5.3

 

1.1.       Military Revolution and Westernization

 

The Turkish modernization/Westernization had been interpreted primarily as an identity problem rather than a strictly political and structural one by the earlier historiography. The political necessity or even political immediacy had been recognized as a push factor that forced Ottomans to pursue an aggressive and uncompromising enterprise of Westernization. For scholars like Berkes and Lewis, the Otttoman transformation/modernization/Westernization process was primarily a structural and political one implemented in dire conditions as an utter necessity but they also assumed that identity problem had to be encountered and resolved for Ottomans to embark on a determined Westernization venture. In these scholars, the Ottoman transformation was

 

 

Identities: The Self-Representation of Rulers and Subjects, Cambridge, U.K. : Cambridge University Press, 2001.

²²⁰ Wortman, Richard, Scenarios of Power, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.

²²¹ For the representations and manifestations of the Japanese imperial cult, see Fujitani, Takashi, Splendid Monarchy, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

²²² Deringil, Selim, The Well-Protected Domains, London; New York: I. B. Tauris, 1999,

p. 17.

²²³ For the Habsburgs, also see Unowsky, Daniel L., The Pomp and Politics of Patriotism: Imperial Celebrations in Imperial Austria, 1848-1916, West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2005.

perceived as a matter of identity more than a matter of adaptation to modernity.²²⁴ This paradigm is arguably a relic of the Orientalist origins of Ottoman historiography.

With the incorporation of Ottoman studies into the mainstream historiography, from the 1970s onwards the late Ottoman history began to be investigated through the application of universal concepts of social sciences and paradigms of history and historical sociology. Here, in line with these studies, it will be suggested that it is misleading to attribute a primary role to the politics of identity and presume that politics of identity was prevalent since the beginnings of Ottoman Westernization. However, it is necessary to contextualize and historicize identity politics rather than treat it as a natural phenomenon as if West and East exist in pure forms. Here, it will be argued that, the problem of identity arose in the later phases of the so-called Westernization process which itself was a product of

―Westernization‖.²²⁵ This point will be explored in the coming chapters in the case of Ottoman diplomats. In fact, identity politics is a consequence of encountering with modernity as argued by Sorin Mitu.

―In fact, identity and self-perception crises are merely an effect of modernization, all the sharper as the latter quickens its pace. As a consequence, there is no escape from

²²⁴ Berkes, The Development… p. 2, Lewis, The Emergence… pp. 45-46.

²²⁵ The notion of identity had been introduced to social sciences by Eric Ericson, a Swedish émigre to United States, he felt his identity as a constitutive part of his self (Handler, Richard, ―Is ‗Identity‘ a Useful Cross-Cultural Concept ?‖ in Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, John R. Gilllis (ed.), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994, p. 34). In his classical opus, Ericson studied Martin Luther as a man in psychological crisis. He introduced and developed psychological history. His personal and individualistic notion of identity had been redefined in social sciences as ―social identity‖, identity as a social notion. From Ericson, identity had been a popular interest area of social sciences in general. It even demolished the socio-economical approach which had been the principal perspective in social sciences until 1980s. With the linguistic turn, identity had been seen an autonomous subject by itself. The recent theorists presume that ―identity‖ does not only accompany social-economical developments but it has its own reality. Furthermore, identity may have priority over the socio-economical developments in historical determinacy. The identity may determine the socio-economical context and not vice versa. However, a reaction to the hegemonic discourse of identity had been leveled in the recent years. Charles Taylor‘s ―Sources of the Self‖ exposes that a certain understanding/perception of the self is a modern-Western concept, although Taylor‘s book does accept many of the presumptions of the identity discourse. See Erikson, Erik, Young Man Luther, Norton, 1962; Taylor, Charles, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge, U.K. : Cambridge University Press, 1992.

an inter-conditioning between critical reflection on modernity and an identity-centered problematic, as a fundamental and inextricable datum of one‘s existence. Modernity, as mental space and general human condition, shelters the seed of a somewhat paradoxical attitude: the post-modern tendency to deny and ceaselessly reformulate not only tradition and the ‗oldness‘ against which it defines itself, but also its own bases and motivations-reasons, individualism and ‗progress‘, individual and collective identity, which is a tendency that runs the risk of being (completely erroneously) taken for traditionalism and anti-modernity.‖²²⁶

The structural reasons for the precipitation of the Ottoman modernization and transformation is attested by the new generation of Ottomanists. Şükrü Hanioğlu writes;

―by and large, when Ottoman policy makers and intellectuals turned toward Europe, they did so not out of a clear, articulate ideological preference, as is often suggested by later Ottoman scholars. Rather, they looked to Europe for answers because a return to the old order was thoroughly unattractive for answers because there was nowhere else to turn. Extreme reactionaries existed in late Ottoman society as elsewhere. But the sharp debate between them and the radical Westernizers distorts the historical reality of a consensus on the need for a European-inspired change that was shared by a solid majority of the Ottoman elite from the nineteenth century onward.‖²²⁷ First and foremost, the labeling of the process had to be questioned. The label ―Westernization‖ is a label that had been established in reading history backwards and misrepresents the actual process in many ways. The label ―modernization‖ also creates similar shortcomings. The problem with these two idioms is that they evoke an organized, pre-planned and full-fledged project of social, political and institutional transformation. These labels assume implicitly that there was a certain decision made at a certain time which initiated the inevitable and irreversible process of ―Westernization‖ and ―modernization‖. In reality, the objects of the process were much more modest and spontaneous. It was in the beginning fundamentally a project

²²⁶ Mitu, Sorin, National Identity of Romanians in Transylvania, Budapest: CEU Press, 2001, p. 97. Also for the development of identity politics in Poland throughout 19th century in encounter with the ―West‖ and quest for authenticity and inclusion simultenously, see Jedlicki, Jerzy, A Suburb of Europe, Budapest: CEU Press, 1988. The Romanian, Polish and Turkish self-perceptions and identity constructions are strikingly similar. These identities and attributes all derived from encountering with modernity and

―more advanced Western nations‖.

²²⁷ Hanioğlu, Şükrü, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman History, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008, p. 211.

of reforming the current state apparatus and rendering the state organization more resilient and more efficient. It was a state project targeting state institutions. It involved no social and transformative dimensions.

It was a Westernizing project in the sense that the Ottomans wanted to replicate the impressive and effective state institutions of the Western powers which had been the supporting base for strong armies. The Ottomans did not show any timidity in their aspirations. They wanted to learn how Western powers had organized themselves that made them so vigorous and fierce. This was not a matter related to the ―realm of religion‖ but relevant to the ―realm of state affairs‖ and ―military science‖²²⁸ (fenn-i harb²²⁹).

―State affairs‖ in the late 18th and the early 19th century meant predominantly military affairs. The budget was principally spent on military expenditures until the early 19^th century.²³⁰ Furthermore, it was the military defeats rather than certain other economical

²²⁸ For 18th century ―military science‖, see Stoye, John, Marsigli‟s Europe, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. Also for ―military science‖ being a distinct and specialized science, see Webb, Henry, Elizabethian Military Science, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965.

²²⁹ Fenn-i harb was defined in a manual written in the 1830s as follows: “Her bir nefere başka başka „acemi ve üstad nefer ta‟limini öğrettikten sonra birkaç neferi bir sıra üzre dizip‟ aynı hareketleri onlara beraberce icra ettirmek ve ba‟dehu ol neferatı bir bölüğe rabt ile bölük ta‟limini ve sekiz bölüğü bir tabura rabt ile ta‟bur talimine ve dört taburu bir alaya rabt ile alay ta‟limini ve iki alayı bir livaya rabt ile liva ta‟limini ve iki livayı bir fırakaya rabt ile ferik ta‟limini icra ettirmek usulü velhasıl ta‟lim ve ta‟allüm maddesi al‟l- itlak fenn-i harb tabir olunmakla fenn-i harb fenn-i ta‟lim demek olur.” In the same manual, fenn-i muharebe was defined as follows: “ol mu‟allem ve muntazam‟ askeri bir yere cem edip musammem olan maksudun istihsali zımmında cümlesini mahal ve mevki‟inde güzelce ve müdebbirane istimal etmek fenn-i muharebe ta‟bir olunur.” Yıldız, Gültekin, Neferin Adı Yok: Zorunlu Askerliğe Geçiş Sürecinde Osmanlı Devleti‟nde Siyaset, Ordu ve Toplum (1826-1839), İstanbul: Kitabevi, 2009, p. 362.

²³⁰ Cezar, Yavuz, Osmanlı Maliyesinde Bunalım ve Değişim Dönemi, İstanbul: Alan Yayıncılık, 1986, p. 301. This book demonstrates the military origins of fiscal reforms and fiscal modernization in the 18th and early 19th century Ottoman Empire. For a calculation of the percentages of the spending of the imperial treasuries on military affairs in the postclassical era, see Murphey, Rhoads, Ottoman Warfare 1500-1700, London: University College London Press, 1999, pp. 49-63. Also see for the complex organization of warfare and campaign, see Finkel, Caroline, The Administration of Warfare : The Ottoman Military Campaigns in Hungary, 1593-1606, Wien: VWGÖ, 1988. This book is pretty illustrative in its demonstration of the parallel development of the ―military revolution‖ in the Ottoman context and therefore a valuable reading to evaluate the Ottoman early modernity.

losses and failures that enforced a drastic reform. In the perception of the dignitaries of the time, the state meant to a larger extent the military machine. This assumption was not wrong. The well-being of the state was directly related to military success and efficiency. State‘s might, glory and pompousness were measured according to its military efficiency. All other state affairs were auxiliary to the military advancement of the imperium. In a sense, the pre-modern state was, in Charles Tilly‘s terms, an organized crime founded for the very interests of the members of the gang.²³¹ The recognition of the fact that military might became much more dependent to the non-military factors necessitated the reformation of the state apparatus. The demilitarization of the state also triggered the effort of the ruling elite to differentiate themselves from those whom they decreed as criminal and illegitimate.

In this regard, there was nothing surprising that so-called Westernization had been

―initiated‖ firstly in military affairs. Of course a valid and legitimate question to be posed here is that how can we interpret this process as a Westernization move? The phenomenon of bringing foreign experts for the military was not a novelty in the eighteenth century. Ottomans had always invited foreign experts for assistance.²³² This was not a unique Ottoman method either. In early modern Europe, European countries had always sought and brought experts regardless of the nationality and ethnicity of the experts. This was one of the causes and the outcomes of the European military revolution²³³. The transfer of

²³¹ For the classical account of pre-modern state formation Elias, Norbert, The Civilizing Process, part 2 (State Formation and Civilization), Blackwell, 1994. For a contemporary analysis of the premodern state formation, Wickham, Chris, Framing the Early Middle Ages, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 56-150. For some other excellent overviews, see Duby, Georges, The Early Growth of the European Economy, Ithaca: Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978; Earle, Timothy, How Chiefs Come to Power: The Political Economy in Prehistory, Stanford: Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997.

²³² See Agoston, Gabor, Guns for the Sultan, Cambridge, U.K. : Cambridge University Press, 2005; Grant, Jonathan. ―Rethinking the Ottoman ‗Decline‘: Military Technology Diffusion in the Ottoman Empire, Fifteenth to Eighteenth Centuries‖, Journal of World History, vol. 10, n. 1 (Spring 1999), pp. 179-201.

²³³ For the European Military Revolution, see Parker, Geoffrey, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500-1800, Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996; Black, Jeremy, A Military Revolution ?: Military Change and European Society, 1550-1800, Basingstoke: Macmillan; Eltis, David, The Military Revolution in Sixtenth-Century Europe, London; New York: Tauris Academic

technological developments within the European scene was prevalent which ensued the dissemination of new military methods. The transfer of military technology had exploded due to the rapidly developing military technology. After a point, it became a dire necessity to adapt these novelties and no European power could dare to disregard it. Basically, the eighteenth century European experts had introduced the novelties of the military revolution to Ottomans. This was to counter Russians and Austrians who were holding the upper hand against the Ottomans thanks to their superior military technology and tactics.²³⁴ The principal ally of Ottomans against these powers was France, so it was France to whom the Ottomans turned to take military know-how. The military advisers who throughout the eighteenth century happened to be French (with the exception of De Tott who had a Hungarian origin but had been Frenchified) were individual entrepreneurs trying to make their living and career in the Ottoman military although it was with the French backing they had acquired their contracts in the Ottoman army.

In short, the presence of military advisers in the Ottoman army involved international dimensions as well. France was allied with Ottomans and content with the well-being of Ottomans as long as it could keep the privileges it obtained in 1740 and retain its hegemony in the Levantine trade and economy.²³⁵ Thus, ―the French connection‖ was a crucial factor in Ottoman politics and it continued to be so throughout Tanzimat.

The reign of Selim III had begun with continuous defeats in wars with Russia and Austria. The warfare ended with the disappointing treaty of Sistova. From then onwards, Selim III decided to reform the military.²³⁶ The military reform was followed by a

Studies, 1995; Rogers, Clifford J, ―The military revolutions of the Hundred Years War‖, The Journal of Military History 57 (1993), pp 258-75; Rogers, Clifford J, The Military Revolution Debate : Readings on the Military Transformation of Early Modern Europe, Boulder: Westview Press, 1995.

