Foundations of Modernity

Human Agency and the Imperial State

Isa Blumi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780415884648
• eBook ISBN: 9781136718137
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

Investigating how a number of modern empires transform over the long 19th century (1789-1914) as a consequence of their struggle for ascendancy in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East, Foundations of Modernity: Human Agency and the Imperial State moves the study of the modern empire towards a comparative, trans-regional analysis of events along the Ottoman frontiers: Western Balkans, the Persian Gulf and Yemen. This inter-disciplinary approach of studying events at different ends of the Ottoman Empire challenges previous emphasis on Europe as the only source of change and highlights the progression of modern imperial states.

The book introduces an entirely new analytical approach to the study of modern state power and the social consequences to the interaction between long-ignored "historical agents" like pirates, smugglers, refugees, and the rural poor. In this respect, the roots of the most fundamental institutions and bureaucratic practices associated with the modern state prove to be the by-products of certain kinds of productive exchange long categorized in negative terms in post-colonial and mainstream scholarship. Such a challenge to conventional methods of historical and social scientific analysis is reinforced by the novel use of the work of Louis Althusser, Talal Asad, William Connolly and Frederick Cooper, whose challenges to scholarly conventions will prove helpful in changing how we understand the origins of our modern world and thus talk about Modernity. This book offers a methodological and historiographic intervention meant to challenge conventional studies of the modern era.

1 The Local Scramble for Ascendancy and the Demise of the “Era”

The possible ranks higher than the actual,

—Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 1929

Since the rise of the Ottoman dynasty in the late thirteenth century, its political and military fortunes have been scrupulously studied by both historians and social scientists. Of late, the Ottomans have been “studied” in an increasing number of comparative contexts as well.¹ The results have been varied to say the least. Increasingly, studies focusing on correcting earlier work challenge how many scholars approach “Empire” with predisposed ideas as to how it will serve their larger theoretical or empirical project.² For many, the Ottoman Empire, in particular, constitutes a neatly confined set of historical events that can be folded into a set of recognizable—and thus studied and compared—institutions and practices.³ Invariably it is the generic state under a regime named after a man—sultan, pasha, king, military general—that performs either its pre-destined role as facilitator to Western hegemony or, in its failure, opens the gates for those who would succeed in the modernization project. As such, the generic Ottoman Empire can be inserted pro forma into any number of analytical frameworks that all seek to historicize Modernity.⁴

Problematizing this method (which is never innocent of political resonance) of representing empire is central to the larger objectives of this book. The disparate events that consistently reshape the different experiences of empire for the peasant, merchant, or soldier cannot be reduced to fit a neat set of analytical frameworks. Empire as experience, in other words, needs to be disaggregated from a narrative that otherwise blurs the variables that consistently distinguish each set of indigenous experiences. In the “models” that are used to compare the “Ottoman experience” (in the singular) with other cases relative to “Europe,” the generic Ottoman Empire serves as a general unit of analysis that applies to areas and peoples as distinctive as Yemen, Kuwait, Armenia, and Montenegro. The inhabitants of these areas are presumed to share, to varying degrees, an Ottoman experience that caters to the methods of analysis that is reductive rather than elaborative and contextual. The Ottoman Empire thus functions as a unit of analysis that links in important ways a composite of many disparate sets of experiences that all are expected in conventional scholarship to conjoin eventually with the twentieth century as a cumulative story. Political and economic developments, in particular, often through the citing of specific institutions as they emerge at specific times in the over six hundred years of “Ottoman History,” link these regions to larger geographically-specific administrative units known as extensions of the Ottoman Empire without considering the variances at play as the state administration attempted to adjust to contingencies.

Put differently, as Ottoman history is often constructed along thematic timeframes that experientially, temporally, and spatially condense the entire empire, it is assumed that the many different peoples living in, for example, the Western Balkans, experience the same “decline,” “crisis,” “reforms,” and “transformations” as those in Syria, Eastern Anatolia, or Cyprus. As such, the empire is used to help frame a larger narrative in which it and its plethora of subjects are subordinate to a generic European teleology.⁵

This chapter is dedicated partially to offering a set of counter arguments to the “decline” thesis that is tied to this Eurocentric stubbornness.⁶ It is not, however, my intention simply to discredit nomenclature(s) that reduce Ottoman history to generic decline, a sort of “counter-model” operating to reinforce the narrative of European Modernity’s ineluctable triumph.⁷ To date, challenges to such reductive models still evoke the “empire” as a coherent unit of analysis. The point of this chapter is to highlight how changes monitored in the Balkans, Red Sea, and Persian/Arab Gulf, long associated with expanding Modernity, prove much more unstructured than conventionally depicted within formal imperial contexts. In many important ways, the watershed events in these distinct regions on the fringes of imperialism are beyond categorization. That is to say, resisting hegemonic models of analysis requires dropping a logic that still flattens these disparate human experiences to fit a narrative shaped by liberal sensibilities only really articulated after World War II.

