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

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Palestine and Lebanon, in Aleppo and even on the sultan’s doorstep in Istanbul,

where Armenian merchants doggedly supported the Catholic cause, often at

great expense to their treasure and lives.

In the Balkans outside Bosnia, the Catholics had little long-lasting success

in winning the lasting spiritual loyalty of Orthodox Slavs or Greeks.

But the

Ecumenical patriarchs’ fear of the Catholic challenge led them to attempt to

centralise the church hierarchy under their control wherever possible. In the

case of Creteor Cyprus,this simplymeant replacing local clergywith men from

the capital.

But in the Slav lands, centralisation meant Hellenisation. This

wasaccomplished politically with the abolition of the independent patriarchate

of Pe

cin1766 and the archbishopric of Ohrid a year later, both of which had

nourished Slavonic Orthodox culture. This power grab enhanced the role of

the independent Serbian archbishopric at Sremski Karlovci in the Habsburg-

ruled Vojvodina. When the patriarchate of Pe

c was abolished, the patriarch

simply moved into the Habsburg lands. From that point on, the ambitions

of Serbs to reclaim their church and eventually their nation were nurtured

outside the sultan’s control.

For Orthodox Bulgarians, the centralisation of

all church authority in the hands of Greek speakers sparked a revived interest

in the history of the Bulgarian kingdom and in the development of a literary

Bulgarian language in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Local clergy

fostered a parallel awakening of interest in history and the vernacular language

in Wallachia among peoples who were yet to become Rumanians in their

collective imagination but who had become restive with a Greek-controlled

church and economy.

The struggle over the centralisation of church authority in both the Ortho-

dox and the Armenian millets had inadvertently sparked the growth of ethnic

consciousness that would emerge as the Romantic nationalisms of the nine-

teenth century. In the case of the Armenians, it had a unifying effect by pro-

viding divine sanction to one literary language, as many who were Armenian

in their religious loyalties had long been subsumed into the larger Turkish-

or Arabic-speaking linguistic communities among whom they lived. For the

Orthodox, it had the opposite effect of splintering a community of the faithful,

some of whom preferred literacy in their mother tongues to that of the Mother

20 Masters, Christians and Jews,pp.80–95; Vartan Artinian, ‘The Formation of Catholic and

Protestant Millets in the Ottoman Empire’, The Armenian Review 28 (1975), 3–15.

21 Hupchick, The Bulgarians,pp.74–83.

22 Molly Greene, A Shared World: Christians and Muslims in the Early Modern Mediterranean

(Princeton, 2000), pp. 191–4.

23 Dennis Hupchick, The Balkans from Constantinople to Communism (New York, 2002)

pp. 200–1.

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Christians in a changing world

Church. Whether in Syria, Bulgaria, Rumania or Serbia, the attempts by the

Ecumenical patriarch to consolidate his authority gave rise to a resistance by

local clergy who increasingly voiced their opposition in the local vernaculars,

unintentionally creating the basis of a national consciousness.

The politics behind the creation of the millets required a great deal of money.

The triumph of the Ecumenical patriarch would not have been possible with-

out the ﬁnancial support of the Orthodox merchants in the capital. These were

collectively labelled the Phanariotes, after the district of the city which housed

the patriarchate and where many chose to build their homes. The Phanariotes

were often descended from Byzantine noble families with strong ties to the

Ecumenical patriarch. They supported the upkeep of churches, monasteries

and the priesthood, while their relatives ﬁlled the ranks of the higher clergy.

By the eighteenth century, the Phanariotes controlled much of the wealth and

trade of the Ottoman Balkans. Using that wealth, they were able to convince

the Ottoman ofﬁcials that a Orthodox millet centred in the capital would stop

the erosion of Ottoman authority in the Balkans.

Similarly the Uniate move-

ments, where successful, and the monks of the Balkans who were writing

national histories and deﬁnitive grammars for what would become ‘national’

languages, were supported by local merchants who resented the idea that they

might lose inﬂuence in their local churches, the only political institution in

which they had any voice.

