In two places this clash of faiths and empires was critical for the larger course of history: Moghul India, where the British began gobbling territory, revenues, and sovereignty; and the Ottoman empire, where the sultan’s writ was flouted and his lands gnawed by the pretensions of Christian neighbors and the derived nationalism of Christian subjects. Both these entities were aristocratic (despotic) empires in the classical mold: societies divided between a small elite and a large mass of fleeceable subjects. Above the prime divider that separated the few and the many, nobles and officials held limitless power. They had a monopoly of violence, restrained only by the occasional, random, even whimsical wisdom of the ruler. These societies were not without a sense of justice: one historian even speaks of “the vitality of a constant moral code made self-aware by a compassionate society.”1 (Reading the laments of contemporaries, including visitors from Europe, I find such a view curiously optimistic.)
Below the divider, people had no rights, no security; only duties and submission. Resistance was next to impossible. The only escape from abuse was to fly or hide—the invisibility of nobodyhood. As one of the caliphs in Baghdad is said to have said: “The best life has he who has an ample house, a beautiful wife, and sufficient means, who does not know us and whom we do not know.”2 He knew. In such a society, to know and be known by power was to ask for trouble. A Sufi saint put it well when asked to receive the ruler: “My house has two doors; if the Sultan entered it through one, I would leave it by the other.” Of course only a saint could afford to talk that way, and only a saint would be asked. How, then, could the masses identify with king or kingdom? Recruitment into the armed forces could only be a form of servitude. Fighters tended to be either slaves or mercenaries, wanting in zeal and loyalty.
In India, the Moghul empire was already fragmenting when the Europeans arrived; the death process was under way and nothing could have reversed it. This subcontinent, apparently destined to oneness by shape and religion, had in fact never been able to cohere. One invader after another had come in across the northwest passes and imposed its rule on the Indus and Ganges basins; but the south had always held out, tenacious in its linguistic and cultural nativism, like a spring in compression. So, no unity: “The country seemed to fall asunder at the touch.”3
But then why not a system of independent nation-states as in Europe? Why, “given the makings of a similar set of competing polities, did no states system emerge?”4 Because, I think, these aristocratic tyrannies, large and small, could not create the popular identities needed to bond a people and make it feel different from, even superior to, its neighbors. Religion might have done—Muslims vs. Hindus—but that would not serve as a national definer (discriminant) until the twentieth century. Had the Europeans not come in the seventeenth century, India would simply have reverted to the internecine divisions and troubles that had been its lot for millennia.
The British changed everything. They brought the administrative experience and superior technology that permitted a tiny force to govern a docile people thousands of times more numerous. Except for the Sepoy rebellion (1857-58), ruthlessly suppressed, and occasional religious riots, neither Muslims nor Hindus would resist. The British also came with decisive trade advantages. Like the Portuguese and Dutch before them, they were the active partner in this union of West and East. It was their ships that went and returned, their merchants who sailed forth into Asian waters. (Contrast here the symmetrical pattern of exchange and competition in the North Atlantic.) Old Asian commercial networks, for all their wealth and experience, yielded the juiciest transactions to foreign agency houses, and India’s economic development from the late eighteenth century came to be shaped more by British imperial policy than by indigenous initiative.
British rule proved a school for scorn. The white sahibs and memsahibs felt themselves infinitely more civilized—cleaner, smarter, handsomer, better educated. The Indians returned the contempt in spades. The English, the Bengali folk myth had it, were descended from the union of a demon with a she-monkey. The more sophisticated Indians eschewed such fanciful genealogies but noted that their ancestors wrote poetry and knew about the zero when the British were still skulking through the woods. Sir Henry Maine, British social anthropologist of the late nineteenth century, deplored this self-indulgent nostalgia, on either side: “The Natives of India have caught from us Europeans our modern trick of constructing, by means of works of fiction, an imaginary Past out of the Present….” And again: “On the educated Native of India, the Past presses with too awful and terrible a power for it to be safe for him to play or palter with it.”*
Today, of course, we all do that. We think it good, and we call it multiculturalism.
