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

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sufferingthe effects of long years of disastrous wars. With its low price elasticity,

French cloth could hardly adapt to such a situation. True, part of this loss had

been alleviated by coffee and sugar exports. Supplanting – albeit partly – local

coffee with an American ersatz, and promoting the consumption of colonial

sugar were certainly positive developments, but this bulky trade was far from

bringing the same proﬁts and satisfaction as the cloth trade.

For exports and imports alike, the major weakness of Western traders had to

do with their relative dependence on Ottoman merchants and intermediaries.

Sales were made to powerful groups – often corporations – of wholesalers,

through the mediation of brokers on site; purchases, in the best of cases, had to

rely on the services of local factors or, if not, were made from local merchants.

Retail trade was off limits, leaving most of the proﬁts to wholesalers who were

Ottoman subjects; exceptin Istanbul, purchasesand sales wereoften integrated

into a complex system of barter and anticipated transactions, conducted on

terms generally determined by local merchants. As long as both parties found

mutual proﬁt in any operation or transaction, things would move on smoothly.

Yet, whenever Ottoman traders felt threatened in their commercial interests,

the ensuing conﬂict could result in serious damage for the foreign trading com-

munity. Typical examples of the intimidation or aggression by local merchants

could be found in the numerous boycotts of foreign commodities designed to

force Western merchants to lower the price of their goods. With the knowl-

edge that unsold stocks were a painful hindrance to foreign merchants who

worked with little capital, that one nation could be played off against another,

and with the possibility of ensuring a strong implementation of the boycott

thanks to the solidarity structures of the corporation system, Ottoman mer-

chants were almost always capable of imposing their will on their Western

counterparts. Similar tactics were often used by local suppliers to raise the

price of their commodities by creating an artiﬁcial shortage until the discour-

aged Westerners ﬁnally yielded to pressure. Interestingly enough, when, in

the 1720s and 1730s, the French nation of Istanbul was confronted with such a

boycott on its cloth stocks, it was able to counter this move only by imposing

on its members a very strict solidarity structure – the arrangements – whereby

traders were forced to adopt what was, in fact, a rather faithful imitation of

the Ottoman corporatist system that was used against them.

59 Paris, Histoire du commerce,pp.542–52; Eldem, French Trade,pp.244–6.

60 C. Roure, ‘La r

eglementation du commerce franc¸ais du Levant sous l’ambassade du

marquis de Villeneuve, 1728–1741’, in J.-P. Filippini, L. Meignen, C. Roure, D. Sabatier

andG.St

ephanid

es, Dossiers sur le commerce franc¸ais en M

editerran

ee orientale au XVIIIe

ecle (Paris, 1976), pp. 33–101; Eldem, French Trade,pp.249–50, 260–3.

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Capitulations and Western trade

It was obvious then, that Western traders, if they wished a ﬁrm and secure

implantation in the Ottoman market and a proﬁtable development of their

trade, needed more than just commercial success. Their economic leverage

over the market and its local actors was simply not sufﬁcient to impose their

own conditions. The best they could hope for – and which they generally

obtained – was to conduct their trade with some success, as long as they

did not overstep the limits set by local merchants or enter into open conﬂict

with them. In cases of conﬂict, or simply when Western traders wanted to

impose conditions which seemed unacceptable to their Ottoman counterparts,

the only solution the foreigners really had at their disposal was to resort

to political action. Political action could take a wide range of forms. In the

provinces, obtaining the support of a local ofﬁcial, or even of a local bandit or

ayan, providing he was powerful enough, was often quite sufﬁcient to ensure

some protection or leverage to European traders. But this kind of political

power was ﬁckle, and rarely reliable enough in the long run to protect them

from reversals of fortune and changes of allegiance. What they needed most,

then, was a strengthening of the capitulatory regime, both in juridical and in

practical terms. From a juridical perspective, the capitulations still lacked the

clarity and precision required for their systematic application to commercial

matters. From a practical point of view, they needed to be enforced more

efﬁciently than had previously been the case, especially in areas removed

from the protection and mediation ensured by the ambassador. This goal was

ﬁnally attained when in 1740 the French ambassador, Villeneuve, obtained

from the Porte the renewal of the capitulations. The French obtained thereby

an instrument of domination much more efﬁcient than all the commercial

tactics they had so far used.

The capitulations of 1740 and patterns

of domination

The successful mediation of the marquis de Villeneuve had led to the signing

of the treaty of Belgrade, which gave back to the Ottomans some of the

self-conﬁdence and self-esteem they had lost during decades of defeats. The

1740 capitulations were granted as a way of paying back this debt, as the text

explicitly said – even though, strangely, in the middle of Article 55 rather than

in the preamble.

