The Ottoman Empire underwent a slow but decisive transformation from the early eighteenth century onward. The societal change observed during the eighteenth century was accompanied by change in state structures during the reign of Selim III (1789–1807) and Mahmud II (1808–39). The most comprehensive transformation of the Ottoman polity, however, took place during the so-called Tanzimat period (1839–76). While the subsequent long reign of Abdulhamid II (1876–1909) put a halt to some of the trends for reform, the society and the state continued to evolve. The Hamidian period came to an end with the Revolution of 1908, which made the empire a constitutional monarchy.
The question of taxation was one of the issues the policymakers had to deal with throughout the entire process of transformation. Tax-related problems became especially pressing during two particular periods, first after the declaration of the Tanzimat edict in 1839, and then during the last years of Abdulhamid’s reign. State policies regarding taxation and the popular reaction to them became one of the most important aspects of state formation during the Tanzimat and pre-1908 periods.
This is not surprising given the significance of taxation for modern states. First, the balance of state finances, therefore many of its capacities, depends on the state’s ability to tax the population. A large tax base, a sound taxation system, and of course a quiescent population are therefore critical for any modern state to function properly. Second, the ability to tax also reflects a state’s legitimacy in the eyes of the people. Coercion might not be sufficient in itself for taxation if the state does not enjoy a certain amount of legitimacy at the societal level. Third, taxation is a class issue. Who is taxed how much and who enjoys the benefits of the tax collected are questions that speak not only to state structure, but also to the relations between upper classes and lower classes. The latter often have a sharp sense of what is fair and what is not, and that does influence their attitudes toward state attempts at taxation.
This article is roughly divided into two sections. In the first section, I focus on the tax revolts that took place during the Tanzimat period; the second section is about the tax revolts that preceded the Revolution of 1908. In both sections, I describe the general characteristics of the period and the most significant revolts and discuss the rebels and their demands. I also analyze the Ottoman state’s responses to the two waves of revolt. The first section also includes a theoretical discussion about the state-formation approach. The Tanzimat period and pre-1908 revolts are comparatively discussed in the Conclusion.
Tax Revolts in the Tanzimat Period: Three Perspectives on Late Ottoman History
The Tanzimat is the name historians give to the period that began with the declaration of the Imperial Rescript of Gülhane on November 3, 1839, and ended with the promulgation of the first Ottoman constitution in 1876. The reform program initiated and implemented by the Ottoman state in this period is also known as the Tanzimat.
The Gülhane Rescript had a quite conventional preamble that attributed the recent problems of the Ottoman polity to deviation from sacred law. However, despite the traditional beginning and wording, the document was indeed a radically original one, which set forth guarantees ensuring Ottoman subjects security of life, honor, and property; called for a regular system of taxation and specifically the abolition of the tax-farming system; a regular system for military service that would include non-Muslim subjects of the empire; and equality between Muslim and non-Muslims.
The rescript turned out to be the beginning of a great series of reform. In the subsequent decades, a new, modern bureaucracy replaced the old one and the number of state servants increased dramatically. Decision-making processes were gradually democratized; a number of quasi-legislative councils with real powers were constituted at the center as well as in the provinces. The principle of equality before law was recognized, along with a new notion of citizenship. There was a massive codification campaign in which either original laws were enacted or foreign laws were adapted in the fields of civil law, penal law, commercial law, procedural law, and citizenship law. A gradual but decisive process of secularization began, seen most clearly in the religious courts’ loss of jurisdiction to secular ones. As we shall see, not all of these steps taken as part of the Tanzimat reform program were successful; yet the Tanzimat as a whole irreversibly changed the nature of Ottoman polity. It was in fact the most comprehensive attempt at modern state formation in the Ottoman Empire to date. Scholarship, therefore, has shown a high interest in the period. In contrast, despite such interest, the Tanzimat reform program in particular and the late Ottoman reforms in general have not been adequately analyzed.
This is partly related to the influence of modernization theory, which has, until recently, dominated the field of Ottoman studies. The proponents of this theory have seen in the emergence of modern Turkey a success story. All the changes that took place in different spheres of life in the period, from the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries, have been reduced to “modernization,” according to which a couple of reformist sultans and a handful of Western-minded bureaucrats tried to save the empire from collapse by emulating the successful European model and restructuring its state along those lines. In this story, the history of the Ottoman Empire from the late eighteenth century onward becomes one of struggle between modernizers and forces of reaction.Footnote 1 Dependency theory has been developed as an alternative to the modernization approach. An offshoot of dependency theory, the world-system perspective, produced by Immanuel Wallerstein and his colleagues at SUNY Binghamton from 1970s, has had a short-lived, yet important, impact on Ottoman studies.Footnote 2 With their stress on economic relations, world-system scholars have shown that the late Ottoman Empire cannot be understood solely in terms of political modernization. Their works that focus on the incorporation of the Ottoman lands into world capitalism have pointed out those aspects of the transformation of Ottoman polity that had hitherto been in the dark. In contrast, using world-system theory to analyze late Ottoman history has its problems, some of which are related to its basic concepts. The concepts of “incorporation” of the Ottoman Empire into the world capitalist system, or, even more so, the “penetration” of capitalism into the Ottoman territories, suggest that the process was essentially external to the Ottoman social formation. Thus, the contribution of the studies influenced by the world-system approach to Ottoman studies has been overshadowed by the implicit assumption on which they are based: the internal dynamics of the empire was not strong enough to create a profound change by themselves. Although the world-system approach by and large lost its appeal among Ottomanist historians, terms such as “incorporation” became staples especially in the analyses of the nineteenth-century Ottoman economy.