Orthodoxy won the ‘millet wars’. By the mid-eighteenth century, the

Ottoman state stood ready to assist the guardians of ‘tradition’ against the inno-

vation of Catholicism and the traditions of local autonomy that had emerged

in the absence of a centralised Mother Church. That victory had come at a

cost, however. The Christian communities of the empire had experienced a

struggle that affected not only the elites but ultimately all the laity. Which

language to pray in had become an issue of fundamental political importance,

and equally political was the question of which authority could claim the ulti-

mate spiritual allegiance of the faithful. Coming to a decision on these matters

would ultimately reshape the identities of Ottoman Christians.

24 Dimitrije Djorjevi

c and Stephen Fischer-Galati, The Balkan Revolutionary Tradition (New

York, 1981), pp. 45–57.

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part v

Making a Living

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

Capitulations and Western trade

edhem eldem

Western trade in the Ottoman Empire: questions,

issues and sources

The issue of Western trade and that of its legal framework, the capitulations,

has always been viewed as crucial in the understanding of certain transforma-

tions undergone by the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth

centuries. The implicit argument behind these statements is that, in the long

run, Western trade and economic presence in the Levant has worked towards

the gradual integration of the Ottoman Empire into an economic system

that came to be dominated by Western powers. This integration, in turn, has

generally been described in rather negative terms, ranging from (Ottoman)

passivity to signs of an impending domination of the Ottoman economy by

the commercial and industrial supremacy of Europe. In that sense, it is rather

striking that most scenarios concerning the evolution of Western trading activ-

ity in the eastern Mediterranean basin tend to reinforce the often-criticised

vision of decline applied to the Ottoman Empire as a whole and, more particu-

larly, to its military and diplomatic performance against the growing power of

Western nations. Political and diplomatic in essence as it may have been, the

Eastern Question is inextricably linked to the outcome of over three centuries

of commercial interaction between Europe and the Ottomans.

This, one may argue, is even truer of the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-

turies. While the sixteenth century is generally associated with the emergence

of the Ottoman capitulatory regime and the granting of the ﬁrst commercial

‘privileges’ to the French and the English, the implicit understanding is that

these treaties were granted out of a combination of a self-assured magnanimity

and a desire to forge durable political alliances with certain Western powers.

However, from the seventeenth century on, this image of Ottoman superiority

and autonomy is gradually tempered by the sense of an increasingly aggres-

sive encroachment of European trading activity on the Ottoman domains.

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edhem eldem

The development of the already existing French, Venetian and Genoese trade,

the rising competition of the English on the same turf and the appearance of

yet another maritime power – the Dutch Provinces – all conﬁrmed the notion

that the Western ‘miracle’ – of which the ‘rise of the Atlantic economies’ was

one of the most blatant signs – was about to change the rapports de force that

had until then characterised the economic and commercial relations between

Europe and the Ottoman Empire.

In that sense, the eighteenth century could only be the logical consequence

of this gradual transformation. A conﬁrmation of the preceding trend, it sig-

nalled the predominance of Western nations – mostly the French – over Levan-

tine trade and preﬁgured the watershed of the nineteenth century and the total

domination of Ottoman markets by Westerners. The transformation under-

gone by Western trade was both quantitative and qualitative: not only had it

grown in volume, it had also acquired a typical pattern of unequal exchange,

with European manufactured goods ﬂooding an Ottoman economy which

was forced into the subservient role of feeding the growing Western indus-

tries with raw materials. In three centuries of relentless effort, Western traders

had been able to subdue the Ottoman economy, together with its principal

actors, and to prepare the ground for the violent onslaught of European capi-

talist expansion in the last century of the empire’s existence.

Needless to say, this rather mechanistic scenario has long been criticised for

its tendency to oversimplify what was in fact a much more complex process –

from the broader perspective of relative underdevelopment – and a much more

marginal and therefore less determining one – within the narrower context of

commercial domination. Yet, despite the obvious shortcomings of this model,

one has to account for the undeniable fact that the terms under which trade

was conducted between Europe and the Ottoman Empire evolved from a

situation of equality or even of relative Ottoman superiority to one that is best

described as an effective domination or inﬂuence of Western economic actors

over Ottoman markets, production and consumption.

