Turkey

A Modern History

Erik J. Zürcher

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786721839
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

This revised edition builds upon and updates its twin themes of Turkey's continuing incorporation into the capitalist world and the modernization of state and society. It begins with the forging of closer links with Europe after the French Revolution, and the changing face of the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century. Zurcher argues that Turkey's history between 1908 and 1950 should be seen as a unity, and offers a strongly revisionist interpretation of Turkey's founding father, Kemal Ataturk. In his account of the period since 1950, Zurcher focuses on the growth of mass politics; the three military coups; the thorny issue of Turkey's human right's record; the alliance with the West and relations with the European Community; Turkey's ambivalent relations with the Middle East; the increasingly explosive Kurdish question; and the continuing political instability and growth of Islam.

PART I

Capitalism, Imperialism and the Growth of the Modern State

1 ·The Ottoman Empire at the End of the Eighteenth Century

In the late eighteenth century, just before the upheavals caused by the French Revolution, the Ottoman Empire roughly consisted of the Balkans (with modern-day Serbia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Albania, Greece, Bulgaria and large parts of Romania), Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) and most of the Arab world (with the modern states of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Iraq, Kuwait, parts of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Algeria). In large parts of his dominions, the sultan’s real power was slight; in some parts (North Africa, the Arabian peninsula) it was practically non-existent.

The population of the empire

There are no reliable estimates of the population of the empire, but the number of inhabitants is often put at about 25 million, a low number for so large an area (about three million square kilometres).¹ Indeed, the lack of manpower constituted one of the main handicaps of the Ottoman Empire both economically and militarily throughout the nineteenth century, at a time when the population of Europe showed a high rate of growth. Of the Ottoman population, about 85 per cent lived in the countryside, while about 15 per cent lived in towns of 10,000 inhabitants or more. Both in population density and in the degree of urbanization there were great regional differences, with the Balkans being the most densely populated area. Around 1800, the Balkan provinces also held the majority of the population, but their share would decline sharply in the nineteenth century.² The population of the empire had probably been on the decrease during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but the extent of this decrease is not known. The decrease, and the very low density that was the result, were the product of the classic Malthusian checks of war, famine and disease. Wars, and especially the small-scale internal conflicts that were the result of the existing lack of centralized control and maintenance of law and order, caused interruptions in the agricultural production process and in communications. The resulting famines in turn made the population vulnerable to epidemics, which usually attacked the weakened population in the aftermath of a food shortage. Lack of security caused the population in the countryside to withdraw gradually from the low-lying plains into the hills or the mountains. Over time this turned many former cultivated areas into malaria-infested marshes.

In the Asiatic provinces of the empire the large majority of the population was Muslim (mainly Turks, Arabs and Kurds), with significant Christian and Jewish minorities. In the Balkans, the majority was Christian (Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs, Montenegrins, Vlahs) with significant Muslim minorities (Bosnians, most Albanians, Turks and Pomaks, namely Muslim Bulgarians). These religious divisions within the population were important because the empire, at least in theory, was an Islamic empire, ruled on the basis of religious law. It used to be the accepted truth that the Ottoman Empire knew no distinction between religion and state, but modern research tends to emphasize the extent to which the Ottomans did separate politics and religion, at least in practice. Theoretically, the holy law of Islam ruled supreme in the empire, but in practice by the eighteenth century it had been confined to matters of family law, of contract law and of ownership. According to Ottoman legal experts, the sultan had the right to rule by decree, örf or kanun, as long as his decrees could be shown not to contradict Islamic law. Public law, and especially criminal law, was largely based on these decrees.