²³⁴ For example see the description of Russian military might in Koca Sekbanbaşı‘s tract,

Hulasat-ül Kelam fi Redd-i Avam, Tercüman Yayınları, edited by Abdullah Uçman.

²³⁵ McGowan, Bruce, ―The Age of the Ayans‖, in İnalcık, Halil & Quataert, Donald (ed.), An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, Cambridge, U.K. : Cambridge University Press, 1997, v. II, p. 642-43.

²³⁶ For the ―meşveret meclisi‖ gathered after the defeat and a detailed narrative of the discussions within the meşveret meclisi based on the chronicles of the time se Shaw, Stanford, Between New and Old, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1971. For more information on the meşveret meclisi see Cihan, Ahmet, Reform Çağında Osmanlı

comprehensive reform of the statecraft as it became evident that military power depends on a modern organization of the state. For Ottoman reformers, once the machines were activated, the inevitable positive feedback mechanism was also to begin to operate.

 

 

 

1.2.     The Ancien régime Problem in Europe

 

―(The concept) ancien régime was created by the French revolution. It was what the revolutionaries thought they were destroying in and after 1789.‖²³⁷ Thus, the concept ancien régime emerged as an ideological artifact for the purpose of discrediting and denigrating an invented diametrically opposite adversary by the revolutionaries. Thus, ancien régime was denied any agency and any constitutive role for its posterity. However, later scholarly works acknowledged the existence of a certain form of politics, society and culture which may be justly named as ―ancien régime‖ not definable in relation with what it preceded (―the new regime‖) but as an encompassing vision of political and social order with its distinctive attributes.²³⁸

The culture of aristocracy was at the very center of the ancien régime. ―Nobility‖ and

―aristocracy‖ are concepts, which may have different meanings in terms of time and social context. Marc Raeff, a historian of Russian aristocracy writes in his introduction to his book that ―we must turn to the always tricky problem of terminology, for Russian reality and concepts have no obvious equivalents in the West. Our study concerns the dvorianstvo of eighteenth century.‖ He defines dvorianstvo as ―all titled persons, serf owners, officers, officials, professional people, whether they owned land or not‖²³⁹, and technically ―the

İlmiyye Sınıfı, Birey Yayıncılık, 2004, p. 144-155; Akyıldız, Ali, ―Meclis-i Meşveret‖, İslam Ansiklopedisi, Akyıldız, Ali, Osmanlı Bürokrasisi ve Modernleşme, İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2004, pp. 31-44.

²³⁷ Doyle, William, The ancien régime, New York: Palgrave, 2001, p. 1.

²³⁸ For example see Baker, Keith Michael (ed.), The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture : The Political Culture of the Old Regime, Oxford: Pergamon, 1987; Doyle, William, The Old European Order, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992

²³⁹ Raeff, Marc, Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia: The Eighteenth-Century Nobility, San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1966, p. 8.

service nobles of the Grand Duke and Tsar.‖²⁴⁰ The aristocracy of Russia was from the beginning constituted very much in relation to the state and shaped by the initiatives of the state beginning from Ivan the Terrible‘s suppression of the boyars.²⁴¹ Every polity had developed different notions of privilege, distinction and political ordering. An aristocracy does not necessarily fit in the Western European classical model in which nobility preceded the formation and expansion of the states. The making of nobilities and state nobilities had different modalities in different national contexts.²⁴²

Moreover, no aristocratic cluster remains the same in the course of time. The characteristics and social roles of aristocracies do change, transform and evolve. One interesting case is the trajectory of the Prussian aristocracy throughout Prussia‘s evolution from a lesser princely polity to an authoritarian monarchy. The Prussian aristocracy achieved to sustain its power vis-a-vis the non-aristocratic interests in a world in which land and landed interest were no more the dominant means of production and means of power. The state and the aristocracy established a partnership in which aristocracy redefined itself with regard to its relation to the state.²⁴³

One of the main debates among English historians is the problem of the break/continuity of the ―ancien régime‖ in Britain. The question is whether the political establishment of British 19th century can be seen as the continuation of the 18th century political regime and establishment or not. The (old) Whig families constituted the political elite of the 18^th century Britain. It was a century of oligarchy and a period of consensus within the commanding heights of the British ruling class. With the extension of political

²⁴⁰ ibid, p. 15. Also see Lieven, Dominic, Russia‟s Rulers Under the Old Regime, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989, 1989, pp. 21-22.

²⁴¹ For the development of nobilities and orders in post-Petrine Russia, see Becker, Seymour, Nobility and Privilege in Late Imperial Russia, De Kalb, III: Northern Illinois University Press, 1985.

²⁴² For comparative nobilities, see Dewald, Jonathan, The European Nobility 1400-1800, Cambridge, U.K. : Cambridge University Press, 1996; Bush, Michael, Noble Privilege, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983; Bush, Michael, Rich Noble, Poor Noble, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988.

²⁴³ For the evolution of Prussian aristocracy, see Rosenberg, Hans, Bureaucracy, Aristocracy and Autocracy: The Prussian Experience 1660-1815, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1958.

rights in 1832, a reshuffling took place, terminating the Whig ascendancy. Whigs had to share political power with the Tories as the commonality of interest among the politically ruling elite had ebbed. Furthermore, Tories reigned for the most of the 19^th century and new alignments within the politically ruling elite and outside the politically ruling elite took place. Thus, liberals and radicals made their way into the parliament within the Whig establishment and the old whigs had to lose their dominance within the Liberal Party.

The traditional Whig historiography associated the ascendancy of Britain with the rise of a new entrepreneur class capitalizing on the benefits of Industrial Revolution. However, the revisionist historians of 1980s claimed that ―the strength of Britain....lay less in its novel entrepreneurial activities than in the elements of stability and continuity, which derived from its status as a rural ancien régime society, the monarchy, the church and the aristocracy.‖²⁴⁴ The eighteenth century Britain (not unlike with the new interest to the eighteenth century Ottoman Empire) was rehabilitated from being a neglected field of study to a field of increasing attention. John Brewer, Paul Langford, Linda Colley²⁴⁵ and others produced remarkable studies that investigated and reassessed the eighteenth century Britain and the British aristocracy in power not as a world doomed to collapse and vanish but as the harbinger of the dynamic nineteenth century Britain. The revisionist historians asserted that aristocracy played a constitutive role in the making of the British nineteenth century.

David Cannadine showed that the collapse of the British aristocracy can be dated only to the late 19th century and 20th century.²⁴⁶ In another book, he also reinterpreted English imperialism, in a polemic with Edward Said, as a venture motivated mainly by aristocratic aspirations²⁴⁷ which also challenged the assumptions of historians of imperialism. The new imperial historians also shed light on the significant contributions of the British aristocracy

²⁴⁴ O‘Gorman, Frank, The Long Eighteenth Century, 1997, Arnold, p. xi

²⁴⁵ Brewer, John, Pleasures of Imagination, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000; Langford, Paul, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman 1689-1798, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991, Colley, Linda, In Defiance of Oligarchy: The Tory Party 1714- 1760, Cambridge, U.K. : Cambridge University Press, 1985.

²⁴⁶ Cannadine, David, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, London: Papermac, 1992.

²⁴⁷ Cannadine, David, Ornamentalism, London: Penguin Books, 2001.

to the development of British imperialism. For the impressive historians of British colonization, Hopkins and Cain, British imperialism was advanced by the southern aristocracy of Britain who failed to compete against the northern industrialists and northern capitalism.²⁴⁸ In an influential book, Martin Wiener claimed that the disappointing economical performance of 20th century Britain was the result of the dominance of the southern land-based aristocrats in the political and cultural spheres impeding the rise of the ethos of bourgeoisie of the northern industrialists. For Wiener, land-based aristocrats disdained the culture of the innovative and industrious business elite and promoted an anti- industrialist ethos. For Wiener, the industrialists, who were mocked in Charles Dickens‘ Hard Times, never seized the political and ideological control²⁴⁹ and the ―old regime‖ with its value system had prevailed.

The French historians also rehabilitated the neglected role of the aristocracy in the making of the 19th century France. Coming from an aristocratic family victimized in the terror of the French Revolution, De Tocqueville had already in the mid 19^th century claimed that French Revolution did in fact pursue the legacy of the ancien régime but did not suggest that the old powerhouses of the Ancién Regime had survived and retained their power after the French Revolution. Nevertheless, Tocqueville‘s view remained a minority before he was rehabilitated by the revisionist historians of the French Revolution. The

―arch-revisionist‖ Alfred Cobban refuted the Marxist interpretation of French Revolution in 1964 which argues that it was essentially a bourgeoisie revolution.²⁵⁰ Influenced by him, in late 1960s and 1970s, a new generation of historians of French Revolution further demolished ―the myth of bourgeois revolution‖.²⁵¹ Revisionist historians of the French

²⁴⁸ Cain,P.J, & Hopkins A.G, British Imperialism: 1688-2000, New York: Longman, 2002.

²⁴⁹ Wiener, Martin, The Decline and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850-1980, Cambridge, U.K. : Cambridge University Press, 1981.

²⁵⁰ Cobban, Alfred, The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964. For an overview of the revisionist historiography of the French Revolution, see Maza, Sarah, ―Politics, Culture and the Origins of the French Revolution‖, The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 61, No. 4 (Dec., 1989), pp. 704-723.

²⁵¹ Colin Lucas, "Nobles, Bourgeois, and the Origins of the French Revolution," Past and Present 60 (August 1973) pp. 84-126; Taylor, George V, "Noncapitalist Wealth and the Origins of the French Revolution," American Historical Review 72 (January 1967), pp. 469-496.

Revolution differed in their views and in their interpretation of the revolution. Nevertheless, the collapse of the argument that 1789 was a bourgeois revolution brought back the aristocracy to the stage. The aristocracy was no longer seen as a class that had ceased to exist after 1789. Revisionist historians documented how the ancien régime aristocratic families managed to adapt themselves to the new circumstances of the nineteenth century and reproduced their wealth.²⁵² The French case was different from the British one in the sense that the French aristocrats as a class lost their political power. Nevertheless, in economics, politics and bureaucracy, the aristocracy retained its strong presence throughout the nineteenth century.²⁵³ The aristocratic families found ways to retain their wealth and prestige before they began to vanish by the end of the nineteenth century.

Furthermore, there was no self-standing and arrogant bourgeoisie committed to eradicate the aristocracy and the passé aristocratic values as Marx had postulated with enthusiasm in the 19^th century. Sarah Maza shows that the myth of bourgeoisie was invented to refer to a fictive enemy rather than to represent social reality.²⁵⁴ Contrary to the vision of Marx, the bourgeoisie of the 19th century France was timid and never intended to challenge or oppose aristocracy. On the contrary, the bourgeoisie imitated the aristocracy and as it found its impressive literary account in Marcel Proust. We may speak of the final triumph of the bourgeoisie, if there ever was a bourgeoisie and if it was ever victorious, only in the 1890s with the consolidation of the institutions established by the Third Republic.²⁵⁵ However, the bourgeoisie of the 1890s was not the bourgeoisie of the previous

²⁵² See Higgs, David, Nobles in Nineteenth Century France, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987; Forster, Robert, ―The Survival of the Nobility during the French Revolution‖, Past & Present, No. 37 (July, 1967), pp. 71-86. Also see Chaussinand- Nogaret, Guy, The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century: from Feudalism to Enlightenment, Cambridge, U.K. : Cambridge University Press, 1985.

²⁵³ Mayer, Arno, The Persistence of the Old Regime, New York: Pantheon, 1981.

²⁵⁴ Maza, Sarah, The Myth of the French Bourgeoise, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2003.

²⁵⁵ For the struggle of the Republicans to establish a ―bourgeois Republic‖ during the Second Empire, see Nord, Philip, The Republican Moment, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1995. For the intense struggle in the first decade of the Third Republic between the Republicans and the monarchists and the dynamics of the consolidation of the

decades. It was the bourgeoisie that made its peace with the order and abandoned its

―progressive‖ and oppositionist rhetoric after witnessing the horrors of the Commune. In other words, the triumph of the bourgeois and the Third Republic was in many ways more the victory of the ancien régime.

The czarist Russian historiography also reassessed Russian ancien régime. The conventional historiography of the czarist Russia‘s interpretation of czardom had been revised by the revisionist historians beginning from 1970s. The revisionist historiography developed a comparably ―favorable‖ view of the czardom refuting to label czardom as mere despotism;²⁵⁶

―In recent years, Nicholas‘ bureaucracy has been the subject of considerable study in the West. For H. J. Torke the major characteristics of the Russian civil service were its lack of professional autonomy, expertise or ethos. Unlike its Prussian counterpart it had neither the corporate rights guaranteed by the Allgemeine Landrecht, nor yet a clear sense of service to the communal welfare enshrined in an abstract ideal of the state. Without challenging Torke‘s view that the Russian civil service as a whole was corrupt, inefficient, arbitrary and concerned with its own welfare rather than the communal interest, some American scholars recently casted a somewhat redeeming light on certain aspects of Nicholas‘ bureaucracy. What emerges clearly from the work of these scholars is that by the 1850s Russia possessed an elite officialdom fully committed to the service of a state whose only legitimate function in their eyes was the welfare of the community. These men were expert career officials, firmly rooted in the ministerial apparatus, and possessed an ethos distinct in most cases from that of the landed aristocracy and the gentry. They expected the state to play the leading role in bringing reform and modernization to Russian society and, if permitted by the monarch and his entourage, were willing and able to take the burden of leadership on their own shoulders.‖²⁵⁷

The Great Reform era initiated after the catastrophic Crimean War, which had been perceived as a dismal failure, was reexamined and rehabilitated: ―More recently, Western

Third Republic as a ―bourgeois Republican‖ regime, see Agulhon, Maurice,The French Republic 1879-1992, Oxford; Cambridge, Mass. : Blackwell, 1995.

