Download PDF | (Library of Ottoman Studies) Cem Emrence - Remapping the Ottoman Middle East_ Modernity, Imperial Bureaucracy and the Islamic State-I.B.Tauris (2011).
207 Pages
Cem Emrence is a post-doctoral fellow of history at the Univer sity of Massachusetts-Amherst. His research focuses on the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey. His work has appeared in many academic journals including the Journal of Global History, Middle East Studies Association Bulletin, Middle Eastern Studies, Turkish Studies and Comparative Sociology. He teaches courses on the Ottoman Empire, Comparative Empires and the Modern Middle East among others.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Several people helped me to turn an ambitious research agenda into a book. I would like to thank the editors of the Journal of Global History and Middle East Studies Association Bulletin who allowed me to discuss my ideas about Ottoman historiography in their journals. A concise version of the argument here first appeared in ‘Imperial Paths, Big Comparisons: The Late Ottoman Empire’, Journal of Global History, Vol. 3 (3), 2008, 289–311, and an earlier version of Chapter 1 first appeared in ‘Three Waves of Late Ottoman Historiography, 1950–2007’, Middle East Studies Association Bulletin, Vol. 41 (2), 2007, 137–151. Participants of the Great Lakes Ottoman Workshop at the University of Michigan (2007) shared with me their knowledge of the Ottoman frontiers. A presentation at the Contentious Politics Workshop at Columbia University (2007) was instrumental to locate the intellectual boundaries of the project.
A pre-organized panel about comparative empires at the Annual Meeting of American Historical Association (2009) proved to be useful to rethink the Ottomans from a comparative perspective. My dissertation committee at Binghamton University raised important conceptual and methodological questions which I later addressed in the book. The comments of my advisor, Çağlar Keyder, were especially helpful. I made the final touches in the book at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst where I am a post-doctoral fellow in the department of history.
I would also like to use this opportunity to thank Şevket Pamuk who supported my professional development throughout the years. Hasan Kayalı not only read the manuscript in its entirety but also was always there when I needed help regarding my professional career. My editors at I.B.Tauris, Joanna Godfrey, Jenna Steventon, and Tomasz Hoskins have been supportive and provided feedback. Daniel Chard helped me with the copyediting issues. My family also deserves a big thank you note as they endured the graduate school and the writing process of this book. Finally, Ays¸egül has been with me throughout these difficult but happy years.
INTRODUCTION
With the end of the cold war, the Balkans and the Middle East have hit the headlines on a daily basis. Both regions have turned into major conflict zones where state sovereignty and collective identity are redefined in important ways. For the distant observer, failed states, communal violence and resistance to the West provided the much needed mental map to locate the human tragedies from Bosnia to Iraq. In this view, political conflict in Eurasia is a natural outcome of historical tensions between ethno–religious and civilizational units. Lending support to this argument, empire historian Anthony Pagden recently suggested that the region has been the battleground between East and West for centuries.1 Commonsense views reflect a fundamental claim about the region’s history: that the Eurasian experience is characterized by antagonistic cultural identities that are mobilized by great-power competition and hostile nation-states throughout history. Acting as intellectual derivatives, the clash-of-civilizations arguments, confessional wars, the discourse of Balkanization, cold-war rivalries and nationalist imagery are deployed to make sense of the past and explain the present to contemporary audiences. A major deficit in this comprehensive and yet simplistic account is that it misses the Ottoman input in the region’s transition to modernity during the nineteenth century. The scholarship on the Ottoman Empire has not addressed the issue either. Late Ottoman Studies approach the imperial
experience in terms of the modernizing vision of the state elites, the decisive impact of the world economy, or the resilient nature of local dynamics. Meanwhile, the more popular nation-state accounts view the late Ottoman period from a nationalist angle, portraying an unjust and/or ineffective Ottoman state. Despite their differences, both literatures have one thing in common: they fail to deliver imperial accounts that reveal the multiple transitions of late Ottoman societies to the modern world. This book aims to accomplish that task and unveil alternative paths to modernity in the Ottoman Middle East. For this purpose, it presents an intra-empire perspective and explains the variation in the Ottoman world with reference to historical trajectories. Disagreeing with linear and state-centric models of history, I argue in this book that the coast, the interior and the frontier emerged as distinct imperial paths during the nineteenth century. Each Ottoman path represented a unique order in the region and produced important outcomes for the modern Middle East.
