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

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that the Ottoman government’s attitude stemmed more from the marginality

and reduced incidence of Western trade on the economy than from an igno-

rance of mercantilist and protectionist principles. In other words, the Ottoman

state chose to adopt a non-mercantilist – rather than anti-mercantilist – atti-

tude because the threat constituted by the import of Western manufactured

goods was far less than the advantages that could be derived from a ﬁscalist

exploitation of customs revenues.

At any rate, Western traders were perfectly

conscious of the fact that there was a ‘communion of interest’ between their

own goals and the traditional policies of the Porte, and this knowledge was

reﬂected in the rhetoric they used in formulating their petitions, constantly

appealing to the provisionist fears, ﬁscalist greed and traditionalist stand of the

state.

With the Ottoman state their ally – at least in principle – and the Ottoman

market open to penetration – although marginally from the central govern-

ment’s viewpoint – one could be tempted into believing that the Ottoman

Empire was a safe haven for the expansion of European trade. Indeed, in many

respects, the Ottoman lands proved to be fertile ground in which, throughout

the seventeenth century, Western traders were able to develop their activi-

ties and sow the seeds of long-lasting commercial ventures. One of the most

striking examples of this fruition was probably the rise of Izmir as one of the

main emporia of Western trade in the empire. What was characteristic of

this western Anatolian port city was that, unlike most other Ottoman cities

where Western traders grafted themselves onto a pre-existing economic struc-

ture, Izmir developed almost entirely thanks to the presence of a community

of foreign merchants, eventually diverting the Anatolian silk trade from its

previous itinerary.

Yet this favourable environment was offset by a number of ‘resistances’

which hampered the smooth evolution of Western trade in the Ottoman lands.

Some of these were directly linked to Westerners themselves: ﬁerce compe-

tition among traders of a single nation or else among merchants of different

nations, clashes among consular authorities and traders, repercussions of polit-

ical conﬂicts in the motherland and so on.

But from an Ottoman perspective,

38 Bruce Masters, The Origins of Western Economic Dominance in the Middle East: Mercantilism

and the Islamic Economy in Aleppo, 1600–1750 (New York, 1988)pp.190–3; Edhem Eldem,

French Trade in Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century (Leiden, 1999), pp. 267–72.

39 Eldem, French Trade,pp.272–7.

40 Daniel Goffman, Izmir and the Levantine World, 1550–1650 (Seattle and London, 1990).

41 Paris, Histoire du commerce,pp.288–93; Niels Steensgaard, ‘Consuls and Nations in the

Levant from 1570 to 1650’, Scandinavian Economic History Review 15, 1–2 (1967), 13–55;

Daniel Goffman, Britons in the Ottoman Empire 1642–1 660 (Seattle and London, 1998).

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Capitulations and Western trade

there were two major obstacles in the way of a full-ﬂedged development of

Western commercial potential: the resistance of the economy to penetration

and the impediments arising from the political system, which often combined

to create a hostile environment that constantly surfaced in the complaints and

petitions of traders.

The commercial obstacles set by the local economy graphically illustrated

the marginality and superﬁcial implantation of Western traders in the empire.

Generally conﬁned to a few port cities, where they were almost segregated

in a certain district, or sometimes in a few khans, European traders had only

limited access to redistributive networks across the hinterland, or even within

the structure of the city that hosted them.

The limited market for the luxury

commodities they imported – generally broadcloth – further reduced their

commercial autonomy, as these products were usually in competition with

cheaper local, or higher-quality Oriental, goods. The same was true of the

purchases they made of local products. Most of these commodities – silk,

cotton, fruits, dyestuffs – had to be purchased from well-established local

traders, who had much greater access to, and control over, the provisioning

networks. Even whenWesterners tried to procure some of these products from

the producers – as in the case of wool or cotton in western Anatolia – they

had to rely on the services of local factors and brokers. As most transactions

were conducted on the basis of barter and long-term credit, and the value of

local purchases almost always exceeded the income derived from the sales of

Western products, European traders became even more subservient to their

local counterparts, and were obliged to conduct business on terms generally

favourable to the latter. This situation may be viewed, to a certain extent, as the

expression of a pattern of domination whereby, contrary to most expectations,

Ottoman merchants had a clear ascendancy – at least within the limits of their

market – over Western traders.

