Anyone familiar with Ottoman history?

Economics Economics Questions
1

Ok, in a recent debate I’ve had with several individuals involving free trade, one particular person brought up the Ottoman empire and used this article to buttress his argument: http://www.amconmag.com/pdfissue.html?Id=AmConservative-2010aug01&page=41 (you can find the article, without logging in, here: http://www.thefreelibrary.com/How+to+lose+an+empire%3A+America+goes+Ottoman+shopping.-a0229835121)

First off, I know free trade was not the cause of the Ottoman empires decline, but is anyone familiar with what really was the cause for decline? Obviously military adventurism played a heavy role–and I suspect expansion of government spending had some aspects to do with it, but I’m curious as to whether or not there were other factors at play here.

2

Not to be intentionally unhelpful, but

"This one time, this guy had freedom, and he didn’t make the optimal choice. Since I know a better choice, it would have been better if he had been forced to do what I thought.

Therefore free trade is not the best way to organize society"

3

I don’t know if this is something that is in the general literature, but I think that the rise and fall of the Ottoman Empire is a great example of a coercive monopoly and how to break them.

The Ottomans, and basically all the muslim empires before them, were the ultimate middleman. The physically controlled all the major trade routes between the Far East, Africa and Europe. Goods could not pass between these three areas, all far more rich in natural resources than Ottoman territory, without going through muslim hands.

Then this pesky little thing called the Age of Sail happens. And Europeans start to figure out that they don’t need the middleman anymore. They can just go get what they want directly from India, China, Africa etc. Now Ottoman society needs to change - it needs to actually produce things other people want in exchange for goods and services, because their monopoly on long-distance trade had been broken.

I´d argue that the Ottomans never managed to make that transition, and that more than anything led to their ruin.

This turned Central Asia from the beating heart of the Eurasian economy to a relatively isolated, irrelevant backwater. It was cheaper and faster just to ignore them and sail around the Horn of Africa.

4

As is always the case with declining empires/civilizations you cannot point a finger to a single cause.

The first issue of the Ottoman Empire was leadership. The first nine rulers of the House of Othman (up to Suleiman the Great) were all outstanding characters. With the exception of Bajazed II they were all excellent generals and they were all capable administrators and not afraid to initiate deep reforms. After Suleiman we sure had a number of interesting Sultans but Ottoman leadership went into an overall qualitative decline and a despotate without a strong leadership is bound to suffer.

Second issue. The Ottoman Empire was born on the battlefield and geared for conquest. The Timar system initiated by Orkhan both rewarded and helped keep in check the large military establishment. But once new lands stopped coming, for a reason or another, many negative traits of the European feudalism started to appear. Also the almighty Ottoman military grew complacent and became fossilized. The swarms of ferociousTimariot cavalry and the well disciplined and drilled Jannisaries and Sipahis could squash a feudal army but became increasingly useless against professional European armies, with large numbers being now their main strength. Raimondo Montecuccoli (1609-1680), the great Hapsburg marshall, gave a measure of how outdated their tactics were by pointing out that when European armies, under the influence of the French, were already adopting the bayonet the Turks hadn’t even adopted the pike.

Third issue. The Ottoman Empire was, even under the strongest Sultans, prone to rebellion to say the least. The Mamelukes and the Shi’ite sects and tribes proved to be unwiiling subjects to say the least and even many governors were only too happy to jump on the popular unrest bandwagon if they saw any chance of profit. Also frequent outbreaks of religious enthusiasm led to frequent uprising. While the Porte had no issue in putting down a rebellion in the most fearful fashion they proved unable (or unwilling) to adopt the extreme measures adopted by, say, the Romans or the Chinese. This may stem from the fact that the Ottoman Empire was a bizzare combination of brutal despotism and unusual (for the times) religious and ethnical tollerance, pretty much like the Mongol khaganates much farther to the east. There was also continous strife with the Persians on the eastern border. Even during periods of peace border raids and insurrections were the norm. In the end this ended up sapping much of the vital strength of the Empire, just like the neverending wars between Sassanid Persia and Byzantium ended up leaving both exhausted and an easy prey to the Arabs.