Method
I employ the concept of historical trajectory to understand the variation in the Ottoman world. The trajectory approach suggests that the historical experience is spatially-diverse, temporallybounded, and follows a path-dependent pattern. Path-dependency comes into effect when key decisions made at junction points persist over time and produce long-term outcomes.2 Accordingly, this research agenda investigates the locked-in effects of statesociety and global–local relations that have become entrenched over time because of high reversal costs. High reversal costs stem from set-up expenditures or increasing returns over time. While the former reveals the bounding character of initial decisions, the latter demonstrates the benefits accrued with successful learning processes.3
Trajectory analysis views causality in history from a pathdependent perspective. It specifies eventful origins, underlines reinforcing processes, and looks for important outcomes. As Andrew Abbott points out, turning points represent abrupt and chaotic moments that open up the possibility for networks to rearrange.4 While the subsequent episode strengthens the new direction, it is the processes that turn episodes into stable trajectories. Key processes do this by acting as positive feedback mechanisms. As Kathleen Thelen noted sometime ago, stability cannot be taken for granted; it is something that has to be sustained.5 Path-dependency ideas inspired innovative research.
Examining state-building in early modern Europe, Thomas Ertman showed that it was the timing of geopolitical competition and the organization of the local government that paved the way for distinct political regimes in the region.6 James Mahoney demonstrated how the choices of domestic elites at a junction point vis-à-vis the question of state-building and commercialization of agriculture consolidated different political regimes in Central America.7 Examining post-socialist transformations in Eastern Europe, David Stark and Laszlo Bruszt concluded that regional divergence is the outcome of different institutional choices regarding privatization and citizenship rights.8 The analytical strength of path-dependency approach then lies in its ability to explain patterned diversity in a universe.
Contemporary scholarship has documented alternative routes to state formation in Latin America, regional origins of fascism in interwar Italy, and the evolution of distinct welfare regimes in Europe.9 In this vein, the path-dependency approach departed from convergence accounts and systemic narratives in social sciences that respectively assume the existence of a singular path (i.e. modernization) or explain social change in terms of a single variable (i.e. capitalism).10 It is also different from continuity arguments in the history field, that offer a static analysis of durable structures or deep-rooted ideologies.
Shifting the focus from turning points to path-making processes themselves, this project suggests that it was local politics, economy and contention that shaped the Ottoman Middle East during the nineteenth century. First, they were key sites to accumulate power, wealth and status in late Ottoman society. Second, their interactive character consolidated the power of interlocked leaderships.11 Third, the three processes in turn shaped local hierarchies, defined the specific bargains between ‘peripheries’ and the Ottoman state, and determined the nature of interactions between imperial agents and global society.
Following these guidelines, my arguments in this study will be three-fold. First, economy on the coast, politics in the interior, and contention in the frontier served as primary processes that initiated regional paths in the late Ottoman Empire. Second, Ottoman trajectories were consolidated when there was convergence among economic, political and contention forms, yet these processes institutionalized differently in each path. Finally, the Ottoman paths were also the making of regional actors that utilized global capitalism, state transformation, and geopolitical competition to build competing imperial experiences. Overall, the book suggests that understanding the nineteenth century Ottoman world and its legacy should start from exploring the regionally-constituted, network-based and path-dependent historical trajectories.
