The Ottoman Empire in the Tanzimat Era

Provincial Perspectives from Ankara to Edirne

Yonca Köksal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429812514
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

The Ottoman Empire in the Tanzimat Era generates a new history of the Ottoman Empire's Tanzimat reforms in the provinces of Edirne and Ankara. It studies variation across the two provinces and the crucial role of local intermediaries such as notables, tribal leaders, and merchants.

The book provides insights into how states and societies transform each other in the most difficult of times using qualitative and quantitative social network analysis and deep research in the Ottoman and British archives to understand the Tanzimat as a process of negotiation and transformation between the state and local actors. The author argues that the same reform policies produced different results in Edirne and Ankara. The book explains how factors such as socioeconomic conditions and historical developments played a role in shaping local networks.

The Ottoman Empire in the Tanzimat Era invites readers to rethink taken-for-granted concepts such as centralization, decentralization, state control, and imperial decay. It will be of interest to scholars and students interested in Middle Eastern and Balkan studies, and historical and political sociology.

1 Introduction

Ottoman historians have long studied the Tanzimat from a top-down perspective in which policies planned in the imperial capital Istanbul were imposed with little consultation on provinces and outlying populations that were too restive or too aggrieved to accept the reforms. The story often told about Ottoman history is one of the state doing too little, too late to stave off inevitable decline. This perspective changed in recent decades as historians shifted their sights down to the provinces to study how different social actors responded to state reforms.¹ However, they paid far more attention to events in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, well after the Tanzimat reforms had come to a close. This book makes a case that it was premature to shift the sights away from the Tanzimat era, and the pages that follow are an attempt to restore the study of the Tanzimat and bring it firmly back to the attention of Ottoman historians and historical sociologists.

The book investigates the nuanced effects of the Tanzimat reforms on provincial administration to reveal that the Ottoman state was far smarter in applying its policies than historians have given it credit. It analyzes the variation across provinces, and certainly the crucial role of local intermediaries such as notables, tribal leaders, merchants and others who at times undermined the power of the state but in other times worked hand in hand with state officials to build roads, improve infrastructure and provide security. It brings together a diverse array of actors across the empire’s vast geographies and uses network analysis and deep archival research to show the Tanzimat as a process of negotiation and transformation between the state and local actors. Along the way, we learn not only about Ottoman history but also about how states and societies transform each other in the most difficult of times. As such, this book deploys the Tanzimat reform to make contributions both to history and to the social sciences.

Our setting is the provinces of Edirne (Adrianople) and Ankara (Angora), both located in core regions of the Ottoman state. The Ottomans long considered Western and Central Anatolia and parts of the Balkans as the core regions of the empire. Historically, these were the areas of earlier Ottoman expansion. They were part of the timar system, representing a more centralized taxation and state rule than the peripheral provinces that were subject to an annual tribute and an administration mainly handled by local agents such as Egypt, Moldavia and Wallachia. The province of Edirne was located in Eastern Thrace and Ankara in Central Anatolia.² Because of their close location not far from the imperial center, they were subject to the earliest Tanzimat policies. The same Tanzimat policies were applied in both regions, but the reforms yielded different results: Tanzimat policies were much more influential and effective in increasing state control and improving socioeconomic development in Edirne than they were in Ankara. The two provinces differed in socioeconomic development, geopolitical significance and social networks which linked local elites to other social actors and state authorities. A comparison of the Tanzimat in these two Ottoman provinces raises several questions: What types of interactions existed between the state and social actors during the Tanzimat? How did these interactions influence the outcome of reforms? What did these relations and their impact on reforms tell us about state transformations? Answers to these questions not only narrate social and economic changes in the provinces of Edirne and Ankara, but they also invite us to rethink taken-for-granted concepts such as centralization/decentralization, state control and imperial decay. While imperial transformation in the Tanzimat era has generally been studied from the vantage of the central state, this study emphasizes the reaction to the transformative reforms at the local level and shows how the reforms required both state and social actors to adapt, accommodate and, in some cases, hammer out alternative paths to the reforms. The study of Edirne and Ankara provinces parcels out these mechanisms of adaptation and accounts for their variation.

Roderic Davison, one of the more sympathetic historians on the Ottoman Empire’s reform processes, argues that “considered in the abstract, this system [Tanzimat] represented an intelligent attempt at combining centralization with decentralization, balancing officials appointed from Istanbul with representatives of the local population. In actuality, it failed to work smoothly.”³ This so-called failure of reforms has occupied the terrain of late Ottoman studies and has been a question with theoretical implications for the general study of imperial regimes. The inevitable decline argument has long dominated Ottoman studies, and events beyond the apogee of the empire in the 16th century were labeled as “stagnation and decline.” Fortunately, the version of Ottoman history that sees the 19th-century empire as an anomaly not capable of modernization and industrialization has lost its dominance in the recent decades. However, historians continued to adopt a state-centered view, and they portrayed state-society relations as a zero-sum game, especially in studies on the Tanzimat era.