The dynamic counter-actions of what are as much discontinuities as linkages manufactured to fit on the Eurocentric trajectory observed below will force us to appreciate various possibilities for new spaces (Althusser’s “levels”) and temporalities (in the spirit of Koselleck).⁸ In other words, this chapter resists the appropriation of events by a logic and vocabulary directly communicating Modernity in order to leave open the opportunity to expose/ unveil a range of “new landscapes” historical agents had available to them.⁹

In the end I use this chapter to cast doubts on our ability to engage in any revisionist enterprise if we retain these quintessential tools of historicism now recognized as generally unhelpful.¹⁰ What animates this critique is the apparent inability of many to recognize how methodological choices like constantly evoking the role of prominent men—Ayan—or a series of state reforms—the “Tanzimat”—as available proof of Ottoman adaptability fails to account for the heterogeneity and dynamism of late Ottoman polities. In many ways, the generic categories of Tanzimat and Ayan so dominant in the scholarship on the nineteenth century distort our studies of important conjunctures of forces, leading us to make simple associations that misrepresent dynamic processes by levelling everything to fit the stage/ period conventions our present paradigms set.¹¹ To counter this thinking, not only must we resist letting a vastly different set of policies, applied to address a local set of issues in the Red Sea, Western Balkans, or Gulf, be reduced to a totalizing analytical framework (one that evokes “reform” to simplify and thus erase all nuance in each specific set of local conditions), but we need also to reconsider the actual dynamics that help make each variant of Tanzimat reforms or Ayan appointed distinct in these regions.¹²

To make this point, I will stress below the actions of important intermediaries long mobilized to help assist in the management of the vast empire, as their adaptive policies prove not only the precursors of Ottoman system change in the middle of the nineteenth century, but also may prove the origins of what actually is called the threshold of modern statecraft in general. The infamous Ayan of the Balkans and by extension, Egypt, constitute these regional intermediaries whose previous role in the scholarship has largely been extracted from the important local context out of which they originally came.¹³ Rather than returning to a narrative approach that equates individual Ayan to a larger phenomenon, I explain below how the asserted “superstructure” of the nineteenth century as presented in three distinct “phases” in the literature is actually a by-product of these very locally-rooted regimes. Moreover, these “great men” of the pre-Tanzimat era will be used here to highlight the importance of local factors to the developments that ultimately enabled the personalities of Ottoman historiography to secure leverage over larger regional and international forces. In other words, I will mobilize the story of the Tanzimat as a by-product of the actions of men like Ali Pasha of Tepelena and Mehmet Ali of Kavala, who in turn, are better understood as not merely constituent of the theme of state imposed “reform” in Ottoman history, but as a reflection of very complex local dynamics that ultimately account for the transformations in the nineteenth century hitherto centered in Europe.

Rescuing Historic Complexity from the Narrative

Rescuing the complexity of events taking place in various arenas that are normally treated as being on the front lines of inevitable change can open this study of foundations without the determinism so often evident in how we study the Ottoman Empire in relation to “modern” imperialism. This is done by actually engaging with a “period” extending from 1789 to 1875, long assumed to be the quintessential moment of “Western” ascendancy in the Middle East, and by offering other possible interpretations of what were, in reality, many different things happening for many different stakeholders dispersed throughout this vast arena we call the Ottoman Empire.¹⁴

While it is rare to find new studies that audaciously cover six hundred years, works covering a “period” in the empire’s history spanning centuries are still regularly commissioned by publishers. These disingenuously “synoptic” studies invariably assert “stages” of historic development that lead to events like Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt and British imperial penetration in Arabia. This is especially important when the historical narrative functions to account for an apparent European ascendancy. Here the periodizations are fixed on positioning “Europe,” often corresponding with the tropes of European modernization initiated by the French Revolution, as an ontological opposite of the “Orient.”¹⁵ None other than Edward Said reinforced this periodization by positing that Napoleon’s “invasion” was an enterprise of a generic Western power and its programmatic use of knowledge to initiate a permanent break between an economically “stagnant” East and vibrant West that culminated in direct imperial rule.¹⁶

While no longer idealized, the periodization that centers Napoleon as the watershed in Middle Eastern (and European) history remains intact in troubling ways; its unspoken assumptions persist, leaving unacknowledged ideologically-skewed perceptions of the past to determine how we study events, processes, and possibilities in the larger world.¹⁷ In the end, this “transformation” phase serves to highlight other processes deemed crucial in the Ottoman Empire’s (again, a diverse amalgamation of polities and economies) eventual subordination to Western power.¹⁸

As it is impossible to argue that these six hundred years of Ottoman struggles constitute a single experience for millions of inhabitants, the Ottoman Empire’s history (instead of histories) is invariably presented in stages, much like the periodization of Western economic and political development found in Marxist-Leninist literature.¹⁹ Every stage is neatly reduced to major themes that encapsulate each level of history, be it the genesis period of the Osman dynasty (1300–1550), the “consolidation period” (1550–1718), which includes the “glory years” of Süleyman the Great positioned as the apex of Ottoman history, or finally the “transformation period (1718–1923), which is inevitably associated with decline.²⁰ The vast diversity of experiences one could find by studying a small corner of Yemen or Bulgaria individually have all too often been subsumed in these periodization schemas.²¹ As a result, we approach our research to fit within (or write against) these themes, be they reform, modernization, or early expansion of European capitalist hegemony.²²