Thus the capitulations of 1740 differed from all previous

capitulations in that, for the ﬁrst time, they were born of an Ottoman political

61 Testa, Recueil,p.200.

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‘obligation’ and thus came close to the erroneous meaning that has often been

ascribed to the word.

The exceptional nature of the 1740 capitulations was not limited to the pro-

cess that led to their ratiﬁcation. The titles granted to the French king had been

modiﬁed to include, for the very ﬁrst time, the appellation of ‘friend’, which

implied full recognition of the equality of status between the two sovereigns.

Most importantly, Article 85 included the radical innovation of granting per-

manent and perpetual status to a type of document which until then had

been limited to the reign of the signing sultan.

As a result, the capitulations

would remain in force, without any need for a renewal, until their abolition in

1914. As to commercial clauses, there was nothing radically new in the articles

of the 1740 capitulations. However, great care had been taken to avoid any

ambiguity and vagueness – so typical of earlier texts – and to bring as much

precision to the text as possible. As a result, they contained no fewer than

eighty-ﬁve articles, almost double the number found in the previous capitu-

lations of 1673. This change in the nature and spirit of the capitulations had

radically transformed them into what the French had always longed for: an

ofﬁcial recognition of privileges, combined with a commercial code applying

to French subjects residing in the Ottoman Empire.

Obviously, the signing of the 1740 capitulations did not change the con-

ditions of trade overnight. Yet when combined with the growing inﬂuence

and prestige of the French ambassadors, they gave traders a considerable

amount of freedom and power to back their claims by referring to their spe-

ciﬁc clauses. Nothing had really changed in the essence of the process, but

the growing dependence of the Ottoman state on Western diplomatic sup-

port and approval no longer allowed it to disregard some of the provisions of

the capitulations, or to treat their implementation by local authorities lightly.

The mere toleration of the Western commercial presence was evolving into

a situation in which European traders were able to impose themselves on the

political and economic system of the empire.

The impact of this changing balance of power was best felt in the domain

of the relations between foreign and local traders. As foreign traders secured

the support of the Ottoman bureaucracy through the capitulations, Ottoman

traders lost much of the leverage they had so far enjoyed. Under the com-

bined pressure of European mercantilism, on the one hand, and of Ottoman

‘liberalism’, on the other, they were gradually forced to abandon their com-

petitive – and even aggressive – policy, and to opt for a more cooperative stand

62 P

elissi

eduRausas,Capitulations,p.79. 63 Testa, Recueil,p.210.

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Capitulations and Western trade

altogether. This radical shift in the attitude of local economic actors found

its fullest expression in the rapid spreading of the status of prot

e–beratlı,

in Turkish – to a large number of non-Muslim traders of the empire. This

status, originally deﬁned as, and limited to, the position of dragomans and

interpreters for ambassadors and consuls, provided its holders with assimila-

tion to the status of foreigners, with consequent enjoyment of the privileges

granted by the capitulations. The second half of the eighteenth century wit-

nessed an actual boom in demands for this status, as well-to-do traders ﬂocked

to the embassies and consulates to obtain – often against cash payment –

the precious documents that would free them from Ottoman subjection and

grant them equal footing with their former rivals. This, more than anything

else, was a clear sign that local merchants, losing any hope of competing

against foreign traders, saw no other solution than to entrust their commer-

cial destiny to those who had often been perceived as a major threat to their

interests.

Throughout the last decades of the century, as the Ottoman state was

plagued by warfare and its diplomatic standing at the lowest, European –

especially French – traders, diplomats and observers had come to agree

that, in the same way that the Porte had surrendered to Western diplo-

macy, the Ottoman market had fallen under European control. The French

ambassador, Choiseul-Goufﬁer, had even gone as far as to claim that the

Ottoman Empire had become ‘one of the richest colonies of France’.

About

a century of commercial expansion and growing political inﬂuence seemed

to have swept aside most of the obstacles and resistances that had, until

then, characterised the Ottoman economy in its confrontation with Western

trade.

Western economic domination: illusion and reality

There were many signs conﬁrming the correctness of Choiseul-Goufﬁer’s

somewhat provocative statement. Ever since the end of the seventeenth cen-

tury, Western trade had steadily increased its level of encroachment on the

Ottoman economy, exploiting a growing number of local resources, and open-

ing new avenues of consumption for the products of Western industries and

colonial re-exports. The qualitative evolution of trade further conﬁrmed this

64 Ali

Ihsan Ba

gıs¸, Osmanlı ticaretinde gayri M

uslimler. Kapit

ulasyonlar – Avrupa t

uccarları-

beratlı t

uccarlar – Hayriye t

uccarları (1750–1839) (Ankara, 1983).