Nevertheless, accommodating the non-Muslim communities within a dominant Islamic society did pose problems. As in earlier Islamic states, the Christian and Jewish groups had been incorporated into society by giving them dhimmi (‘protected’, in practice tributary) status. This meant that, in exchange for the payment of a special tax, they were allowed to continue to live within the Muslim state, without forced conversion but as second-class subjects. The dhimmi communities enjoyed a measure of autonomy in the conduct of their own affairs and were represented by their religious dignitaries in their dealings with the representatives of the state. As is the case with many aspects of the Ottoman state and society, the nature of this system, often designated as the ‘millet system’ (millet: nation, community) has long been misunderstood. This is because scholars based their work on the writings of representatives of the central government, who wrote about the way things should be, not about how they really were. In the last 30 years, detailed research of local and regional realities has shown that the system did not consist of ‘nationwide’ autonomous bodies headed by, for instance, the Greek patriarch in Constantinople, as had been supposed, but of local communities with a certain measure of autonomy vis-à-vis the local representatives of the government. Also, segregation seems to have been much less strict than had been assumed earlier.³

The Muslim majority of the indigenous population of the empire was by no means monolithic. The large majority belonged to the Sunni (Orthodox) version of Islam and according to its official ideology the Ottoman state was the protector of orthodox Islam in the world. Officially, it combated heterodox Muslims even more vehemently than it did Christians. This was logical because, while Islamic law could and did recognize the existence of other ‘People of the Book’ (Christians and Jews who were also the recipients of revealed religion), Islam was officially one and indivisible. In practice, important Shi’i (Heterodox) minorities lived in the Balkans, Anatolia, Syria and Mesopotamia, tolerated by the Ottoman authorities: Alevis, but also Nusayris and Druze.

Christian foreigners who resided in the empire enjoyed aman (mercy), a safe conduct under Islamic law. Their ambassadors and consuls, who had a measure of autonomy in dealing with cases that concerned only members of the expatriate community, represented them. These rights had been laid down in the so-called ‘capitulations’. Originally, these were voluntary concessions the sultan granted to the subjects of friendly states, but in the second half of the eighteenth century, with the changing balance of power between Europe and the Ottoman Empire, the capitulations had acquired treaty status, with the European powers insisting the Ottomans could not change them unilaterally. Furthermore, in the eighteenth and especially in the nineteenth century more and more local Christians (mostly Greeks and Armenians but also Maronites and others) were granted the status of subject of a foreign power through the acquisition of a berat (decree of appointment) from the Ottoman government. They from then on fell under the capitulations of that power and with the growing strength of the European powers gained an ever-growing advantage over the sultan’s Muslim subjects. At the same time, the influence of the foreign powers increased further because of the growth in the number of their subjects in the Levant.

The Ottoman system of government: theory and reality

According to the Ottoman ideology, society in the empire was organized around a – theoretically strict – distinction between a ruling elite, which did not pay taxes and was entitled to carry arms, and the mass of the population (in Ottoman terms: reaya, ‘flocks’) for which the reverse was true. The ruling elite consisted of two categories: the representatives of the sultan’s power and the guardians of the moral order. The ruling elite, which was designated as askeri (military), or ‘Ottoman’ (Osmanli) par excellence, consisted of all servants of the sultan: the military, the clerks of the scribal institutions and the royal household. The ulema, the religious scholars, who were entrusted with the keeping of the moral order and thus with most forms of formal education and justice, also belonged to the ruling elite. Although extremely privileged when compared with the mass of the people, the sultan’s servants did not yet constitute a more or less autonomous bureaucratic/military elite such as they would become in the next century; they were instruments of imperial power, to be rotated, dismissed or executed at the sultan’s will. This was even true for the highest dignitary of all, the grand vizier (Sadrazam), who was regarded as the sultan’s alter ego, and who was invested with all the powers of the ruler as long as he held the sultan’s seal of office, but at the same time was completely dependent on the latter’s whim.⁴

By 1800 the governmental system could still be characterized as ‘patrimonial’: it basically formed an extension of the sultan’s own household. The pattern of rule through an extended household, of which not only family members but also servants, slaves and clients form a part, was characteristic of the Ottoman elite at all its levels. Seeking patronage through adhesion to such a household was a prerequisite for any governmental career.

