Ali Yaycioglu. Partners of the Empire: The Crisis of the Ottoman Order in the Age of Revolutions. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016. 368 pp. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8047-9612-5.
Reviewed by Robert John Clines (Western Carolina University)
Published on H-War (June, 2018)
Commissioned by Margaret Sankey (Air University)
There is a threadbare myth that the Ottoman Empire, spasmodically depicted from the mid-nineteenth century onward as the Sick Man of Europe, was in a free-fall decline because of its antiquated Oriental despotism and failure to modernize adequately; meanwhile, Europe marched toward modernity and left its Eastern converse behind. The result, so the old story goes, was not only the empire’s collapse after its defeat in the First World War, but a complete recalibration of statecraft in postwar Turkey that aimed to correct the corrupt ineptitude that had plagued a moribund empire and prevented the construction of a modern state. This persistent view was at least partly driven by the Eurocentric belief that the only way for a state to reform itself—to modernize—was to follow a European paradigm of statecraft, grounded in Westernization, secularization, democratization, and neoliberalism. That a failed teleology was the root cause of the Ottoman Empire’s collapse in the wake of World War I whereas its European rivals thrived, so Ali Yaycioglu contends, overlooks a significant body of evidence that illuminates a more complicated process in which the Ottoman Empire did not limp along until its inevitable fall, but rather grappled with internal crisis, attempted to reform its institutions, and aimed to coordinate cooperative leadership between imperial and provincial magnates in the name of streamlining the state and creating a more efficiently governable empire.
Yaycioglu argues that one of the challenges confronting Ottoman scholars regarding reform movements in the Age of Revolutions is that many studies have looked at the relationship between the provinces and the imperial center as one of oppositional binaries that eventually gave way to absolutist integration that was not as efficient as the types of shared governance and bureaucratization that one sees in European nations at the time; but this is a problematic view, because there was clearly an entanglement of “ties, institutions, and relationships that were continuously renegotiated by many actors. Integration was neither necessarily imposed by the center nor fully controlled by it” (p. 12). While later developments should not be ignored, such as the role that the American and French Revolutions played in stimulating nationalist sentiments among Balkan Christians—first and foremost in Greece—Yaycioglu insists that we should move beyond seeing the Age of Revolutions solely as proof of European political dynamism in contrast to Ottoman stagnation. Rather, we should investigate in greater depth “how Ottoman political culture produced possibilities for reform of the empire in an epoch when reform was increasingly understood as inevitable, and how various groups—with their own agendas, priorities, and calculations—challenged or became part of reform politics” (p. 8). Furthermore, lest we forget the role of larger geopolitical shifts in reform movements, Yaycioglu also “highlights historical connections, since most of these episodes took place, not in an isolated Ottoman theater, but as an integrated part of Eurasian politics, economies, and war” (p. 8). The result is a book that positions crises of empire and Ottoman reform movements as not at all different from the types of crises and concomitant reforms that were prevalent in other European nations in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Over five chapters, Yaycioglu lays out his argument that the crises of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire should be seen in light of larger crises and reforms throughout Europe. The first three chapters present analytical and thematic explorations of Ottoman institutions and how various actors transformed them amid social, political, military, and fiscal crises. Chapter 1 provides an overview of current scholarship and gives a brief sketch of the Ottoman world in the eighteenth century. It also provides an examination of the New Order, a set of reforms that aimed to deal with fiscal and military challenges that were heightened by wars with Russia and Austria. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on the provinces and their relationships with the imperial center as well as the empire as a collective whole. Chapter 2 explores the nature of ties between the provincial elite and the imperial administration. Yaycioglu claims that we should see Ottoman provincial elites as entrepreneurs who, rather than oppose imperial designs of reform, saw the reform movement as an opportunity to promote personal, family, and regional interests. Chapter 3 builds on what Yaycioglu calls the “business of governance” (p. 95) in chapter 2 by exploring how provincial communities grappled with the reformist changes that recalibrated the relationship between provincial and imperial elites. In particular, Yaycioglu underscores the “institutional consolidation of several bottom-up collective practices in public administration and finance in the central provinces of the empire” that quite demonstrably “echoed physiocracy in France and Spain in the eighteenth century” (p. 117), further proof that Ottoman reforms did not occur in a hermetically sealed, Eastern vault, but rather occurred as part of a larger pan-Mediterranean, shared vision for political reform.