Yet, despite the obvious hindrance created by the comparative advantages

of local traders, most of the complaints of Western traders concentrated on

a very different type of ‘resistance’, that of political pressures exerted on the

trading communities by a wide spectrum of Ottoman authorities, ranging

from the government in Istanbul down to local authorities or paramilitary

42 For a comparative analysis of Western merchant communities in three different urban

contexts, see Edhem Eldem, Daniel Goffman and Bruce Masters, The Ottoman City

between East and West: Aleppo, Izmir, and Istanbul (Cambridge, 1999).

43 Michel Morineau, ‘Naissance d’une domination. Marchands europ

eens, marchands et

march

es du Levant aux XVIIIe et XIXe si

ecles’, in Commercedegros,commerceded

etail

dans les pays m

editerran

eens [XVIe – XIXe si

ecles]. Actes des journ

ees d’

etudes. Bendor 25–26

avril 1975 (Nice, 1976), pp. 144–84.

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groups in the provinces. The reason for this emphasis on political rather than

economic factors may be interpreted in several ways. First of all, it is more

than probable that Western traders knew better than to complain about what

was, after all, fair play in a situation of commercial interaction. Moreover, a sit-

uation of relative inferiority and subordination did not exclude the possibility

for Western traders to make substantial proﬁts and to enjoy their own com-

parative advantages deriving from their control over the channels and terms

of trade between the empire and Western markets. In short, if the essence of

Western complaints tended to concentrate on political action and reaction, it

was, on the one hand, because these hindrances were perceived as arbitrary

and illegitimate – a point further strengthened by Western stereotypes about

Ottoman despotism and Islamic fanaticism – and because they knew well that

their own implantation on the Ottoman market depended mostly on polit-

ical and diplomatic action, which found its most concrete expression in the

capitulations.

Political abuses, generally lumped under the generic term of avanias, cov-

ered a wide range of actions and demands, from harassment to bribes, and

from disregard of the capitulations to outright violence. Some were consid-

ered to be of a ‘structural’ nature, such as the gifts and donations expected by

most individuals in power, from the sultan and the grand vizier to the local

kadi or customs ofﬁcer of a provincial town. Bribes, as long as they did not

stem from outright blackmailing or threats of violence, were also perceived

as normal – indeed, typical of the alleged rapaciousness of Oriental ofﬁcials.

The real complaints were therefore linked to all sorts of physical abuses or

threats – imprisonment, ransoming, expulsion – and to various actions that

constituted blatant breaches of the capitulations – excessive taxation, forced

and often unpaid loans, unjustiﬁed ﬁnes, etc.

There is no doubt that many of the abuses described were exaggerated for

various reasons and, most of all, that they were much more exceptional than

the correspondence of traders and consuls might suggest. However, a certain

degree of insecurity, of arbitrariness and of political encroachments on the

market were certainly part of the overall conditions of trade in the Ottoman

lands. The relative autonomy enjoyed by provincial authorities in the seven-

teenth and eighteenth centuries was partly responsible for this situation, and

the capitulations and other agreements reached between the ambassadors and

the Porte in Istanbul were often extremely difﬁcult to implement in provincial

towns where the local balance of power between trading communities and

44 Paris, Histoire du commerce,pp.294–310.

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ofﬁcials tended to determine the rules of the game.

What European traders

did not report – or at least complain about – was that the ﬂexibility of the

system very often worked to their own advantage, and that it opened the path

to the circumvention or outright disregard of those rules and regulations that

imposed constraints on their own trade.