The elite not only exercised power, it also was the keeper of a classic civilization, a ‘great tradition’, based on written Islamic sources (of which the ulema were the keepers and which was reproduced through the system of religious colleges called medreses) and on a more secular code of conduct and taste called adab (which was characteristic of the military/bureaucratic elite and reproduced through informal education and training). This civilization, which was really the set of values and opinions that made an Ottoman an Ottoman, constituted a strong integrative force in an empire made up of so many diverse elements. There was an exceedingly wide chasm between this civilization and the outlook of the almost totally illiterate rural population, whose horizon was limited by the surrounding villages and, at best, the market town. One link between the elite civilization and popular culture was formed by the mystical orders or fraternities (tarikat), such as the Mevlevi, Nakşibendi, Rifa’i and the heterodox Bektaşi orders, which had established a closely-knit network of lodges (tekkes) all over the empire. Membership of these lodges cut across the different layers of society and the most important şeyhs had a great deal of influence even in the ruling circles.

Other links between the mass of the population and the ruling elite were formed by the rich merchants and bankers of the towns, who, while technically not members of the askeri, performed vital services to this group, and – for Muslims – by the ulema, who formed a body connecting the lowliest kadi (judge) in the provincial town to the highest religious dignitaries in Istanbul. An important category among the ulema was formed by the müftüs. These were legal experts who upon request and against payment gave legal opinions (based on Islamic canon law). Although these legal opinions (called fetva) were not binding (they were not verdicts), the müftüs enjoyed great respect. The fact that the Ottoman state legitimized itself as an Islamic state meant that the opinions of the doctors of Islamic law carried a great deal of weight. The most important of the müftüs was the Şeyhülislam, who was regularly asked to legitimize the acts of the government. In the event of rebellions against the palace or the grand vizier, the insurgents always made sure they received a fetva condoning their actions. For the Christians of the empire the churches with their own hierarchies constituted an important element linking the mass and the elite.

According to the official ideology, the main task of the ruler and of his servants was to defend the Islamic community against the outside world and to maintain justice within Islamic society. Justice (adalet) and the government’s role in guaranteeing it was key to the Ottoman view of society. In the eyes of the Ottoman statesmen it, more than anything else, stood for stability and harmony. It meant that within society, each group and each individual should remain in his place (within his bounds or hudud), without trespassing on the rights of others. The government should rule within the bounds of law and enforce the hudud. A ruler (or his representative) who did not remain within the hudud was guilty of zülm, tyranny. The emphasis on the value of stability entailed a basically conservative political outlook in which any change in the social order had negative connotations. Ottoman writers were quick to label any social or religious protest fitne (mischief, disorder). According to nineteenth-century Ottoman sources, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Islamic scholars in particular had developed a very conservative, sometimes obscurantist attitude. This was blamed on the fact that appointments depended on nepotism, not scholarship.⁵ It should be added, however, that very little research has been done on the ulema of this period.

Ottoman ideology emphasized the exclusivity of the relationship between the ruler (and his servants) and the subjects. The sultan represented absolute power and many of his servants, though powerful as delegates of his authority, were technically his slaves. The Ottoman system of government and of land ownership had always been geared towards preventing the emergence of competing centres of power, such as an aristocracy, which would be able to skim off part of the surplus production of the population, which would otherwise have reached the coffers of the state in the form of taxes. For a long time, the central Ottoman government was quite successful in this respect, but, as we shall see, by the end of the eighteenth century, this was no longer true.

