Faroqhi S.N. The Cambridge History of Turkey: Volume 3, The Later Ottoman Empire, 1603-1839

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

linda t. darling

regions and 42 per cent in Anatolia and the Arab lands. The large and lucrative

Aegean and Balkan investments came mostly from janissaries and central state

elites, while the smaller Anatolian and Arab investments were held by a wider

mix of local Muslim elites. Non-Muslims were not permitted to hold malik

anes,

but continued to participate in state ﬁnances as ordinary tax-farmers. The most

proﬁtable investments were the customs dues and excise taxes, whose high

levels of return reﬂect the growing prosperity of the mid-eighteenth century,

the dividends of peace and the increase in trade with Europe. Eighty per cent

of this wealth was controlled by a few hundred members of the central elite

whose large households, extensive provincial connections and ability to amass

capital and creditmade them the major players in the malik

ane ﬁeld.

To spread

the risk, these large holders began to sell shares of their lifetime tax-farms to

others and to diversify their holdings among a number of malik

anes as well as

other forms of investment.

Credit was handled by a group of non-Muslim

moneychangers (sarraf), who registered with the treasury as guarantors of the

lifetime tax-farmers’ payments; they also handled loans and fund transfers via

bills of exchange.

The malik

ane system in some cases encouraged greater investment in the

income-producing properties of the empire. Examples include the establish-

ment of a dye-works in Tokat by the holder of the stamp tax on cloth and

improvements to the dye-house of Aleppo.

But it was often true that holders

in Istanbul could not be brought to care about affairs in a distant provincial

malik

ane or used their lifetime tax-farm merely as an investment receptacle

for wealth from other sources.

As shareholders multiplied, they gained the

right to manage their own shares of the malik

ane or farm them out to still

more managers, further distancing the state from the productive classes. The

participation of local notables in the system strengthened the involvement

of provincial urban residents in the rural economy, but mainly through debt

patronage rather than agricultural investment.

In urban areas artisanal taxes

32 Ibid., p. 282. 33 C¸ izakc¸a, Comparative Evolution,p.171.

34 Salzmann, ‘Measures’, pp. 195–202; Pamuk, Monetary History,pp.200–4.

35 Mehmet Genc¸, ‘Ottoman Industry in the Eighteenth Century: General Framework,

Characteristics, and Main Trends’, in Manufacturing in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey,

1500–1950, ed. Donald Quataert (Albany, 1994), pp. 59–86,atp.61; Jean-Pierre Thieck,

‘D

ecentralisation ottomane et afﬁrmation urbaine

a Alep

a la ﬁn du XVIII

eme si

ecle’,

in Mouvements communautaires et espaces urbaines au Machreq, ed. Mona Zakaria et al.

(Beirut, 1985), pp. 117–68,atp.129.

36 C¸ izakc¸a, Comparative Evolution,p.172.

37 Ariel C. Salzmann, ‘Privatising the Empire: Pashas and Gentry during the Ottoman 18th

Century’, in The Great Ottoman Turkish Civilisation, ed. Kemal C¸ic¸ek, 4 vols. (Istanbul,

2000), vol. III, at pp. 132–9,pp.135–6.

128

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Public ﬁnances: the role of the Ottoman centre

were sold as malik

ane to janissaries in return for protection; the cost of this

practice encouraged the formation of craft monopolies and closed guilds that

discouraged expansion and innovation. Production and experimentation were

driven to the rural areas where ﬁnance and transportation were difﬁcult to

obtain and where export industry was prohibited by the state.

Production

investment seems to have had a low enough rate of return to discourage efforts

to overcome these hurdles in most cases, even though productive and commer-

cial activity was growing rapidly in the ﬁrst two-thirds of the century. Proﬁts

from malik

anes on trade, on the other hand, were substantial, varying from

20 to 40 per cent in the eighteenth century.

This revenue system apparently

facilitated the development of a commercial and rentier economy dependent

on the capitalist world system. In this century the ﬁnance department was

better able to keep the government’s budget in the black but less successful at

maintaining the legitimacy conferred by just taxation.

Because the state was unable to alter the conditions of malik

ane contracts,

over time the treasury received a lesser share of the proﬁts, a third to a fourth,

according to C¸ izakc¸a.

Moreover, the 1763 defeat of the French, the Ottomans’

largesttrading partner, created a ﬁnancial crisis in Mediterraneantrade, and the

treasury’s precarious stability was further threatened by the Russo-Ottoman

war of 1768–74. A new mode of state ﬁnancing was developed in 1775, the

system of esham (shares). In this system, the estimated annual proﬁt of a

revenue source was divided into a large number of shares which were sold to

the public at ﬁve to six times the annual proﬁt.

The government retained

control of the revenue source, so it kept any additional proﬁts and was better

able to maintain productivity. The revenue was collected by state agents or

tax-farmers and used to pay the dividends to the shareholders as well as the

expenses of the revenue source and the payments due from it. As the proﬁts

of a revenue source increased, or as other revenue sources were added to it,

more shares could be sold. For example, as the proﬁt on the Istanbul Tobacco

Customs Mukataa went from 400,000 kurus¸ to 760,000 in the period 1775–1806,

the number of shares grew from 160 to 303.