In contrast to the world-system approach that made a strong entrance to the field yet left the scene largely unnoticed,Footnote 3 the modernization approach has been subject to sustained criticism. As a result, the more open forms of the modernization approach have been largely abandoned in the last two decades. Many of its less-explicit assumptions, however, continue to exert their influence on the study of the Tanzimat period. The Tanzimat is still seen as just another step in a series of reform attempts that stretched from 1789 (the accession of Selim III) to 1923 (the establishment of Republic of Turkey). Moreover, it is still common to consider the Tanzimat reform program as a state initiative formulated and implemented top-down by state officials.Footnote 4 In a similar vein, the social unrest that followed the declaration of reforms is seen as mere reactions to it.Footnote 5 Balkan nationalist historiographies, by contrast, have tended to see the post-Tanzimat uprisings in the Balkans as part of, or prelude to, the “national awakening” led by nationally-conscious urban intellectuals and middle classes. Both approaches have relegated cultivators to being passive recipients of (national or central) state-building projects of the elite.
The modernization approach, therefore, has refused to look into the social dynamics of late Ottoman reform. The world-system perspective, on the other hand, has conducted the analysis at too high a level of abstraction and failed to address the internal dynamics of development. In this article, I discuss the outlines of an alternative approach to late Ottoman history, derived from the state-formation approach developed by sociologist Derek Sayer (with his colleague Philip Corrigan and also Harvey Ramsay) based on a close reading of the works of Marx and Engels as well Weber and Durkheim. Their approach is particularly suitable for the empirical study of historical phenomena as it assumes that concepts are empirically open-ended and necessarily historical. This means that to define a social phenomenon, in the final analysis, is to write its history.Footnote 6 There is no ground for excluding any kind of social relation from being a relation of production, or for assigning, a priori, some social relations to “base” and others to “superstructure.”Footnote 7 According to Sayer, the question of what is a relation of production could only be resolved for particular historical forms using empirical criteria.
Their approach contravenes both the liberal notion of state, which views it structurally separate from the (civil) society, and the Marxian views that see the state either as an instrument in the hands of the ruling class or superstructural. The state-formation approach stipulates that the state, instead, is necessarily and internally related to capitalist economy. Although state forms appear separate from the economy and above the society, the former appearance is a result of the fetishized nature of social relations under capitalism, and the latter is related to the organizing role of the state under the capitalist mode of production: “The State within capitalist production, regulates and orchestrates—in short, organizes—in such a way that the defining material characteristics of capitalist production relations (individualization, formal equality, and a host of social forms) are made to appear the only way those social activities could be conducted and arranged.”Footnote 8 In fact, the state could organize only by appearing outside economy and above sectional interests in society.
In their major historical study, The Great Arch, Corrigan and Sayer apply this perspective, which sees the state not as a thing but as a reified, organized, imposed, and regulated form of social relations of production to English state formation.Footnote 9 They underline that English state formation did not consist only of repression. Legal regulation, that is, the law, and moral regulation also played a significant part in the long process of English state formation from medieval to modern times. Legal and moral regulation reduces all people to individuals and delegitimizes and even criminalizes alternative forms of existence. They create a sense of sameness and commonness while keeping deep social divisions intact. During state formation, the nation as a politically defined entity is also created. On the one hand, nationalism disintegrates other identities and subjectivities.Footnote 10 On the other hand, those who are deemed worthy to be included in the political nation are included and those who are considered unworthy or dangerous are excluded or disciplined through jurisdiction.Footnote 11 In the English case, this double process of inclusion-exclusion was imposed most importantly on the working class and women.
Corrigan and Sayer show that state forms are extremely flexible and, as such, they are constructed through struggle and contention between actors. One aspect of this contentious process is “the constant ‘rewriting’ of history to naturalize what has been, in fact, an extremely changeable set of State relations, to claim that there is, and has always been, one ‘optimal institutional structure’ which is what ‘any’ civilization needs.”Footnote 12 To turn to the Ottoman case, the preamble of the Tanzimat rescript is quite revealing in this respect. The authors of the text are at pains to argue that they are offering nothing new and it is the same old imperial state that had some problems recently and needs only some “maintenance” to return to its old glorious days:
All the world knows that in the first days of the Ottoman monarchy, the glorious precepts of the Kuran and the laws of the empire were always honored.
The empire in consequence increased in strength and greatness, and all its subjects, without exception, had risen in the highest degree to ease and prosperity. In the last one hundred and fifty years a succession of accidents and divers causes have arisen which have brought about a disregard for the sacred code of laws and the regulations flowing therefrom, and the former strength and prosperity have changed into weakness and poverty; an empire in fact loses all its stability so soon as it ceases to observe its laws.
The Ottoman state’s reaction to agrarian unrest is of particular importance for the present article. As Corrigan and Sayer write about the English state: “The state is involved in regulating into silence, eccentricity, marginality or crime all doctrines and practices within the realm of cultural life that provide glimpses of an alternative set of social relations.”Footnote 13 The Ottoman state’s attitude to post-Tanzimat rural unrest was quite similar. The state tried to marginalize all forms of protest, violent or otherwise, and to discursively reduce social unrest to ordinary crimes through the use of terms such as “fesad” (mischief) and “müfsid” (troublemaker). By contrast, it is noticeable that the actions of protest and resistance themselves and the “ringleaders” were criminalized, not the large masses who got involved in or supported the actions in one way or another. In the revolts of non-Muslims, religious difference allowed the Ottoman state to blame foreign-agent provocateurs who supposedly exploited the naïveté of peasants and incited them to revolt. This gesture of the state served a double purpose; it made ignoring the root causes of unrest possible and prevented the identification of large segments of the population, or a definite ethnic/religious group, with the “crime.” This material and discursive separation of the “crime” from those who committed it also enabled the state to hold a small group of “instigators” responsible for cultivator protest and severely punish them, while at the same time showing imperial “mercy” and “benevolence” to masses.