The empire of the Ottoman Turks proved more durable. That in itself is a mystery, because after some two hundred fifty years of expansion (1300-1550), its downhill course should have brought about fragmentation and liquidation in a matter of decades. By the nineteenth century, Turkey was recognized as the “sick man of Europe,” but the dying process had actually started three hundred years earlier. How could a living corpse, rotting in all its parts, take so long to expire?
The Ottoman empire began in the late thirteenth century when the Osmanlis, a Turkish clan or tribe, somehow penetrated into northwest Anatolia, far from the plains and pastures of their ancestral home, very close to the center of Byzantine (Greek) power. This warrior people was swift to move and keen for loot—very dangerous. The Greeks should have known it and seen them as potential, inevitable enemies. Instead, these pseudo-Hellenes, too clever by half, thought they could turn the Ottomans into tools and allies.
So when, in the mid-fourteenth century, the Byzantine empire was riven by civil war, both sides began calling in Turks and Serbs (also invaders) for aid. This pattern went back centuries: co-opt the barbarians and get them to fight for rather than against you. Yet it’s a high-risk strategy to let the enemy into the house. He may like it too well. When the Serbs got ambitious and decided to replace the Greek dynasty by one of their own, the Greeks called once more on the Turks for help, which they gave. But why stop there? Having beaten the Serbs, the Turks planted themselves in Gallipoli in 1354, then overran Thrace, and then in 1365 took Adrianople (the city of the Roman emperor Hadrian) as their new capital, a day’s march from Constantinople. Now the Ottomans had one foot firmly established in Europe and one in Asia Minor. The Byzantine “empire” was reduced to shrunken nodules, Christian islets in a Muslim sea; and the Ottomans, like other Asian invaders before them, began to imitate the pomp and ceremony of the Greek court, though in their own way.
In 1453, when the Ottomans captured Constantinople and put an end to the Roman empire, bells tolled and worshippers mourned in courts and churches a thousand miles away. At that point, the Turks held as much territory in Europe as in Asia, and were seen and feared as the bearers of the Islamic sword against Christendom. The Turk became a new bogeyman, his name synonymous with “brute” or “cruel savage.” Carnival targets, “têtes de Turc,” worc turbans and large mustaches.* Schoolboys did arithmetic problems that sought the most efficient way to dispose of Turkish passengers on a sinking ship.
These hostile (fearful) perceptions and intermittent aggressions marked off a restless, moving frontier of conflict. The fall of the great city, The City (which gives us the name Istanbul), constituted one of the fateful events of all time, one that changed history in ways that are still being worked out five hundred years later. Witness the fighting and the outrages of so-called ethnic cleansing in today’s Bosnia.
The Ottoman empire was a typical despotism, only more warlike. The rulers took the surplus, though at first they apparently squeezed the masses less, or less effectively, than in Moghul India.* Perhaps this was because the Ottomans were too busy fighting. Every year brought its campaign, its forays into neighboring areas. So long as these incursions paid off, one could keep the rayas, the human cattle, on a loose leash. Besides, the Turks were eager to encourage commercial and
industrial enterprise by minority communities—Christians (Greeks and Armenians, but also an increasing number of Levantines) and Jews. In effect they built their society on an ethnic division of labor, a sign of their own distaste for and superiority to trade and crafts. This segmentation opened enterprise to a few, but impeded its extension. In despotisms, it is dangerous to be rich without power. So in Turkey: capital accumulation proved an attractive nuisance. It aroused cupidity and invited seizure.
Over time, the size of the Ottoman empire grew to cover all the Muslim Middle East (including Syria and Iraq), all of North Africa (including Egypt, Tunis, and Algiers), and a large chunk of southeast Europe plus lands around the Black Sea. This congeries of opportunistic acquisitions could not be administered uniformly. Some closely governed pieces paid taxes; others were bound by ties of fealty and paid tribute. Others went in and out of Ottoman control with the fortunes of war and diplomacy. Sovereignty was often suzerainty, and power was as much virtual as real; that is, the Ottoman court ruled as much by what it could and might do if challenged, as by what it did.
