The Ottoman East in the Nineteenth Century
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The Ottoman East in the Nineteenth Century

Societies, Identities and Politics

Ali Sipahi, Dzovinar Derderian, Yasar Tolga Cora, Ali Sipahi, Dzovinar Derderian, Yasar Tolga Cora

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eBook - ePub

The Ottoman East in the Nineteenth Century

Societies, Identities and Politics

Ali Sipahi, Dzovinar Derderian, Yasar Tolga Cora, Ali Sipahi, Dzovinar Derderian, Yasar Tolga Cora

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About This Book

The Ottoman East what is also called Western Armenia, Northern Kurdistan or Eastern Anatolia compared to other peripheries of the Ottoman Empire, has received very little attention in Ottoman historiography. So-called taboo subjects such as the fate of Ottoman Armenians and the Kurdish Question during the latter years of the Ottoman Empire have contributed to this dearth of analysis. By integrating the Armenian and Kurdish elements into the study of the Ottoman Empire, this book seeks to emphasise the interaction of different ethno-religious groups. As an area where Ottoman centralization faced unsurpassable challenges, the Ottoman East offers an ideal opportunity to examine an alternative social and political model for imperial governance and the means by which provincial rule interacted with the Ottoman centre. Discussing vital issues across this geographical area, such as trade routes, regional economic trends, migration patterns and the molding of local and national identities, this book offers a unique and fresh approach to the history and politics of modernization and empire in the wider region."

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PART I
TRANS-REGIONAL CONNECTIVITY: BORDERS, IMMIGRANTS AND COSMOPOLITANISM
CHAPTER 1
THE ROLE OF THE TRABZON–ERZURUM–BAYEZID ROAD IN REGIONAL POLITICS AND OTTOMAN DIPLOMACY, 1850s–1910s
Fulya Özkan