At any rate, without ceasing completely, the complaints of European mer-

chants started to fade away rather visibly in the eighteenth century. Western

trade in the 1600s had been characterised by much turmoil, instability and inse-

curity. The rise and fall of several trading ‘nations’, long periods of war and

their negative impact on trade, internal conﬂicts and insecurity in the empire

had all contributed to a somewhat erratic and unstable evolution of the Levant

trade. In contrast, the eighteenth century was characterised by a much more

regular growth of this trade and, most of all, by a gradual normalisation of the

conditions under which it was conducted. For those nations who were able –

and willing – to maintain their presence well into the eighteenth century, the

Ottoman Empire would prove to be a much safer and more reliable environ-

ment. In fact, much more than an increase in the volume of trade, the most

important change that the eighteenth century brought to the Levant trade

was a gradual ‘taming’ of a half-hostile and hardly controllable world into a

collaborative and eventually dominated one.

The eighteenth century: the French conquest

of the market

If the seventeenthcenturyhad been marked by a notable domination of English

traders, the eighteenth would turn out to be French. The ﬁrst signs of this

reversal had been witnessed in the late 1600s. The French were preparing

a comeback, putting serious efforts into the amelioration of their diplomatic

relations with the Porte, but also increasing their implantation in the Ottoman

Empire and developing a textile industry in Languedoc that might compete

with the English cloths much demanded in the Levant. The Dutch threat

had been pushed aside thanks to the combined efforts of the English and

French crowns through a series of wars that had greatly reduced Holland’s

naval power. True, the English still remained the ﬁrst and most powerful

actor on the Levant market, but the ﬁrst signs of a gradual disengagement

from the Ottoman Empire could already be felt in the last two decades of

45 Daniel Goffman, ‘The Capitulations and the Question of Authority in Levantine Trade

1600–1650’, Journal of Turkish Studies 10 (1986), 155–61.

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the seventeenth century. The Levant Company now operated in a much less

propitious climate: competition with the East India Company over the silk and

spice market along with the notable impoverishment of Ottoman consumers

following almost twenty years of warfare combined with the systematic efforts

of French traders at underselling English cloth; and all these factors had started

to seriously threaten English pre-eminence on the Levantine markets. Yet what

really ensured a decisive victory for French mercantilism was the incipient shift

of English commercial capital and interests towards the Indian and Atlantic

Oceans.

By 1730 French trade reigned supreme, and would remain in this

position until the last decade of the eighteenth century.

Throughout the 1700s French trade rose steadily: from some 10–15 million

livres tournois at the beginning of the century to almost 50 million at the end.

Typically, as had been the case with English trade in the preceding century,

exports from the Ottoman Empire by far exceeded imports from Marseilles.

During the second half of the century, the French trade deﬁcit represented

approximately one-ﬁfth of the total volume of trade, with exports to the

Levant standing at about 70 per cent of imports (see table 14.12). This deﬁcit,

however, was based on the balance of trade, and did not take into account the

balance of payments, including the ‘invisibles’ of trade – freight, insurance,

proﬁts accrued from monetary transfers; moreover, it was magniﬁed by the

tendency of contemporary statistics to inﬂate the price of Ottoman goods

relative to that of French exports. All in all, it appears that throughout the

century, French trade evolved in a fairly balanced way, without causing any

major haemorrhage to the French monetary stock.

Unlike English trade, which mobilised only a limited number of traders and

ships, French trade in the eighteenth century developed in a most intensive

way, spreading to a large number of port towns and cities – the

echelles du

Levant – involvingthe participation of a largenumber of traders, administrators

and dependants (no less than 1,211 men and women, accordingto a census taken

in 1769),

providing employment for a multitude of ships – a yearly average of

130 (see table 14.5) –and mobilising the administrative and diplomatic efforts of a

huge bureaucracy, from the Marseilles Chamber of Commerce to the Ministry

of the Navy in Paris. Yet another sign of the massive involvement of France

46 Paul Cernovodeanu, ‘The General Condition of English Trade in the Levant in the

Second Half of the 17th and at the Beginning of the 18th Century’, Revue des Etudes

Sud-Est Europ

eennes 5, 3–4 (1967), 447–60.

47 Charles Carri

ere and Marcel Courduri

e, ‘Un sophisme

economique: Marseille s’enrichit

en achetant plus qu’elle ne vend (R

eﬂexions sur les m

ecanismes commerciaux levantins

au XVIIIe si

ecle)’, Histoire, Economie et Soci

e 3, 1 (1984), 7–51.