As I have noted above, state formation is not limited to violence or repression in general. Modern states provide services and improvements for the general public, such as mass education, health system, and better urban sanitation. The Tanzimat period witnessed attempts to improve the living conditions of Ottoman subjects. Many signs of the existence of a modern state, including mass schooling, postal service, railways, clock towers, museums, censuses, passports and so on,Footnote 14 were introduced either during the Tanzimat or could be associated with the trends that the Tanzimat initiated. These changes were most visible in urban areas, as a new urbanism approach changed the face of cities.Footnote 15 But these benefits of the modern state “were never offered in vacuo as ‘social goods’; they were made available in specific social forms of State provision which, moreover, marginalized and suppressed pre-existing class and other alternatives.”Footnote 16
According to the state-formation approach, a crucial component of modern state formation is individualization. Only citizens could become part of the political nation, and people could become citizens only by first becoming individuals. In other words, people could enjoy the bundle of rights associated with citizenship only by expressing themselves solely as individuals. The individual, a politico-legal construct, comes into existence through a process of abstraction, which forces human beings to exist only as individuals, abruptly and arbitrarily isolated from their constitutive social relations.Footnote 17 The Tanzimat-period Ottoman state was also involved in a double process of conversion. The principle of equality before the law, measures to provide Muslim–non-Muslim equality, and steps such as the citizenship law aimed to make subjects into citizens, but people had to “become individuals” to enjoy citizenship rights. However, the individualization tendency of the Tanzimat is most clear in the Land Code of 1858. The Code recognized only the abstract individual as a legal subject and the entire realm of the new Ottoman land law was based on this notion.Footnote 18
Individualization was increasingly accompanied by state intervention into people’s lives. This intervention often took the form of collecting information. The modern state tries to collect, classify, and interpret as much information about its citizens as possible. As a result, the areas of information collection of the state and the number and extent of the records it keeps grow rapidly. Ottoman bureaucracy grew rapidly during the Tanzimat in terms of personnel, the areas it tried to cover, and the volume of records it produced.Footnote 19 The number of documents preserved in the Ottoman archives attest to the dramatic increase in the production of official documents after 1839. Needless to say, this was not a spontaneous or neutral process. Michel Foucault has shown through his concept of governmentality that the seemingly neutral and routine practices of collecting and classifying information are actually part of a discourse of power and techniques by which population groups are rendered governable.Footnote 20 As Corrigan and Sayer put it, “The power involved in recording, preserving and retrieving ‘facts’—defining realities—is one that grows rapidly by being used; behind the individual records is a formal authority which establishes routines and rituals, each buttressing the other.”Footnote 21 As such, collecting and recording information were part and parcel of state regulation of its citizens’ lives and bodies and one needs to look at the Tanzimat state from this angle, too.
Finally, the displacement of religion as the basis of legitimacy was observed in the Ottoman as well as the English cases of state formation. Despite the mention of sacred law in the text of the Tanzimat edict, the reform program itself included a tendency toward secularization. Secularization was gradual and less visible than some other aspects of the reform program, but it was unmistakable. Religious courts headed by the kadis increasingly lost ground to newly established secular Nizamiye courts. Secular elements were introduced in some of the new laws. The gradual erosion of the Muslim–non-Muslim hierarchy and the increasing recognition of the rights of non-Muslim subjects were also elements of secularization. Religion was not immediately sidelined as the main pillar of legitimacy but was gradually replaced by law, citizenship, and allegiance to the state.
The Tanzimat-Era Revolts
The Tanzimat reform program was not implemented everywhere at the same time. First the central provinces were included and then gradually more remote provinces were incorporated into the coverage of reforms. Almost everywhere that the new regulations concerning taxation were implemented, there were instances of unrest, at times in the form of tax strikes and revolt. Below I present an overview of some the major tax revolts that occurred in the Tanzimat period.
The revolts took place in different parts of the empire, including the Balkans and Anatolia. One such revolt occurred in 1840 in Akdağ in central Eastern Anatolia. Although there were accusations of corruption against the chief tax collector, and the populace complained about the requirement to billet troops and tax collectors in villages, the main dynamic of the revolt was the local people’s reluctance to pay the newly allocated taxes. It is interesting that the revolt started with the townspeople’s argument that “the state has forgiven our annual taxes.”Footnote 22 Once the tax strike spread to rural areas, it became a full-fledged revolt. The rebellion could be subdued only using significant military force. The official report prepared after the revolt pointed out several inconsistencies with regard to tax collection, including the deliberate use of unsound devices to measure land and forcing technicalities in tithe collection.Footnote 23 These were not only instances of corruption on the part of local officials, but they attest to one of the problems of the reform program. There were “technical” obstacles to the Tanzimat all along.