65 Paul Masson, Histoire du commerce franc¸ais dans le Levant au XVIIIe si

ecle (Paris, 1911),

p. 279.

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impression. Raw materials had always dominated Ottoman exports to the

West, but by the second half of the eighteenth century, the almost exclusive

concentration of exports on textile raw materials certainly evoked colonial

patterns of trade. The most striking example was probably that of cotton.

Against a twenty-fold increase of the volume of raw cotton exported from the

empire the exportation of cotton thread, once the dominant item in the cotton

trade, had been reduced by almost 50 per cent.

True, the transformation of the empire into a raw-materials basket for

Western industries was not coupled with a corresponding ﬂooding of its mar-

ket by Western manufactures. In fact, their proportion in imports had tended

to decrease towards the end of the century, as part of the cloth trade was

replaced by a trade in raw materials or half-processed goods, such as sugar,

coffee and dyestuffs. Nor were Ottoman raw materials re-entering the econ-

omy in a processed form: imported cloth was made of Spanish wool, and the

huge quantities of cotton exported never came back in the form of cotton

fabrics. The actual penetration of the Ottoman market was still in its infancy,

leaving much space for local industries to thrive on a vast market of modest

consumers. Indeed, marginal as they may have been compared to the bulk

of Ottoman exports, local cotton textiles still ﬁgured among the shipments

made from Aleppo to Marseilles (see table 14.2).

Similarly, the increasing

quantities of indigo and cochineal imported from Marseilles towards the end

of the century can only be interpreted as a sign of the resilience – and possibly

the development – of Ottoman textile industries making use of these dyestuffs

in their fabrics.

However, thereweresomesectorsthat didseem to surrender almostentirely

to Western penetration. This was particularly the case with maritime trans-

portation, where French ships – the caravane – established a near-monopoly

on coastal shipping between Ottoman ports, contributing to a very substan-

tial reduction of the alleged trade deﬁcit of France with the Levant.

The

same was true of the rich and brisk ﬁnancial trade that developed between the

Ottoman Empire and the West from the 1760s on. Combining shipments of

silver coinage from France, Italy and Austria – mostly in the form of Spanish

piastres and Austrian thalers – with a dense network of bills of exchange drawn

on the major ﬁnancial centres of Europe – Vienna, Venice, Leghorn, London,

Amsterdam – foreign and local traders were able to realise handsome proﬁts

66 Paris, Histoire du commerce,p.511.

67 Katsumi Fukasawa, Toilerie et commerce du Levant d’Alep

a Marseille (Paris, 1987).

68 Daniel Panzac, Commerce et navigation dans l’empire ottoman au XVIIIe si

ecle (Istanbul,

1996).

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Capitulations and Western trade

in a trade that was often much more attractive than the cumbersome trade in

commodities.

All in all, then, it was clear that the overall outcome of commercial expansion

in the eighteenth century had been favourable to Western traders, and that the

French, in particular, had reaped substantial proﬁts and advantages from this

situation. With an expanded volume of trade, a growing integration of local

production with the needs of Western industries, a still limited but growing

penetration of consumer markets, and with local resistances reduced through

the diplomatic leverage of ambassadors and the partial co-optation of local

traders, patterns of domination had indeed started to appear clearly in the

relations between Western economies and the empire. However, most of the

economic and commercial advantages greatly depended on political leverage

and inﬂuence. As a result they were also fragile and volatile in the medium and

long run, as certain events that took place in the last decades of the eighteenth

century and in the early 1800s would soon prove.

This was particularly true of French commercial interests, which started to

be seriously threatened by certain transformations of the 1770s and 1780s. The

treaty of K

uc¸

uk Kaynarca in 1774, the opening of the Black Sea to foreign navi-

gation in 1783 and the outcome of the 1788–92 conﬂict with Russia had lowered

the former political and diplomatic preponderance of France at the Porte, and

created a forced rapprochement between the Ottomans and the Russian and

Austrian empires. Certain local communities had beneﬁted from this shift in

the diplomatic balance of power. Greek and other Balkan merchants, who

already participated in a thriving trade with central Europe, increased their

power in those regions and routes where French presence had always been

limited.

Greek shippers, obviously harmed by the rapid development of the

French caravane, found new avenues of expansion into the Adriatic and the

Black Seas, making use of their Austrian, Balkan and Russian connections.

Most emblematically, French trade ﬁnally collapsed, almost disappearing from

the Levant, in the wake of the political cataclysm that shook France after 1789.