48 Eldem, French Trade,p.206.

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in the Levant trade was the great diversity of goods that were exchanged.

While English trade had narrowed down to silk imports and cloth exports,

French trade covered a much wider range of products: cotton, wool, mohair,

oil, dyestuffs, hides, beeswax, and even textiles. In addition to the bulk of cloth

exports, the French marketed sizeable quantities of colonial products: coffee,

sugar, indigo and cochineal (see table 14.12).

French traders were disseminated throughout the empire. While this had

previously been because of disorganisation and instability, by the eighteenth

century this dispersal allowed the development of a rather efﬁcient trading

network monitored by Marseilles, sometimes via Istanbul. The great diversity

of French commercial implantations had created a momentum of its own,

with

echelles specialising in particular trades, and complementing each other

in ﬁnancial and administrative matters. A multitude of small

echelles whose

main function it was to export local products made up the French network

in the Levant; these were not able to sell enough French goods to ﬁnance

their purchases. Smaller centres were always connected to major

echelles –

Aleppo, Cairo, Izmir, Istanbul, Salonika – whose much more balanced trade

gave them greater power and autonomy. Some stood out from the mass, due to

their powerful and particular position. Izmir, already one of the major empo-

ria of the Levant trade in the preceding century, had become the wealthiest

echelle of all, draining products from its rich hinterland and beyond, and serv-

ing as a centre of redistribution of French commodities throughout Anatolia.

Istanbul, the major consumption centre of the empire, played a somewhat

different role. It swallowed a formidable quantity of European products –

mostly cloth, sugar and coffee – without any redistribution into the hin-

terland, yet came second only to Izmir as the major outlet of the Levant

trade. This huge level of consumption dwarfed the few exports that could

be made from the city: some wool from the regions south of the Marmara

Sea, occasional shipments of silk from Bursa and of mohair from Ankara,

some beeswax, some hides and so on. As a result, large amounts of specie

accumulated in the hands of the French ‘nation’ of Constantinople, a phe-

nomenon unique enough to single out Istanbul from all other

echelles in the

empire.

49 Quite a number of studies deal speciﬁcally with European trade in some of the major

echelles: N. G. Svoronos, Le commerce de Salonique au XVIIIe si

ecle (Paris, 1956); Ralph

Davis, Aleppo and Devonshire Square: English Traders in the Levant in the Eighteenth Century

(London, Melbourne and Toronto, 1967); Masters, Origins; Elena Frangakis-Syrett, The

Commerce of Smyrna in the Eighteenth Century (1700–1820) (Athens, 1992); Eldem, French

Trade.

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The differences in the nature and volume of trade conducted in different

echelles made it necessary to organise integrative and collaborative mecha-

nisms. Care was taken to avoid any risk of competition between two neigh-

bouring

echelles, either by operating jointly on purchases and sales, or by adjust-

ing price levels. More importantly, a rather sophisticated network of ﬁnancial

transfers was developed that allowed the consumption-oriented

echelles – espe-

cially Istanbul, with its huge surplus of specie – to ﬁnance the export-oriented

ones, which could not balance their purchases of local products with the sale

of Western imports. The system was simple, and had been in use since at least

the seventeenth century: traders in Istanbul would remit part of their proﬁts to

their correspondents in the peripheral

echelles through bills of exchange. The

counterpart of these remittances was met by the sums local Ottoman ofﬁcials –

governors, tax-farmers and the like – had to transfer to the imperial treasury.

The same sum would thus be paid by local ofﬁcials to European traders in the

provinces, and by European traders to the treasury in the capital, providing

the integration of the

echelles among themselves and, to a certain degree, that

of Western trade with Ottoman ﬁnancial and political networks.