This raises the question of the coexistence of the somewhat paradoxical

notion of a marginal position and inﬂuence of Western trade in the empire

eventually developing into a full-ﬂedged domination of a quasi-colonial type.

Combining these two notions requires, therefore, allowing for a non-linear and

complexchain of causality linking therather mild level of penetrationthat char-

acterised the Levant trade of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with

the dramatically violent kind of unequal exchange witnessed throughout the

Tanzimat period. The major explanation that can be advanced in the direc-

tion of this non-linear plot is the fact that the situation that seems to have

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Capitulations and Western trade

crystallised after the 1840s was not necessarily the outcome of a smooth and

cumulative process of a purely commercial and economic nature. On the one

hand, one could easily argue that much of the development of Western trade

during the period went hand in hand with diplomatic and political processes

whose incidence on trade was in no way negligible. Supported by the growing

power of their respective states, relayed by the embassies in Istanbul and a wide

consular network in the provinces, Western traders were thus able to compen-

sate for their potential weakness and limitations on the local market through

the use of extra-economic means of negotiation and, eventually, persuasion.

On the other, one should keep in mind that, even from a strictly economic per-

spective, it is rather likely that what prepared the ground for the quasi-colonial

situation of the nineteenth century took place at the very end of the period

under study, namely during the last decades of the eighteenth century and the

ﬁrst decades of the nineteenth. In other words, to assume a cumulative and

gradual effect of penetration from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth

is quite akin to building a scenario that would describe an undifferentiated

continuum of economic development for western Europe during the same

period. If the initial phase of the Industrial Revolution, say from the 1760sto

the 1820s, resulted in the drastic transformation of the most developed areas

of the Western world, to the point of relegating the preceding period to the

status of an economic ancien r

egime, one should all the better be able to accept

the idea that most of the preconditions of ‘peripheralisation’ of the Ottoman

economy were not to emerge before the maturation of an industrial Europe

with an actual capacity to dominate the Ottoman markets.

The aim is not to negate the existence of a gradual pattern of domination

inherent to the widening and development of Western trade in the eastern

Mediterranean, but rather to put this process into a wider, and possibly more

realistic, perspective that would allow for a combination of several factors in

explaining its complexity. At any rate, for the period under study, the argument

that Western trade was much more marginal than was previously thought,

both in terms of its volume compared to Eastern and domestic trade and,

consequently, in terms of its possible inﬂuence on Ottoman markets and pro-

duction, has gained wide recognition throughout the ﬁeld. Apart from bring-

ing about a fruitful discussion about the alternative dynamics and timing of

later integration on unequal terms, this argument has been characterised by

a notable absence of rigorous and convincing quantitative data to support it.

Indeed, the discovery of the ‘marginality’ of European trade in the seventeenth

and eighteenth centuries, although aimed at a quantitative countering of the

alleged dynamics of domination during the period, has relied on a surprisingly

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thin layer of evidence. Based on hunches, on certain qualitative indications

and on an evident amount of common sense, this ‘revisionist’ assessment of

Western trade is still begging for extensive research into the ‘other’ – and now

admittedly more important – trades of the empire, namely the domestic and

Eastern trades.