The Revolution had already harmed the image of France in the empire, reduc-

ing its political prestige, credibility and inﬂuence; but the real crisis emerged

in 1792–3, when political and economic chaos in the motherland irreparably

69 Charles Carri

ere, Marcel Courduri

e, Michel Gutsatz and Ren

e Squarzoni, Banque et

capitalisme commercial. La lettre de change au XVIIIe si

ecle (Marseilles, 1976); Eldem, French

Trade,pp.174–202.

70 Stoianovich, ‘Balkan Orthodox Merchant’.

71 Traian Stoianovich, ‘Pour un mod

ele du commerce du Levant:

economie concurren-

tielle et

economie de bazar, 1500–1800, Istanbul

a la jonction des cultures balkaniques,

editerran

eennes, slaves et orientales’, AIESEE Bulletin 12, 1 (1974), 61–120,atp.95.

323

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destroyed what remained of the presence and organisation of French trade

in the Levant. The vacuum created by the disappearance of the major trade

partner of the empire was easily ﬁlled, partly by Western competitors, but

mostly by local traders who enjoyed, until the end of the Napoleonic wars, a

revival of their trade and shipping.

Conclusion: an ambiguous picture

A general evaluation of Western trade in the Ottoman Empire during the

seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is bound to consist of half-measures

and half-truths. The dearth of Ottoman archival material to be put to use

as a counterpart to the wealth of Western sources on the Levant trade is

partly responsible for the feeling of doubt and inconclusiveness that surrounds

many of the issues raised. Nevertheless, even in the light of this imperfect and

unbalanced documentation, certain trends do emerge that allow for a global

assessment of the period. That this assessment involves quite a number of

conﬂicting and paradoxical aspects should not be viewed as a defect, but

rather as a consequence of the coexistence of diverging – and sometimes

opposing – trends in a world best deﬁned as a pre-capitalist social and economic

environment.

Economic and commercial leverage as well as patterns of domination are

probably the most striking aspects of this immaturity. Over two centuries,

Western trade increasingly encroached upon the economy of the empire; yet,

so marginal and superﬁcial were these commercial and economic advances

that they barely posed a threat to the dynamics of the formidable – and some-

what archaic – host economy. The Ottoman economy and its major actors,

even if they occasionally felt threatened by the growing presence of Western

traders, had, until the nineteenth century, enough leeway to navigate between

a multitude of actions and reactions, ranging from outright resistance to tem-

porary collaboration. European traders were partly fooled by their relative

success into believing that they had achieved some degree of domination over

this foreign environment, but their own pre-industrial economies were not yet

equipped with the tools that would allow them to transform their advantages

into victory. They saw relations of domination: the relations were there, the

domination was not. Patterns of integration had been set, but integration itself

was yet to come.

72 Charles Carri

ere, N

egociants marseillais au XVIIIe si

ecle, 2 vols. (Marseilles, 1973), vol. I,

pp. 109–52; Bruce McGowan, ‘The Age of the Ayans, 1699–1812: Trade’, in Inalcik and

Quataert (eds.), Economic and Social History,pp.637–758,atpp.727–9, 737–9.

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Capitulations and Western trade

Nevertheless, even in the absence of domination and integration, the pat-

terns themselves were important and signiﬁcant enough. Relations with local

traders were a case in point. The French had been able to subdue Ottoman

traders through political inﬂuence and by offering them a dependent, but grat-

ifying, role within their commercial network. The Dutch had done exactly the

contrary, allowing their trade to be ‘conquered’ by local merchants, who acted

as proxies to absentee traders.

In both cases, however, from the perspective

of the empire there was a common loss. What disappeared was the allegiance

of a commercial elite – perhaps a would-be bourgeoisie – which chose to dis-

sociate itself from the Ottoman commonwealth through foreign protection

or, as in the case of many eighteenth-century Greeks and Armenians, through

expatriation.

Independently of the vicissitudes of the commercial, economic and political

conjunctures, the tone had been set for what was to come in the nineteenth

century. Western trade had matured enough in its format, if not in its impact,

to preﬁgure the turn it would take in the following century. All it would take,

then, is the ﬁnal comeback of an industrialised power, Britain, whose massive

irruption on the Ottoman market would soon be followed by others.

