Artisans of Empire

Crafts and Craftspeople Under the Ottomans

Suraiya Faroqhi

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780857737618
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du Moyen-Orient

The manufacture and trade in crafted goods and the men and women who were involved in this industry - including metalworkers, ceramicists, silk weavers, fez-makers, blacksmiths and even barbers - lay at the social as well as the economic heart of the Ottoman empire. This comprehensive history, by leading Ottoman historian Suraiya Faroqhi, presents the definitive view of the subject, from the production and distribution of different craft objects to their use and enjoyment within the community. Faroqhi sheds new light on all aspects of artisan life, setting the concerns of individual craftsmen within the context of the broader cultural themes that connect them to the wider world. Combining social, cultural, economic, religious and historical insights, this will be the authoritative work on Ottoman artisans and guilds for many years to come. 'A display of unrivalled knowledge of the sources by one of the leading historians of the Ottoman Empire.' - Erik J. Zürcher, Professor of Turkish Studies at the University of Leiden

CHAPTER 1

Writing about Artisans

The state of the art

The historiography of Ottoman artisans may not be very extensive but it is indispensable for any work of synthesis: whether we like it or not, our assumptions here and now are shaped by what has been done or left undone by our predecessors. Moreover to readers who approach our topic from the outside, the full meaning of certain statements will only become clear in the light of previous discussions. The latter will therefore be presented in a short overview, which by the same token will introduce topics to be dealt with in later chapters.

To announce a complete change of paradigm is a great advantage to any author; such a claim brings prestige and helps to sell books. We will certainly move away from certain concepts prevalent in the secondary literature of past decades.¹ But I do not believe that the history of Ottoman artisans at present is undergoing a complete revolutionary turnover. By contrast, incremental changes are numerous, and perhaps these are the harbingers of some future paradigm change – it is too early to tell. Given this situation the present study is intended as a further step on the long road of Ottomanist historiography, both of the older socio-economic variety and of the more recent ‘culturalist’ one.

Religion and the economic mentality of craftsmen

At the earliest stage of scholarly research on Ottoman guilds, those few historians interested in the topic tended to concentrate on what might be called the ‘ideological’ aspects of craftsmen activity. A special interest in the spiritual concerns of artisans was perhaps due to the fact that studies of Ottoman guilds were first undertaken by scholars whose major focus was on the religion of Islam, and who usually worked on the period before about 1500 or 1550. After all, the literary texts in the broader sense of that term, which largely constitute the source basis of the medievalist, emphasize morals and ceremonials rather than the mundane problems of artisans’ daily lives.

These linkages between religion and guild activities were a major interest of Franz Taeschner (1888–1967), an early student of Ottoman guild life. Through his work on medieval Anatolian hagiographies and their reception in the craft milieu, Taeschner was able to show that certain features of the fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century brotherhoods known as the ahis, widespread in Anatolia during that time, in certain cases continued to be relevant to guild life as late as the 1700s.² Although more or less contemporary evidence on the ahis is rather thin on the ground, consisting largely of the names of personages who founded mosques and other charities, the religious aspect of these urban groupings in which some artisans must have taken part, has rendered the latter continuously attractive to conservative historians. Taeschner himself fell into that category. Moreover it was known that, for instance, in the central Anatolian town of Çankırı, twentieth-century artisans perpetuated ceremonies presumed to have been derived from those of the ahis: today this town houses a lodge serving this very purpose. Scholars and politicians celebrating the memory of the ahis probably wished – and wish – to distance ‘good’ artisan organizations from ‘bad’, areligious trade unions: an interest in historical instances of male bonding sometimes is thrown in for good measure.

Taeschner’s contemporary Abdülbaki Gölpınarlı (1900–82), best known for his many works on the dervish order of the Mevlevis, approached the ahis not as a specialist on Ottoman artisans but as a religious historian. As the treatises known as fütuvvetnames, presumably at one time current in the ahi milieu, were relevant to his work on dervishes and their beliefs, around 1950 Gölpınarlı published and translated several such texts; his commentaries are the basis of all further work on the subject. These treatises enumerated the qualities expected of a perfect brotherhood member (fata, fityan, ahi). The ahi was supposed to practise modesty, abnegation and self-control, a complex of virtues known as fütüvvet, and the writings in question also described the rituals which the ahis regarded as central to their associational commitments. Fütüvvetnames were copied out in artisan circles and thus must have been important long after the ahis as actual organizations had faded away.