In the beginning, such bonds could be strong; the Ottoman empire had a number of able leaders. In the long run, however, autocracies, like all hereditary monarchies only more so, suffer from two intrinsic weaknesses: the accidents of heredity and the problem of succession; and the two are connected. The first shortcoming is unavoidable: even a brilliant family will regress to the mean, and ordinary families will oscillate around it. The succession, meanwhile, is defined by social and political convention. In Muslim lands, succession often went to the oldest male member of the clan, conceivably an uncle, cousin, or the oldest son. The Turkish variant was succession by the ablest, later by the oldest, son.
In both systems the multiplication of spouses and concubines and the proliferation of descendants (what else could an idle ruler do—what better proof of vigor?) posed the question of legitimacy. The Ottoman way of dealing with this was to strangle all potential competitors, delicately to be sure, by a silken cord. Such definitive stakes incited to precautionary murder not only of rivals but of the rivals’ mothers (stuffed into a bag and drowned in the Bosphorus); also to the prudent immurement of the heir-apparent in the harem, safe from intrusion and harm. This stultifying isolation led to intellectual and political impotence. From the seventeenth century on, the future sultan was typically an uneducated nonentity—an instrument for others to play.
Around this void at the center, courtiers maneuvered for influence and intrigued. As the Ottoman bureaucracy grew, as the paper piled up and regulations multiplied, the state came to rely on non-Turkish personnel, even at the highest levels. Many of these were recruited by a head tax in the literal sense (the devshirme): Christian subjects of the empire were required to supply sons to the state, to be reared as Muslims and used in peace and war in occupations high and low.5 The system stirred jealousy among the older elites—“how come that those who enjoy rank and power are all Albanians and Bosnians?”—but this meant the Ottomans were open to talent, including renegades.* They were no longer a Turkish empire—indeed the very word “Turk” came to have negative connotations of ignorance and boorishness—but rather a pluralistic assemblage. Not a melting pot, though: the Turks never could create an Ottoman identity that commanded the loyalty of their diverse subjects.†
Meanwhile the Turkish warriors of old lost their fighting spirit, and patriotic volunteers were not to be found. More and more, the state depended on slave soldiers, the janissaries in particular.* The janissaries began as the servants of the sultan, his right arm, his elite corps; but the power to kill is a key to power. In Constantinople (Istanbul to the Muslims),† the janissaries became a state within the state, a pretorian guard that made and unmade rulers, until in 1826 the sultan got the consent of religious leaders to rid the place of these troublemakers. First the sultan set up a new corps and told the janissaries they would be welcome to join—elimination by fusion. They refused and dug in. The sultan’s loyal troops then brought up their artillery, cannonaded the barracks, and the mob did the rest. Balance sheet: six to ten thousand dead, and the janissaries had become history.