²⁵⁶ Also for Lieven‘s reassesment of the autocracy of Nicholas II and his criticism of the historiography on Nicholas II, see Lieven, Dominic, Nicholas II: Emperor of all the Russians, London: Pimlico, 1994.

²⁵⁷ Lieven, Dominic, Russia‟s Rulers Under the Old Regime, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989, pp. 23-24. For an exhaustive survey of the literature on Russian czarist bureaucracy, also see Orlovsky, Daniel T, ―Recent Studies on the Russian Bureaucracy‖, Russian Review, vol. 35, no. 4 (October 1976), pp. 448-467. Also see Raeff, Marc, ―The Bureaucratic Phenomena of Imperial Russia 1700-1905‖, The American Historical Review, vol. 84, no.2 (Apr. 1979), pp. 399-411.

scholars have looked much more depth at the question of how the Great Reforms were implemented, tested and developed and considered their broader social, political, and cultural implications in an impressive series of studies(.)‖²⁵⁸ Apparently, recent studies do not celebrate the autocratic reformism of Alexander II but present a balanced evaluation of the Great Reform era.²⁵⁹ Hence, the myth of ―monarchic absolutism‖ for Russian czardom had been demolished. In short, for the revisionist historians, the czarist Russia was not a medieval obscurantism but a dynamic polity that would had viability in the world of the twentieth century if the Revolution had not taken place as an unexpected consequence of the World War I.

The post-WW II assumption that Germany followed a distinct trajectory in contrast to the British and French trajectories is also criticized heavily by the recent historians. ―The peculiarity of Germany‖ argument was very problematic first and foremost because it implied that France and Britain followed a ―normal/straight path‖. Furthermore, the revisionist historians have questioned the validity of the conventional narrative seeing Britain and France necessarily destined to evolve into liberal democracies and Germany doomed to its path to the Nazi totalitarian state. Apparently, this was a presentist reading of history.²⁶⁰

The Sonderweg (special path) debates constitute the very essence of the German historiography.²⁶¹ The Sonderweg argument simply states that Germany did not follow the

―normal path‖ to evolve to a liberal democracy but followed a distinctive path. Different explanations and variants of the Sonderweg paradigm blamed various reasons such as late

²⁵⁸ Lincoln, W. Bruce, The Great Reforms: Autocracy, Bureaucracy and the Politics of Change in Imperial Russia, De Kalb, III: Northern Illinois University Press, 1990, p. xv.

²⁵⁹ See Orlovsky, Daniel, Limits of Reform, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1981; Lincoln, W. Bruce, In the Vanguard of Reform: Russia‟s Enlightened Bureaucrats 1825-1861, De Kalb, III: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986; Wortman, Richard, The Development of Russian Legal Consciousness, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.

²⁶⁰ For a criticism of this presentist reading of German history, see Nipperday, Thomas,

Thinking About Germany, Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1994.

²⁶¹ For a survey of the Sonderweg debates, see Kocka, Jurgen, ―German History Before Hitler: The Debate About the German Sonderweg‖, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Jan., 1988),p p. 3-16; Berger, Stefan, The Search for Normality, Providence: Berghahn, 1997.

modernization, the failure of the 1848 Revolution²⁶² or the authoritarian Prussian tradition.²⁶³ The late modernization thesis establishes that the urge to catch up the early modernizers compelled the state to engineer the growth of economy.²⁶⁴ The state assumed an immense power in the economy and did not allow the emergence of a self-regulating market. On the contrary, the state had promoted certain industries and entrepreneurs to enable them to expand to gigantic proportions. The lack of a competitive market meant that the capitalist entrepreneurs were rendered dependent on the state and therefore subordinate to the ancien régime elite. In short, according to the Sonderweg approach, ―Germany industrialized without destroying the social and political hegemony of aristocracy, of modernizing economically while remaining entrapped in a pre-industrial nexus of authoritarian social structures, values and political attitudes.‖²⁶⁵

This study is not the place to enter into the historiography of the Sonderweg. The word was originally coined in the imperial period by the German conservative historians and publicists to eulogize Germany for escaping both from the corrupt autocracy of Russia and the decadent democracies of Britain and England.²⁶⁶ Later, especially with the impact of the World War II, the word was employed by English historians such as Sir Vansittard, Namier, French historian Poliakov and most popularly by the American journalist William

²⁶² The failed 1848 Revolution was hailed as Germany‘s missed opportunity. Although it is evidently true that, the failure of the liberal parliament in Frankfurt paved way to the consolidation of power by the authoritarian and illiberal Prussian monarchy; the significance of the 1848 had been exaggerated. For a brief historiography of the 1848 Revolution, see Han, Hans Joachim, The 1848 Revolutions in German-Speaking Europe, New York: Longman, 2001.

²⁶³ Engels was a contemporary observer of the failure of the 1848 Revolution. For his pessimism for the advancement of liberalism in Germany as well as his severe critique of the ―bourgeoisie‖ for their timidity to challenge the authoritarian regime, see Engels, Friedrich, Germany: Revolution and Counter-Revolution, New York: International Publishers, 1969.

²⁶⁴ See Moore, Barrington, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, London: Penguin, 1967. For the coining of the term of Verspate Nation (belated nation), see Plessner, Helmuth, Die Verspatete Nation, 1959.

²⁶⁵ Blackburn, David & Evans, Richard J, ―Preface‖ to The German Bourgeoise, David Blackbourn &,Richard J. Evans (ed.), London; New York: Routledge, 1991, p. xv.

²⁶⁶ Kocha, Jurgen, ―Asymmetrical Historical Comparison: The Case of German Sonderweg‖, History and Theory, Vol 38, No:1 (February 1999), p. 41.

Shirer to establish that Hitler was an inevitable outcome of the course of German history. This assumption was taken and transformed into an academic argument by the postwar German historians such as Fritz Fischer and Hans-Ulrich Wehler who were critical to the nationalist historiography prevalent in Germany before the 1960s. Hans-Ulrich Wehler and his ―Bielefeld School‖ associates depicted imperial Germany as a paternalistic and hierarchical society carefully engineered by the ancien régime aristocrats:²⁶⁷

―Criticizing an older German historiography which denied the long-term roots of Nazism in German history....(Wehler) insisted..(that) in 1848....the German bourgeoisie failed in its attempt to wrest power from aristocracy in the way its counterparts in other countries had done, in England in 1640 for example, or France in 1789. As a result, the Prussian aristocracy was able to preserve its sociopolitical hegemony. It cemented it through the conservative ‗revolution from above‘ which united Germany under Prussian domination from 1866-1871. Continuing industrialization and social change increasingly threatened its position, but it was the army, the civil service and the Reich leadership. To bolster this, it engaged in a successful ‗feudalization of the bourgeoisie‘ into aristocratic modes of behavior and value-orientations (such as dueling, deference to inherited status, the hunt for decorations and titles, the scramble for the position of reserve officer, the adoption of an authoritarian and paternalistic attitude towards employees in industry, and, crucially, the rejection of democracy and parliamentarism), a process made easier  as

a result of the ―great depression‖ of 1873-96, which left the big industrialists heavily dependent on the interventionism of the undemocratic state.‖²⁶⁸

Wehler‘s imperial Germany was static and closed to any change unless destroyed by external shocks and extraordinary developments such as had happened in 1918.²⁶⁹

The nature of the German bourgeoisie was at the center of the debate of the German Sonderweg. The German bourgeoisie was accused for being accomodationist and submissive. It had been suggested that, because the German bourgeoisie did not opt to openly challenge the established order, especially in the critical year of 1848, it had been

²⁶⁷ Wehler, Hans-Ulrich, The German Empire, 1871-1918, Leamington Spa; Dover, N.H. : Berg Publishers, 1985.

²⁶⁸ Evans, Richard J, Rereading German History, London; New York: Routledge, 1997,

pp. 12-13.

²⁶⁹ For a recent reinterpretation of imperial Germany, see Berghahn, V.R, Imperial Germany 1871-1918, Berghahn Books, 1994. For the historiography of the imperial Germany, see Lorenz, Chris, ―Beyond Good and Evil ? The German Empire of 1871 and Modern German Historiography‖, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 30, No. 4 (Oct., 1995), pp. 729-765

forced to accept a marginal and subordinate role within the elite. However, this assumption tacitly assumes that the bourgeoisie fought aggressively elsewhere and, furthermore, bourgeoisie as a class has an intrinsic motivation to confront (and destroy) established orders.

Arno Mayer‘s ―The Persistence of the Old Regime‖ is the classical account of the new reassessment of the nineteenth century.²⁷⁰ Arno Mayer showed that, contrary to the established opinion, in the nineteenth century, it was the nobility of different sorts that had controlled political power.²⁷¹ For Mayer, the Marxian assumption that the economical and political powers are indistinguishable and who controls the economy controls the political power is wrong. For him, throughout the 19^th century, the political power continued to be exerted by traditional elites which did not overlap and intersect with the economical elites and centers of economic production.²⁷²

Two leading historians of Germany, David Blackbourn, and Geoff Eley analyze the problem of the German bourgeoisie in their path breaking book, ―The Peculiarities of German History.‖ They question the relevancy of the historiography of German history and conclude that, it is misleading to assume that German history is particularly ―peculiar‖. They criticized the approach comparing the German model to the supposedly ―normal‖ model. For Blackbourn and Eley, the course of German history might display certain peculiarities but ―all national histories are peculiar.‖²⁷³

Blackbourn and Eley opposes the ―bourgeois-centered‖ historiography. The conventional historiography assumed that it was the dynamic bourgeoisie that had shaped and transformed the modern world. According to this approach, the problem with Germany

²⁷⁰ Mayer, Arno J, The Persistence of the Old Regime, New York: Pantheon, 1982.

²⁷¹ The ―persistence‖ of traditional landed, bureaucratic and military elites was not noticed for the first time by Arno Mayer. ―Vilfredo Pareto, Herbert Spencer and Max Weber wrote with dismay about the ‗persistence' of traditional elites at the second half of the nineteenth century as after the 1870s, as new authoritarianism is rising European wide.‖ See Halperin, Susan, War and Social Change in Modern Europe, Cambridge, U.K. : Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 11.

²⁷² For an interpretation of 19th century European political power structures, see Halperin, ibid.

²⁷³ Blackbourn, David & Eley, Geoff, The Peculiarities of German History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984, p. 286

(and Russia and many others) was that the state played the constitutive role in the ―making of modern Germany‖. However, with the hindsight of many historical case studies and theoretical works, we now know that the state played an immense role in the making of the modern world in general.²⁷⁴ First of all, capitalism was generated, fostered and maintained thanks to the institutionalization of the states. It was the states that were the gears of capitalism, not the markets.²⁷⁵

To conclude and go back to our inquiry, it had been suggested that the immense and decisive role the state played in the emergence and development of modernity was not peculiar to the Ottoman/Turkish case. The states defined the mode of the modernity of their respective ―nations‖. Moreover, it was the states that had formulated Turkishness as well as Englishness, Germannes, Frenchness, even Britishness and Ottomannness. However, unlike the 18^th century Britain where in the journals ―John Bull‖s were drawn, defined and redefined²⁷⁶, in the absence of public expression, the degree of the role the state played in the Ottoman/Turkish case was incomparably immense.

In many ways, Hans-Ulrich Wehler‘s representation of Willhelmine Germany resembled Hamidian Ottoman Empire although some seminal aspects which Wehler attributed to the Willhelmine Germany are missing in the Hamidian Empire such as the

―manipulation of political anti-semitism‖²⁷⁷ and ―industrial capitalism‖. Definitely, the

―industrialists‖ are missing in the power configuration in the Hamidian context.

²⁷⁴ Among many others, see Brewer, John, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State 1688-1783, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1990;Bonney, Richard (ed.), The Rise of the Fiscal State in Europe c. 1200-1815, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999; Mann, Michael, The Sources of Social Power, Cambridge, U.K. : Cambridge University Press, 1986; Tilly, Charles, Coercion, Capital and European States, Cambridge, Mass. : Blackwell, 1990.

²⁷⁵ The unnaturality of the 19th century markets was the main theme of Polanyi‘s ―The Great Transformation‖. Polanyi, Karl, The Great Transformation, Boston: Beacon Press, 1957. Also for a critical approach to the market-centered explanations of modern capitalism, see Grassby, Richard, Kinship and Capitalism, Cambridge, U.K. : Cambridge University Press, 2001. Also see North, Douglass C, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economical Performance, Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

²⁷⁶ For the development of the character of ―John Bull‖ in 18th century English print press, see Langford, Paul, Englishness Identified: Manners and Character, 1650-1850, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

²⁷⁷ Wehler, Hans-Ulrich, ibid, p. 246.

