New Approaches to State and Peasant in Ottoman History

Halil Berktay,Suraiya Faroqhi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317241492
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Debates on the world historical place of the Ottoman Empire in the last few decades have been conducted mainly in Turkey, but increasingly concepts have been introduced into the conversation from the study of European, Chinese and Central Asian history. This book, first published in 1992, examines the nature of the Ottoman state from a variety of perspectives, economic, political and social.

The Ottoman State and the Question of State Autonomy: Comparative Perspectives

JOHN HALDON

DOI: 10.4324/9781315628592-3

John Haldon is at the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham, PO Box 363, Birmingham B15 2TT.

I. STATE THEORY AND STATE AUTONOMY: THE PROBLEM

The Ottoman state has frequently been cited in works of comparative history or sociology as a particularly clear example of a centralised, bureaucratic state standing over a social formation which, in its essential economic relationships, exemplifies the ‘ Asiatic’ mode of production. In this contribution, I want to examine these assumptions in respect of both the actual functioning of the Ottoman state and its apparatuses, on the one hand; and, on the other, of the concepts through which it might best be understood. In the process, I will suggest that Ottoman society can be approached most profitably in terms of feudal production relations (understood in the political economy sense, therefore, rather than the non-Marxist legalistic-political usage). I will then go on to suggest that, contrary to some recent ‘state theorist’ interpretations, states cannot act entirely autonomously from the relations of production on which they are founded, and that the Ottoman state (which supposedly counts as one of the most successful in this respect, since it has been assumed that it was able – through the devşirme – to create a state elite divorced from the rest of society) is no exception to this. The Ottoman state elite was no more divorced from the social relations underlying the state than any other social group.

All of this is predicated upon an essentially historical materialist perspective, however; and in order to demonstrate these points, I shall begin by taking up some recent challenges from state theorist analyses to a Marxist approach. This will entail a digression on the degree and nature of the explanatory and causal force we are to ascribe to ‘the economic’ in historical materialist analysis, that is to say, what role the relations of production and the forces of production play in the overall configuration and historical trajectory of state and social formation. My discussion of the Ottoman case will follow.

As mentioned already, recent comparative historical work has stimulated a great deal of interest in states and state formations, and in setting out to challenge what, from the point of view of ‘state theory’, are seen as traditional and flawed approaches, writers working from this perspective have taken up the question of the underlying causal relationships leading to the wide range of political structures and forms of the distribution of power within human society. Most have been concerned with modern industrial or industrialising societies, and there have appeared in the last year or so a number of excellent and penetrating critiques of some of these works, and so I will not address these here.

But two books have appeared recently which deal with pre-capitalist state formations and society, and these present major challenges to both traditional Weberian as well as Marxist approaches to the state and to the role of the economic, although they in their turn clearly derive much of their impetus and explanatory input from the two older traditions.

The books in question are Michael Mann’s The Sources of Social Power, and W.G. Runciman’s A Treatise on Social Theory (in particular Volume Two, which offers a wide range of specific analyses).¹ These two books present a challenge because both are clearly based on what are essentially materialist epistemological premises (although diverging from what each of them sees as many of the elements of ‘traditional’ views), and because both usefully propose new ways of conceiving of and then analysing social relations (whether in the economic, political-ideological or social-structural sense). Specifically, both form part of a developing tradition of analysis in which the key motif is the relationship between human agency and social structure. They challenge the tendency to ignore individual subjectivities in their structure-constituting role, which they argue is inherent to Marxist discussion and theories of agency and causation; and they attempt to rehabilitate in various guises what might be seen as a methodological individualism, a perspective which immediately poses problems and a challenge to a historical materialist history or sociology. Most importantly of all, they represent one aspect of a growing trend towards macro-historical sociology, the analysis of long-term historical and societal evolution through the interrogation of micro-historical analyses.

Crucial to Mann’s work, for example, is the notion of social power, which – to summarise a complex and well-argued case rather crudely – can be seen as fundamental to the actual configuration of different networks of social relations and to the state formations which develop out of them. Equally important is his conceptualisation of the state as constituting itself as an autonomous actor in the evolution of social-economic and power relations.² Neither of these assumptions is, in itself, inimical to a Marxist analysis, of course (the framework within which I wish to make my own remarks), although I will argue that they need to be qualified in certain key respects.

Runciman’s book, in contrast, is both more broadly comparativistic and addresses the issue of social-structural evolution and selection as a generic problem of human societal existence. Where Mann is concerned to explain, in effect, the reasons and processes behind the dominance of the West on the world-historical scene, Runciman is interested in the micro-structural elements and the process of selection and survival of social practices which make change in social relations possible, and which lead to the development or blocking of certain modes of the distribution of power. Both books, however, and several others which have appeared in the last few years,³ have provided a great deal of food for thought for those concerned with trying to understand the reasons why states develop and evolve in the contexts and the ways in which they do, and how, why and if they do or do not transform the social relations within which they were embedded and upon which they were based.

In view of this continuing and important debate, therefore, and of the fact that there is a long and important Marxist tradition of interest in state formation which has produced several alternative ways of looking at them and their relationships with social formations,⁴ I want in the present study to look at one particular problem: what is the relationship between state structures, their personnel (state elites) and the relations of production in pre-capitalist social formations? In other words, how ‘autonomous’ can such states become, and under what conditions? But since this question immediately raises the problem of the role of the economic in determining or not the ways in which this relationship functions and evolves, I will look also at this problem, and again in the specific context of pre-capitalist state formations.