Compared with governments of modern nation-states (but not with those of other eighteenth-century states) the Ottoman Empire, certainly in the eighteenth century, was very different in three respects. First, it was very small. This was true in an absolute sense: the central governmental apparatus in Istanbul (the Bab-ı Ali: ‘Sublime Porte’, or ‘Porte’ for short) employed between 1000 and 1500 clerks.⁶ It was also true relatively speaking: the part of the national product that went to the central government in taxes is not known exactly or even approximately for this period, but it almost certainly did not exceed 3 per cent.⁷ This does not mean that the tax burden on the population, especially the rural population, was light: quite the contrary. It does mean, however, that the revenue did not reach the central treasury, because intermediaries skimmed it off to an extraordinary extent. According to some estimates the central state received only the equivalent of between 2.25 and 4 million pounds sterling out of the 20 million that was levied in taxes in an average year. If this is true, the Ottoman state treasury held only between one tenth and one sixth of that of France.⁸ Part of the explanation is that the empire by this time had a highly decentralized structure and provincial treasuries used a large part of the tax income to cover the costs of provincial government.⁹

The tasks performed by and expected of the government were, by modern standards, minimal. It concerned itself with the defence of the realm and the maintenance of law and order (including criminal justice); it supervised the markets, weights and measures; issued coins; provided the major cities, especially Istanbul, with food and built and maintained some major public works. In order to be able to execute these tasks, the government enforced, as much as it could, the collection of taxes. All kinds of things that are nowadays looked upon as normal tasks for a government, such as education, healthcare, welfare and housing, were of little concern to the imperial Ottoman government.

Second, the small scale of the government apparatus meant that, unlike a modern government, which deals directly with its citizens in many ways, the Ottoman government more often than not dealt (or had to deal) with representatives of communities: parish priests or imams represented the wards, grand masters the guilds, consuls the foreign residents and sheikhs their tribes. The main reason for this was, of course, that the state lacked the resources to deal with each individual, but it is also true that, as in most pre-modern societies, the individual was very much subordinate to the group, or the different groups, to which he or she belonged.

Third, there was no concept of equality before the law. Even in modern nation-states equality before the law is an ideal, not a reality, but in the Ottoman Empire it was not even an ideal. Inhabitants of the cities were treated differently from the rural population; Christians and Jews were treated differently from Muslims, nomads differently from settlers and women very differently from men. Towns, guilds, tribes or individuals jealously guarded old established privileges.

The Ottoman Empire was a very large pre-modern state and it had not undergone the centralization that France had experienced in the seventeenth century and that enlightened autocrats like Joseph II in Austria, Frederick the Great in Prussia and Catherine the Great in Russia had carried out in the eighteenth century. This meant that by the late eighteenth century the empire was in a weakened position, relatively speaking, with regards to its main European rivals. This weakness was expressed primarily on the battlefield. The two classical pillars of Ottoman military might since the fourteenth century, the salaried janissaries (originally Yeni Çeri, ‘New Army’) infantry and the semi-feudal Sipahi cavalry, had long since lost their value. The janissary troops, who by the eighteenth century were garrisoned in the major provincial centres as well as in the capital, were a numerically large (and expensive) but militarily largely worthless body, strong enough to terrorize government and population alike, but too weak to defend the empire, as a series of disastrous wars with technologically and tactically superior European armies had shown during the last hundred years. The janissaries had by now developed into a part-time militia. Through shared ownership of shops and protection rackets they had merged with the guilds in the bazaars. Their paper appointments in the regiments gave them and the shops they protected a privileged status. The number of appointment papers for a Janissary regiment was far higher than the number of soldiers actually serving and in some places had developed into a kind of informal currency. The Sipahis, who during the heyday of the empire had been paid indirectly by the granting of fiefs (timars), had been driven off the land by inflation because their income consisted of a fixed sum, while the real costs of going on campaign spiralled. Their number had greatly declined by 1800. Besides, the type of essentially mediaeval cavalry they represented was of course of little use in the wars of this time. In the wars of the late eighteenth century, the Ottoman army came to rely on levies of mainly Muslim Anatolian and Balkan peasants and of lawless young men from the towns, collectively called Levends. These militias were hired for a single campaign season or for th...