Prelude to domination: a growing inﬂuence

on the economy

The massive (re-)entry of the French – or rather the Marseillais – into the

Levant trade was of crucial importance to the direction in which trade would

eventually evolve. The Levant trade had once represented over 15 per cent

of English foreign trade, but by the beginning of the eighteenth century this

proportion had dropped to less than 7 per cent. For most of the century,

it remained somewhere between 1 and 2 per cent (see table 14.7). Towards

the mid-eighteenth century, the Levant’s share in the trade of Marseilles was

almost 36 per cent, and would only drop to 33.5 per cent in the 1770s.

The

ﬁgures were much lower, of course, for French foreign trade in general – the

Levant had dropped to 5–9 per cent of all French foreign trade at the end of

the 1780s

– but the stakes of this trade for Marseilles and the surrounding

region were high enough to justify the deployment of tremendous efforts

to ensure its development, particularly the diversiﬁcation of this trade. One

of the ﬁrst articles of commerce to beneﬁt from this policy had been cloth,

which, in order to compete with its superior English rival, had been given

particular attention. The ﬁrst attempts made in the 1670s and 1680s to increase

50 Davis, Aleppo and Devonshire Square,pp.189–206; Eldem, French Trade,pp.113–47.

51 Paris, Histoire du commerce,p.3. 52 Ibid., p. 578.

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Capitulations and Western trade

the volume and quality of cloth production in Languedoc had gradually borne

fruit, and by the 1710s French cloth – particularly the famed londrins seconds –

had come to be sought after by most members of the Ottoman elite, including

the palace.

Yet, apart from ensuring their control over what had been for

long the staple European export to the empire, Marseilles traders had also

been able to add new products to their exports, or to develop previously

marginal ones. This was particularly the case with sugar, coffee, indigo and

cochineal, all of which were imported from the French Antilles and from

South America.

The diversiﬁcation of French exports was coupled with a

parallel development with respect to products imported from the Ottoman

Empire. The English had gradually abandoned the Levant trade partly because

Ottoman and Iranian silk had been displaced on the market by Bengali, Chinese

and, most of all, Italian silk.

The French, although they were also confronted

with the marginalisation of Levant silk, were able to maintain and increase

their import trade by developing their purchases of other products: wool,

mohair, camel hair, beeswax, hides and, most of all, cotton. It was for this

last product that the most formidable growth was registered throughout the

century, from a value of a mere 1.5 million livres at the beginning of the century

to almost 13 million at the end (see table 14.12).

The impact of this expansion and diversiﬁcation on the Ottoman economy

was considerable. True, even under the pressure of French trade, Western com-

mercial activity still remained marginal in the empire. However, the impact of

some of these developments cannot be discarded: as more cloth was imported

its price decreased and, in consequence, its consumption in some of the major

urban centres expanded. The impact of the massive irruption on the Ottoman

market of daily consumption goods such as sugar and coffee was even greater.

While Western cloth, because of its higher quality, did not really threaten

directly local producers of coarser textiles, the situation was totally different

in the case of sugar and coffee. American sugar was of higher quality – and,

most of all, better reﬁned – than the local Egyptian and Cypriot product; its

spread throughout the Ottoman market represented a direct encroachment

on local production, the consequences of which could be felt even in the pro-

ducing regions themselves.

In the case of American coffee, the impact was

not only economic, but also symbolic. Coffee had been the local product par

excellence, exports of which had played an important role in the Levant trade

throughout the seventeenth century. The development of coffee production

53 Ibid., pp. 543–5. 54 Ibid., pp. 557–64.

55 Davis, ‘English Imports’, pp. 198–9. 56 Paris, Histoire du commerce,pp.557–9.

315

edhem eldem

in America had not only put an end to all coffee exports from the Levant; after

the ﬁrst imports in the 1730s, it had started to replace the Yemeni product on

the Ottoman market itself. Local tastes and ‘protectionist’ measures – such

as the prohibition of mixing Yemeni and ‘Frankish’ coffee during the process

of torrefaction – could hardly offset the fact that American coffee was, on the

average, two or three times cheaper than the local product. By the second

half of the century, the invasion of the market by American coffee had trans-

formed this commodity into a much more ‘democratic’ beverage, consumed

in remote towns and areas of Anatolia and Rumelia.