Imperial Paths
The Ottoman Middle East was characterized by three historical trajectories during the nineteenth century. These were the coast, the interior and the frontier. The coastal framework represented the port-cities and commercial hinterlands of western Anatolia and the eastern Mediterranean littoral; the interior path marked the inland experience of Anatolia, Syria and Palestine; and the frontier incorporated the contentious borderland regions of eastern Anatolia, Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula. In a snapshot, the Ottoman trajectories were shaped by market relations and the discourse of modernity on the coast, the imperial bureaucracy and the notion of Islamic state in the interior, and religious trust networks and politics of mobilization in the frontier. The coastal path was initiated by the world economy. Built after foreign trade, the coastal model carved out a new economic geography which benefited the domestic non-Muslim merchants the most and paved the way for middle-class hegemony in major port-cities.12
The new historical setting was also a consequence of the expanding public sphere and found its expression in reformist port-city press, autonomous municipal councils, and class-coalitional politics. Towards the end of the century, merchants and professionals implemented middle-class rule on the Ottoman coast and shaped the coastal space around the values of cosmopolitanism, free trade and modernity. The inland regions merged into a single historical trajectory between 1840 and 1860. A window of opportunity was opened in Syria and Palestine after the withdrawal of Egyptian forces in 1841. After two decades of crisis, the Muslim bloc pre-mpted the rise of non-Muslim merchant classes, and Ottoman centralization measures blocked the path to further autonomous rule. Subsequently, the imperial center sealed a new political contract with the urban Muslim bloc, reproducing the familial coalitions in the interior. Bureaucratic governance attached economic opportunities to political power, sustained the ideological hegemony of Sunni Islam, and shaped contention towards patrimonial conflicts around the Ottoman state.13
The Ottoman frontier was set on a new track during the age of imperialism. Representing the largest collective action effort in the Middle East, political mobilization was rural in nature, operated through religious brokerage, and perceived the imperial state as a corrupt and immoral entity.14 Directing communal resistance against the central state, frontiers had a better chance of institutionalizing local autonomy. This was especially the case when the local elite possessed moral authority, kept its powerbase outside bureaucratic structures, and secured economic survival through protection rents. Furthermore, imperial rivalries granted an extra-space to frontier leaderships for deal-making with Ottomans and third parties at the same time.15 Political coalitions, economic networks, and collective claims sustained the distinct character of Ottoman trajectories.
It was the middle classes on the coast, urban Muslim coalitions in the interior, and religious trust networks in the frontier that governed the region. While municipal and administrative councils tied the first two to the public politics of the empire, the frontier leaderships operated in and out of the state. Economic forms were also trajectory-specific. Non-Muslim merchants traded cash crops for the world market on the coast whereas it was large landholding and regional markets that consolidated the power of Muslim interests in the interior.16 Frontier leaderships were able to oppose both types of commercialization and collected protection rents for economic and political survival. Contentious collective action had a unique repertoire in each Ottoman trajectory.
In the coastal path, port-city mobilizations were the outcome of distributional conflicts which were fought over new economic riches.In the interior, elite Muslim households competed for precious bureaucratic posts once artisan discontent and non-Muslim challengers disappeared from the scene. In the frontiers, religious entrepreneurs forged communal protest identities to organize large-scale movements. In sum, it was marketbased contention, patrimonial politics, and discourses of autonomy and religious revival that operated as the ideological and material bases of claim-making in the Ottoman Middle East. The late Ottoman Empire was characterized by socially and materially distinct political geographies during the nineteenth century. Thin rule defined the arid frontiers where rural–religious networks operating on protection rents clashed with the Ottoman state over centralization. There was contested rule on the coast where non-Muslim middle classes enjoyed the spoils of foreign trade and European services but had limited political bargains with the Ottoman state. Consensual rule characterized the interior experience where the unrivalled hegemony of the late Ottoman state was backed up by bureaucratic institutions, domestic markets, and a powerful Sunni bloc.17
Ottoman trajectories produced long-term outcomes. The coast became the spatial seat of modernity, embodying middle-class values, global interactions, and a broad public sphere. State-led transformation and conservative values dominated the inland regions where legitimacy of the state and moral values of Sunni Islam characterized the interior. Geopolitical competition blocked the path to successful state-building in the frontiers, allowing the local interests to bargain effectively with the central state for autonomy. Despite the political intervention of nation-state framework later in the twentieth century, the coast preserved its global outlook; the interior kept its conservative identity; and the frontiers utilized insurgency and heterodox Islam to make political statements. It would be helpful at this point to clarify the central concepts used in this study.
The broadest analytical claim made in the book is that each Ottoman trajectory represented a distinct path to modernity in the Middle East. I define modernity as an episode of world order that was characterized by capitalist expansion, fast-track statebuilding, and imperialist competition at the turn of the twentieth century. What I mean by historical trajectory then is an articulation with a key aspect of the modernist project by developing routine relations between local, imperial and global actors. Accordingly, this study views historical trajectory as a temporally and spatially bounded social formation that represents a distinct (economic, political and moral) order with a path-dependent character. Late Ottoman trajectories had common properties. First, each path utilized economic and political resources as well as cultural frames to carve out a regional order. Second, path-making was an active process rather than a pre-given historical reality.