In 1912, Mehmet Emin Bey, the governor of Erzurum, a major trade hub in eastern Anatolia, wrote a long report in which he complained about the lack of roads in his province. The report dramatically described how slowly public works progressed in Erzurum. Socio-economic conditions in his region were especially poor compared to other provinces, which had already benefited from railroad connection and electrification. Therefore, the residents of Erzurum lived in poverty. To overcome this destitution, the governor emphasized that the Ottoman state urgently needed to follow the path of ‘advanced’ nations (nesl-i mĂŒtemeddin-i beƟer), which required a full-scale road reform. According to the governor, to be able to benefit from its natural resources, a country should have a good road network. Thanks to their own improved transportation facilities, the European powers were able to impose on nations that had failed to develop their public works. The governor thought, however, that the Ottomans were one of those nations which insisted on ignoring ‘progressive’ ideas such as road reform. The result was unfair economic treaties and many lost wars. Thus, remembering the recent Italian attack on Tripoli in 1911, the governor saw roads as a significant means to defend the empire against its enemies. In other words, roads were of both political and military significance, as no nation could stay politically independent or militarily strong without economic independence. In this context, the governor thought that roads in Erzurum would protect the empire from the expansion of Imperial Russia.1
Similarly, about ten years prior to the above-mentioned report, the authors of the Trabzon provincial yearbook also stressed that roads had both military and economic functions.2 Moreover, the military function of roads was related not only to the defence of the empire against its foreign enemies but also to protection from its own subjects, because roads served to prevent vagabondage and theft, which were the outcome of unemployment.3 Thus, by the early twentieth century, Ottoman statesmen were aware that they needed to reform the imperial road network in order to ‘save’ the empire. As a matter of fact, this idea had become a concern for them as early as the mid-nineteenth century. For example, provincial elites thought that the construction of roads was at least as important as the elimination of the unjust taxation system;4 the founding father of the Tanzimat, Mustafa ReƟid Pasha, believed that the construction of roads was an indispensable part of civilization;5 and the 1856 Reform Act (Islahat Fermanı) prescribed the formation of roads in order to increase the facilities of communication and the sources of wealth.6
In this context, Ottoman ruling elites, both at the central and local levels, started renovating the Trabzon–Erzurum–Bayezid road in 1850. Only a few months later, however, the construction stopped because of harsh weather conditions. Construction started again in 1857 and continued for the next 14 years. During this long period, only the section between Trabzon and Erzurum was completed. Moreover, when construction ended in 1871, certain parts of this section had already started deteriorating and needed repair because the renovation had taken such a long time. Furthermore, the other half of the road between Bayezid and Erzurum was never completely renovated during the Ottoman Empire. Last but not least, the section between Trabzon and Erzurum also needed frequent repairs after 1871. The construction and repair processes took such a long time because of several difficulties, ranging from financial constraints to technical problems, from official disagreements to corruption, and from organizational defects to natural conditions. In other words, the construction was a never-ending process. A ‘simple’ engineering project thus turned into a long-term process, which continued from the late 1840s – when the initial plans were made – to the late 1910s, the end of the Ottoman Empire
fig-1-1
Figure 1.1 The Trabzon–Erzurum–Bayezid Road
Source: B.O.A., HRT.h. 406.
Part of the reason for this prolongation was the ambivalence inherent in the reform agenda: the state attempted to govern society through the construction of roads, which in reality contributed to the further acceleration of mobility and thus to dynamism and instability. In its essence, the Ottoman road reform had two major goals: one, administrative, and the other, economic. While providing greater security, roads also created a domestic market. To achieve both of these goals, roads were essential because they would connect the provinces both to the centre and to one another. In short, roads would unify the empire. This is how the Ottoman statesmen envisioned the enhanced road network in theory. In reality, however, different state actors were in disagreement about how exactly roads would serve that function. There was a difference both between central and local authorities, and among provincial officials themselves. Thus, there was not a specific ‘state’ goal.
One of the best ways to observe this fragmented nature of the modern Ottoman state may be to divide the imperial geography into the different spatial levels within which the Trabzon–Bayezid road functioned. While Ottoman statesmen renovated their road system in order to create both political and economic unity within the empire and to separate it from others (mostly Russia and Iran in this context), roads also, as I will show below, turned into subversive spaces, functioning against the very logic of creating borderlines between different political entities. The implicit dilemmas and contradictory aspects of the reform agenda brought into question the very idea of strict borders. Pointing out this aspect of the reform serves to reveal the invalidity of the assumption that the local was absorbed within the ‘national’ along with the emergence of modern states. According to this view, ‘scholars understand the state to be the culmination of a process transcending the old localized organizations in societies, which had previously made the rules’.7 In contrast, I argue that the geographical ambivalence inherent in the road reform can further contribute to the argument that the very nature of modernization was actually contradictory and inconsistent and that its logic counteracted the creation of a structural order of neatly separated provincial and imperial borders.