In short, the eighteenth-

century expansion of Western trade – with the French leading – resulted in a

still modest, but rather emblematic, penetration of the Ottoman market by

European goods.

As French traders developed and diversiﬁed Ottoman exports the empire’s

economy at large was also affected, even if this effect, as in the case of imports,

remainedlimited and irregular. Everylocal product for whichWestern demand

was created or grew signiﬁcantly in the eighteenth century represented a new

avenue of Western penetration into production and distribution networks

throughout the empire. This was particularly true of the period, since, unlike

silk in the preceding century, the major export items of the eighteenth century

were almost all local products. Western traders knew well that for such prod-

ucts, the best conditions could only be obtained by establishing direct contact

with the producers. Consequently, Western traders dealing in these products

sought ways of avoiding wholesalers and middlemen in the

echelles by moving

into the hinterland. The development of a community of Western traders –

mostly French – in landlocked Ankara for the sole purpose of dealing directly

with mohair producers was a typical example of this trend. True, direct access

was not always easy – or even possible – since Westerners had to deal with

the obstacles set by traders and authorities on the spot, or to recruit local fac-

tors to ensure their provisioning. Yet, by and large, the process did result in a

substantial increase of the level of integration of Ottoman producers with the

European economy, although as yet the demand of Western merchants and of

their factors was limited by later, nineteenth-century standards. In the case of

cotton, the process was ampliﬁed by a sudden boom, due to demand by the

thriving textile industries in France: the quantity of raw cotton exported from

the Ottoman lands to Marseilles increased more than twenty-fold during the

century. Moreover, this boom had been accompanied by a concentration on

twoparticular regions: by the end of the century, 70 per cent of all Ottoman raw

57 Ibid., pp. 559–61; Eldem, French Trade,pp.75–81.

316

Capitulations and Western trade

cotton was exported from Izmir and 22 per cent from Salonika. Growth and

concentration had led to an increasing commercialisation of the commodity

and to a growing impact on the local economic and social equilibria. One of

the most striking aspects of this process was the role played by the local ayans

of Rumelia and of western Anatolia in the organisation of this trade. Com-

bining their occasional control over the land with their social and economic

power over the peasantry and with the political and ﬁscal advantages they had

wrested from the state, these local notables played a crucial, if ambiguous, role

in this trade, acting variously as middlemen, power brokers, suppliers, protec-

tors or abusers. To view them systematically as large landowners, and as actors

in a process of integration of the Ottoman agrarian sector into the Western

economy, would certainly be an exaggeration; but there is no doubt that their

‘participation’ in Western trade came to constitute one of the principal bases

of their power in the second half of the century.

Local resistances

If Western trade, under the leadership of Marseilles traders, was making con-

siderable progress in terms of mastering local conditions and strengthening its

grip on certain aspects of production, distribution and consumption, it still had

to face formidable potential for resistance from local economic actors. Most

of the conditions already described for the seventeenth century were still valid

ﬁfty or a hundred years later. European exports, although highly appreciated

by elite consumers, remained expensive, and their hold on the market was

still very superﬁcial. Even at a time when they could boast about how they

had ousted their English, Dutch and Venetian rivals thanks to the quality and

price of their cloth, French traders were conscious of being squeezed between

the consumption ceiling they seemed to have reached and the constant threat

of competition from coarse local, and ﬁne Indian, fabrics. At any rate, the

fragility of this trade would eventually be demonstrated by the substantial

slump recorded in the volume of cloth exports to the Levant in the last quar-

ter of the century. Several reasons were put forward to explain this failure:

a decline in quality due to a slackening of controls in France; and growing

competition from German and English cloth. But once again, one of the most

fundamental causes had been the impoverishment of the Ottoman consumer,

58 Traian Stoianovich, ‘Land Tenure and Related Sectors of the Balkan Economy’, Journal

of Economic History 13, 4 (1953), 398–411; Gilles Veinstein, ‘Ayan de la r

egion d’Izmir et le

commerce du Levant (deuxi

eme moiti

e du XVIIIe si

ecle)’, Revue de l’Occident musulman

et de la M

editerran

ee 20, 2 (1975), 131–46.

317