There was another case of tax resistance in the Çarşanba (in present-day Macedonia) district in the Balkans in the same year. The populace complained of excessive taxation in the new system, and wrote in a petition that “not only don’t we have the means to pay this amount; there is no [imperial] edict for its collection either,”Footnote 24 both declaring their inability to pay and questioning the legitimacy of the tax. In the Anatolian town of Tokat, there was a tax-related incident in 1840, in which the chief tax collector was lynched. Demonstrating an interesting sense of justice, the rebels not only killed him but dragged his corpse to the court! There were shorter episodes of tax resistance in the neighboring areas of Amasya and Zile.Footnote 25
One of the biggest post-Tanzimat tax revolts took place in Niş (Niš), in the northern central part of the Balkans, in 1841.Footnote 26 The area was comprised of fertile plains, which, along with the international route that linked the Balkans to central Europe, made the city and the region surrounding it an important center. The unrest began with the objections of Muslims and foreigners against the new system of taxation in that they would be liable for taxation for the first time. Then local Christians gathered in a church and demanded to see the tax registers.Footnote 27 The revolt soon spread to the countryside and engulfed first the districts of Niş and Leskofça (Leskovac) and then the district of Şehirköyü (Pirot). Interestingly enough, people living in places where the new system of taxation had not been put into effect also rose up in revolt, apparently preemptively. The peasants left their villages, gathered in some villages, and positioned themselves around certain bridges and important mountain passes, occasionally resorting to violence. The peasants insisted that their revolt was by no means against the Sultan but rather against the oppressive and exploitative actions of local magnates and functionaries. The insurgents initially scored some military victories. Nevertheless, they were eventually defeated through massive military response; 225 villages were burned down and an estimated 8,000 people fled to Serbia.Footnote 28
Taxation continued to constitute a major social and political problem in the Niş area even after the end of the revolt. Around ten years afterward, a single case in the Leskofça district created a big commotion. It was a dispute between a certain Zekeriya Bey, bearing the title of sipahi, and the peasants of at least seven villages.Footnote 29 According to the latter’s claim, once they started to pay their tithe to tax collectors instead of Zekeriya in accordance with the new tax regime, he was supposed to get his stipend from the central treasury. He, however, claimed the villages as his property and pressured the villagers to pay rent in addition to tithe.Footnote 30 In 1855, the peasants once more refused to pay the amount Zekeriya claimed.Footnote 31 Two years later, in late March 1857, the confrontation was renewed. The cultivators in two villages refused to pay the “rent” and the so-called kesim tax.Footnote 32 An imperial order concerning the land question in Niş and Leskofça was promulgated on November 7, 1858.Footnote 33 Despite this, the tax revolts in the area continued sporadically. In a separate incident, by early 1859, a large group of peasants were noted for not paying taxes for a year and a half. They had also reportedly formed an association to defend their cause.Footnote 34
The Vidin Revolts of 1849 and especially 1850 were perhaps the most violent revolts during the Tanzimat period.Footnote 35 In the nineteenth century, the town of Vidin was an important economic center and a port city on the river Danube in the northern-central section of the Ottoman Balkans. In rural Vidin, an “archaic” land regime called gospodarlık, which was based on a complex set of relations of exploitation, including corvée, and the exclusion of Christian cultivators from controlling arable land was in effect.
Following the unrest of April 1849, a bigger and more violent uprising broke out in 1850. Up to ten thousand people joined the insurgency.Footnote 36 In response, the governor sent out a group of negotiators composed of Muslim and Christian notables and Christian clergy to listen to the rebels’ demands and to try to persuade them to give up. The rebels, however, refused to talk to people from Vidin. Although the central state ordered the governor to act moderately and not to use excessive force, the landlords took total control of the local council and dealt with the revolt heavy-handedly, using irregular troops.Footnote 37 Large-scale massacres of Christian peasants and even townspeople followed.Footnote 38
Another tax-related conflict took place in Canik, a central Anatolian region on the Black Sea coast, from the 1840s to the 1860s. The majority of the population was Muslim, with a significant presence of Greek Orthodox and Armenian populations. Due to the fertility of land, the main economic activity in the region was agriculture, though the importance of the Samsun port and customs increased in the second half of the century.Footnote 39
In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Hazinedar magnate family controlled a number of bureaucratic posts, including the crucial one of governorship of Trabzon, the jurisdiction of which covered Canik.Footnote 40 The family and their entourage had tax farming rights over wide tracks of arable land. The already-existing tension in the region was intensified when the Tanzimat reforms were declared applicable to Trabzon province.Footnote 41 The former tax farmers who had been authorized to collect taxes in the area before the introduction of the new “a la Tanzimat” taxation system, now claimed to own the villages that had fallen under their authority in the old system. Accordingly, they tried to impose double the regular tithe and an additional tax called kesim on villagers.Footnote 42 The peasants responded in a number of ways and employed different strategies in their struggle against the magnate families, but tax strikes were the most important part of the Canik peasants’ protest. In certain cases, they were able to stop payments for years in a row. The disturbances that began in late 1840s in Canik lasted well into the 1880s without a real response given by the Ottoman state to peasants’ demands and complaints.Footnote 43
The Tanzimat State, Taxation, and Peasants
The Tanzimat was an ambitious reform program that aimed at transforming important aspects and policies of the Ottoman state, including taxation. The Tanzimat-era Ottoman state policies had two goals with regards to taxation: to connect the individual with the state directly through taxation and to move from collective taxation to individual taxation.Footnote 44 The Ottoman state failed in both objectives. The institution of chief tax collector (muhassıl), designed as a means to eliminate intermediaries, failed because of excessive resistance. Moreover, military force (zaptiye) got involved from 1840s into tax collection.Footnote 45 The tax surveys of 1840 and 1845 were still based on collective taxation.Footnote 46 The tithe, which was traditionally collected in kind, could not be abolished until as late as the end of the first quarter of the twentieth century.
These failures should not be seen only as technical ones, or problems stemming from the “weakness” of the Tanzimat-era Ottoman state. True, there were issues that prevented the implementation of some state policies. We have seen above one example related to the problems created by the absence of standardization in measuring devices. In addition, financial shortage accompanied almost every move of the state. And third, despite several successful campaigns against magnates and autonomous rulers of peripheral areas in the first decades of the nineteenth century, the state was far from enjoying a monopoly over the use of legitimate force. The frequent use of irregular troops by local notables and officials against popular movements clearly exemplified this problem.
