Download PDF | (Frontiers of Ottoman Studies 1) Colin Imber, Keiko Kiyotaki, Rhoads Murphey - Frontiers of Ottoman Studies_ State, Province, and the West, Volume I -I. B. Tauris (2005).
303 Pages
Preface
These volumes contain a selection of the papers presented at the 15th Symposium of the Comité International d’Études PréOttomanes et Ottomanes (CIEPO-15), held in London from 8 July to 12 July, 2002. Keiko Kiyotaki arranged the chapters in the volumes under thematic headings which reflect the sessions of the conference. Colin Imber was the overall editor of volume 1, dealing with the political, social and economic history of the Ottoman Empire. Keiko Kiyotaki edited the statistical material in the volume. Volume 2 covers literary and cultural topics. To maintain the thematic integrity, the editors had regrettably to exclude some articles that were intrinsically very interesting. We were also unable to consider contributions in languages other than English. The editors respected the authors’ own systems of transliteration. Tables and illustrations were standardised in form only. Endnotes remain unaltered except in the style of citation. The authors were individually responsible for obtaining permission to use copyright materials. Views and opinions in the text are those of the individual authors.
Colin Imber and Keiko Kiyotaki
Introduction
Colin Imber
More than a quarter of a century ago a scholar described Ottoman history as ‘Clio’s poor relation’. That was certainly true then, and in terms of the status of Ottoman history, at least in the history departments of European and American universities, it remains true today. Furthermore, the study of Ottoman history since the collapse of the Empire after 1918 has suffered from more than neglect, and has had to endure more than its fair share of stresses and strains. Despite pockets of enlightenment, most western historians have, until fairly recently, been content to think of the Ottoman Empire, if they thought of it at all, in terms of ‘the Turkish menace’ or as ‘the sick man of Europe’. Western thinking about Ottoman government and institutions often did not progress beyond a vague concept of— in the words of a British administrator in Mandate Palestine—‘the blasting rule of the Turks’.
In the twenty-five or so countries that today occupy the former territory of the Ottoman Empire there is a greater awareness of Ottoman history and consciousness of an Ottoman legacy. However, more often than not Ottoman history in these countries has been co-opted by nationalist governments and, outside Turkey at least, presented in school and university curricula in terms of ‘the Turkish yoke’ that for centuries stifled the culture and development of the occupied nations. In Turkey, on the other hand, the nationalist agenda has been to present a one-dimensional view of the Empire as a great and uniquely Turkish achievement, and to seek the origins of its institutions in a vaguely defined Turkish past, somewhere in Central Asia. These ways of thinking have left a legacy of clichés and misconceptions that even today present a minefield through which serious students and researchers must pick their way carefully. It is, however, easy to exaggerate the obstacles that face historians of the Ottoman Empire. Next to the nationalist and other politically and ideologically motivated dross, there are seams of gold, and as more historians enter the field the quantity and quality of published material has increased.
Studies continue to appear which add not only to the sum of our knowledge of the Ottoman Empire but also to our understanding of how it worked, allowing us to see beyond the old clichés and to correct hoary misconceptions. As an example, Keiko Kiyotaki’s article in this collection directly challenges a frequently stated opinion that the practice of tax farming in the Ottoman Empire was necessarily a symptom of weak and inefficient government and a source of corruption. Through a case study of Iraq in 1831 she demonstrates that in some respects tax farming was beneficial. It not only gave the farmer an interest in stimulating the economic activities that provided him with an income and the government with revenue; it also had the effect of giving the taxfarmers, often powerful local notables, a vested interest in upholding the Ottoman system. Such re-assessments are possible only through a careful study of the sources, and in this respect Ottomanists are more fortunate than historians working in other areas of the Islamic world. As the articles in this collection show, Ottoman source material is abundant, and in particular the millions of documents preserved in the Prime Ministry Archive (Başbakanlık Arşivi) in Istanbul.