A mere location on the coastline, inland region or a border zone did not necessarily mean ‘free admission’ to a historical trajectory. Third, the strength of any historical path in a specific location depended on the degree of compatibility among key processes. Fourth, Ottoman paths emerged in a sequential order that tried to contain (coast–interior) or replicate (interior–frontier) the experience of the antecedent path. Finally, Ottoman trajectories were uneven formations distributing resources and leadership in an unequal fashion. It was major port-cities, provincial inland capitals, and far frontiers that benefited the most from each Ottoman path.
I also argue in the following pages that the late Ottoman trajectories enjoyed competing social bases. The middle classes of the coast refer to domestic merchants and professional groups who were connected to global flows and operated as vanguards of modernization in the eastern Mediterranean world. The Urban Muslim Bloc was a composite leadership who established a hegemonic presence in inland regions by controlling land, local bureaucracy, and moral order in late Ottoman society. Following Charles Tilly, I define frontier societies as trust networks who successfully limited the access of outsiders to community resources.18 Frontier leaderships functioned as gatekeepers in Ottoman society and mobilized distinct cultural frames (such as religious messages) to protect communal and/or regional autonomy.
Theory
This study has eclectic theoretical origins despite its strong intellectual ties to historical institutionalism. I have benefited from a variety of schools in history and social sciences to explain each Ottoman path throughout the book. World-systems analysis and new economic sociology showed how the coastal trajectory came into being with global economic incorporation and later was transformed into a novel middle-class setting with the input of domestic actors. The key was the locally-embedded character of the economy. It is no wonder that circuits of commerce relied on trust, reciprocity and cultural conventions, and economic outcomes largely depended upon effective control over communication lines and information flows on the Ottoman coast.19 I have used the institutionalist explanation to understand the durable nature of Ottoman rule in the interior. The Ottoman institutions solved the collective-action problems of the Muslim bloc by coordinating elite interests, generating common cultural scripts around Sunni Islam, and providing social mobility to Muslim citizens.
Compliance to Ottoman rule was based on what Margaret Levi calls “credible commitments and fair procedures.” 20 The Ottoman world was predictable; the state honored its commitments; and no social actors appeared on the interior scene with rival cultural schemas and economic resources. As Arthur Stinchcombe reminds us, institutions can only function well with the perfect combination of resources and believable commitment.21 Basic insights from rational-choice institutionalism and contentious-politics literature proved extremely useful to explain thin rule in the frontiers. As rational-choice analysts argue persuasively, principal–agent problems limit the power of the central state in outlying areas because of high monitoring costs, and weak state presence enables the locals to use rebellion as a bargaining strategy.22 If mass mobilization is an effective way to strike deals with the center, contentious-politics literature showed how it was done in the Ottoman frontiers. Acting as powerful movement brokers, religious entrepreneurs relied on pre-existing tribal ties, mobilized heterodox brands of Islam, and utilized the expanding political opportunity space to protect local autonomy.23
The economic bases of autonomy in the frontier became clear for me with the help of institutional economics. The absence of state as an enforcer of contracts was an important reason as to why the Ottoman frontiers did not experience market integration to the same degree as compared to the rest of the empire.24 Still, as Roy Bin Wong argued for Qing China, informal mechanisms can be as important as formal rules in economic exchange.25 With this idea in mind, I have discussed various informal constraints on markets such as protection rents and religious fees that not only blocked market integration in Middle Eastern frontiers, but also served the economic well-being of frontier leaderships. The trajectory model proposed in the book also benefited from spatial approaches in the world-history field. The spatial model called for new units of analysis in writing imperial histories by demonstrating the fact that empires were not homogenous entities.
The recent monographs on Russian and Chinese frontiers, as well as burgeoning research on seas and littoral zones, have equally made it clear that coasts and frontiers accumulated distinct (imperial) experiences.26 Taking a similar direction, this study promotes a trajectory-specific account of late Ottoman history, departing from top-down imperial histories, retrospective nationalist narratives, and micro history studies. The spatial turn that this study takes needs to be qualified in order to separate it from purely geographical perspectives. Thomas Gieryn warns us that it is only places (not spaces) that give durability to social identities, cultural norms and economic hierarchies.27 It is not mere geography but rather its institutional properties and organizational structuring that shape the experience of a specific location.28 In that respect, geography operated as a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the emergence of Ottoman paths. Late Ottoman territories experienced distinct types of place-making because of capitalism, state centralization and inter-state competition which in turn produced the coast, interior and frontier as regional trajectories during the nineteenth century.