As certain narrative texts from the 1500s detail ‘disreputable’ trades, contempt on the part of certain artisans for others presumably counted for something in everyday social relations during those years.³ However, we do not know to what extent; and there is no indication that Ottoman government authorities considered these expressions of contempt on the part of some guilds for the members of other craft associations as significant from a policy point of view. Except for tavern keepers and a few others, all artisans officially speaking seem to have been regarded as equal, and inter-guild disputes about ranking only rarely surface in official documentation. If Evliya Çelebi was correct, and there really existed guilds of pickpockets and other marginal folk in mid-seventeenth century Istanbul, these groupings would certainly have been considered disreputable. But at present the existence of such guilds has only exceptionally been confirmed by outside sources, although the work of Eyal Ginio and Marinos Sariyannis recently has unearthed quite a bit of evidence on marginal people.⁴

Moreover certain fütüvvetnames have been studied by religious historians of the twentieth century because they demonstrate a widespread popular veneration for the descendants of the Imām ʿAlī, the relative and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad. This sentiment was common not only among people with Shiite leanings but also among Sunnis, and it was particularly well attested in certain craft milieus.⁵ The fütüvvetnames thus form one of the very few available sources on the mental makeup of at least a section of Ottoman artisans, and as these guildsmen, in some aspects of their associational lives, strongly focused upon Islamic values and ceremonials they have remained for quite some time the chasse gardée of religious specialists.

On the other hand, the economic historian Sabri Ülgener (1911–83) saw the Ottoman craft guilds in quite a different light. Ülgener was one of the first Turkish scholars to get interested in the German school of economic history and the theories of Max Weber; he had encountered this line of thinking when studying with Fritz Neumark and Alexander Rüstow, who had come to Istanbul as refugees from Nazi persecution.⁶ The link between Calvinism and capitalism that Weber assumed to have existed in the early modern period prompted Ülgener to ask himself in what ways the religious views of Ottoman artisans had affected their economic behaviour.⁷

If this concern with Weber tied Ülgener to the social sciences of the early twentieth century, seen from another perspective he was himself a pioneer. For in the Ottoman context, Ülgener’s work was one of the first attempts to study a topic that from the 1970s onwards came to be called the ‘history of mentalities’. This kind of research had been pioneered by French historians such as Michel Vovelle (b. 1933), and though it was adopted, somewhat belatedly, by a few Ottomanist historians, on the whole the history of mentalities has been relatively neglected by the representatives of our field down to the present day.⁸ Following a Weberian trajectory Ülgener arrived at a set of scholarly interests in some ways similar to those developed later by Vovelle: these included a concern with the views of people who wrote little, if at all, and whose manner of thinking must be ‘teased out’ of sources which refer to these thoughts and feelings only in an indirect fashion.

More specifically, Ülgener asked himself why Ottoman craft producers had failed to make the transition to capitalism. His answer was that because of the shift of international trade routes away from the Mediterranean, beginning in the sixteenth century, the Ottoman economy increasingly found itself in a backwater, with access to international markets severely limited. To this lack of opportunity on the ‘macro’ level, craftsmen supposedly responded with an ideology that made a virtue out of necessity by emphasizing the values of modesty and also a kind of egalitarianism, all this embedded in a culture of poverty. Or at least, this was the ideology: in real life, this spirit of abnegation was often conspicuous by its absence, and townsmen who could afford it were inclined towards opulence and ‘lord-like’ consumption.⁹

In spite of his own family background linked to the religious and dervish milieu, Ülgener considered the positive values that might have been inherent in Ottoman artisan ideology less important than the concomitant denigration of worldly activity, ambition and drive, and he was acutely sensitive to the pettifogging jealousies which in the narrow limits of a small-town market all too often flourished behind the façade of otherworldliness. After all, as an economist Ülgener was confronted with the problems of his own time, more specifically the mid-twentieth century, and in his perspective quite a few contemporary economic difficulties could be derived from the fact that Ottoman craftsmen and petty traders had so thoroughly rejected the idea not only of foreign but also of home-grown capitalism. Ülgener did not live long enough to observe the drastic changes of the last few decades.

In discussing the problem why a well-developed market economy such as the Ottoman had not made the transition to commercial and industrial capitalism, Ülgener’s emphasis on endogenous factors and ‘ideological’ considerations limiting economic expansion did not sit well with the concerns of scholarship during the 1960s and 1970s. For at this time some Ottomanist historians became involved with ‘world economy’ studies in the Wallersteinian manner.¹⁰ According to the latter model, the reasons for Ottoman economic stagnation and even ‘de-industrialization’ were located squarely in developments taking place outside the confines of the empire, namely in northwestern Europe; these changes in the long run were to result in the economic marginalization of the Mediterranean world.