Analysing the variety of the spatial frameworks within which the Trabzon–Bayezid road functioned can also contribute to the depiction of modernity as an unstable and incoherent process. In the last instance, modernization, which initially seemed to be a progressive idea, also involved, in its essence, a conservative aspect. As Lefebvre suggests, ‘the contradiction between the demands of mobility and the general preoccupation with stability, security, structure, ‘structuring’, and equilibrium’ is one of the ‘several genuine traits of modernity’.8 In more general terms, as David Harvey states,
[m]odernism's travails were internal. How to contain flowing and expanding processes in a fixed spatial frame of power relations, infrastructures and the like could not easily be resolved. The result was a social system that was all too prone to creative destruction.9
These lines manifest the inherently contradictory nature of modernity: the optimistic belief in a better future promises change and progress which, in turn, need to be balanced and controlled by order and discipline. As Lefebvre suggests, this contradiction has been intrinsic to the meaning of the word ‘modern’ from the very beginning. The term ‘involved the double idea of renewal and of regularity in renewal’ or the ‘idea of cyclical regularity of change, and of change as norm’.10 Thus, Lefebvre defines modernity as ‘a fruitless attempt to achieve structure and coherence. Everything leads us to the conclusion that structures are being ‘destructured’ even before they have gained a coherent internal stability.’11
Along these lines, this chapter will analyse the renovation process of the Trabzon–Bayezid road across three spatial categories. The first section will outline the importance of the road from the perspective of the regional economy, which transcended the borders of the Ottoman Empire and established ties with the Russian Caucasus. The next two sections will discuss the local rivalries and tensions both between Erzurum and Trabzon provincial governments and within the general public of each province. Last but not least, the final section will focus on the trans-imperial importance of the road as it became a hotly debated topic among the diplomatic circles of the Ottoman, Qajar, Russian, British and French states.
Regional Economy
In 1909, Erzurum's governor Mehmet Celal Bey wrote a report in which he argued that the province urgently needed a road to connect to the Black Sea. In the absence of roads, people could export only their livestock; but they faced difficulty in transporting agricultural produce. The lack of sufficient transportation facilities also turned minor crop failures into widespread famine. On the other hand, when eastern Anatolia benefited from a good harvest, the result was a decline in local grain prices because the province lacked a road network that would allow it to transport its surplus grain to other markets.12
These observations point out the regional and trans-imperial framework within which the road functioned. Fresh produce decomposed in Erzurum's storehouses, while the neighbouring province had to import food supplies from Europe and the Americas in order to feed its population of 1,500,000. This was the case because Trabzon lacked fertile soil. In turn, Trabzon financed the imbalance in its trade income with the remittances of its residents – predominantly from Lazistan sub-province – who worked in the Russian mines. At the same time, however, there were rich iron, copper, and coal mines on Hınıs Mountain just to the south of Erzurum. Thus, instead of immigrating to Russia as seasonal workers, residents of Trabzon could actually work in Ottoman mines. This irony could be resolved only if the two provinces were able to communicate with one another in an efficient manner.13
In other words, with better transportation facilities, Lazistan sub-province could be integrated into the local economy of Erzurum and overcome its isolation from the rest of the empire which was caused by its closeness to the Russian border. Above all, if transportation were cheaper, Erzurum's agricultural produce could compete with the foreign goods that Trabzon imported. Due to high transportation costs and variances in local prices, however, Erzurum's merchants preferred to keep their products in warehouses until a more appropriate time – like famine or war – arrived and they could sell their goods at a higher profit.14
Whereas Trabzon needed Erzurum's grain, Erzurum needed to import timber and fresh produce such as fruit and vegetables from Trabzon. Due to the lack of dense forests, Soğanlı Mountain near SarıkamÄ±ĆŸ had been the closest and primary source of timber for Erzurum – as Alexander Pushkin, who travelled to the city in 1829, confirmed15 – until the Treaty of Berlin, which concluded the 1877–78 Russo–Ottoman War, assigned Soğanlı Mountain to Imperial Russia.16 Thereafter Erzurum faced a serious shortage of timber and Derindere Forest (located between Trabzon and Bayburt) became the province's closest source of timber.17 In this context, the maintenance of the Trabzon–Erzurum road became even more urgent and the central government decided also to repair the Derindere road, which linked the forest to the main Trabzon–Erzurum road.18
In exchange for timber, fruit, and vegetables, Erzurum also exported yearly 1,600 tons of leather, wool, eggs, cheese, dried beef, catgut, suet, linseed, asphodel, beeswax, and straw mats in the early twentieth century. In return, the province imported 16,000 tons of goods from outside. For example, the province was importing iron, copper, sugar, and kerosene from Russia. Russians sent these items to Trabzon by sea and then Trabzon transported them to Erzurum. Russian ships also sold flour and corn to the residents of Lazistan sub-province. Finally, the region also imported ironware and copperware from Europe.19
To summarize, there was a triangular trade between Trabzon, Erzurum, and Russia and in this picture, Lazistan sub-province of Trabzon seemed to be economically more integrated to Russia than to the Ottoman Empire. Trabzon imported grain from foreign markets (including Russia, Europe and the Americas) in exchange for sending mine-workers to Russia. As for Erzurum, the province was importing fresh produce and timber from Trabzon, but the volume of this trade was not matched by the export of grain to Trabzon because of high transportation costs. Therefore, more efficient transportation facilities between the two provinces promised to establish a new triangular relationship with the Lazistan sub-province which wo...

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