Nevertheless, the Hamidian Empire may be interpreted as an authoritarian polity with

―superimposition of class differences on those between the traditional late-feudal estates‖ and ―myth of the bureaucracy‖ as Wehler had defined Wilhelmine Germany. Interestingly, such an interpretation of Hamidian Empire would coincide with the traditional perceptions of Hamidian polity which see the Hamidian regime as closed to any modernization and a bastion of obscurantism in reaction to the reformism of the Tanzimat. Recent studies, however, acknowledged the enormous contributions of the Hamidian era to the establishment and development of ―modern‖ institutions and reforms in Turkey. Therefore, while the frameworks of historians such as Wehler and Mommsen were criticized by names such as Blackbourn, Eley, Evans and Berghahn for taking the Willhelmine era as static and ―reactionary‖ within a structural Marxian paradigm, historians such as Deringil and Akarlı criticized the depiction of Hamidian regime as a monolithic power structure with a reactionary ideological foundation by the earlier generation of scholars. Apparently both the Willhelmine Empire and the Hamidian Empire were not monolithic power blocs and new generation of late Ottomanists and scholars of Willhelmine Germany are exposing the more complicated nature and various aspects of these two polities.

It was no coincidence that the foundation and the consolidation of the Hamidian autocracy coincided with the consolidation of fellow authoritarianisms of Willhelm II in Germany, Alexander III (who inverted the policies of the assassinated liberal czar Alexander II) in Russia and the Meiji in Japan. In this regard, Hamidian autocracy, like the Tanzimat preceding it, can be seen as influenced and shaped by the political/social/economic developments and trends of late 19^th century.²⁷⁸ It was a manifestation of the European turn to conservative modernization and authoritarianism. In Europe, the late 19th century was an age of restoration of political stability and restoration of ancien régimes within the structures of modern states. This process was a reaction to the rise of republicanism, liberalism, and other destabilizing forces and political movements throughout the 19^th century. Political stability was maintained with the iron fists of the

 

 

²⁷⁸ For a survey of the historiography of the Hamidian era, see, Özbek, Nadir, "Modernite, Tarih ve İdeoloji: İkinci Abdülhamid Dönemi Tarihçiliği Üzerine Bir Değerlendirme." Literatür, no. 3 (2004), pp. 71-90

states in the age of dreadnoughts and machine guns.²⁷⁹ For sure, the Ottoman Empire did also achieve a temporary stability in the Hamidian era. The principal motivations for the emergence of Hamidian autocracy were dissatisfaction with the Tanzimat reformism and liberalism and the rise of ethnic politics and separatisms. Apparently, in the Hamidian context, the forces of instability were ethnic unrests rather than social and political agitations of Europe.

The assumption Wehler and his contemporary associates developed was that because Germany did not eliminate the aristocratic/royal elite as the French did, imperial Germany was doomed to be reactionary. Although it is a truism that the aristocratic ruling elite did construct a different political system than France or Britain developed, this political system was equally ―modern‖. Indeed, in many ways, it was arguably ―more modern‖ than its West European counterparts in terms of its economic dynamism, the structure of its economy and its military organization, technology and mobilization.

Willhelmine Germany created its own ―national cult‖, a state-nationalism unique to itself as like any other manifestation of nationalism. Contrary to the pre-1848 anarchic/Republican nationalisms²⁸⁰, the Willhelmine national cult presupposed a staunch loyalty to the monarchy and the emperor. It was the emperor and his aura that represented the nation in his persona. In the figure of the emperor, the nation found its embodiment. The German nation was embedded within the emperor and the state. This national cult was to be challenged not only by socialists but race-centered nationalists from 1890s onwards²⁸¹, again not unlike the Young Turk challenge to the Hamidian official proto- national imperial representations and the official cult. Apparently, German/Prussian construction of official national cult was not unique to Germany. For example Russian autocracy developed its own cult along same lines. Along the same lines, the Russian autocracy established its ―national cult‖ around an imperial idea. In the genesis and

²⁷⁹ Eric Hobsbawm aptly names this period as the ―Age of Empire‖ following his ―Age of Revolution‖ and Age of Capital‖. Hobsbawm, Eric, The Age of Empire 1875-1914, New York: Vintage, 1989.

²⁸⁰ For the anarchist, liberal and libertarian nature of early 19th century nationalisms, see Thom, Martin, Republics, Nations and Tribes, London; New York: Verso, 1995.

²⁸¹ Eley, Geoffrey, Reshaping the German Right, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991, p. 9.

development of Russian ―official nationalism‖ and in the Russian perception of the

―nation‖ , nation was defined strictly not in terms of ethnicity but in terms of obedience to the imperium and identification with the imperium.282 In the words of Richard Wortman,

―After 1825, nationality was identified with absolutism, ‗autocracy‘ in the official lexicon. Russian nationality was presented as a nationality of consensual subordination, in contrast to egalitarian Western concepts. The monarchical narrative of the nation described the Russian people as voluntarily surrendering power to their Westernized rulers.‖283

As mentioned above, in the post-1870 Europe, the nation-states had consolidated themselves and repressed liberal and Republican opposition. The liberal and Republican contours of nationalism were eliminated and subordinated. The nation had been redefined in terms of states. The states began to be embodiments of the nations and replaced ethnicities. The Hamidian structures of loyalty to the Empire and the sultan himself can be interpreted in line with these developments. The Hamidian Turkish national cult defined nationhood not in terms of Turkish ethnicity but Turkishness embodied within the imperium, Islamic identity and the sultan himself. It is here suggested that, such a construction of nationhood around the imperial center was a founding moment in the forging of the Turkish nationalism.

To sum up our remarks on the problem of ancien régime, we portrayed a certain vista of ancien régime, not an ancien régime about to be thrown into the dustbin of history but an ancien régime that had reestablished/reinvented itself, an ancien régime which is not static and doomed to collapse soon or later, but an ancien régime vivid and innovative in its own ways. In other words, this is an ancien régime constitutive of the modern world as much as the modern nation-state. Establishing the preeminent roles of the ancien régimes, we may argue that the Ottoman ancien régime was constitutive of the Turkish modern nation-state, Turkish nationalism and ―Turkish modernity‖ in general. It had reinvented and adapted itself not as a relic of the past but as an entirely novel phenomenon.

²⁸² See, Wortman, Richard, Scenarios of Power, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995 (2 volumes). Also see, Weeks, Theodore R, Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia, De Kalb III: University of North Illinois Press, 1996; Hoskings, Geoffrey, Russia and Russians, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2001.

²⁸³ Wortman, Richard, Scenarios of Power, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995, v. II, p. 12

The Turkish ancien régime was very pivotal in the constitution of Turkish modernity not only with the legacy it had left but also by crafting the very founding contours and axioms of Turkish modern experience and discourse. It is also argued that Turkish ancien régime should be understood fundamentally as a state-elite phenomenon. No economical and social forces played a significant role in this process. The principal stimulator was the state and the state-elite. As the 1789 and Industrial Revolution were no ―year zero‖s for France and Britain, respectively, and as elites of the ancien régimes persisted in new clothes, the Tanzimat and Hamidian elites derived from earlier generations of elites. In this genealogical continuum, an ideological continuum may also be observable connecting the traditional Ottoman imperial discourse to Turkish nationalism. It is argued that, clinging under the banner of the Ottoman imperial identity, the agents and actors of the ancien régime had designed a modern Turkish national identity defined in its subordinate relation to the political authority. The next chapter will deal with the Hamidian bureaucracy and its visions of nation and Empire. It will be argued that these premises will be reproduced by the later generations. Then the study will particularly focus on the Ottoman diplomatic service. The Ottoman Foreign Ministry, one of the best showcases of the Turkish ancien régime, is a good place to probe the worlds and times of the Turkish ancien régime.

 

 

 

CHAPTER II

 

 

THE STRUCTURES OF MENTALITIES OF THE LATE OTTOMAN BUREAUCRACY

 

2.1.  A Note on Bureaucracy

 

The bureaucratic theory in its Weberian ―ideal type‖ assumes impersonality as the very definition of bureaucracy. This theory takes bureaucracy as impersonal. The officials do not exist as themselves, but as anonymities.²⁸⁴ This anonymity renders bureaucracy a very efficient mechanism.²⁸⁵ Thus, within this perspective, bureaucracy is invented for its very functionalism by an external superior prerogative. Apparently, bureaucracy lacked any

―agency‖ itself but was in the service of a superior authority.

Weber and Michels²⁸⁶ can be seen as the two founders of the classical theory of bureaucracy although criticisms of bureaucracy, e.g., idioms like ―bureaumania‖, were prevalent themes throughout the 19th century and although Martin Albrow spoke of the

―English theory‖²⁸⁷ of bureaucracy before Weber and Michels ―theorized‖ bureaucracy. Although the Weberian conceptualization of bureaucracy continued to be taken as the classical account of the social sciences regarding bureaucracy before the 1970s, the social functionalists, who brought Weber to North America, had already exposed the limitations

²⁸⁴ For a criticism of the ―anonimity of bureaucracy‖ theory claiming that the opposite is the case for the 19th century British bureaucracy, see Parris, Henry, Constitutional Bureaucracy, London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1969, pp. 93-94.

²⁸⁵ For Weber‘s discussion of bureaucracy, see Weber, Max, Economy and Society, New York: Bedminster Press, 1968, pp. 215-266, 1006-1110.

²⁸⁶ For Michels‘ conceptualization of bureaucracy, see Michels, Robert, Political Parties, New York: Free Press, 1949. Also see Mosca, Gaetano, The Ruling Class, London; New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1939, pp.83-87.

²⁸⁷ Albrow, Martin, Bureaucracy, New York: Praeger, 1970, p. 21.

and inadequacies of the Weberian theorization. Selznick and Merton pointed out the unexpected consequences of the bureaucratic undertakings and demonstrated the inefficiencies of the bureaucracy while Anglo-Saxoning the Weberian theory.²⁸⁸ However, these criticisms of Weber did not question the founding assumptions of the Weberian ideal type. Indeed, they focused on frictions of the theory and qualified, improved, and deepened the theory. Their critiques of Weber were limited to pointing out the ―externalities‖ of the bureaucratic theory such as the unpredicted complications of organizations rather than questioning the theory itself.²⁸⁹ It was the later students of bureaucracy who demonstrated that bureaucracy is not free of personalized relations, biases, or cultures. For these critics, bureaucracy cannot be reduced to the objective and mechanistic implementation of the task given.²⁹⁰

For Weber, ―(b)ureaucratic administration means fundamentally the exercise of control on the basis of knowledge. This is the feature which makes it specifically rational.‖ Furthermore, in Weber‘s view it was axiomatic that in order to generate control,

²⁸⁸ Selznick, Philip, TVA and the Grass Roots, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984; Merton, Robert, Bureaucratic Structure and Personality, in Reader in Bureaucracy, Merton, Robert et al (ed.), Free Press, 1952, p. 361-71; Gouldner, Alvin, Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy, New York: Free Press, 1964. Also see Merton, Robert et all (ed.), Reader in Bureaucracy, New York: Free Press, 1952; La Palombara, Joseph, Bureaucracy and Political Development, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963; Blau, Peter, The Dynamics of Bureaucracy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963.

²⁸⁹ For the critics of the Weberian conceptualization of bureaucracy from an organizational theory background in postwar Northern American academia, see Meyer, Marshall W, Changes in Public Bureaucracies, Cambridge, U.K. : Cambridge University Press, 1979.

²⁹⁰ Orlovsky in his article on the literature on the Russian bureaucracy notes that there are two different conceptualizations of the term ―bureaucracy. ―The first is descriptive and denotes the government of a territory through a system of offices staffed by appointees loyal to either dynasty or state. The second is normative and is usually associated with the writings of Hegel and Max Weber. This bureaucracy expresses the rationalization of collective activity and is associated with the appearance of capitalism.‖ For Orlovsky, the confusing of these two different conceptualizations of bureaucracy is common in the studies of Russian bureaucratic history. Orlovsky, Daniel T, ―Recent Studies on the Russian Bureaucracy‖, Russian Review, vol. 35, no. 4 (October 1976), p. 452. After the decline of the ―modernization paradigm‖, we learned to treat bureaucracy not necessarily as a Weberian-Hegelian entity but simply as an organization that is more or less intended to be hierarchical, rational, and regulated although at a level that varies in different examples of bureaucratic structures.

knowledge itself had to be controlled. Quoting Weber, David Vincent leveled the question of ―whose rationality‖ is served in keeping the information secret. Vincent pointed out that the secrecy of the bureaucracy is self-serving rather than in the public interest.²⁹¹ Vincent‘s book along with many other ―post-Weberian‖ books emphasized the self-interestedness of bureaucracy. Of course, one of the most subtle analyses of the bureaucracy had been made by Michal Herzfeld, who interpreted bureaucracy not as a master builder but as a mechanism of minimalization of damage or as a mechanism of damage control.²⁹² Furthermore, quoting Gerald Britan²⁹³, Herzfeld notes that ineffectiveness of bureaucracy is not a failure but an intrinsic aspect of bureaucracy given that the very basic goal of the bureaucrat is not rational efficiency but his and his group‘s survival unless he is motivated by some other pragmatic goals.²⁹⁴ The bureaucracy is evidently not an altruistic but a self- interested group contrary to what Hegel had presumed.²⁹⁵

The birth of modern Turkey and the modern Turkish nation can be seen as an elaboration of the bureaucratic or semi-bureaucratized privileged imperial class in interaction with other dynamics. The culture and habitus the Turkish bureaucracy had developed and maintained was a prominent component of the Turkish modern and Turkish national imagination. The fact that the survival and well-being of the Turkish nation was central to the self-interest of the Ottoman bureaucracy does not mean that Ottoman bureaucracy was a self-interested actor, but it means that the self-interests of the bureaucracy defined to a certain extent the character of the ―original‖ Turkish nation constructed in the image of the bureaucracy.