Fourth issue. It cannot be hidden that the Ottoman Empire, just like Byzantium, its linear ancestor, was an agricultural-military power. Just as Europe was sowing the seeds that were to lead it to the Industrial Revolution a few centuries later, the Porte was still clinging to the same old model that differed little from the days of Manuel Komnenos. This was much exacerbated that the Ottoman Empire Anatolian and European possesions were ravaged by centuries of war and civil strife. For example the famed Greek silkworm farms, which supplied Byzantium with raw material for one of its main industries, had all but disappeared. And the rest of the Empire didn’t fare better: Alexandria, conquered from the Mamelukes, quickly sank into the ruin of its former self Napoleon saw in 1798, due to the embargo on Venetian trade and the emergence of more favorable trade routes. When Sultans tried to reverse the process it was too late and the Empire was already in full decline. That it managed to survive for so long is due to the fact that no new dynamic power quickly rose to prominence in its vicinity. When Russia emerged as a world power the Porte found unlikely allies in the European powers, eager to curb the tzars’ ambitions.

Of course this came at a price.

5

Well, to the excellent posts above I can only add what I understand form the history of my own country under the Ottomans: in a word, centralization.

At an age when all the fad was religion, the ottomans where by far the most tolerant polity in Europe on religious matters, as the Cordoba Caliphate had been before them. They actually allowed for every religious minority the right of self-rule. That these minorities did not try to make an economic use of such religious self-rule, seems strange to me.

The true decline of the Empire came only after the introduction of the Tanzimat reforms, aimed at centralizing power in the formerly heavily decentralized Empire. Within months rebellions broke out everywhere, which in turn led the most short-sighted among the ottoman intellectuals to call for even more centralization, until the Young Turks finally came up with a Prussian-inspired absolutely centralized parliamentary monarchy. WW1 was just the fitting end to the monster that this Empire had become.

Its easy to speak at such a distance of time, but I believe that the ottomans could have capitalized on the rise of the pashalleks (I count two large ones in Albania alone) in the late XVIII century, instead of fighting them. They could have allowed full autonomy to the new pashas, retaining their decentralization and extending it to full political and economic maters, instead of just religious ones. In such en Empire, competition among different Pashas could have crashed the backward feudal economy into industrialization. The High Porte should have just furnished the services of the enforcement of peace, to prevent war among the Pashas (for a fee, that is). Add in rights of secession, and I believe tat, after losing a few territories, the Empire would have bounced back.

But we’ll never know, won’t we?

6

I think Kugo and Merlin stated the simplified Ottoman Empire history in a most excellent way, though I may nitpick with him on Byzantium. It must be stated though, few people I know inhabiting Near Eastern lands outside of maybe Turkey have pleasant things to say about the Ottomans.

7

Ottoman Empire fell behind economically. Its areas stood still seeing almost no development. It did so because there was no any investment. And there was no investment because the system disincentivised it

You have to know that the Ottoman Empire had a structure of a so called “oriental absolutism”. A ruler in an oriental absolutist empire is far more powerful that any ruler in Europe was. Technically speaking he owns everything in his empire including its inhabitants. This allows for incredible centralisation and incredible cash flow for the ruler. However once this cash is transferred to the ruler there is none left for investment. Initially the resources were used for warfare (the usual way in which rulers aggrandise themselves), with the Ottoman Empire being a sort of Prussia on steroids, so it with its many conquests looked strong on paper, but naturally even this in itself would have been higly problematic in the long term.

We have to keep in mind that at one point the area from the Persian Gulf almost to the Atlantic was ruled directly from Constantinople. No European power (with their still semi-feudal relations characterised by a strong nobility) of the time would have been able to rule such a wast and popolous area (and in such a centralised fashion) without disintegrating from within. In the Ottoman Empire however there was no class with a powerbase of its own and so no centrifugal forces that could constantly challange its integrity. (Certainly no such factors as a land owning aristocracy or wealthy autonomous cities, not even a vast militarised yeoman estate as in Russia.)