Yet, rather than being unable to implement certain policies, the attitude of the state toward the agrarian question itself was the source of much of the problem. For example, Nadir Özbek argues that the Tanzimat-era state tried to move the burden of taxation from the agrarian to the urban economy.Footnote 47 But the actions and policies of the Ottoman state regarding peasants do not suggest that there was such an attempt. Indeed, the state tried to solve problems created by its own policies, usually to the detriment of peasants. This was especially true for non-Muslim peasants, who in general were more vulnerable in their dealings with the state and the magnates. The real reasons for the inability of the Tanzimat state to reform taxation, then, should be sought less in its “weakness” or failure to modernize but in the class composition of the political support for reforms. The alliance that supported the Tanzimat reforms as well as the preceding ones consisted of the central state bureaucracy, the petty gentry, and the wealthier merchants.Footnote 48 It was fragile and there were groups within the alliance that could be adversely affected by some of the reforms. The central state could not afford to alienate any element of the alliance and as a result, its policy toward the upper classes was determined by permissivenessFootnote 49 and salutary neglectFootnote 50 rather than weakness. As a result, attempts to modernize taxation were hardly backed with an unambiguous political will to restrain former tax farmers or local gentry, leading to violent reactions on the part of the cultivators.
The problems in rural Vidin stemmed from the systematic exclusion of Christians from land ownership. Perpetuating this ethno-religious exclusion, however, became increasingly contradictory in the face of the Tanzimat principles that promised equality before law. Despite this contradiction, except for a brief period after the rebellion, the government was determined to prevent land acquisitions by Christian cultivators, which was one of the prime reasons why the conflict remained unresolved for a long while. The cultivators of Vidin reacted to this apparent contradiction by withholding tax payments. Indeed, the first goal of the peasants who rose up in revolt was to defend their livelihood. However, the revolt was not a desperate attempt for survival. The Tanzimat was indeed an essential component of the background that paved the way for the peasant rebellions in Vidin and elsewhere. Moreover, it figured predominantly in the way the rebels perceived the conflicts and configured their demands. The Vidin peasants “read” the reforms differently and argued that the sultan had given them the land. Moreover, they did not accept the double taxation situation where they would be paying the new Tanzimat taxes as well as the old dues. As a result, they refused to pay and were able to avoid paying the claims of the landowners for as much as seven years. They thereby did not agree to extractions they considered illegitimate.
In Canik, the disturbances intensified after the Tanzimat program began to be applied in the Trabzon province in 1857.Footnote 51 In order to preempt the Tanzimat decision to liquidate tax farming, old tax farmers and notables feeling the threat of disenfranchisement under the reformed polity set out to claim peasant land as their private estates. In the short term this entailed double taxation for peasants, with worse potential result in the long run. The tax revolt in this case was against a situation in which they not only could not benefit from the reforms but actually end up worse off than the prereform status quo.
Contrary to the widespread notion, tax revolts of Ottoman peasants that took place in the Tanzimat period were not against the reforms. Instead, they accepted the reforms and adopted the prose of the Tanzimat. The insurgent peasants perhaps interpreted the Tanzimat in a more radical way than its architects wanted. Yet this was much more than a case of misunderstanding on the part of mostly illiterate peasants. Through tax revolts, the peasants were indeed collectively pushing to get all of what they believed they deserved as part of the reforms.
Tax Revolts Before the Revolution of 1908
The Ottoman Empire during the last years of the Hamidian reign was of course much different from what it had been in 1840s and 1850s. Major changes took place in the political and economic structures of the empire between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth century. The empire continued to be the playground of the Eastern Question. The Eastern Question did not bring about the disintegration and colonization of the Ottoman Empire and the latter could protect its territorial integrity until after World War I. Yet the borders of the empire did change. Although the Ottoman state retained large territories in the Balkans until the Balkans War of 1912–13, it nevertheless suffered from significant losses of territory in the late nineteenth century, especially in 1878, which shifted the economic, political, and cultural center of gravity of the empire eastward toward Anatolia.Footnote 52 Moreover, in the meantime, the empire received millions of Muslim refugees from the Balkans and from Russia, making a hitherto much more cosmopolitan society increasingly a Muslim one. Such factors gave way to a gradual deterioration of relations between ethno-religious communities.
There was also much change in the economic structure. During the period, the Ottoman economy became increasingly internationally oriented and the fiscal fate of the state came to depend on foreign sources. Agriculture, the dominant sector of the economy, witnessed significant change. The opening of the empire’s economy to external markets, and the rising Western European demand for agricultural products, accelerated commercialization of Ottoman agriculture. Especially in regions that could produce cash crops and have transportation advantages, commercialization went further. As a result, external trade of agrarian goods dramatically increased. In a similar vein, one could see a sharp upturn in the production of crops such as cotton, tobacco, grapes, and corn. The manufacturing sector was forced to operate within parameters imposed by the international capitalist system. Such conditions did give way to a decline, but it was a relative one stemming from the failure of Ottoman manufacturing to catch up with the booming economies of countries such as Britain. Manufacturing, therefore, did not collapse and managed to survive by transforming itself in terms of spatial organization, organization of production, and the nature of the workforce.Footnote 53
Another element of the opening up of the Ottoman economy was the foreign treaties to which the empire was a party. After the Tanzimat, the Ottoman state signed dozens of trade treaties with foreign states. Finally, a novelty introduced in the Tanzimat period was foreign borrowing. The first formal foreign borrowing took place in 1854 and the empire increased its debt rapidly after that.Footnote 54 The process resulted in the first fiscal bankruptcy of the state in 1875. Such close ties with world capitalism in general and foreign credit sources in particular were important determinants of the place and role of the Ottoman state within the international system.