In Egypt, a similar corps, called Mamelukes, had actually taken over the kingdom and ruled it for some 260 years (1254-1517) as an aristocracy whose very name (Arabic memalik, slave) had changed its meaning. Even after the Ottoman conquest, they ran Egypt, up until the intrusion of the French under Bonaparte (1798) and the counter-invasion by British forces. In the train of these Europeans came an Albanian adventurer who made himself the sultan’s viceroy and the new pasha of Egypt. This soldier of fortune, Mehemet Ali by name, decided he had had enough of the Mameluke parasites and needed to clarify his authority. So in 1811 he invited their chiefs to a banquet. They showed up at the palace all gay and hearty and dressed in their best and sat themselves down to the feast. Most of them never got up. The gates were closed, and shooters killed them from above like ducks on a pond. Finis to over 550 years.**
But here we get ahead of our story. After the defeat of the first Ottoman siege of Vienna (1529), the empire suffered repeated setbacks in Europe as inchoate Christian polities got organized. Among other changes that made a difference, European military technology kept improving. The Ottomans tried to keep up, but they were imitators rather than inventors. They understood the value of cannon and especially of siege artillery, but they depended on Christian technicians to do the founding. As the gap between Christian and Muslim guns grew, the Turks could not even make use of pieces captured in battle.6
Ditto at sea: the Ottomans replaced their battle vessels with more of the same, while Christian naval armament improved. Listen to the Ottoman historian Selaniki Mustafa Efendi reporting on the arrival in 1593 of the vessel that brought the second English ambassador to the Sublime Porte: “A ship as strange as this had never entered the port of Istanbul. It crossed 3700 miles of sea and carried 83 guns, besides other weapons. The outward form of the firearms was in the shape of a swine.”7 This image unconsciously testified to ignorance: these pigs (significant symbol: Christian fare, taboo to Muslims) were iron naval cannon, made in England in quantity as nowhere else. That ship and a few others like it could have blown the Ottoman fleet (and the Venetian to the bargain) out of the water before it got close enough to ram or grapple. Meanwhile the Ottomans tried to keep up by importing large quantities of war materiel: muskets, gunpowder, saltpeter, iron, blades. In spite of papal interdictions on arms sales to Muslims, in defiance of clerical anathemas and excommunications, much of this armament came from England, which also sold to Spain. But then, what to expect from conscienceless heretics?
And not only armament. Over time, trade relations between Europe and the Levant reversed. Eastern craftsmen had once supplied Europeans with fine cloth, carpets, tapestries, faience, and the like in exchange for metal (copper and tin), slaves, and money. From the sixteenth century on, Europe made and sold the manufactures in exchange for dried fruit, spices, cotton, cereal. The same for silk: in the Middle Ages Europe had bought Byzantine silk fabrics; now it imported raw silk, and local producers in Turkey found it hard to compete with European buyers for the raw material. And paper: this writing material was eagerly adopted in the Middle East (eighth century) from Chinese example; forage was short, hides were scarce, and so was parchment. The new technology took root slower in Europe, where parchment was relatively abundant; but once European makers learned to produce paper, they far surpassed their Levantine predecessors and were soon selling large quantities in the East.8 Even such substances as coffee and sugar that had originally come to Europe from the East now went the other way—in the case of sugar, after refining and processing.9
Islam’s greatest mistake, however, was the refusal of the printing press, which was seen as a potential instrument of sacrilege and heresy. Nothing did more to cut Muslims off from the mainstream of knowledge.
As a result of this intellectual segregation, technical lag, and industrial dependency, the balance of ec
onomic forces tilted steadily against the Ottomans, while a series of military defeats undermined their assumptions of superiority and paralyzed their ability to respond. A few farsighted observers tried to warn the ruling elite and pushed for reform, but to little effect. The evil was constitutional, founded in religious dogma and inculcated by habit. A byzantine bureaucracy made everything harder with thorny regulations in incomprehensible officialese. Corruption—the only way to get something done—just fed on itself.
This self-imposed archaism dissolved the loins of empire. “The Ottoman state was a plunder machine which needed booty or land to fuel itself, to pay its way, to reward its officer class.”10 The Ottomans had originally filled a power vacuum—had taken over a region once strong, now enfeebled—looting as they went. Now they could no longer take from outside. They had to generate wealth from within, to promote productive investment. Instead, they resorted to habit and tried to pillage the interior, to squeeze their own subjects. Nothing, not even the wealth of high officials, was secure. Nothing could be more self-destructive. The only thing that saved the empire from disintegration was its inefficiency, the venality of its officials, and the protective interests of stronger powers.
In these circumstances, the continued advance of European technology, in particular the Industrial Revolution, nailed shut the coffin of Ottoman industry. Except for some local specialties, nothing could stand up to cheap factory-made cottons and silks. The nineteenth century saw Britain protect the Ottoman empire from the territorial ambitions of its adversaries, while blithely killing off its manufactures. But from the British point of view, that was as it should be: British goods were cheaper, and the Ottomans could not possibly compete. They did not know enough; they did not have the capital; they could not count on political stability.
The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor Page 47