As highlighted in a number of these revisionist studies, the imperial state (and the vast majority of its subjects) by the beginning of the nineteenth century had been undergoing a series of comprehensive administrative adjustments, changes that, ironically, if interpreted in ways historians do when they study early modern societies in Western Europe, could constitute an important corrective to our flawed understanding of the entire nineteenth century. Indeed, as an enterprise that adopted innovative measures to balance the needs of a vast imperial state and its capacities to effectively rule, a few scholars have observed that an impressive compromise of power took place in the late eighteenth century that transformed the way the Ottoman elite would rule in the nineteenth. As Ariel Salzmann argues, “ … the decentralized apparatus of the eighteenth century facilitated the transition between a precocious imperial centralization of the fifteenth-century and the peculiar institutional centralization that ushered in the modern state in the early nineteenth century.”²³

On the surface, this observation appears a valuable challenge to the still popular belief that the empire had already been in decline and was beyond repair by the late eighteenth century. The problem, however, is the reliance on the notion of a deductively incontestable “modern state” itself. Although this much needed complexity helps us revisit the processes of change in new ways, and thus helps us from mistaking changing institutions for systemic collapse, it is crucial not to assume what exactly constitutes that “modern state” to which Salzmann refers. The centrality of the state and its role in shaping the larger world are on-going issues. I for one, question the dynamic of even institutional change being generated from within that “state.” As explained throughout, the Ottoman, British, Italian, French, or Russian imperial “state” proves far more dispersed and multifarious as its bureaucrats adapt to very different conditions in different times and places.

Unfortunately, what we have with the debates on whether or not the Ottoman state successfully adapted to the challenges of the modern world is a dispute between practitioners of two different methodological conventions, both of which equate identifiable and disingenuously “fixed” institutions with entire societies, which are also aggregated and generalized to serve a narrative purpose. In most scholars’ hands, state reform in these “transitional periods” is a mere extension of a generic analytical theme that combines the numerous tensions, confusions, and adaptations scattered throughout vastly different territories of nineteenth century “modernizing” empires.²⁴ As a result, the complex and distinct processes happening in one part of trans-regional empires—say in the Western Balkans, in the Red Sea, or the Persian/Arab Gulf as covered in this book—end up being subsumed in a larger process associated with a generic imperial project. It gets worse when the project is reduced to one identifying the process of modernization—“Europeanization” or “Westernization”—as the source of change in the Ottoman Empire.²⁵

Unhinging Change from the Ages of the Ayan and Reform

We are dealing with two distinct methodological problems that persistently misdirect our attention from identifying the foundations of modernity as being dispersed and inherently fragile. The first set of methodological problems starts when the last 150 years are framed in terms of distinctive eras. Framed as distinctive from an “Early Modern” period when the Ottoman Empire still held considerable authority over its provinces and could withstand the onslaught of the Euro-Atlantic world, the strictly delineated period from Napoleon’s invasion in 1798 of Egypt to the Russo-Ottoman war of 1877–1878—the “Transition” period that overlapped with the Age of the Ayan—neatly encapsulates a long process of transformation that inevitably leads to Europe’s domination of the Middle East.²⁶ The implicit use of the signifier “Tanzimat” remains the guiding force for how we understand the Ottoman Empire’s last century.²⁷ Events between 1839 and 1876, in other words, consistently are filtered through issues related to state “reform,” “transformation,” “centralization,” or “westernization.”²⁸

Fixed to this scheme are the transitional agents, known as the Ayan. Appointed as local governors, these Ayan were political and commercial actors given extensive responsibilities to both collect revenue from the peoples who lived in their areas of authority (always at established rates of extraction set by Istanbul) as well as maintain law and order.²⁹ In this setting, a refined policy of “farming out” disciplinary responsibilities depended on the actual recognized capacity of these partners to effectively lead (and tax) their constituencies. As such, the appointment of these Ayan proved to be a cost-efficient means of assuring both economic productivity and general political stability in distant lands.

It needs to be stressed that these were not “men” (more like operations) simply co-opted because they (already) violently suppressed their subordinates—peasants, merchants, militia members—and thus were entrusted to “maintain order.” Rather, they were employed because they were established leaders of their communities.³⁰ What is missing, therefore, in much of the literature th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Maps
• List of Abbreviations
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Relocating the Great Transformation in the Balkans and Arabia
• 1. The Local Scramble for Ascendancy and the Demise of the “Era”
• 2. Demarcating Imperial Boundaries and the Rise of Difference
• 3. Beyond the Frontier: Subduing the Agents of Change
• 4. Diasporic Agency and the Shifts in the Possibilities of Empire
• 5. Capitalizing Empires and the Political Economy of Reform
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index