Background and Plan of the Book
This project is built upon the interplay of ideas and evidence. While world-systems research, the world-history field, network analysis, the institutional school, historical sociology, contentious-politics literature and debates on social-science methodology certainly improved the final product, it is to my fellow historians of the Ottoman Empire whom I owe a great deal. This study could not have been undertaken without the important steps taken in the field that produced three impressive bodies of knowledge in the last thirty years.
These have been the growth in the politicaleconomy literature on the Ottoman Empire during the 1980s, the Arab historiography on the Ottoman Middle East during the 1990s, and the more recent critical accounts of the late Ottoman past regarding the frontiers and marginal groups. Contemporary realities also shaped the way I think about the Ottomans. The end of the cold war, the demise of the nationstate order, and changing forms of legitimacy and identity in the Middle East have finally brought the “imperial moment” back that kept its traumas and failures but also successes hidden in the box for a long time.
The common ground has suddenly become obvious: to revise the Western impact and give more authorship to the Ottoman state and the local actors in the making of the region. It is this message that the book wants to take further. As such, my intention is neither an unqualified eulogy to the empire nor an outright condemnation of the late Ottoman past. The idea is to make a critical assessment of the imperial past by tracing the diverse record of the Ottomans in different regions. 29 The limitations of this work should also be made clear from the outset. My analysis of the Ottoman Empire leaves the Balkans and North Africa outside the borders of this study. This is done for analytical reasons.
I believe that “the other historical routes” to the late Ottoman Empire require different causal dynamics and large-scale processes to examine in the first place. Colonialism and white-settlers in North Africa, and nationalism and great power intervention in the Balkans were just two points that have to be factored in to the analysis. Likewise, despite its cursory treatment in the book, eastern Anatolia, Macedonia, and Kosovo need to be evaluated as part of a distinct historical path where there was nationalist agitation, inter-communal violence, and geopolitical rivalry after the Berlin Congress (1878).
Thus, I leave the study of other Ottoman paths (colonial, nationalist and conflict) to another volume. On intellectual terms, this is an analytically-driven historical study to incorporate the Ottoman case to larger debates in comparative historical social science and world history. It uses a causalnarrative structure and a relational macro-historical approach to chart long-term historical patterns and trace important outcomes. Hence, it gives more weight to medium-range theory building, conceptual framework and methodological concerns. Unlike the conventional research routine on the Ottoman Empire, then, this study surveys all Asian provinces of the Ottoman Empire for more than a hundred years in order to capture patterned diversity within the imperial universe. Accordingly, I have not examined primary sources about a specific location or a time frame that are available in imperial, national, regional and colonial archives. Instead, I utilized most of the available and expanding literatures on the late Ottoman Empire and complemented that with a wide range of readings from social sciences and history.
The latter included theoretical readings from political science and sociology, methodological debates from social sciences, and comparative cases from world history and historical sociology. The synthetic approach allowed me to construct the late Ottoman experience around a theoretically-guided agenda and come up with an empirically reliable comparative analysis. On the whole, the book provides fresh answers to a variety of important questions regarding the late Ottoman past in the Middle East. To mention a few, what was the nature of late Ottoman rule that secured ideological legitimacy and yet could not prevent imperial collapse? How did Islam legitimize the Ottoman state and yet function as a protest ideology? What did cosmopolitanism, autonomy and frontier politics mean in the Middle East? Is it meaningful to discuss civil society in the Ottoman Empire? What was new about the Ottoman experience during the nineteenth century? Can a regional-trajectory approach help us see Young Turks era and Arab nationalism under a different light? Finally, what were the key Ottoman legacies that shaped the region during the twentieth century? 30
The book tries to answer these critical questions in five chapters. Chapter 1 provides a detailed discussion on late Ottoman historiography and concludes that the field operates with dualistic accounts and state-centered narratives. The remaining chapters introduce a trajectory perspective. Chapter 2 traces the creation of middle-class settings in the eastern Mediterranean littoral. Chapter 3 demonstrates the power of Muslim coalitions in central Anatolia, Syria and Palestine. Focusing on eastern Anatolia, Iraq, and the Arabian Peninsula, Chapter 4 answers the key question of why the Ottomans had thin rule in the frontiers. Chapter 5 unveils the resilient character of regional trajectories in the closing years of the empire and demonstrates that mass politics and major wars revised the Ottoman paths, yet did not destroy them.
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