For Marxist historians this has become particularly important. A great deal of criticism, both explicit and implicit, has been directed at Marxist writings on the state, and the related question of class and economic relations, as well as the (much misunderstood and misused) concept of class struggle, A symptomatic example is the fairly recent book edited by J. A. Hall, entitled States in History, which appeared in 1986,⁵ and in which the majority of the contributors evince either a clear suspicion of or, in some cases, hostility to a historical materialist approach. Yet all the contributions are stimulating, constructive and valuable. And given the obvious failings of some traditional Marxist writing, both empirical and theoretical, in respect of the problem of the state, this attitude is hardly surprising, the more so since, in response to non-Marxist challenges in respect of the apparent autonomy of historically-researched political and ideological practices from the economic ‘base’, post-Althusserian and other versions of Marxist theory have not always been able to mount a particularly coherent counter-offensive. Such a response has been based primarily around the idea, found in Engels, for example, of the ‘relative autonomy’ of the political or other levels or instances of the social formation, an idea according to which a careful distinction is drawn between, determination, on the one hand, and dominance, on the other. Thus Poulantzas, following Althusser, argued that, while the economy (the relations of production and reproduction of a social formation) is always determinant ‘in the last instance’, it does not necessarily play the dominant role: this may be carried by certain ‘superstructural’ levels – ideology, for example – although the possibilities for this dominance are inscribed within the structure of the economic sphere. Hence elements which, according to the classical model, belong to the superstructure, can possess a ‘relative autonomy’.⁶ But this approach still remains open to criticism from those who argue that it allows no space for the autonomous effects of the political – as well as from those critics (not necessarily the same!) who find the Marxist theory of class and class struggle unacceptable. Quite apart from this, of course, there have been strong criticisms of this formulation from within Marxism. As I will imply, the continued use (or abuse) of the ‘base-superstructure’ metaphor underlies much of what is wrong with the Althusserian project. One purpose of this article, therefore, will be to suggest that such criticism (where it is based on more than straightforward political hostility) reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how class and class struggle are to be invoked in historical explanation.

In fact, of course, Marxist historians (or some representatives of Marxist history-writing) are by no means alone in being accused of reductionist tendencies. The Annales school itself (if ‘school’ is the right word for such a broad set of tendencies and research programmes), as embodied in, for example, the work of Braudel, and the notion of the longue durée, could also be shown to represent in some ways a reductionist approach to politics, in which structures – natural, climatic, geo-political ‘givens’ and so forth – overwhelm the human, individual moments of social evolution and change. And so one is led to the conclusion that these challenges to Marxism, in particular, represent one of two basic approaches: either they are a response to the success of Marxist interpretations in both setting up problems and suggesting practicable hypotheses for their resolution; or they reflect a certain political-ideological hostility to Marxism which is, at least to a degree, and even if unconsciously so, partly a reflection of the current political-ideological situation (since the early 1980s) in Western Europe and North America especially.

A second set of criticisms related to the same question revolves around the problem of Marx’s society-orientated humanism. The philosophical anthropology which underlies much of his writings and clearly informed his socialist ideals, undoubtedly represented an evolutionary and moral vision in which human history would culminate in the ‘withering away’ of states and the re-assertion of the essentially good and non-conflictual qualities of humankind. In accepting this perspective, of course, Marxists have been condemned also for accepting the subordinate and effectively non-causal value of the state (for example) which becomes merely an appendage (albeit a necessary one) to class society. This point has been made both in respect of Marxist approaches to the state and state formations as well as to Marxist attempts to explain historical processes in which war plays a major role. As Ernest Gellner has suggested, the central premise of Marx’s approach seems to be that the root source of conflict, evil and maladjustment in society is class exploitation; and that consequently political coercion has no ontological foundation: it is merely a reflection of class struggle within the institutionalised structures of the state.⁷ This is only one, rather narrow reading of the writings of Marx or Engels and many later Marxists, however. Historical materialism, as a coherent intellectual and political project, however pluralistically we may define and employ its paradigmatic theorems, is bound neither by a biblical loyalty to Marx’s writings nor to the cultural-ideological discourses within which Marx the individual lived.

II. SOME REFLECTIONS ON HISTORICAL MATERIALISM

Before I address the state itself, therefore, I will suggest a partial response to some of these fundamental criticisms, beginning with the whole question of the philosophical underpinnings of the Marxist project. And here, I would make two crucial points.

In the first place, it seems to me that Marxists have traditionally been constrained by the ideological demands of the various historical conjunctures through which they have fought their political struggles, whether at a predominantly intellectual level or not, to place excessive emphasis, explicitly and implicitly, on their ‘marxological’ inheritance, too little on the structure of a historical materialism.⁸ It is generally recognised that Marx’s writings on history embody three major strands, whose original development and elaboration were mutually contingent, but the existence of each of which may not necessarily demand the others as its precondition. These three strands have been characterised as, first of all, a general philosophy of history, entailing, as I have said, a notion of progress and evolution, a moral vision which entails a process of human self-realisation through conflict and the resolution of contradictions in the structure of the process of production and distribution of wealth. Marx himself was not always clear about the effects of this visonary, if not quite inevitabilist, tendency in his thinking, a tendency clearly derived from Hegel – but it is clear enough in his political writings and to a degree in his more analytical work.

Secondly, there is a general theory of historical causation and change depending upon arguments for the primacy of productive forces. Developed, later modified and then rejected by Cohen, taken up again by others,⁹ this approach has received a great deal of criticism from within Marxism, for its supposed determin...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Chronology
• Editors’ Introduction
• Introduction
• The Ottoman State and the Question of State Autonomy: Comparative Perspectives
• The Search for the Peasant in Western and Turkish History/Historiography
• Ottoman History by Inner Asian Norms
• In Search of Ottoman History
• Three Empires and the Societies They Governed: Iran, India and the Ottoman Empire
• Abstracts