The Regime of Abdulhamid II and Its Dusk
Many of the changes in the social, economic, and political structure of the empire began, accelerated, or came to a head during the long reign of Sultan Abdulhamid II (1876–1909). Assessing Abdulhamid has been one of the most difficult problems of Ottomanist historiography. For the modernization school-inspired historiography, it is an anomaly in that it does not fit into the narrative about the gradual modernization of the Ottoman-Turkish state and society from 1789 to 1923. Conservative authors have approached the Hamidian era mostly uncritically, creating an almost saintlike figure in the sultan. Recently, however, historians have begun to consider the Hamidian period not as a deviation from but as part of the general trends of nineteenth-century Ottoman history.
Abdulhamid’s regime was a highly oppressive and uncompromisingly absolutist one, however. After the transitional period of 1876 to 1886, during which time the constitution was suspended and military and civilian bureaucrats suspected of liberal ideas were eliminated, a full-blown absolutist regime was established. The regime maintained an unmistakable hostility to all forms of liberalism. There were heavy limitations on the use of personal rights and freedoms, which were enforced by relentless censorship of the press and an overdeveloped spy network accountable directly to the Sultan. Abdulhamid established tight control over ministers, and central as well as provincial bureaucrats, and tried to suppress all autonomist tendencies in the provinces. The Hamidian Regiments, quasi-regular units recruited from certain Sunni Kurdish tribes incorporated into the army, engaged in widespread massacres against Armenians in Eastern Anatolia. An estimated one hundred thousand Armenians died in the 1895–96 massacres, at best initiated by civilians and ignored by state forces, but often provoked, facilitated, and even carried out by them. In short, the reign of Abdulhamid put a long halt to the processes of democratization of decision-making and enlargement of civil and political liberties in the Ottoman Empire that had been initiated with the Tanzimat.
However, it is problematic to see the Hamidian period as a “stray from the track” as a whole. There were serious attempts at economic and technological progress, in particular in agriculture and transportation. There was a significant increase in investment in education. Programs of social welfare were initiated.Footnote 55 The regime paid great attention to both internal legitimation and international symbolic competition through the emphasis on the Sultan’s title of caliphate, public displays of grandeur, and elaborate ceremonies.Footnote 56
Despite such attempts, however, the regime in its final years had increasing difficulty containing discontent. The last period of the Hamidian regime indeed witnessed much social unrest and growing political opposition. The main opposition group was called the Young Turks, an umbrella organization that brought together diverse groups against the regime. Despite important internal tensions, the opposition made important headway in organizing at home and unifying their forces. The 1907 alliance between the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) and the Armenian Revolutionary Federation was especially important in this respect. The liberal revolutions of 1905 in Russia and of 1906 in Iran did not help the Hamidian regime either. They caused a good deal of concern in the regime and inspired hope in the opposition. They were particularly influential in Eastern Anatolia.Footnote 57 There were several serious instances of mutiny in the armed forces, especially in the navy, between 1906 and 1908.Footnote 58 In addition to tax revolts, there were other forms of social unrest. In Eastern Anatolia, there were uprisings against the notorious Hamidiye Regiments.Footnote 59 Food riots took place in Erzurum, Aleppo, and Beirut in 1907 and in Sivas in 1908.Footnote 60
The Pre-1908 Tax Revolts
A frequent form of social unrest during the last years of the Hamidian period was tax strikes and revolts, which took place mostly in urban areas across the empire. The first signs of discontent were seen in 1904 in Izmir and then instances of tax resistance were witnessed in almost all parts of the empire: Dersim, Van, Selanik (Thessaloniki), Edirne, İstanbul, Hınıs,Footnote 61 İzmir,Footnote 62 Midilli (Lésvos), Basra, Trablusgarp,Footnote 63 İşkodra,Footnote 64 Musul, Bayburt, Narman, Hasankale, Trabzon, Sivas, Giresun, Kayseri, Zeytun, Macedonia, Bitlis, Samsun, Ankara, Muş, Van, Aydın, Muğla,Footnote 65 Yemen, Albania, Prizren,Footnote 66 and Kastamonu.Footnote 67 Despite the large geographical extent of the tax strikes, there were more tax revolts in Central and Eastern Anatolia than other regions and the former ones tended to be more violent and to last longer.
The biggest and longest tax revolt took place in the eastern city of Erzurum. The main goal of the revolt was to counter the two taxes the government introduced: hayvanat-ı ehliye rüsumu (animal tax) and rüsum-ı sahsiye or vergi-i şahsiye (personal tax).Footnote 68 What began as a tax strike in Erzurum soon spiraled into an open revolt; the people, including women, armed themselves.Footnote 69 The rebellion acquired a revolutionary character in its second outbreak and the rebels killed policemen and captured the governor himself, practically ruling the town for weeks.Footnote 70 In response, the government first tried accommodation and then switched to repression; neither worked to subdue the revolt. Despite the central government efforts, the local garrison did not intervene into the insurgency,Footnote 71 echoing other instances of mutiny in the army.