Shares were also subdivided

and fractional shares sold to smaller investors. The shares themselves were

supposed to be valid only for the life of the buyer, but when buyers began

38 Genc¸, ‘Ottoman Industry’, pp. 62–3.

39 Mehmet Genc¸, ‘A Study of the Feasibility of Using Eighteenth-Century Ottoman

Financial Records as an Indicator of Economic Activity’, in The Ottoman Empire and

the World-Economy, ed. Huri

Islamo

glu-

Inan (Cambridge; 1987), pp. 345–73,atp.358 and

ﬁg. 16.1.

40 C¸ izakc¸a, Comparative Evolution,pp.165–6.

41 Cezar, Osmanlı maliyesinde bunalım,pp.79–80. 42 Ibid., pp. 83, 108.

129

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

linda t. darling

to sell and bequeath them as property, they once again escaped the state’s

control.

The state ﬁrst placed a 10 per cent tax on such transfers and then

turned the designated shares into bearers’ shares, similar to bonds, so that they

could be transferred freely. This system did succeed in broadening the group

of people lending to the state and involving themselves in public ﬁnance; even

women and non-Muslims became shareholders.

As malik

ane-holders died,

their holdings were incorporatedinto the esham system, so that by 1827 the level

of investment in esham was triple that in malik

ane.Theesham, like malik

anes,

were equivalent to a long-term loan, making it possible for the Ottomans to

stave off foreign indebtedness until the nineteenth century.

In the late 1700s and early 1800s the French Revolution, wars in eastern

Europe, the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt and the rise of British power in the

Mediterranean created an ongoing ﬁnancial crisis. At the same time, Selim

III introduced military and administrative reforms that demanded additional

funds. In 1793 he created a new treasury, the

Irad-ı cedid hazinesi, to manage

the revenues dedicated to his New Order Army, the Nizam-ı Cedid. This new

treasury managed revenues from esham and from the abrogated malik

anes,

as well as taxes on wool and cotton. As the central malik

ane-holders were

eliminated, the state depended more heavily on the ofﬁcials and notables

who controlled the wealth of the provinces. The provincial notables were

nearly successful in parlaying that inﬂuence into permanent political power.

In 1808 they signed the Sened-i

Ittifak (document of agreement) agreeing to

collect taxes and recruit for the military strictly in accordance with the law, in

exchange for the sultan’s respect for their autonomy and his promise to govern

justly.

The new sultan, Mahmud II (r. 1808–39), however, refused to restrict his

authority in this way. Hampered by a conservative reaction to past and pro-

posed reforms, he refrained from making signiﬁcant changes until he was able

to gain control over strong political forces in the bureaucracy and the military.

The destruction of the janissary corps in 1826 ﬁnally enabled him to move

forward with the re-centralisation and reform of Ottoman administration. To

fund military reform he took over the imperial foundations, gaining control

of all their surplus funds. He re-centralised all the large tax-farms for his mili-

tary treasury and began the long process of replacing tax-farmers with central

government tax-collectors (muhassıls). He established a new market tax and

stopped payment on janissary pensions. He ordered a new census of Rumeli

43 C¸ izakc¸a, Comparative Evolution,p.180. 44 Pamuk, Monetary History,pp.170–91.

130

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Public ﬁnances: the role of the Ottoman centre

and Anatolia, which was carried out in the 1830s. He also revitalised the postal

system and began building better roads, facilitating the transport of revenues

to the treasury. These reforms, asserting once again the central government’s

control over and concern for the countryside, were continued after his death

during the subsequent period of reorganisation, the Tanzimat.

131

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

part iii

The Centre and

the Provinces

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

The Ottoman centre versus provincial

power-holders: an analysis of the

historiography

dina rizk khoury

The seventeenth century ushered in a period of crisis for the Ottoman state.

Plagued by a series of debilitating rebellions in Anatolia, Egypt, Baghdad and

Mount Lebanon, war on its European and Eastern frontiers, and ﬁscal troubles

brought about by the twin evils of inﬂation and war, the Ottoman central gov-

ernment found itself under increasing pressure to change the ways in which

it administered its provinces. The K

opr

u vizieral dynasty instituted a series

of measures to stave off further erosion of imperial control in the provinces in

the second half of the seventeenth century. By the ﬁrst half of the eighteenth

century, the government had reorganised its provincial administrative struc-

ture and attempted to regularise tax-farming practices to allow it more access

to the taxable income of its subjects. The prosperity brought about by the

expansion of regional economies and trade with Europe in western Anatolia,

Syria, Egypt and Iraq during the ﬁrst half of the eighteenth century allowed

for the development of a modus vivendi between local elites in the provinces

and the Ottoman government.

However, by the second half of the century the relatively trouble-free rela-

tions between the centre and the provincial elite began to fray. Saddled with

problems of mobilisation for a disastrous war against Russia, and unable to

easily muster the loyalty and support of its provincial power-holders, the gov-

ernment found itself ﬁghting a number of rebellions by semi-autonomous

provincial power-holders in the Balkans and the Middle East. Yet despite severe

challenges to the supremacy and legitimacy of a much weakened sultanate

at the end of the century, the Ottoman state was able to maintain a tenuous

allegiance from a sector of the local elite in most of its Asian provinces and

some of its European provinces well into the nineteenth century.

