Old World Empires by Ilhan Niaz

Author:Ilhan Niaz [Niaz, Ilhan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Asia, World, Social History
ISBN: 9780415725972
Google: Q4PsnQEACAAJ
Publisher: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2014-01-15T01:22:34+00:00

THE EMERGENCE AND TRIUMPH OF TURKISH NATIONALISM, 1839–2002

The Ottomans are of particular importance to any study of nationalism in the Muslim world. Not only did the Ottomans rule a considerable portion of the Muslim world, but they were also in continuous contact with the West for nearly six centuries, and may well have retained the throne of Turkey had Kemalism not emerged as the dominant political trend in the 1920s. The political and cultural regeneration of the Muslim world after three centuries of Christian Crusades and Mongol massacres (1095–1405) can be credited to Turks, be they Seljuk, Ottomans, Safavids, or Timurids.

The Ottoman Sultanate had to solve the fundamental economic problem of getting food from rural producers to urban consumers while extracting a sufficient share of the surplus to pay for the court, military, and administration. The sultan ran the empire as his personal estate and answered to no one—the only limits to his power were those imposed by geography, rebellion, his personal character, and the abilities of his advisors. Arbitrary rule meant that the quality of the state and the prosperity of the land depended upon the intellectual and moral capabilities of the sultan and his servants. Wise rulers, such as Suleiman I, took a keen personal interest in the management of their sprawling dominions, tempered arbitrariness with enlightened self-interest, and sought to ensure that their corps of military and civilian officers, many of whom were slaves, operated on principles of merit. Ottoman administration of a diverse multitude of communities spread across three continents coupled with the Sublime Porte’s unrelenting pursuit of war and magnificence presented a dilemma common to other continental bureaucratic empires. It was simply not possible to pay the servants of the state, who wielded enormous arbitrary power in the name of the sultan and were often hundreds of miles away from his supervision, a regular salary that would keep them subservient and reasonably honest. The Ottomans, in order to solve this problem, resorted to the sale of offices and tax farming by the sixteenth century.104 “The political repercussions of the ‘privatization’ of the state resources were the incremental loss of control….”105 Another manifestation of the deterioration of the ability of the sultan to restrain his officers was that from “… the end of the sixteenth century bribery became widespread even in the highest grades of the administration,” partly due to the decline in the purchasing power of government salaries.106 Furthermore, the Ottoman Sultanate, for all its administrative genius and power, never developed a mercantilist economic policy107 designed to keep wealth in the hands of indigenous merchants and artisans.

The causes of Ottoman decline have been studied exhaustively. Explanations range from cultural rigidity, which made the use of Western technology and knowledge controversial to the point of inducing paralysis108, to the predatory nature of the janissaries, the millet system, and the Capitulations.109 There was also a widely acknowledged decline in the competence of the sultans from the 1600s onwards although this decline was partly offset by the strength of the central bureaucracy and the abilities of individual ministers.

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