Although the popular unrest that engulfed the empire from 1904 to the Revolution had diverse causes and was a sign that the Hamidian regime was losing its legitimacy in the eyes of Ottoman subjects, as in Erzurum, the main reason of the big revolts was to oppose government attempts to introduce a new tax, namely, the personal tax. The demand to abolish this tax was the main rallying point of the rebels in many towns. The rebels condemned the tax as excessive and unfair, arguing that it had not been set according to the income levels of the population and the powerful and the richest were finding ways to avoid it.Footnote 72
The personal tax was introduced in 1903 as an attempt to change the predominantly collective character of taxation in the Ottoman Empire. Interestingly enough, the Ottoman attempts at tax reform correspond to similar attempts seen in major industrialized countries in the early twentieth century.Footnote 73 Yet in its original formulation, the tax still retained its collective characteristic and all peasants were required to pay the same amount.Footnote 74 Faced with intense protests and demands, the government tried to fix some of the problems with two amendments. The 1905 amendment simplified the rules and, importantly, exempted all peasants.Footnote 75 The 1906 amendment, in contrast, laid out quite detailed rules for the collection of this tax and apparently tried to render it fairer.Footnote 76
As I have touched on above, Özbek sees continuity in the general taxation policies of the Tanzimat and Hamidian states and considers this tax as part of the attempts to remove the collective character of taxation in the empire and move the burden of taxation from the rural to the urban economy. There are certain problems related to this point. First of all, although the peasants were exempted with the 1905 amendment, the original tax applied to peasants as well. Moreover, Özbek argues that it was mostly the upper-income groups in the towns that strongly objected to the tax. Yet, if it was the case, why the Hamidian regime would want to tax the upper classes more heavily needs to be elaborated. Such a shift in the tax burden from the upper to lower classes might be a result of the changing balance of power among classes, where the lower classes would come to exercise more political power or have more political significance than before. Alternatively, a shift in tax policy might reflect the views of the ruling groups about raising more revenues for the state and at the same time being fair.Footnote 77 Thus, the point that the Hamidian regime changed the class character of its taxation policy might not be wrong, but it needs to be accompanied by a discussion on the class composition of the social base of the Hamidian regime and/or the attitude of the regime on taxation issues. Unfortunately, the existing literature and the evidence it provides does not allow for an adequate discussion.
Who Were the Rebels?
The tax revolts that preceded the Revolution of 1908 were predominantly urban revolts with limited peasant participation. The merchants and artisans played a significant role in the revolts; indeed there is evidence that many of the acts of protest were led by them. Petrosyan contextualizes the leadership of merchants with the argument that after the 1894–95 Armenian massacres, the bulk of commerce in Anatolia came to be controlled by Turkish merchants.Footnote 78 One needs to be careful with this argument in that the Turkish merchants were quite active in local and regional commerce well before the Armenian massacres. However, the massacres might have eliminated some competition. In any case, the role that wealthy merchants played in the revolts is unmistakable.Footnote 79 Of course, other groups such as liberal intellectuals, members of the underground opposition, and some Muslim clergymen also participated in the tax revolts. The coexistence of bread riots alongside the tax strikes in some cases, and working-class participation in rare cases, suggests that urban lower classes were part of the rebels in certain areas.Footnote 80
A question that needs to be answered is whether urban aristocracies, for example, the biggest merchants in the towns, were also involved in the revolts. In one account of the Kastamonu revolt, it is reported that the rebels accused the richest merchants of dodging the personal tax.Footnote 81 Moreover, an account of the Erzurum uprising reports that the wealthiest people in Erzurum were forced to leave the city during the revolt.Footnote 82 However, these points should not be considered as evidence that the uppermost segment of the urban bourgeoisie was not involved in the tax revolts at all. The account of Kastamonu rebels accusing the rich merchants is not corroborated by other contemporary accounts. With regards to Erzurum, it seems that the rich who were forced to flee had been engaged in intensive moneylending. Thus, that particular incident could be related to a specific anti-moneylender feeling. But more probably, it was politics, especially the stance toward the Hamidian regime that determined whether the bourgeois were for or against the revolts. The tax revolts were highly charged political events that had clear anti-Hamidian-regime dimensions. It is therefore logical to assume that the urban bourgeoisie in those cities were divided along political, and not class, lines when the uprisings began.
Özbek’s criticism of Kansu suggests that more research is necessary on the class backgrounds and political leanings of the rebels.Footnote 83 The demands of the different groups that participated in the revolts should be carefully analyzed before assessing the general character of the tax revolts. Yet the political character of the revolts should not be underestimated. First of all, on a general level, taxation itself is a political issue that touches upon the moral economy of the lower classes, class relations, the legitimacy of the state, and so forth. Second, there is strong evidence that more was at stake in the pre-1908 revolts than simply the complaints about taxation. In Erzurum, as we have seen, despite the initial policy of accommodation of the state, the revolt continued and did not stop even when the government offered important concessions about the collection of the new taxes.Footnote 84 In Kastamonu, the rebels campaigned for a boycott of the municipal elections, arguing: “We don’t know anything about our municipality. We don’t know about its income or spending. How can we elect its officials?”Footnote 85 Moreover, they implicitly threatened a boycott of military service. Perhaps most important, the rebels directly questioned the legitimacy of the state when they occupied the telegram office and demanded that they be put into contact with the Sultan himself: “We want our sultan; why doesn’t he come by the telegram? Perhaps we don’t have a sultan.”Footnote 86 Also significant is the fact that the empire-wide unrest did not fade when the government totally abolished the personal tax in March 1907.Footnote 87 Obviously what was at stake was more than just taxes. That so many simultaneous tax revolts took place in different parts of the empire under a highly centralized and autocratic government shows that by 1908, the Hamidian regime had lost its ability to govern.
If the tax revolts had a directly political dimension, what, then, was the role of the CUP and the Young Turk opposition in general in the revolts? The few scholars who have worked on the issue have presented differing views about the relative weight of the CUP / Young Turk organization and propaganda in the outbreak of tax strikes and revolts in the empire. One can conclude from the literature that the presence and activities of the opposition in the provinces certainly influenced the tax-related events there. First of all, although still based in exile and more powerful in Macedonia, the opposition was engaged in intensive attempts to organize in the Anatolian provinces, which witnessed the biggest uprisings. There was widespread underground propaganda in the towns led by the CUP and other groups such as the Prince Sabahaddin faction. This was especially true for the Eastern Anatolian cities of Trabzon and Erzurum.Footnote 88 Another factor was the presence of opposition members who had been exiled in the Anatolian towns.Footnote 89 There were a large number of exiles in the town of Kastamonu, for example, where the second biggest tax strike took place.Footnote 90 Finally, among the points agreed upon by different opposition groups in the Young Turk Congress held in Paris in 1907 were organizing revolts, acts of civil resistance, and tax strikes.