 

 

²⁹¹ Vincent, David, The Culture of Secrecy in Britain, 1832-1898, Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

²⁹² Herzfeld, Michael, The Social Production of Indifference: Exploring the Symbolic Roots of Western Bureaucracy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Also see Mitchell, Timothy, Rule of Experts Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

²⁹³ Britan, Gerald, Bureaucracy and Innovation: An Ethnography of Policy Change, Beverly Hills: Sage, 1981.

²⁹⁴ Herzfeld, Michael, ibid, p. 5.

²⁹⁵ Hegel, G.W.F., Philosophy of Right, Kitchener: Batoche, 2001, pp. 194-262.

2.2.     Prussian Ruling Elite and Bureaucracy and the Tanzimat Bureaucracy in Comparative Perspective

 

The illiberal character of the Prussian path to modernity is a well-established notion in academia since the World War II.²⁹⁶ This illiberalism derived from the existence of an all- powerful bureaucratic organization regarded as totally autonomous from external forces and political/royal prerogatives. It is no coincidence that the ―myth of the bureaucracy‖ emerged in Prussia. The Prussian Hegel observed that the bureaucratic class ―is at the apex of the social pyramid not only because of its universal intentionality, but also because it is the only class of society whose objective is knowledge itself, not nature, artifacts or abstraction, as it is the case with all other classes²⁹⁷   The universal class has for its task

the universal interests of the community.‖²⁹⁸ Furthermore, it is not a coincidence that another German, Max Weber, conceptualized bureaucracy as "the dominance of spirit of formalistic impersonality: ‗Sine ira et studio,‘ without hatred or passion, and hence without affection or enthusiasm.‖²⁹⁹ It is ironic that Weber‘s perception of the Prussian bureaucracy was taken as the representation of the universal bureaucratic model until his interpretation was questioned several decades later.

The British and French bureaucracies expanded enormously in the nineteenth century (and the British bureaucracy‘s expansion preceded the others) and subsequently these bureaucracies acquired immense power but no such ―myth of the bureaucracy‖ emerged in

²⁹⁶ Among the various studies, see Wehler, Hans Ulrich, The German Empire, 1871-1918, Leamington Spa; Dover: Berg, 1985; Mommsen, Wolfgang J, Imperial Germany, 1867- 1918, London; New York: Arnold, 1995; Craig, Gordon A., Germany 1866-1945, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988; Hamerow, Theodore S., The Social Foundations of German Unification, 1858-1871, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969.

²⁹⁷ Quoted in Avineri, Shlomo, Hegel‟s Theory of the Modern State, Cambridge, U.K. : Cambridge University Press, 1974, p. 108.

²⁹⁸ Avineri, Shlomo, ibid, p. 158.

²⁹⁹ Weber, Max, Economy and Society, New York: Bedminster Press, 1968, p. 225. Weber admits that, ―this is the spirit in which the ideal official conducts his office.‖ However, for Weber bureaucrats‘ failure to handle their tasks ―without affection and enthusiasm‖ is an exception and distraction from the general rule.

these countries.³⁰⁰ This was arguably because these bureaucracies remained subservient to the political authorities above them and therefore could not ―own‖ the state and were not charged with national and universal missions in these countries.³⁰¹

If the Prussian model and its independence from any external authority (in its Hegelian-Weberian interpretation) is one extreme manifestation of bureaucracy, the Russian case can be taken as the embodiment of the other extreme. The Russian bureaucracy may be characterized as less autonomous from the prerogative of the czar vis- à-vis its Prussian, French and British counterparts. Although, the conventional historiography depicted 19^th century Russian bureaucracy as completely dependent to the prerogative of the czar, this reductionist view of the Russian bureaucracy has been challenged by a new generation of historians who established that the Russian bureaucracy also developed considerable autonomy as well as sophistication and effectiveness in the 19^th century czarist Russia.³⁰²

The Ottoman bureaucracy not only gained an autonomy but also exerted an immense power with the Tanzimat. Indeed, it had been shown in this study that, the era of Tanzimat may be characterized as the Ottoman bureaucracy‘s assumption of power beginning from 1839 before the loss of this power beginning from 1871 first with the death of Âli Paşa and appointment of Mahmud Nedim Paşa to the grand vizirate and then with the reign of

³⁰⁰ For some prominent works on the emergence of the French and British bureaucracy,see Church Clive.H., Revolution and Red Tape: The French Ministerial Bureaucracy, 1770- 1850, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981; Brown, Harold G., War, Revolution and the Bureaucratic State, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995; Parris, Henry, Constitutional Bureaucracy, London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1969.

³⁰¹ For a comparative study of bureaucracies, see Heper, Metin (ed.), The State and Public Bureaucracies: A Comparative Perspective, New York: Greenwood Press, 1987; Dreyfus, Richard, Bürokrasinin İcadı, İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2007. For the birth of the English bureaucracy, see Aylmer,G.E, The King‟s Servants: The Civil Service of Charles I, 1625- 1642, London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1961; for the growth of the British bureaucracy from the eighteenth century onwards, Parris, Henry, Constitutional Bureaucracy, London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1969; for a general evaluation of the modern British bureaucracy, see Rose, Richard, Ministers and Ministries, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.

³⁰² For a critique of this perception, see Lincoln, Bruce, ―The Ministers of Nicholas I: A Brief Inquiry into Their Backgrounds and Service Careers‖, Russian Review, Vol. 34, No. 3, (Jul., 1975) pp. 308-323.

Abdülhamid II. In the Hamidian era, the Ottoman bureaucracy lost its autonomy considerably and lacked effective mechanisms to protect itself from the royal and political prerogative, but it could develop as an effective and imposing structure. Nevertheless, what Abdülhamid II did was the reestablishment of the political prerogorative. In a way, the history of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century can be partially read as the clash of the administrative elite versus the royal/political authorities.

Hans Rosenberg, the pioneering historian of early Prussia, presents a survey analysis of the transition of the Prussian polity from ―dynastic absolutism‖ to ―bureaucratic absolutism‖.³⁰³ Rosenberg‘s contribution was his assessment that the bureaucracy was an autonomous territory independent from the interests of the crown and the aristocracy. Although the bureaucracy was a creation of the crown and although its members were recruited from the aristocracy (Junkers), through time it acquired a separate identity. Rosenberg did not see the bureaucracy as a technical instrument of professional public administration. For Rosenberg, the Prussian bureaucracy was a political and social interest group. For Rosenberg, by the early nineteenth century, the bureaucracy achieved a

―revolution from above‖ and assumed control of the Prussian polity.

A few other historians studied the Prussian bureaucracy in its different phases, and all were influenced by the framework and main thesis of Rosenberg. Reinhard Koselleck took over where Hans Rosenberg left off by studying the decline of bureaucratic absolutism after the reign of Friedrich the Great and before the Revolution of 1848.³⁰⁴ Runge picked up the story in 1918, focusing on the role of the civil service in the German Revolution and the status of the civil service under the Weimar Republic.³⁰⁵ Eckart Kerr, the precocious Marxist of Weimar, also penned a fragmentary but insightful assessment of the 19th century Prussian bureaucracy.³⁰⁶

 

³⁰³ Rosenberg, Hans, Bureaucracy, Aristocracy and Autocracy: The Prussian Experience 1660-1815, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1958.

³⁰⁴ Koselleck, Reinhard, Preußen zwischen Reform und Revolution. Allg. Landrecht, Verwaltung und Soziale Bewegung von 1791 – 1848, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1987.

³⁰⁵ Runge, Wolfgang, Politik und Beamtentum in Parteistaat, Stuttgart: Klett, 1965.

³⁰⁶ See his chapter ―Das Soziale System der Reaktsion in Preussen unter dem Ministerium Puttkamer‖, in Primat der Innenpolitik, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1970.

According to Rosenberg and other historians of the Prussian bureaucracy, the Prussian bureaucracy reached its zenith in terms of the power it held and the prestige it acquired between 1815 and the 1840s.³⁰⁷ This was the period when Fichte called for a national reinvigoration after the embarrassing defeat by Napoleon. In the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, a national plan to reinvigorate Prussia was enacted by Karl von Stein.³⁰⁸ From Stein onwards, the bureaucratic reform was hailed and cherished as ―liberal‖ and

―progressive‖.³⁰⁹ In the eyes of the ―progressives‖ of the time, bureaucracy was seen as the prime mover of emancipation from the obscurantist medievalism of the Junkers. The establishment of law, order, and administration was seen almost by definition as

―progressive‖. It was the social and economic unrest (in the years of the ―hungry forties‖³¹⁰) in the 1840s that harmed the prestige of the bureaucracy. By the 1840s, the bureaucratic establishment had lost its magnificent isolation from the social world surrounding it. The end of its isolation also meant the end of its grace, aura of privilege, respectability, and infallibility. The bureaucracy as a corps came down to earth from its divine loftiness and lost the mysticism attributed to it. The mission and the meaning attributed to the bureaucracy had vanished. It turned into a mere practical institution. Furthermore, Prussian intellectuals began to criticize the bureaucracy for no more serving the public interest, but only seeking to protect its own interests as a corps as elaborated in Theodor Von Schön‘s influential pamphlet Woher und Wohin ?³¹¹ The critics argued that bureaucracy became an end in itself. In the following decades, many progressives

³⁰⁷ The Code of 1794 was the founding codex of the 19th century Prussian bureaucracy which bestowed a huge mandate and also provides universal respect and social prestige. Willis, John, The Prussian Bureaucracy in Crisis 1840-1866, Stanford: Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1971, p. 16.

³⁰⁸ For Stein and the controversy around him and his political orientations, see Epstein, Klaus, ―Stein in German Historiography‖, History and Theory vol: 5, no:3, 1966, pp. 241- 274.

³⁰⁹ Langewiesche, Dieter, Liberalism in Germany, London: Macmillan Press, 2000, p. 5.

³¹⁰ For the political impact of the social and political developments in the 1840s, see Hamerow, Theodor S, Restoration, Revolution, Reaction: Economics and Politics in Germany 1815-1871, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966.

³¹¹ Willis, John, The Prussian Bureaucracy in Crisis 1840-1866, Berkeley: Stanford University Press, 1971, p. 20.

denounced the Prussian regime to advocate liberal and socialist agendas adverse to the Prussian state and its raison d‟etat. Ottoman officialdom did not encounter similar ideological and categorical criticism from liberal and socialist standpoints. Socialist/radical critique was almost non-existent and was limited to small circles. The timid Ottoman liberalism never questioned the legitimacy of state governance but criticized it only from a technical point of view: namely the cumbersomeness, ineffectiveness, and incompetence of the state which was not necessarily a liberal critique.³¹²

With the 1840s, the flow of landed aristocrats into the higher civil service was accompanied by the influx of the entrepreneurial middle class into the lower echelons of the civil service.³¹³ The prestige of Prussian bureaucracy was so much that, ―the Frenchmen wants the Order of the Legion of Honor; the Englishmen wants MP beside his name; the German wants to become a Kommerzienrat or Geheimrat.”³¹⁴ Throughout the 19th century, the state became the ultimate address of the expression and manifestation of the spiritual cosmos of the privileged. It was no longer the imagined community of the nobility but the state that exposed the sheer strength and magnificence of the world of the powerful and privileged. The state assumed the central position in the symbolism of the imagined community of the nobility. This transition implied a partial surrender of the aristocrats‘ lofty distinction and excellence but also implied the emergence of a new configuration of relations of power.

Another question to be resolved was the extent of the overlapping of the interests of the bureaucracy and the Junkers. The Prussian bureaucracy was definitely an institution of the establishment. It was a part of the conglomeration of the ancien régime. It may even be said that it was the guardian of the establishment although not in a Marxian sense. What made the bureaucracy a peculiar status group was that its interests were partially dependent on external circumstances and the social forces exterior to it. Willis establishes the

³¹² Prince Sabahaddin, the foremost Ottoman ―liberal‖ was predominantly influenced by French conservative thought rather than French liberal thought. See Kansu, Aykut, ―Prens Sabahaddin‘in                                                    Düşünsel                             Kaynakları                              ve Aşırı-Muhafazakâr Düşüncenin İthali‖, in Mehmet Ö, Alkan, Modern Türkiye‟de Siyasi Düşünce, v. I, İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2001, pp. 156-165.