Chapters 4 and 5 take a different path, as they are more case studies than the broad, big-picture explorations seen in the first three chapters; but, like the first three chapters, they nevertheless show the larger links within and beyond the empire that have long been overlooked in the scholarship. Chapter 4 explores a two-year window (1806-08) in which the New Order and Janissaries, the elite infantry units of the Ottoman old guard, battled for control of the empire. Through a narrative of events that appear to be nothing short of a full-blown revolutionary war ostensibly not dissimilar from the American and French Revolutions, replete with deposed sultans and a war with Russia, Yaycioglu reminds us that “the battle between the New Order and the Janissaries was far more complex than simply a conflict between new and old, change and reaction, Western and Eastern” (p. 162). Rather, we should broaden our scope and recognize the fluid interstices between these two antagonistic groups as well as the actions of outsiders who had much to gain or lose in the conflict. In essence, not only was Janissary resistance to the New Order not grounded in outmoded dialectic oppositions (viz. modern/premodern, East/West, democratic/despotic) that have pervaded the scholarship, but opposition to the New Order played itself out in a fashion similar to resistance to myriad reform movements throughout Europe, for example in coffeehouses, baths, barbershops, etc.—that is to say, resistance was often grounded in popular furor, not just between competing elites.
Chapter 5 is a close reading of the Deed Allowance of 1808, a draft agreement following two years of civil war that allowed for an alliance of mutual governance between the central state and provincial magnates that would potentially extend the survival of the empire. While the Deed of Alliance itself was never actually implemented in Ottoman law, Yaycioglu’s close readings of its seven clauses and discussions of its long-term implications allow him to posit that the Deed of Alliance shaped much of the political discourse and constitutional reforms of the Ottoman Empire throughout the nineteenth century. This was because the deed was neither a top-down nor a bottom-up call for reform, but rather was a surety contract between central and provincial elites that “envisioned a horizontal partnership of elites, whose safety was mutually guaranteed, with full liability” (p. 236). The result was a document that paved the way for the types of governmental reforms that defined the Age of Revolutions, namely limits on the power of monarchs, juridical reform, rights to opposition, and participation in the governance of the state.
On the whole, when we compare Ottoman reform movements in the wake of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century crises with reforms and revolutions elsewhere—from America to Safavid Persia, according to Yaycioglu—it should be quite clear that the Ottoman Empire’s New Order experiment and the resulting crises and compromises should be placed into a global context and not seen as evidence of Ottoman dysfunction that would eventually cause the empire’s collapse in the twentieth century. While Yaycioglu does admit that the burgeoning senses of nationalism among the empire’s Christian populations eventually did signal the empire’s death knell, those movements also happened across the Mediterranean, such as in the Habsburg-controlled Balkans, further proof that this was not purely an Ottoman problem but was a tacit reality in an era of political revolutions and burgeoning nationalisms.
At times, Yaycioglu’s presentation of this tension between new and old, change and reaction, Western and Eastern might seem overstated, at least on the surface of things. Nevertheless, Yaycioglu contends, it would behoove the reader to remember that when such tensions are evaluated in the historiographical debates of the Age of Revolutions, there is little discussion of European elites’ backwardness or refusal to grapple with change. Yet, the Ottomans are treated as somehow different because of their perceived non-Europeanness, and the collapse of their empire has been portrayed as the result of the Ottomans’ backwardness rather than the vicissitudes and fortunes of empires. But as Yaycioglu has shown, the Ottoman Empire grappled with the very same problems that its European counterparts did and attempted to reform itself accordingly. And like those in the empires of those counterparts, some reforms worked and others did not. If, then, we are to understand the Age of Revolutions as a global phenomenon, which it most certainly was, Yaycioglu’s study is an important intervention that compels us to reconsider revolution and reform in the Ottoman Empire as evidence that its crises of empire occurred in lockstep with similar crises that arose contemporaneously in the empires of its rivals and allies.
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Citation:
Robert John Clines. Review of Yaycioglu, Ali, Partners of the Empire: The Crisis of the Ottoman Order in the Age of Revolutions.
H-War, H-Net Reviews.
June, 2018.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=52075
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