts with the West, and to mould society according to its own image of modern statehood. The leadership groups, both Muslim and nonMuslim, on the other hand rising to power in society at large, often on the basis of economic power and communal support, sought a government shaped in accordance with their interests, aspirations and respective culture. Thus the conflict between the ruler and the ruled, and the need for harmony between government and society at every level of activity constituted the fundamental problem facing the Ottoman state in its latter stage. The problem was aggravated by the fact that any attempt to reconcile society and government functionally and ideologically was bound to undermine the complex socio-ethnic and religious system of balances on which the traditional Ottoman state stood. The differences and conflicts inherent in this situation were maximized after the social organization and its supporting land system broke down, the commerce with the West in the Balkans and the coastal areas increased, and the authority of the throne collapsed. Trade with Austria and west European countries expanded rapidly

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throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The opening of the Black Sea to the Russian trade through the peace treaties of Kuciik Kaynarca and Jassi in 1774 and 1792, coupled with the loss of territory along the north shores of the same Sea, deprived the Ottoman state of its major economic base. The Black Sea had been an exclusive Ottoman trade area, which compensated for the French and British domination of Mediterranean commerce. Moreover, the merchant class along the Black Sea littoral was related commercially to Istanbul and Anatolia, which served as the trans-shipping points for goods from east, west and beyond. This was in fact a rather complex and balanced trading system which was productive enough to compensate for the losses suffered in the military fields until the end of the eighteenth century. Meanwhile, the Industrial Revolution in the West, the resulting urbanization and change in consumptive habits, coupled with the technological and military advancement, changed drastically the pattern of trade. The Ottoman state, whose trade balance was favorable well into the nineteenth century, gradually became an importer. Its exports, which consisted in good measure of manufactured items, gradually shrank to agricultural commodities by the second half of the nineteenth century. It began to buy some new items, such as indigo, coffee, sugar, steel, metal products, and also clothing apparel, which not only replaced the locally manufactured goods but eventually became symbols of wealth and social status. The empire became an exporter of foodstuffs and raw materials; it sold wool and imported woolen clothes. The total European trade with the Ottoman empire in 1783 was estimated to be 4.4 million. In 1829 it fell to 2.9 million (the Greek independence war accounts for it), but rose to 12.2 in 1845, to 54 in 1876, and to 69.4 million in 1911.4 From about 1850 to 1914 imports greatly exceeded exports. Following the Anglo-Turkish Commercial Convention of 1838, which gave to Great Britain undisputed competitive superiority+ For background information on trade see Charles Issawi, The Economic History of the Middle East, 1800-1914 (Chicago, 1966), p. 60. Nicolas G. Svoronos, Le Commerce de Salonique au XVIIF siecle (Paris, 1956). Paul Masson, Histoire du commerce francais dans le Levant au XVIIP siecle (Paris, 1911). A. C. Wood, A History of the Levant Company (London, 1935). Leone Levi, History of British Commerce 1763-1870 (London, 1872), p. 934, places the exports to the Ottoman empire in 1850 to 2,811,000. Turkey was in third place. Other statistics place the volume of British exports to Turkey well above this figure. See Bailey, British Policy and the Turkish Reform Movement (Cambridge, Mass., 1942), p. 74. Also William Page, Commerce and Industry Tables of Statistics for the British Empire (London, 1919).

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with regard to domestic manufactures, the Ottoman state economy almost collapsed. David Urquhart, who had undertaken an exhaustive survey of Ottoman resources, proposed for the West in the early 1830s to supply the necessities as well as the luxuries of the whole of the eastern population, whose attention will thus be exclusively directed to agriculture, and the furnishing of raw produce . . . [and to] take from them their produce in return for our wares'. Two decades later M. A. Ubicini could lament that themanufacturing industry has greatly declined from what it formerly was in the Ottoman Empire. At present the greater part of the exports of Turkey consist of raw materials which it hands over to Europe, and which the latter returns to Turkey in a manufactured form. The numerous and varied manufactures ... no longer exist or have completely declined ... At Scutari and Tirnova there were two thousand looms of muslin in operation in 1812, whereas there were only two hundred in 1841 ... the same decay is observable in the old manufacturing towns of Syria and of Arabian Iraq.

But Ubicini, despite this trenchant observation, found the fault in the Ottomans' failure to concentrate all efforts on agriculture, thus committing the 'error so common to young states or nations in the process of transformation of endeavoring to produce all things necessary for its own consumption'.5 These developments, coupled with the changes in the patterns of regional exchange, disrupted the internal trade whereby one region supplied the other with raw material or manufactured goods. Eventually these regions, due in part to the predominance of sea communications, became economically attached to France or England, while maintaining a formal but continuously weakening political tie to the Ottoman administration. The social consequences of this expanding but one-sided trade relationthat is, of the economic liberalism advocated sincerely by Ubicini as the surest road to universal material welfare, and unwittingly to imperialismwere not felt everywhere in the empire at the same time and with the same intensity. Southeastern Europe had fallen under the impact of expanded trade with the West early, in3 The quotations are from D. Urquhart, Turkey (London, 1933), pp. 141-4, and M. A. Ubicini, Letters on Turkey, tr. Lady Easthorpe (London, 1856), pp. 339-44, reproduced in Issawi, op. cit., pp. 425 passim.

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the eighteenth century. It benefitted from some special economic safeguards and protectionist measures offered by the Ottoman state in its heydays. Consequently, the area developed itself economically and reached political independence before European industrial development necessitated economic and political dependence on the part of its markets and sources of agricultural commodities. By the end of the eighteenth century the European sections of the empire inhabited by Christians had formed three groups of leaders, conspicuously absent among the Muslims. These groups became the torch-bearers of Balkan nationalism, and eventually the backbone of the Serbian, Greek, and Bulgarian national states (1804-78). The first group was formed by the leading merchants, manufacturers and other related occupations, whose origin can be traced to the intensive trade with Europe beginning in the early part of the century.6 Suffice to mention that the Greek merchant colonies in Vienna, Venice, Trieste, and especially Odessa were the active revolutionary vanguards of their ethnic groups under Ottoman rule. The second group was formed by the non-Muslim intellectuals whose origin and status can be traced either to the merchant class mentioned above or to the schools established or supported by the same or by the local church. This group became the banner-bearer of the nationalist ideology, especially after some members acquainted themselves with the ideas of the French Revolution. To these one may add the lower Christian Orthodox clergy who often found themselves at odds with the bishops or Patriarchs who were associated with the ruling bureaucratic order. The third group of leaders, related to the population at large, was formed by those romantic figures called haiduk or klephtehalf highwaymen, half popular leaderswho often served in Western armies and navies and fought as guerrilla commanders and then as military leaders during their respective national revolutions. The most6 See Traian Stoianovich, 'The Conquering Balkan Orthodox Merchant', Journal of Economic History (June, 1960), pp. 234313, also 'The Social Foundations of Balkan Po