³¹³ Willis, John, ibid, p. 38

³¹⁴ Willis, John, ibid, p.38.

connection between the old house of Junkerdom and the modern Prussian bureaucracy: ―In speaking of the modernization of the bureaucracy, one must be careful to note that the process did not necessarily involve the cessation of all traditional habits and attitudes. On the contrary, one of the most striking characteristics of modernization in Prussia was the way in which apparently contradictory elements were combined, and many reformed institutions were dependent on traditional symbols and personnel for their authority. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the bureaucracy, a group that broke with the past in a rapid and dislocating manner, yet preserved many of the habits and attitudes associated with the earlier period.‖³¹⁵

Nevertheless, the bureaucracy gained prominence after the Napoleonic wars and became a powerhouse by itself. This is why Hegel rightfully called bureaucracy the

―universal class‖. For Hegel, bureaucracy could not have particularistic interests. Its interests overlap with the interests of the ―whole‖. Bureaucracy‘s interest is in the universal advancement of the nation and the subjects of the state. Thus, the ―part‖ becomes the

―whole‖. This was the original version of Marx‘s attribution of the status of ―universal class‖ to the proletariat. Marx attributed to the proletariat what Hegel had previously attributed to the bureaucracy. For Marx, the proletariat could not have its own interests. The proletariat would fulfill itself only by advancing the interests of the whole. Because of its being the universal class, Hegel assumed that bureaucracy was a priori progressive. This assumption was not particular to Hegel but shared by the intellectual world of his time.³¹⁶ As pointed out above, this perception changed after the revelation in the eyes of the intellectuals (who also perceived themselves as representing the interests of the ―whole‖ in themselves) that bureaucracy was the guardian of the status quo from the second quarter of the nineteenth century onwards.

Hamerow contrasts the Viennese and Prussian bureaucracies and argues that whereas for the Viennese civil service bureaucracy was a matter of pragmatic professionalism, the Prussian bureaucracy differed in that, ―behind the outward appearance of a devoted subject lurked the bold frondeur. His faith in the monarchy arose out of a sense of pride, and his

³¹⁵ Willis, John, ibid, p. xiv

³¹⁶ Iggers, George, The German Conception of History, Middletown, Conn. : Wesleyan University Press, 1968, pp. 41-43.

opposition to liberalism was more than a preference for royal over bourgeois rule.‖³¹⁷ Hamerow does not distinguish between the aristocracy and the bureaucracy and associates Prussian bureaucracy with aristocratic power. For him, the Prussian bureaucracy‘s sole purpose was to defend the interests of the conservative establishment. Along the same lines, he does not concede any significant and effective role to the Prussian bureaucracy in the course of German unification in his classic book, The Social Origins of German Unification 1858-1871. Apparently for Hamerow, social and economic developments shaped the German polity, and he conceded no active role to the state and the bureaucracy in this process. Although he saw the Prussian bureaucracy as an adamant adversary of reform, he perceived this opposition as a current against the stream with no transformative role in the flow of history.

After Hamerow, the overwhelming role of the Prussian state in the course of German history has been acknowledged by historians as social scientists, who began to ―bring the state back in‖. Willis claimed that the autonomy of the bureaucracy ended from 1840s onwards. Partisanship, conflict, and disintegration ―replaced the rational and olympian Beamtenstand of the early decades(.)‖³¹⁸

―What ultimately came forth from the upheavals of the transitional period was a relationship suited to an industrialized and urbanized Prussia, in which the old corporative distinctions were no longer tenable. By the time of national unification much that had once divided the aristocracy and bureaucracy had disappeared; both were now part of one relatively homogeneous upper class which also comprises the officer corps and the upper bourgeoisie. Whereas earlier in the century the status symbols of birth, rank, wealth and education had been the property of the separate Stande, now they were characteristic of the upper class as a whole. The social distance between the landed aristocracy, the industrial-commercial bourgeoisie, and the higher bureaucracy had narrowed to the point that there existed what Otto Hintze was to call a ‗noble-bourgeois aristocracy of office‘.‖³¹⁹

Willis presents us with a re-articulation of the Wehler-Mommsen ―ruling elite‖ narrative of the critical, left-liberal German historians of the post-World War II Bielefeld School. This

³¹⁷    Hamerow,    Theodore,    Restoration,    Revolution,    Reaction,    Princeton:    Princeton University Press, 1966, p. 205.

³¹⁸ Willis, John, ―Aristocracy and Breaucracy in Nineteenth Century Prussia‖, Past and Present, No. 41 (Dec 1968), p.107.

³¹⁹ Willis, John, Aristocracy…., p. 108.

―academically popular‖ vision of the ―conglomerate of the ruling elite‖ is both illuminating and irrelevant for the nineteenth century Ottoman context. The Wilhelmine and Hamidian regimes differ in many aspects. First of all, we can speak of neither a ―bourgeoisie‖ nor

―aristocracy‖ for the Ottoman context. However, we can definitely speak of a certain ruling elite for the nineteenth century Ottoman Empire. A very important characteristic of the Prussian polity (as well as the other European polities) was the existence of corporate bodies.³²⁰ The nobility and the civil service were two corporations. They had their precisely defined rights and privileges. What we see through the Tanzimat is the emergence of an informal corporation of the ―ruling elite‖ holding official posts and gaining ―respectability‖. In this study, it is argued that the culmination of the fashioning of the ―ruling elite‖ was reached in the Hamidian era.

The Hamidian elite was not the intimidating and monstrous Willhelmine elite of Wehler-Mommsen. It was much more modest in terms of its organization and structure. No Hegel had attributed a historical mission to it. No Fichte had consecrated it. However, a national mission had been assumed by the late Ottoman bureaucracy. It was the state elite that had to counter the assault of the Western powers and more importantly the seditious and separatist non-Turkish and non-Muslim communities. It was the bureaucracy which had to import the necessary knowledge and skills and apply it for the goodwill of the nation. It became the teacher/instructor and role model of the nation. It was the importer, producer, and reproducer of the modern and national knowledge. This was not yet the divine task the Unionists assumed when they tried to reestablish the state as a tool in their radical and uncompromising policies of all sorts. However, the Tanzimat bureaucracy perceived itself as the only source for the revival of the Ottoman state and the idea it represented. In this regard, the Tanzimat bureaucracy played a much more effective role than its Prussian counterpart. It was more ―Hegelian‖ than the Prussian bureaucracy at least as far as ―national cause‖ was concerned. Therefore, the particular structures of mentalities of the Ottoman bureaucracy were decisive in the formation of Turkish nation and modernity.

³²⁰ For the role of corporations in medieval Europe and their significance within the imagination of social order in European political thought, see Black, Antony, Guilds and Civil Society in European Political Thought from the Twelfth Century to the Present, London; New York: Routledge, 1984.

Following the introductory discussions on bureaucracies in general, this chapter will discuss the collective intellectual formations of Ottoman officialdom. One of the problems in studying 19th century Ottoman intellectual history as well as studying the ideological make-up of the 19th century Ottoman state elite has been to perceive it as a passing or transitory phenomenon. It is as if the Kemalist mind and the Republican reformers ran over the intellectual legacy of the Tanzimat, resulting in its death with this merciless stroke. For example back in 1962, Richard L. Chambers divided, ―Turkey‘s evolution into a modern nation state in two stages, the first of which may be said to begin in 1789, and the second in 1919.‖ For Chambers, ―the early phases of change were in a manner of speaking defensive since they were effected to preserve the authority of the traditional ruling elite; the changes after 1919 were effected in a genuinely progressive spirit.‖³²¹ The Tanzimat,

―brought bureaucrats to the fore as leaders of further defensive reforms(.)‖³²² Chambers saw Tanzimat as the ―age of bureaucrats‖ before they ―lost the position of leadership they had intermittently held for some half a century, first to Abdülhamid and his conservative allies, then to the Young Turk army officers and intellectuals, and finally to Atatürk and the politicians.‖³²³ Here, the snapshot summary of Chambers‘ analysis will not be criticized because these lines are not quoted to criticize the perspective of Chambers but to illustrate the emblematic approach of the time. Chambers himself was a scholar of the Tanzimat bureaucracy and the author of a dissertation on Ahmed Cevdet Pasha³²⁴, and moreover his quoted article was probing not the Republican bureaucracy but the Tanzimat bureaucracy. Nevertheless, he saw the Tanzimat as a bygone age that failed to respond to the assaults leveled firstly by the patrimonialism of Abdülhamid and later by the military officers. In short, the Tanzimat had been eradicated without any trace. While the Kemalist ideology had been delighted with this alleged eradication, many others had resented the collapse of the Tanzimat. Many public intellectuals who are critical of Kemalism perceived

³²¹ Chambers, Richard, ―The Civil Bureaucracy: Turkey‖, in Political Modernization in Japan and Turkey, Robert E. Ward & Dankwart A. Rüstow (ed.), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962, pp. 301-2

³²² ibid, p. 302.

³²³ ibid, p. 325.

³²⁴ Chambers, Richard, Ahmed Cevdet Paşa: The Formative Years of an Ottoman Transitional, unpublished dissertation, Princeton University, 1968.

the gradualism of the Tanzimat as the failed alternative to the radicalism of the Republic. However, here we should probe the Tanzimat intellectual environment not as an archaeologist excavating to find some relics of the past but as a contemporary historian, if not a political scientist, to reconstruct a formative moment of Turkish modernity. In short, here the mindset of the Ottoman bureaucracy will not be investigated as a passé phenomenon, but as the foundation of Turkish modernity as well as the foundation of the Republic.

 

 

 

2.3.  The Problem of Secularism

 

In the modern Ottoman/Turkish historiography, one of the understudied areas and concepts is ―secularism‖.³²⁵ The fact that Mustafa Kemal had decreed secular practices by law and that defined laicism was introduced as a legal concept made us to fail to comprehend and locate what secularity is. Furthermore, the emergence and development of a ―secular mind‖ in the turbulent decades of the late nineteenth century in the Ottoman world could not be mapped satisfactorily. The acuteness and authoritarian nature of the Kemalist practice of Kemalist secularism rendered us unable to grasp the complexity, multi-facetedness, and ambivalent nature of secularism. The preference for the French concept of laicism instead of Anglo-Saxon secularism also determined our (mis)perception of secularity.³²⁶ Laicism was a legalistic and an ahistorical concept as opposed to the dynamic, and socially and historically constituted nature of secularity. Not being a legal

³²⁵ ―Secularism‖ is confined to the sphere of law as it is only a matter of politics and legislation. For the legal development of secularism in Turkey; see Daver, Bülent, Türkiye Cumhuriyetinde Layiklik, İstanbul: Son Havadis Matbaası, 1955; Özek, Çetin, Türkiye‟de Laiklik, İstanbul: Baha Matbaası, 1962. For the social and intellectual development of republican secularism, see Azak, Umut, Continuity and Change in the Discourse of Secularism in Turkey (1946-1966), unpublished dissertation, Leiden University, 2007. Adak, Sevgi, Formation of Authoritarian Secularism in Turkey: Ramadans in the Early Republican Era, 1923-1938, unpublished MA thesis, Sabancı University, 2004.

³²⁶ For a comparative analysis of North American, French, and Turkish interpretations and practices of secularism, see Kuru, Ahmet, ―Passive and Assertive Secularism: Historical Conditions, Ideological Struggles, and State Policies towards Religion‖, World Politics, Vol. 59, No. 4 (2007), pp. 568-594.

notion, there is no Archimedian point at which ―secularism‖ begins.³²⁷ There is not even an agreed definition of ―secularity‖. Furthermore, it is legitimate to question if secularism in its fullness is ever possible. Secularism as an epistemological and ontological notion is almost impossible to comprehend,³²⁸ especially as revealed after the debates of the postsecular society and multiple modernities.³²⁹

The ambiguous aspects and nature of secularism is evident for a student of the development of secularism in 19th century Europe. Arguably, a similar pattern was observable in the Ottoman Empire throughout the course of the 19^th century. What was probably different in the context of the Ottoman Empire was its politicization and the repercussions in its manifestation within the political realm, arguably especially after the Incident of the 31st of March in 1909. The word secularism may imply that there is a clear- cut dichotomy between ―secular‖ polities, and between secular societies and the non- secular ones. It is as if it should be one way or the other.³³⁰ However, in the previous chapter, the place and role of religion in European monarchies had been discussed, and it had been pointed out that religion was brought forth and used for other (i.e., worldly)

³²⁷ Due to this assumption, Daver discusses the secularism of Tanzimat and reaches a middle-ground answer claiming that Tanzimat was a step in the secularization of Turkey although it was itself hardly secular. In a way, for Daver, Tanzimat was half-secular. This is because Daver (not unlike Berkes) does not disassociate secularism from modernization of public law. See Daver, Abidin, ibid, pp. 41-22.

³²⁸ For example, see Pecora, Vincent P, Secularization and Cultural Criticism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006; Asad, Talal, Formations of the Secular, Stanford: Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.