Whyit was ableto do so is a question historians are only beginningto grapple

with. Part of the answer may be found in the changing relations between the

135

dina rizk khoury

centre and those local elites not necessarily at the pinnacle of the provincial

hierarchy of political power. Historians are now directing their attention to

the relations between the central government and a more diffuse and less

politically visible local elite whose members appear to have retained some

loyalty to the state even as their provincial governors and warlords challenged

its supremacy. Drawn from diverse social backgrounds, these elites constituted

the backbone of Ottoman hegemony in the provincial setting.

Well into the 1970s the historiography of the Ottoman provinces allocated

an inordinate amount of space to the spectacular rise and occasional rebel-

lions of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century provincial power elite. The

underlying assumption of many such studies was the view that early modern

multi-ethnic empires with large territories were forever struggling to main-

tain a balance between the needs of the central governments for control and

the limitations created by the relatively primitive level of the organisation

of coercion. The early modern imperial state was no match for the mod-

ern nation-state in its abilities to create consensus and submission within its

disparate populations. There is no disputing the fact that the Ottoman state

devoted considerable resources and political capital between 1600 and 1800 in

attempting to subdue or co-opt the powerful provincial elites that challenged

its hegemony.

However, less spectacular than the disruptive machinations of powerful

provincial elites, but perhaps more signiﬁcant for our understanding of the

ways in which provincial societies remained part of the Ottoman domains

despite seismic political upheavals, were the ways in which the local and less

visible elites transformed the provincial administrative and military establish-

ment. By the end of the eighteenth century, local elites had usurped most of

the administrative and military posts in the provinces, either through purchas-

ing titles and membership into Ottoman military and administrative provin-

cial establishment, or through becoming tax-farmers. Hence, to a signiﬁcant

degree the state ‘made’ provincial power elites, as much as provincial power-

holders ‘made’ the state at the local level. Provincial elites ‘localised’ the hege-

mony of the state.

Scholars are not as yet agreed on how to characterise such ‘localisation’.

Until quite recently, most scholarship viewed the eighteenth century as one

of decentralisation and loss of state hegemony to local power-holders. More

recently, some historians have attempted to articulate this process as one in

which a form of Ottoman political culture centred on elite household organi-

sation was reproduced at the provincial level. They maintain that such ‘locali-

sation’ of Ottoman political authority should not be viewed in strictly ﬁscal and

136

The Ottoman centre versus provincial power-holders

administrative terms – that is to say, as decentralisation – but as a more subtle

and profound expansion of Ottoman forms of political rule to the provinces.

Whether such revisionist historiography is applicable to the empire as a whole,

it is as yet too early to judge. At the moment, it might be safer to write a

general narrative about the process of transformation for our period as one

of ‘localisation’ of Ottoman administrative and military practices by urban

groups.

The Ottoman conquest and control of vast territories depended to a large

degree on the ability of the government to forge alliances with local power

elites. To govern such widely divergent societies as settled peasants, pastoral

nomads and urbanites, the government had to have the will and capacity

to use local systems of control to its own advantage. Its success in doing

so was determined by several factors. Geographical proximity to Istanbul

and other major administrative centres was key. Thus in areas easily reached

by the army and the administrative elites, the ability of the government to

enforce its writ was stronger than it was in mountainous and remote regions

such as Mount Lebanon, south-eastern Anatolia or Yemen. Equally important,

however, was the centrality of certain provincial capitals to the maintenance of

the empire’s frontiers. In Bosnia, Damascus, Egypt, Tunis, Algiers, Baghdad

and Mosul, all centres for control of the empire’s frontiers against foreign

powers and/or pastoral nomads, the government alternated between a policy

of accommodation and suppression of local elites. By the end of the eighteenth

century, however, as in many of these provincial capitals, strongmen challenged

the central government, and the local elites acquired the upper hand in their

dealings with their overlords. Finally, and perhaps most critical for relations

between the provinces and the central government, was the local social matrix

within which the prerogatives of the government were played out. Although

we have as yet relatively few and unevenly distributed studies of provincial

Ottoman history, what is available points to the centrality of local familial

and group networks in shaping the central state’s relations with provincial

societies.

1 Jane Hathaway, The Politics of Households in Ottoman Egypt: The Rise of the Qazda

glis

(Cambridge, 1997), pp. 24–31; Bruce Masters, ‘Power and Society in Aleppo in the

Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, Revue du Monde Musulman et de la Mediterran

62, 4 (1991), 151–8; Karl Barbir, Ottoman Rule in Damascus, 1708–1758 (Princeton, 1980),

pp. 13–56; Dina Rizk Khoury, State and Provincial Society in the Ottoman Empire: Mosul

1540–1834 (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 111–33. For the perspective of the central state, see

Ariel C. Salzmann, ‘An Ancien R

egime Revisited: “Privatization” and Political Econ-

omy in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Empire’, Politics and Society 21, 4 (1993),

393–424.

137