As the whole of the midd class between the ruler and the lowliest of the subjects were dependant on the power and the riches of the ruler from which they drew their own wealth the midd class was de facto a class of political entrepreneurs in its entirety. Its soldiers for example were enterpreneurs who were in return for service given certain privileges that can only be provided by a state. For example they would be given (for themselves, not for their descendants) a small settlement to collect certain taxes from for themselves (timariots) or they were given monopoly over performing a certain trade (jannisaries). Naturally over time this twisted the Ottoman culture from a culture of service to the ruler, to a culture of extreme rent seeking.

So over time there arose so many different rent seekers with so many different privileges all fighting to preserve and/or expand them and where before surplus resources rather than be invested went for warfare, now they went to useless rentseekers. Before you had little economic betterment, in its place you had self-aggrandising warfare, now you had in its place corrupt political enterprenuring.

This competition between and the pressure from the various rent seekers was intensified by a lack of new lands being added to the empire and by evacuation of possessions previously held as more and more often the economically increasingly backward Empire on the battlefields met defeat. Same or greater number of rent seekers were being left to squabble over smaller spoils. To appease them, the rulers extended the width and breath of their privileges creating even greater pressure on the tax payers and undercutting potential for long term economic improvement even further. (Making, in an enchanted circle, victory in war even more distant.)

The reforms of the last period of the Empire aimed at clipping the wings of the traditional rent seekers and institute a modern system where they would be displaced by a conventional buerocracy. This naturally caused upheavel as the beneficiaries of the old system objected to the new. However it can not be said that such modernisation was beyond the Empire. After all the Empire which finally folded was itself a much changed Empire from the one that was proclaimed in late 18th century to be “the sick man of Europe”.

Probably what doomed its fate was its clinging to the fruits of its previous conquests. It made it dependant on the rent seeking classes in the distant provinces to keep the subjugated Christians down. Ironically it would had never been able to cling to these posessions as long as it did, but for the patronage and support of the Powers of Western Europe that in order to frustrate Russia worked to freeze the “Eastern Question”. Once devoid of its imperial posessions it was restructured speedily by Kemalists whereas before most reform was either ineffectual or taking place at a glacial pace and was often reverted.

As a side note, the notion of “Ottoman tolerance” is as bogus as it gets. Christians did not enjoy some mystical autonomy. They were there to be economically exploited until they bled dry. While the Sultan was nominally the owner of everything there were practical and ideological reasons why he could not exploit Muslims to the extent he may have wished to do so. For the exploitation of the Christians on the other hand there existed a superb ideological justification - Islam. So in the first period the Christians peasants were the cattle class that the de facto funded its warfare, and in the second the cattle with which the rent seekers could be rewarded and over which various rent seekers squbbled among themselves and with the centre.

8

The Bosnian Muslims have, having always been ‘more Ottoman than the Ottomans themselves’. It is a situation paralel to Northern Ireland, with Ulstermen, technically living outside Britain, being the best and most loyal Britons.

9

That doesn’t surprise me. Most people I know that I was referring to though come from Near Eastern countries (of both Xtian and Muslim backgrounds) or Greece.

10

The relationship between the Patriarchate of Byzantium and the Porte has been the subject of infinite treaties.

Originally the Patriarchs saw the coming of the Sultans as a boon, and I am not joking. Sure, they had to pay the customary “protection tax” and do a yearly act of homage to the Porte, but they saw it as a small price to pay since they were given authority over the great “breakaway” Patriarchates of the East (Alexandria, Jerusalem and Antioch) and, what’s more important, over the most important Christian sites of the Holy Land. Apart from the customary government greed, Patriarchs also grew accustomed at “throwing a little extra in” to obtain certain favors (sometimes of very dubious nature). While this was again seen as “worth it” in the end proved to be disastrous as they came to be seen as a “piggy bank” of sort. When every single pasha started shaking the Patriarch in Byzantium for money the “brothers” of the East watched with a certain degree of satisfaction.

11

Oh, that didn’t register with me as in the timeframe the Balkans were mostly understood to be a part of the Near East.