³²⁹ For post-secular society, see Habermas, Jurgen, ―Religion in the Public Sphere‖, European Journal of Philosophy, 2006 (14-1), pp. 1-25. For ―multiple modernities‖, see Eisenstadt, Shmuel & Sachsenmaier, Dominic (ed.), Reflections on Multiple Modernities: European, Chinese, and other Interpretations, Leiden; Boston; Köln: Brill, 2002. This volume was previously published as a volume of the journal Daedalus. Also see, Eisenstadt, Shmuel, Comparative Civilizations and Multiple Modernities, Leiden; Boston; Köln: Brill, 2003.

³³⁰ For the ambiguity of the word ―secularization‖ and the impossible effort to designate the point where ―secular‖ begins, see Chadwick, Owen, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge, U.K. : Cambridge University Press, 1975, pp. 15-18. For a literary survey of the sociological critiques of the explanatory capacity of the concept ―secularization‖, also see Glasner, Peter E, The Sociology of Secularisation, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977, pp. 5-14

means. The presence and function of Islam in the 19th century Ottoman Empire also had to be analyzed within this framework and these premises. What was aberrant in the course of Ottoman/Turkish history was the sharp denial of any role to Islam by the republic. In fact, this was also a manifestation of a European-wide pattern (the sudden and drastic decline of recognition of any social or political role for religion in the aftermath of World War I with the collapse of the monarchies across the continent) and thus cannot be analyzed in isolation from global dynamics. In certain ways, this development can be seen as an attempt to accommodate the changing times.³³¹ This also shows that even the radical nature of Kemalism was not a hundred percent local phenomenon but a variation of the postwar republican transformation across the continent.

What the republic did was to shift the ―address of allegiance‖ from a complex and multidimensional one to a blatantly singular one. The republic had declared ―ethnic belonging‖ and the ―state‖ as the immediate ―manifestations/embodiments of the nation‖ thereby eliminating all other sources of identities and legitimacy structures, first and foremost Islam. In this chapter, we will try to delve into the complex and multidimensional mental world of the late Ottoman imperial identity in which different allegiances coexisted and complemented each other.

 

 

 

2.4.  The Structures of Mentalities of the Tanzimat Bureaucrat

 

What do we know about the mindset of the ―typical‖ Tanzimat bureaucrat, not as a literary character in Tanzimat novels, but as a historical person? A meticolous and critical reading of the memoirs will not reveal to us coherent structures of mentalities. On the

³³¹ After the unexpected and dramatic collapse of the ―ancien régime‖ with its value system, religion had been replaced with new forms of political theology as the ultimate source of legitimacy. Nationalism, fascism, and communism are expressions of such an endeavor to establish and perfect a new political religion as first noticed by contemporaries such as Hans Kohn, Hayes, Voegelin, and Raymond Aron. Fascists were explicit in their aim of establishing a new political theology. See Gentile, Emilio, ―Fascism as Political Religion‖, Journal of Contemporary History, vol.25, no.2-3, May-June 1990, pp. 229-251. Kemalist secular theology cannot be analyzed in isolation from this continent wide zeal beginning not with the 1930s, but from 1918 onwards, following immediately the collapse of the value system of the ancien régime and only becoming overt and dangerous in 1930s.

contrary, the memoirs will reveal structures of mentalities full of contradictions and incoherence (though maybe only in the eyes of the historian). These texts are useful in opening up a world for us which we do not know, which we cannot reconstruct, and with which we cannot be familiar or empathize. Still, we can try our best to reconstruct a world which is rather distant and unintelligible to our modern minds. We have a few memoirs of Ottoman diplomats, each of them reflecting different worldviews and mindsets.³³² It is the careful researcher‘s task to integrate them and interpret them as a whole. The memoirs of state officials in general (mostly governors and officers) can also enable us to enter the world of the late Ottoman bureaucratic world in all its complexity.³³³

Although it is a regrettable fact that we lack an abundance of memoirs written in the 19th century (and earlier) in the Ottoman Empire in comparison to the number produced in Western Europe, the ones available provide us with perspectives from which to enter the cultural formations, and social and political cosmologies of the late Ottoman bureaucratic mind. It may be argued that the available memoirs and their contents have yet to be meticulously worked out and interpreted satisfactorily. Moreover, new memoirs are continuing to appear as descendants of the memoirists are publicizing their ancestors‘ notebooks, which were long kept in attics and only taken into daylight in a decade in which antiquity became fashionable. From early 1990s, a growing interest (peaking in the late 2000s) was shown in the memoirs, and since the early 1990s the memoirs of military

 

 

 

³³² See the most comprehensive memoirs, see Söylemezoğlu, Galip Kemali, Hariciye Hizmetinde 30 Yıl, 4 volumes, 1949-1955, For weak but curious memoirs, see Paker, Esat Cemal, Kırk Yıllık Hariciye Hatıralarım, Hilmi Kitabevi, 1952.

³³³ Memoirs written by non-diplomat Ottoman bureaucrats are richer in number. For the best and most useful memoirs, see Tepeyran, Ebubekir Hazım, Hatıralar, İstanbul: Pera Yayıncılık, 1998, Biren, Mehmet Tevfik, Bir Devlet Adamının Abdülhamid, Meşrutiyet, Mütareke Devri Hatıraları, İstanbul: Arba Yayınları, 1993, Midhat Paşa, Tabsıra-ı Ibret and Mirat-ı Hayret, İstanbul: Hilal Matbaası, 1325, Mahmud Celalettin Pasha, Mirat-ı Hakikat, İstanbul: Berekat Yayınları, 1983, Said Paşa, Hatırat, 3 volumes, Konstantiniyye, 1328, Kamil Pasha, Hatırat-ı Kamil Paşa, Matbaa-ı Ebuzziya, 1329, Gazi Ahmed Muhtar Pasha, Sergüzeşt-i Hayatım, İstanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 2 volumes, 1996, Rey, Ahmed Reşid, Gördüklerim Yaptıklarım, İstanbul: Türkiye Yayınevi, 1945, for ―de facto‖ memoirs, Ahmed Cevdet Pasha, Tezakir, Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 4 volumes, 1986.

officers³³⁴ and the members of Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa (Special –Secret- Organization)³³⁵, accounts of Ottoman travelers to foreign countries³³⁶, and other conspicuous accounts were published. Many contemporaneous memoirs printed in part in newspapers (tefrika) were turned into separate books after some more than sixty years since their original printing (some transcribed into the Latin alphabet), as well as some memoirs printed in part in the popular historical journals of the 1950s and 1960s. Although several deficiencies like the

―Turkicizing‖ of the memoirs without providing the original texts are reducing their substantiality and utility for historical research, these memoirs enable us to learn more

³³⁴ ―İş Bankası Yayınları‖ published numerous memoirs of military officers (and private soldiers) although in ―simplified forms‖ and did not provide the original texts. These publications include Bir Onbaşının Doğu Cephesi Günlüğü (Ali Rıza Eti), Kumandanım Galiçya Ne Yana Düşer (M. Şevki Yazman), İstibdattan Meşrutiyete, Çocukluktan Gençliğe (İsmail Hakkı Sunata), İstanbul‘da İşgal Yılları (İsmail Hakkı Sunata), Gelibolu‘dan Kafkaslara (İsmail Hakkı Sunata), Birinci Dünya Savaşı‘nda Bir Yedek Subayın Anıları (Faik Tonguç), Sarıkamış (Köprülü Şerif İlden), Afganistan‘da bir Jöntürk (Mehmet Fazlı). Remzi Kitabevi, another popular publishing house addressing mainstream middle-class readers, also published various memoirs of military officers for the first time without providing their original texts. See Harbiye‘den Dersim‘e (Ziya Yergök), Sarıkamış‘tan Esarete (Ziya Yergök), Sadettin Paşa‘nın Anıları (Sadettin Pasha). Many small publishing houses also published many memoirs. Of course, İş Bankası Yayınları, Remzi Kitabevi, and other small publishing houses reprinted the memoirs previously published. İş Bankası recently republished the memoirs of Cemal Pasha, İzzeddin Çalışlar, Talat Pasha, Ali Fuad Erden, Kılıç Ali, and Enver Pasha. Apparently, there is a rising public interest and curiosity in the recent decade in memoirs as a part of the rising general interest in late Ottoman history and late Ottoman artifacts.

³³⁵ Nevrekoplu Celal Bey, Batı Trakya‟nın Bitmeyen Çilesi, İstanbul: Arma Yayınları, 2000; Aksoley, İhsan, Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa‟dan Kuva-yı Milliye‟ye, İstanbul: Timaş Yayınları, 2009; Balkan, Fuat, İlk Türk Komitacısı Fuat Balkan‟ın Hatıraları, İstanbul: Arma Yayınları, 1998, Arif Cemil, I. Dünya Savaşı‟nda Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa, Arba Yayınları, 1997. The recent interest in Teşkilat- Mahsusa emerged with the publication of the unpublished doctoral disssertation of Philip Stoddard in Turkish in 1994 (as a part of the interest in the rediscovery of a hidden past obliterated by the official republican discourse) and preceded the ―rediscovery‖ in the 2000s of the state-authorized violence perpetrated against the Armenians during the World War and the role of ―Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa‖ in the organization of Armenian massacres.

³³⁶ Bağdatlı Abdurrahman Efendi, Brezilya Seyahatnamesi, İstanbul: Kitabevi, 2006; Ömer Lütfi, Ümitburnu Seyahatnamesi, İstanbul: Kitabevi, 2006; Habibzade Ahmed Kemal, Çin- Türkistan Hatıraları, İstanbul: Kitabevi, 1996; Sadık el-Müeyyed, Afrika Sahra-yı Kebirinde Seyahat, Çamlıca, 2008; Ubeydullah Efendi, Ubeydullah Efendi‟nin Amerika Hatıraları, İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 1990; Mustafa Sait Bey, Avrupa Seyahatnamesi, İstanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 1998.

regarding the worldviews of the Tanzimat and Hamidian cadres. The old assumption that the ―Orient‖ lacks memoirs and personal narratives before the arrival of modernity has been already refuted.³³⁷ New memoirs and diaries have been discovered both from the classical age of the Ottoman Empire written in Turkish and Arabic, and from the 19^th century, further proving that this orientalist cliché is baseless.

The memoirs pose several problems to be tackled. First of all, not all of these memoirs can be taken as sincere accounts. Different from diaries written immediately and objectively, all memoirs have a particular motivation and purpose in being written down. Some might have more innocent purposes, like looking for a commercial success or hoping to be remembered after long years of oblivion. Some are to serve a political agenda. Cemal Pasha wrote his memoirs to expose his innocence regarding the Armenian massacres.³³⁸ Rıza Nur wrote his flamboyant and eccentric thick volumes to be published after his death to challenge and discredit the Kemalists from his tomb.³³⁹ Several memoirs published in the Istanbul dailies in the 1930s were the long-forgotten voices of men of prominence of yesteryear such as the Lord Chamberlain of Abdülhamid II, Tahsin Pasha³⁴⁰ or forgotten Young Turks like Ahmed Rıza³⁴¹, Muhittin Birgen³⁴² and Ali Haydar Midhat³⁴³. Apparently, all these accounts inevitably distorted the past to serve political or personal

³³⁷ Recent works by Ottomans (as well as Arabists) criticized the simplistic and untested claim that the Ottomans (and Muslims in general) do not have a tradition of memoirs unlike the West and demonstrated that Ottomans also produced a remarkable number of first-person accounts. For some reassessments and criticisms, see Kafadar, Cemal, ―Self and Others: The Diary of a Dervish in Seventeenth Century Istanbul and First-Person Narratives in Ottoman Literature‖, Studia Islamica, no: 69 (1989), pp. 121-150; Terzioğlu, Derin, ―Man in the Image of God in the Image of the Times: Sufi Self-Narratives and the Diary of Niyazi Mısri (1618-1694)‖, Studia Islamica, no: 94 (2002), pp. 139-165.

³³⁸ Cemal Paşa, Hatıralar, no publication place, Selek Yayınları, 1959.

³³⁹ Rıza Nur, Hayat ve Hatıratım, Duisburg, no publication house, 1982.

³⁴⁰ Tahsin Paşa, Abdülhamit Yıldız Hatıraları, İstanbul: Muallim Ahmet Halit Kitaphanesi, 1931.

³⁴¹ Ahmet Rıza, Meclis-i Mebusan ve Ayan Reisi Ahmed Rıza Bey‟in Hatıraları, İstanbul: Arba, 1988.

³⁴² Muhittin Birgen, İttihat ve Terakki‟de On Sene, İstanbul: Kitap Yayınevi, 2006.