Such attempts on the part of the Young Turk opposition notwithstanding, the tax strikes began earlier than the Young Turk opposition’s decision to organize such actions or even before they intensified their attempts to organize at home and in Anatolia. Second, it is not clear to what extent the CUP endeavors to organize in Anatolia were successful, with the possible exception of Diyarbekir.Footnote 91 It seems that the level of support the CUP enjoyed in the Balkans was still considerably higher than Anatolia. Indeed, there is no decisive evidence that shows direct Young Turk or CUP involvement in the revolts. For example, the biggest of the revolts, the one in Erzurum, was organized by an obscure organization, which was more likely a local independent one than a part of the Young Turk network.Footnote 92 The CUP and in certain places other members of the opposition tried to create a fertile ground for insurgency through their pamphlets and other propaganda activities. They supported the tax revolts and strived to strengthen and spread them whenever possible, but they did not organize the revolts. That even Kansu, the most prominent historian who argues that the 1908 Revolution was a popular revolution initiated by masses organized and led by the CUP, cannot present unambiguous evidence about direct CUP involvement in the tax revolts is quite telling in this respect. The strikes were mostly spontaneous crowd actions regulated and led by certain groups and individuals in their course.
Conclusion
Several popular rebellions took place in the Ottoman Empire around the mid-nineteenth century. Many of these rebellions included a collective refusal to pay taxes to the state and/or local magnates. In the literature, the revolts have mostly been considered either as nationalist or proto-nationalist uprisings or conservative reactions to the Tanzimat reform program. Another crucial moment was the wave of tax revolts that took place on the eve of the Young Turk Revolution of 1908. From 1906, there were important tax revolts in several Anatolian towns as well as Macedonia and Mosul, largely in response to attempts to introduce two new taxes. Historians have not paid enough attention to those revolts. In fact, the tax-related popular protest and state response in both periods were crucial instances in the slow and painful birth of the Ottoman modern state.
Although taxation was the root cause in both waves of reforms, there were four significant differences between the post-Tanzimat rescript and the pre-1908 Revolution tax strikes and revolts:
1. The Tanzimat period tax revolts occurred in all of the three historical-geographic regions of the empire, namely, the Balkans, Anatolia, and the Arab-speaking provinces. The revolts were concentrated more in the Balkans than the two other regions and the biggest ones seem to have taken place there. The pre-1908 revolts, however, were largely confined to Anatolia. In any case, the major ones occurred there.
2. Although there were instances of noteworthy Muslim participation in the Tanzimat revolts, most rebels were non-Muslim. In contrast, the rebels in the revolts that occurred before the 1908 Revolution were by and large Muslim.
3. The post-Tanzimat uprisings were peasant revolts with limited townspeople participation. The early twentieth-century tax strikes, however, were manned and led by the urban middle classes. Rural participation in those instances of unrest was quite negligible.
4. Contrary to the assumption that the insurgent peasants reacted against the Tanzimat, the rebels in some of the major revolts rather endorsed the prose of reform, often referring to the promises of equality and protection of the well-being of subjects. They often rebelled not to halt the reforms but to preempt a particular way of understanding them. Peasants and other cultivators in several provinces in fact comprehended the transformation the reforms entailed, endorsed them, and the tax revolts were part of their endeavors to reinterpret the Tanzimat. In response to the midcentury revolts, the Ottoman state strived to delegitimize the revolts as foreign instigation or agitation by a handful of ill-intentioned people, criminalized what it saw as their ringleaders and often used excessive force to subdue them. Because of the fragmented and fragile structure of the ruling class, it could not oppose the local gentry and, given the harsh reaction of some segments of the population to double taxation, it was forced to abolish the new taxation system after a short while. Thus, the midcentury peasant revolts and the state’s response in the form of legal regulation, moral regulation, and concessions to the upper classes should be considered as an integral part of Ottoman state formation during the Tanzimat period. The 1904–8 revolts, in contrast, took place amid intense agitation by political opposition toward the end of the autocratic reign of Abdulhamid II. The revolts shook an increasingly oppressive regime. The state responded to those revolts with a mixture of violence and helplessness. It was soon forced to abolish the newly introduced taxes, but it was not enough for the survival of the already weak regime. The tax revolts thus paved the way for the constitutional revolution of 1908.
The differences between the two waves of tax revolts attest to three dimensions of the relationship between late Ottoman social change and state formation. First, it seems that in the mid-nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire the biggest part of the social question was the agrarian question. In the early twentieth century, however, the agrarian question was not as important as it used to be. Instead, the urban bourgeoisie was ready to assume the leadership role in the new wave of tax revolts. The latter fact indeed shows that the socioeconomic development of the empire in general and capital accumulation by the urban middle and upper classes in particular had advanced beyond a certain degree by the first decade of the twentieth century.
Second, that Tanzimat was adopted by peasants who did not refuse the reforms but indeed tried to radicalize it show that the Tanzimat-era state enjoyed a large degree of legitimacy among the rural lower classes, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. The revolts preceding the Young Turk Revolution, however, show that the ancient regime had lost legitimacy even among Muslims, whom it had considered as its main social support base.
Third, around the mid-nineteenth century, the discontent of non-Muslims could still be voiced in non-nationalistic terms. Yet, as a result of certain important political developments, this situation had changed by the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The significant loss of territories in 1878, the development of the Macedonian Question as a burning problem facing the empire and its citizens, and the emergence of the Armenian question as a national question and the subsequent massacres of Armenians in the 1890s all made the emergence of non-nationalized social movements very difficult. As it happened in important central and Eastern Anatolian towns, only among Turkish-speaking Muslims did the tax strikes not acquire a national or at least an ethnic character.