Although this is the repository for records of the central government, and presents a view of the Empire as seen from Istanbul, its records are indispensable for the study of the Ottoman provinces, an area of research that is coming increasingly to the fore and which forms a theme of this volume. The Ottoman Empire, as one historian wisely remarked, ‘floated on a sea of paper’: Ottoman administrators had a passion for lists and inventories which today provide much of the raw material for provincial history. Above all, from the early years of the Empire’s existence, the government maintained registers of taxable resources throughout the sultan’s realms, and it is these documents in particular that provide information about the provinces. Their focus is obviously narrow, but as tax records, they give a picture of settlement patterns, economic activities, and the distribution of tax revenues, and they provide a broad picture of populations and how they fluctuated over the years. It is by the careful study of tax registers that Mehdi İlhan is able to plot the changes in population, city boundaries and districts in the Anatolian city of Çankırı and Tomoki Okawara is able to correct the hitherto accepted picture of Damascus as a city that underwent little change in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
These articles demonstrate how the apparently arid pages of Ottoman tax registers can provide the foundation for urban and provincial history. At the same time, historians are beginning to test the evidence of the registers against archaeological, seismic and other evidence on the ground. Tom Sinclair’s study of the town of Adilcevaz on the eastern frontier of the Ottoman Empire exemplifies this new trend. At a different level, John Curry’s study of the Anatolian ‘saint’ Ömer al-Fu’adi of Kastamonu serves as a reminder of the cultural and religious particularism of towns and districts outside the capital. A growing interest in the different communities within the Empire parallels the research into its various regions and again, by emphasising Ottoman pluralism, serves to show that the advent of Ottoman rule did not, as nationalists once assumed, simply obliterate or drive underground non-Muslim and non-Turkish cultures.
The Ottoman Jewish community in particular enjoyed a less chequered history than did the Jews in many regions of western and eastern Europe. In this volume Shaul Regev shows how Jewish scholarship continued to flourish in the Ottoman Empire, while Orly Meron’s picture of Jewish entrepreneurship in Salonica reminds us of the international importance of the large Jewish population of that city between the fifteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The multinational character of the Ottoman Empire was something that it shared with its dynastic rivals, the Habsburg and Romanov Empires, and which proved, as many have pointed out, to be a fatal weakness in its final decades. The principle of dynastic rule was not something that could survive the growth of nationalist ideologies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. When intellectuals in the Empire began to identify their own communities as forming political nations and above all, perhaps, when the post-1908 Young Turk government began to promulgate Turkish nationalism as an official doctrine, the old imperial structure, perhaps best understood as a coalition of interests and semi-autonomous communities allied to the ruling dynasty, was bound to collapse. The papers by Caesar Farah and Yaron Harel, by referring to the beginnings of Arab nationalism and Zionism in the early twentieth century, connect with this theme. The increasing amount of research on the Ottoman Empire below the level of the central government and the ruling élite has not displaced work on the central themes of imperial history.
In this volume Rhoads Murphey’s article on Mustafa Safi’s early seventeenth century Annals of Ahmed I—a work which, like many other important Ottoman histories, survives only in manuscript—is a reminder of the importance of Ottoman literary chronicles, not only in providing a narrative framework for the Empire’s history, but equally for understanding how the dynasty sought to legitimise its rule and how Ottoman subjects viewed the sultans. It is primarily through semi-official chronicles such as Safi’s that we catch a glimpse of the image that the sultans presented, or tried to present to the outside world. Yavuz Cezar does not concentrate on the person of the sultan or specifically on his government, but rather on a group of men without whom the government could not have functioned. In most years from the last quarter of the sixteenth century the Ottoman treasury ran a deficit and, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, before the establishment of a banking system, turned to the great financiers of Istanbul for credit.
These men and their businesses are the subjects of Yavuz Cezar’s study. The development of banking in the nineteenth century was one of a series of centrally inspired reforms which collectively can be seen as an effort by the reformers to create a ‘state’ in the modern understanding of the term, with permanent institutions and an increasingly wide range of government functions. The reform of the judiciary which, in one of its aspects, forms the subject of Jun Akiba’s paper, was another expression of these changes. All the papers in this volume demonstrate how progress in Ottoman studies still depends on a close reading of primary source material. Jane Hathaway’s paper, for example, by focussing on the meaning of a deceptively simple phrase, evlâd-i ‘arab (literally ‘sons of the Arabs’), in the context of Ottoman Egypt, reminds us how historical interpretation can often depend on our understanding—or misunderstanding—of small details in the texts, sometimes even single words. It is often the apparently inconsequential detail that leads to important discoveries and opens up new fields of research.
In this collection, by enquiring into the sense of the term ‘household’ in Ottoman fiscal documents, Nenad Moačanin raises broader questions about social and family structures in the Ottoman Balkans. The fact that the interpretation of historical documents still often hinges on the precise definition of words is an indication that the serious study of Ottoman history is still at a very early stage in comparison with the historiography of western Europe. This means, however that, with so much to discover and so much material at the historian’s disposal, it has become one of the most exciting fields for historical research even if, in terms of prestige and profile, it still remains ‘Clio’s poor relation’.
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