³⁴³ Ali Haydar Midhat, Osmanlı‟dan Cumhuriyet‟e Hatıralarım, 1872-1946, İstanbul: Bengi, 2008.

interests. Some distortions may be intentional and others unintentional. However, distortions may also be suggestive for deciphering the worldviews of these authors. Memoirs may communicate wonderful observations and interpretations that can be perceived only by an intimate observer. Interesting single anecdotes told by the observer may enable us to conceive the broader picture. Single incidents may be more explanatory and revealing than a whole account. Of course, again we should be careful not to over- interpret the anecdotes and bear in mind that the anecdotes narrated are selected by the author to make his points more persuasive. Literary creativity is a necessary quality of the historian, but the historian is first of all a hard scientist. Though we have the ability to know what the observer preferred to tell us, we however do not have the chance to know completely what the observer preferred not to tell us. However, the possibility of distortion renders the memoirs even more valuable in the eyes of the intellectual historian. The distortions are also a part of the mind of the memoirist.³⁴⁴

One way to categorize the memoirs would be in terms of ―typical‖ and ―non-typical‖ ones. The non-typical memoirs may not be the best sources to depend on as they would not be representative. On the other hand, non-typical memoirs may display the complexity and multi-facetedness of the group for which they are classified as ―non-typical‖. They diverge from the mainstream in a way that reveals the norms and normalities of the ―mainstream‖. For example, we may classify Ebubekir Hazim‘s (Tepeyran) memoirs (written only in the 1940s) as non-typical with regard to his non-nationalist and liberal approach as a provincial administrator and a governor.

Besides the memoirs of governors, military officers, high profile politicians, denizens of the palace, and men of letters, figures from various governmental offices also penned down their memoirs. Some memoirs depicting the interesting careers of the authors were

³⁴⁴ For interpreting and assessing the discourses present in the memoirs and autobiographies, see Olney, James, Metaphors of Self, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972; Weintraub, Karl, The Value of the Individual: Self and Circumstance in Autobiography, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978; Anderson, Linda, Autobiography, London; New York: Routledge, 2001; Nussbaum, Felicity, The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth Century England, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989; Freadman, Richard, Threads of Life, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001; Steedman, Carolyn, Past Tenses, Rivers Oram Press, 1992.

written by medical doctors serving in the imperial hospitals who became the founders of modern Turkish medicine³⁴⁵, a military engineer who became a pioneering industrialist and aviator³⁴⁶, a member of the imperial orchestra³⁴⁷, a military officer active in the establishment of a military veterinary school³⁴⁸, one of the earliest female painters³⁴⁹, and travelers visiting all parts of the world.

Another categorization of memoirs might be established based on the memoirs‘ profoundness and lucidity. Some accounts do not disclose more than a depiction of the daily routine of an author serving in various posts. Many of the memoirs lack a structured framework. Others may reveal the cultural, intellectual, and ideological formations of the author in its all complexity. For example, Ebubekir Hazim‘s (Tepeyran), Mehmet Tevfik‘s (Birgen) and Gazi Ahmed Muhtar Pasha‘s memoirs are examples of lucid and knowledgeable memoirs written by men of prominence who held high offices. More importantly, they were competent and knowledgeable officials, and thus their memoirs convey to us a lot about the worldview of the late Ottoman bureaucrats. From such memoirs, we can construct a comprehensive worldview of the late Ottoman bureaucrat.

Some labels with which we may categorize/label the authors of the memoirs are

―nationalist‖, ―conservative‖, ―modernist‖, et cetera. As articulated in the previous chapter, all these simplistic, definitive labels fail to represent the minds of the Ottoman bureaucrats as the memoirs leave us with perplexing questions rather than providing the keys for penetrating into the mind of the memoirist.

First   of   all,   it   is   very   hard   to   find   an   uncompromising

―conservative/traditional/reactionary‖. The wicked and bigoted reactionary is a character which we encounter both in the Western observers‘ accounts and in the supposedly liberal/westernist Ottoman accounts. For example, the theme of the clash between the

³⁴⁵ Cemil Kopuzlu, Hatıraları, İstanbul: Türkiye Yayınevi, 1945; Operatör Hazim Paşa, Hatıraları, İstanbul: Türkiye Yayınevi, 1945; Celal Muhtar Özden, Hatıraları, İstanbul: Türkiye Yayınevi, 1945.

³⁴⁶ İlmen, Süreyya, Hatıralarım, İstanbul: İbrahim Horoz Basımevi, 1947.

³⁴⁷ Kaçar, Halil, Hatıraları, İstanbul: Türkiye Yayınevi, 1945

³⁴⁸ Albatı, Eşref, Hatıraları, İstanbul: Türkiye Yayınevi,1945.

³⁴⁹ Naciye Neyyal, Mutlakiyet, Meşrutiyet ve Cumhuriyet Hatıraları, İstanbul: Pınar Yayınları, 2000.

progressive Mustafa Reşid Pasha and his reactionary archenemies is prevalent in Ahmed Cevdet Pasha‘s Tezakir. Ahmed Cevdet Pasha wrote that, when Mustafa Reşid Pasha was temporarily dismissed from office, his archenemy the reactionary Said Pasha took control of the state and accused Mustafa Reşid of blasphemy. Furthermore, he exiled all the champions of progressive ideas from Istanbul and tried to transform the state into what it had been one hundred years earlier (İstanbul‟u efkar-ı cedide eshabından tahliye etmek velhasıl devleti yüz sene geriye döndürmek gibi hülyalara saptı).³⁵⁰ The western accounts also like to depict the irreconcilable clash between the progressive wing and the reactionaries within Ottoman officialdom. However, all these accounts fail to substantiate the gist of the matter. The ―uncompromising arch-reactionary character‖ seems to be a literary character (as well as an ideological asset) given that the Tanzimat bureaucracy as a whole was imbued with a certain reformist/transformative agenda although kindred souls of this fictitious character could be found among various conservative figures of the Tanzimat bureaucratic world. As has already been argued, this shared ethos derived less from cultural preferences than from structural imperatives and concerns. A few names such as Namık Pasha, who renounced his earlier Westernized culturalization, became a devoted Naqshibendi, and publicly displayed his piousness, remained exceptional.³⁵¹

The affair that was portrayed as a ―reactionary takeover‖ was Mahmud Nedim Pasha‘s rise to power in 1871. After coming to power, Mahmud Nedim Pasha purged many of the men of prominence (and members of the ―progressive‖ cabal of Âli Pasha) and practically exiled them by appointing them to provincial posts. The appointment of Mahmud Nedim Pasha to the Grand Vizirate was depicted in almost all the contemporary Ottoman accounts as a kind of counter-revolution³⁵² (irtica is the translation of one of the foundational

³⁵⁰ Ahmed Cevdet Paşa, Tezakir, Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1986, v. I, p. 11.

³⁵¹ For a biography of Namık Pasha, see Sinaplı, Ahmet Nuri, Devlete Millete Beş Padişah Devrinde Kıymetli Hizmetlerde Bulunan Şeyh‟ül Vüzera: Serasker Mehmed Namık Paşa, İstanbul: Yenilik Basımevi, 1987; Somel, Selçuk Akşin, ―Şeyh‘ül Vüzera Namık Paşa‖, Toplumsal Tarih, June 2009, no: 186, pp. 60-67; Ceylan, Ebubekir, ―Namık Paşa‘nın Bağdat Valilikleri‖, Toplumsal Tarih, June 2009, no: 182, pp. 76-84.

³⁵² For the birth and development of ―counter-revolution‖ as a reaction to the ―revolution‖ and its demonization and prominent role in the revolutionary rhetoric in France, see Godechot, Jacques, The Counter-Revolution: Doctrine and Action, 1789-1804, Princeton:

concepts of French Revolution, reaction) with a tone resembling the Young Turk accounts narrating the Incident of 31 March as the insurrection of reaction when the politically heavily loaded term/label irtica made its debut.³⁵³ For example, Ebuzziya Tevfik writes that the Young Ottomans who previously were outspoken foes of Âli Pasha appreciated him after his death.³⁵⁴ This was because although they were disturbed by the despotic nature of Âli Pasha‘s governance, they shared the ethos of the Tanzimat whereas Mahmud Nedim Pasha was depicted as a man of radically different aspirations and worldview. Mahmud Nedim Pasha was described in all these accounts as someone who was not only reactionary and politically incapable, but also a man with negative personal qualities such as ―maliciousness‖ and ―treachery‖.³⁵⁵ For Namık Kemal, Mahmud Nedim‘s rule was a despotism aimed at eradicating all the reforms and achievements of the Tanzimat (in contrast to the government of Ali Paşa which was guilty of not undertaking any substantial reforms and betraying the legacy of Mustafa Reşid Paşa) and collapsed in the face of resistance by the whole nation (umum millet).³⁵⁶ Butrus Abu Manneh claimed that Mahmud Nedim‘s takeover had signified a conscious, drastic transfer of power and the capture of power by a certain ideologically motivated mentality which failed after strong and effective resistance by the bureaucracy.³⁵⁷ Mahmud Nedim‘s goal was to destroy the

Princeton University Press, 1981; Sutherland, D.M.G., France, 1789-1815: Revolution and Counter-Revolution, London: Fontana Press, 1985.

³⁵³ Azak, Umut, Myths and Memeries of Secularism in Turkey (1923-1966), unpublished dissertation, Leiden University, p. 38.

³⁵⁴ Ebüzziya Tevfik, Yeni Osmanlılar, İstanbul: Kervan Yayınları, v. II, pp. 110-11.

³⁵⁵ For example, for Ahmed Cevdet Pasha, Mahmud Nedim only cared about his personal interests and would always side with a party after it became victorious. Ahmed Cevdet Paşa, Tezakir, Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Yayınları, 1986, v. I, p. 16, 26-27. For SamiPashazade Sezai, Mahmud Nedim was ―barbaric and treacherous‖. ―Abdülhamid‘in Parası‖, Şura-yı Ümmet, 18 February 1904, excerpted in Kerman, Zeynep, Sami Paşazade Sezai: Bütün Eserleri, Ankara: Türk Dil Kurumu Yayınları, 2001, v. III, pp. 103-7. Also see Ebüzziya Tevfik, ibid, v. II, p. 115-17, 143.

³⁵⁶ Namık Kemal, ―Tanzimat‖, Ibret, 4 Ramazan 1289/ 24 Teşrin-i Evvel 1288. Excerpted in Aydoğdu, Nergiz Yılmaz & Kara, İsmail (ed.), Namık Kemal, Bütün Makaleleri 1, İstanbul: Dergah Yayınları, 2005, p. 223.

³⁵⁷ See Abu-Manneh, Butrus, ―The Sultan and the Bureaucracy: The Anti-Tanzimat Concepts of Grand Vizier Mahmud Nedim Pasha, in Studies on Islam and the Ottoman Empire in the 19th Century, Istanbul: Isis Press, 2001, pp. 160-180. Davison speaks of the

existing bureaucratic caste and to pack the bureaucracy with an alternative group of officials.³⁵⁸ Henry Eliot also notes that after the appointment of Mahmud Nedim as the Grand Vizier, ―(t)he sultan....appoint(ed) to high posts several of the worst of the old school of Pashas.‖³⁵⁹ Although in Elliot‘s narrative, the sultan‘s act remained a personal prerogative and an arbitrary act rather than a manifestation of an ideological dynamic, he established the political underpinnings of this personal prerogative. Although this prevalent narrative reflects a genuine concern and a political feud, it also constitutes a founding discourse of the Turkish progressive narrative by creating an enemy and demonizing it (preceding the 31 March Incident of 1909).³⁶⁰ This is not to suggest that Mahmud Nedim lacked such motivations. However, the ―official demonization‖ of Mahmud Nedim reflects a certain bias. Furthermore this narrative was semi-officialized after Mahmud Nedim‘s retreat against the organized resistance of the leading cadres of the Tanzimat.

The basic motivation that influences Mahmud Nedim‘s rise and practices developed, as shown by Abu Mannah, out of a broad disappointment with the West and the fear of the prospective and inevitable rise of the non-Muslims within the bureaucracy and in the Ottoman world in general after the liberal reforms of 1860s. This fear was shared by the adamant opponents of Mahmud Nedim as well. Therefore, Mahmud Nedim‘s reaction may be regarded as a symptom rather than a cause. The liberal-reformist optimism of the Tanzimat had collapsed from the inside, and Mahmud Nedim was only a symptom of the evolution of the Tanzimat ideology. Mahmud Nedim was only the most visible and

setback of ―gradual secularization, of the pursuit of Osmanlıcılık, of general modernization‖ and the coming of ―nascent Islamic sentiment and a rising anti- Europeanism‖ with the death of Ali Pasha and the appointment of Mahmud Nedim as his successor. Roderick Davison, Reform in the Ottoman Empire 1856-1876, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963, p. 269.

³⁵⁸ For a short discussion of the ―cabal‖ of Mahmud Nedim Pasha, see Butrus Abu Manneh, ibid, pp. 171-76. For the exile policy of Mahmud Nedim Pasha, see Roderick Davison, Reform in the Ottoman Empire 1856-1876, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963, p. 281.

³⁵⁹ Sir Henry G. Elliot, Some Revolutions and Other Diplomatic Experiences, London: John Murray, 1922, p. 231.

³⁶⁰ For the political uses of the Notion of ―irtica‖ in the Unionist and Kemalist eras by the political elites to discredit, demonize and delegitimize opposition (as also noted by Velid Ebüziyya, the son of Tevfik, in 1923), see Azak, Umut, ibid, pp. 38-41.

outspoken expression of the change in perceptions. In short, Mahmud Nedim‘s conservative backlash emanated from the dynamics of the Tanzimat. Nevertheless, his critical attitude to the basic premises to the Tanzimat were denounced and doomed him to failure.