Historians of the Ottoman Empire typically consider the Tanzimat a turning point, marking an important stage in the transformation of the imperial regime from indirect to direct rule.⁴ From the Gülhane Edict in 1839 to the first Ottoman Constitution in 1876, the Ottoman state reorganized its administration and introduced reforms in various areas including taxation, military conscription, public works, justice and education. In a conventional reading that was prevalent until the 1990s, the Tanzimat has been studied as a rapid step toward Westernization and modernization.⁵ The then popularity of modernization theory and legacy of Weberian “patrimonialism” contributed to how historians understood the Tanzimat⁶: as a clunky imitation of the Western model. Such versions see the Tanzimat reforms as modeled on the consolidated nation-states in 19th-century Europe, planned by Ottoman statesmen, and imposed on their governing institutions and society without much consultation.⁷

They argue that financial constraints, resource limitations and the gradual spread of separatist nationalisms among local populations were among the challenges that made the implementation of reforms difficult. Under these conditions, the imperial center was not able to eliminate nor integrate local intermediaries.⁸ To the contrary, some Tanzimat policies, such as the foundation of local councils, were assumed to increase the power of local elites and weakened the state’s control. The state’s granting equal rights to all subjects regardless of ethnic and religious origin also crystallized confessional differences instead of creating a standardized direct relation between rulers and the ruled.⁹ When scholars in this perspective study several dimensions of state capacity, any reform in diverse areas is seen as an insufficient attempt: Administrative reorganization admittedly centralized the empire, but incapable and corrupt bureaucrats were not able to maintain an efficient administration. The persistent inability to eliminate tax farming was a major obstacle to the centralization of the empire and resulted in decline in central control. Education was another failure story. Although many new colleges and high schools were established in a secular tradition, ethnic communities preserved their separate primary schools, and impossibly diverse educational institutions and languages prevailed and undermined any attempt to create an inclusive Ottoman citizenship.¹⁰

This reading gives a coherent picture of the Tanzimat and identifies its general trends; yet, it generalizes too much and missteps when it labels the Tanzimat as a “necessary but failed step” toward Westernization and modernization.¹¹ In declaring a failure to reach an end-state of the European model the Tanzimat was said to mimic, historians disregard historical realities and alternative means to the end product. It is an ahistorical reading of the time period and misses the opportunity to study the richly historical narrative of “center-periphery”¹² relations where (a) each locality has a different relation to the center and (b) these relations are subject to historical and/or accidental factors such as wars, economic crises and others. In addition, the usual studies of Ottoman reforms question the motives, actions and results of state policies, but they do not concern themselves much with the lives of ordinary subjects during the reform era. More importantly, the zero-sum game between imperial center and social forces dominates this framework since centralization implies that the state must eliminate or integrate local intermediaries and elites who are more often than not assumed to work against the imperial center.

This zero-sum understanding of state-society relations was not specific to the Ottoman Empire. In fact, it forms the core of the literature on imperial longevity and decay. In pre-19th-century agrarian empires, maintenance of imperial rule kept imperial domains separate from each other. That is, provinces are able to form administrative mechanisms and political and economic relations distinct from other provinces and nonimperial polities. The imperial center emerges as the main broker of relations between provinces by taking advantage of the absence of connections between them.¹³ The imperial center also forms a bridge by facilitating commerce and communication among provinces. Alexander Motyl resembles this relationship between center and provinces to a rimless hub and spoke,¹⁴ and offers a continuously evolving dynamic for center-periphery relations. The famous saying, “All roads lead to Rome,” represents this structure well.¹⁵ The problem emerges when peripheries start to form linkages with each other and other polities, decreasing the bridge and brokerage roles of the imperial center.

Forces of “modernization” – regardless of how we define modernization¹⁶ – increase stress on imperial structures by developing communication networks and commercialization in this framework. Modernization is not a necessary condition for imperial decline, but it facilitates decline by increasing the complexity and density of local relations. The growing empires of the 19th century – such as the British and French Empires – thus turned into a different form than the gunpowder empires of previous centuries: They had consolidated core states in which nation-state-like structures emerged and integrated or eliminated local intermediaries. They ruled overseas colonies with reformulated versions of indirect rule: a combination of relying on local elites, divide-and-rule strategy and coercion combined with extraction of revenue and rapid commercialization.¹⁷ State centralization – defined as the ability of central elites to establish direct rule and monopolize control over political decision-making, taxation and the provision of public goods – emerges as an important step toward nation-states and political “modernization.”¹⁸

When this framework was applied to the multiethnic empires of Europe such as the Habsburgs, Russians and Ottomans, historians conclude that they were destined to fail and unable to cope with the consequent challenges. They were not able to control their periphery, because of the increasing recognition of ethnic/religious/national differences among their populations in an age of rising nationalism. In addition, their imperial centers could not compete with industrialized states, and, as a result, peripheral elites stoked the flames of revolt and separatism among local populations when the weak imperial center was not able to deliver as many benefits as it had previously.¹⁹ From this perspective, the 19th-century reforms were considered to further the collapse of empires.²⁰ Faced with crisis, empires either looked to alliances with other states or they utilized internal mechanisms by introducing new technologies and extracting more labor and soldiers from the periphery. In the absence of adequate resources, the only alternative is to give a certain degree of local autonomy by allowing local elections and provincial councils. However, this accelerates the collapse of the empire in the long run since local autonomy increases the power of peripheral elites.²¹ This structuralist reading resembles a zero-sum game: When local elites accumulated economic and social capital, they challenged and limited the rule of the imperial center.

Recent studies in Ottoman history have challenged many of the above assumptions and argue that Ottoman transformation was not a linear transition from decentralized to centralized, from Eastern to Western, or from pre-modern to modern. Focusing on a bottom-up perspective, historians have questioned how social groups responded to state policies and became indispensable agents of imperial transformations. Some of the strongest studies in this regard focus on the 17th-century crises in the timar sys...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Diverging paths: Edirne and Ankara on the eve of the Tanzimat
• 3 Local intermediaries and state control in a neglected Ottoman province: Ankara during the Tanzimat period
• 4 Centralization, market integration and coalition building: Edirne in the Tanzimat era
• 5 Explaining variance in reform outcome using social network analysis
• 6 Conclusion and perspectives for future research
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Appendix 3
• Bibliography
• Index