Interestingly, the same obstacles that make it difﬁcult to assess the mag-

nitude of non-Western trade in the region were originally at the basis of the

distortion that tended to overemphasise and exaggerate the importance of

the Levant trade in the economic downfall of the Ottoman Empire. These

obstacles are, generally speaking, directly related to the nature of the sources

available and, as its logical consequence, to the historiographical tradition that

has developed around the exploitation of these sources. Indeed, one of the

most striking aspects of this area of investigation is that it has almost system-

atically developed thanks to the use of Western sources, and in a direction

that could often be qualiﬁed as an extension of Western economic history. In

other words, a number of European sources – produced by state administra-

tions, chambers of commerce, diplomatic and consular missions and agents,

and occasional traders – have helped constitute a rich historical literature of

European presence and trade in the Levant with little, if any, concern for, or

insight into, Ottoman dynamics and responses to the process. To illustrate

this trend, one need only look at the wealth of research conducted on French

commercial involvement in the region during the seventeenth and, most par-

ticularly, the eighteenth centuries: most of this literature treats French trade

as an extension of the ‘metropolitan’ economy, with a minimal amount of

Ottoman documentation to use against – or in complement with – the over-

whelming mass of reports, statistical tables and correspondence emanating

from the Quai d’Orsay archives or from the archives of the Marseilles Cham-

ber of Commerce. With an Ottoman Empire deﬁned more as a geographical

area than a complex socio-economic entity, the chances of grasping the ‘local’

dynamics are evidently low, assuming, of course, that such an intention should

have ever existed. Ottoman dynamics are thus often relegated to a rather super-

ﬁcial and stereotypical account, generally mediated by contemporary Western

observers, or, in the best case, by a genuine effort at deducing or reconstituting

them from patchy evidence from the Ottoman archives.

The preceding paragraph is not a diatribe against Eurocentrism or some

economic variant of Orientalism. True, there is little doubt that some authors

of the late nineteenth or early twentieth century had little concern or curiosity

for things Ottoman, beyond the somewhat exotic stage they provided for a

staunchly Western narrative of adventure and success. However, apart from

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Capitulations and Western trade

the fact that it is, after all, perfectly legitimate to treat Western trade in the

Ottoman Empire as a European phenomenon and to study it from a Western

perspective and within a Western problematic, one can hardly ignore the fact

that practically no Ottoman archival material was available at that date for

any consistent study of these phenomena. For later periods, this excuse may

no longer have been true. Yet one should keep in mind that the harsh real-

ity of the limits and nature of the available documentation can be a serious

obstacle to the realisation of a historically balanced and impartial analysis. In

this respect, there is a blatant discrepancy between European and Ottoman

contemporary sources that can hardly be ignored. On the European side, the

most characteristic aspects of the documentation relating to the Levant trade

are its concentration in homogeneous and continuous series, its tendency to

exhaustiveness and an ‘economic’ nature derived from the usage of statistics,

of serial data, of (relatively) exact units of measurement and categories of clas-

siﬁcation and, most importantly, of a terminology denoting the adoption of

a relatively modern economic logic in the treatment of these data. Last, but

not least, European documentation includes an impressive number of private

collections of papers, correspondence and reports, which, patchy as they may

sometimes be, provide an invaluable insight into the more intimate practice

of trade at an individual level, generally not covered by state and institutional

archives. The overall outlook of Ottoman sources on the same subject seems

diametrically opposed: no concentration, but rather a dispersion throughout

a large number of series and sub-series;

a general patchiness that makes it

impossible most of the time to constitute any consistent series of information

or data over a sizeable period of time; a general lack of ‘economic conscious-

ness’ which is generally replaced by a ﬁscal(ist) one, often favouring a succinct

listing of taxes, dues or customs without entering any of the constitutive

details about the amount, quantity, size or value of the objects of the ﬁscal

survey; ﬁnally, an almost total absence of private papers, whether in the form

of correspondence or of accounting and reports on trading activities. Thus,

while European sources – especially for the eighteenth century – will enable

researchers to draw continuous statistical tables of the major elements of trade

and complement this information with a parallel ﬂow of observations, com-

ments and projections derived from reports and correspondence, Ottoman

1 With the notable exception of the ecnebi defterleri (register books of foreigners), which

regroup the answers given by the Porte to petitions and memoranda of foreign envoys:

see Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘The Venetian Presence in the Ottoman Empire, 1600–30’, in The

Ottoman Empire and the World Economy, ed. Huri

Islamo

glu-

Inan (Cambridge, 1987),

pp. 311–44,atpp.317–18.

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