For the period under study, those developments were still far away. How-

ever, one particularly important – indeed, dramatic – development, generally

masked by the emphasis on the local dimension of trade, needs to be under-

lined. Perhaps the most importantand decisivedevelopmentof the seventeenth

and eighteenth centuries, much more than the terms and conditions of trade,

was the inexorable process of marginalisation to which the Levant – in fact, the

entire Mediterranean – was exposed during this period. With the explosion of

commercial routes and overseas trade throughout this period, the Ottoman

Empire had found itself relegated to a completely marginalised position in

global trade. Marseilles, itself a victim of the same process, could well boast of

its ‘conquest’ of the Levant; in fact, both sides were the real losers in the rapidly

changing economic and commercial world of the time. This marginalisation,

more than anything else, would be one of the major causes of the vulnerability

of the Ottoman economy to the expansion of the capitalist world system. At

the time of its integration, it had long lost the position of pre-eminence that

had characterised it two centuries earlier.

73 Gerard R. Bosscha-Erdbrink, At the Threshold of Felicity: Ottoman–Dutch Relations during

the Embassy of Cornelis Calkoen at the Sublime Porte, 1726–1744 (Ankara, 1975), pp. 202–11.

74 Halil Inalcik, ‘When and How British Cotton Goods Invaded the Levant Markets’, in

The Ottoman Empire and the World-Economy, ed. Huri

Islamo

glu-

Inan (Cambridge, 1987),

pp. 374–83.

325

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Table 14.1

English and French broadcloth exports to the Levant,

1 666–1789 (in pieces of broadcloth)

England France

1666–1671 13,672

1672–1677 20,075

1678–1683 19,652

1684–1690 17,543

1691–1695 12,895

1696–1700 15,122

1701–1705 18,836 5,550

1706–1710 18,300 6,800

1711–1715 14,560 13,047

1716–1720 18,611 11,299

1721–1725 14,805 12,235

1726–1730 15,673 20,708

1731–1735 14,706 26,979

1736–1740 11,865 29,327

1741–1745 6,986 23,782

1746–1750 9,897 28,722

1751

–1755 8,259 31,850

1756–1760 3,210 27,246

1761–1765 3,618 31,925

1766–1770 41,389

1771–1775 47,083

1776–1780 44,529

1781–1785 35,650

1786–1789 29,686

Sources: Davis, Aleppo and Devonshire Square,p.42;Archivesdela

Chambre de Commerce de Marseille (ACCM), H 171–3, Etats des

draps exp

edi

es en Levant. French ﬁgures, originally in demi-pi

eces

(half-pieces) have been divided by two. Data are missing from the

French series for the years 1706 and 1707.

326

Capitulations and Western trade

Table 14.2

Ottoman exports of cotton textiles to Marseilles, 1700–1789 (in livres

tournois)

1700–1702 1705–1714 1732–1740 1750–1754 1766–1772 1786–1789

Aleppo 108,000 179,400 827,700 1,326,000 1,400,500 1,696,000

Istanbul 96,300 4,800 3,100

Izmir 82,000 40,900 19,200 16,000 4,200 70,000

Sayda 18,800 2,700 10,400

Tripoli 15,700 25,200 100

Egypt 156,000 13,800 302,700 242,000 290,700 480,000

Cyprus 10,000 25,600 2,900

Greece 1,200 1,300 800

Crete 200 100 400

other 39,150 131,820 283,752

total 385,150 376,300 1,209,300 1,715,820 1,713,100 2,529,752

Sources: for 1700–2, 1750–4 and 1786–9: Paris, Histoire du commerce,p.534;for1705–14,

1732–40 and 1766–72: Fukasawa, Toilerie et commerce du Levant,pp.21–6.

Table 14.3

Shares of the major European nations in the Levant trade, 1686–1784

(in livres tournois and percentages)

France England Holland Venice Austria Others

1686 1,519,290 4,184,700 3,697,440 246,900

(per cent) 15.743.438.32.6

1749–50 2,550,868 595,850 134,164 637,421

(per cent) 65.115.23.416.3

1776–78 13,448,791 7,432,045 4,300,901 2,875,279 872,018 861,973

(per cent) 45.124.914.49.62.92.9

c. 1784

(per cent) 36.59.218.312.024.0

Note: In 1776–8, ‘others’ include Sweden, Russia and Leghorn. Sources: for 1686:

Archives Nationales (AN), Affaires Etrang

eres (AE), BIII 241,pi

ece 12, Etats du com-

merce des Franc¸ais, Anglais,Hollandais et V

enitiens

a Constantinople, n.d.; for 1749–50:

AN, AE, BIII 241,pi

ece 35,Etatg

eral ou total du commerce des

etrangers

a Con-

stantinople compar

a celui des Franc¸ais pendant les ann

ees 1749 et 1750;for1776–8:

Archives D

epartementales des Bouches-du-Rh

one (ADBR), 41 E 4, Fonds Ollivier,

Cahier de r

eductions de poids et mesures, op

erations de change, etc., n.d.; for 1784:

McGowan, Economic Life in Ottoman Europe,p.28.

327