Exogenous factors thus monopolized attention almost exclusively. Certainly Ülgener also had considered the isolation of Ottoman crafts from the lifelines of international trade as the principal reason for their ‘involution’. But this aspect of his work was not, in the 1960s and 1970s, taken into serious consideration by economic historians. To top it all, Ülgener never had analysed the ‘hard’ data derived from the Ottoman archives, which to the present day form the basis of most work on the pre-nineteenth-century economic history of the sultans’ realm. This fact must also have counted against him in those years, when archival work was seen as the conditio sine qua non of ‘scientific’ history. After a long period of relative neglect on the part of Ottomanist historians, it was only around 1980 that a new interest in Ülgener’s work became noticeable in Turkey.¹¹

That said, it is also important to stress where present research diverges from Ülgener’s claims. First of all, we are no longer as convinced of artisan stagnation as he had been, perhaps under the impact of the poverty and isolation so widespread in Turkey during the 1930s and 1940s as a consequence of lengthy wars (1912–23) and the world economic crisis beginning in 1929. After all, during the early years of the republic the ideology of ‘bir lokma bir hırka’ ([content yourself] with a mouthful [of food] and a dervish cloak) retained wide currency, at least outside of the elite, so much so that studying this attitude became a significant preoccupation of the empirical social science that emerged in Turkey after the Second World War.

Present-day scholars in addition are less convinced that the Ottoman world really turned into a commercial backwater once Europeans began to use the oceanic routes. On the contrary, it has been shown that overland connections or combined land-and-sea routes leading from India to Cairo, Baghdad and even Moscow continued in use until the late 1700s.¹² In other words, today we tend to assume that there was more international trade, and perhaps more outlets for Ottoman artisan production were available than were recorded in European documents. Moreover the sultans’ subjects in the main manufactured not for the world market but for domestic use; even so, trade over long distances was often involved, as the empire encompassed three continents. And even when in the mid-nineteenth century Ottoman craftsmen had to confront the full impact of imported factory-made goods, many of them were able to adjust and their enterprises did not wither away, albeit at the price of seriously declining real wages.¹³ At least some of these petty entrepreneurs seem to have seized market opportunities whenever they presented themselves, and they were not necessarily inimical to commercial expansion.

Ülgener had assumed a professed – if not necessarily real – lack of interest on the part of Ottoman artisans in worldly success, an attitude often expressed in religious terms. Yet more recent research has shown that while this frame of mind was not unknown, it did not mean that entrepreneurial success was widely disapproved of. In practice many craftsmen were willing to accept the leadership of their economically most successful colleagues.¹⁴ Most importantly Ülgener had regarded Ottoman guilds as static and preventing all changes in production methods, while more recent research has shown that this was not true, or at least not as generally true as he had assumed: a degree of flexibility was possible, at least in certain locations and at certain times.

The state of the art: towards an examination of social structures

Ottoman studies of artisans and guilds took something of a new turn in the early 1960s. Now it was not the connection with religious history but a rather more practical approach that became dominant. This new enterprise involved linking up with a quite different scholarly tradition, namely the historical study of Istanbul’s urban administration. Here the pioneer, who had begun his work already during the closing period of the empire, was Osman Nuri, in republican times Osman Nuri Ergin (1883–1961).¹⁵ For it must not be forgotten that in the first half of the twentieth century, Ottoman guilds still belonged to the fairly recent past, and one of the early republican mayors of Istanbul had felt it necessary to obtain extensive information concerning their activities. At least in the port of Istanbul, guilds had been politically potent even in the years preceding the First World War, and in the transport sector some workmen’s organizations perhaps became more rather than less cohesive during the struggles of the late nineteenth century.¹⁶

While in the 1950s craft and service guilds were no longer of much practical concern, emphasis on the ‘secular’ aspects of artisan activity continued to dominate historical research. Apart from the secularist commitments of many social historians, this tendency may have been due to the fact that new document finds from the Ottoman archives were rarely relevant to the religious aspects of craftsmen’s activity. Certainly the sultans’ officials always assumed that Muslims were devoted to their religion, and non-Muslims to their own particular ayin-i batile (invalid religious rites), but this was not a matter on which the authorities had much to say. Of c...