This article aims to explore state–society relations during the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II (1876–1909) through the filter of a unique conjunction of state and society—that is, various social groups' voluntary activities, especially fund-raising campaigns with philanthropic and patriotic purposes, often initiated by the palace itself. These campaigns offer fruitful case studies for the study of state–society relations and the dispositions of the public sphere in the late Ottoman era. In light of these activities and their importance for understanding late Ottoman society, the public sphere in this context may be best defined as a dynamic political realm where social and political groups pursued their particular interests; at the same time, it was “the public domain where authority is constituted as legitimate and exposed to popular review, both inside and outside the accepted terms of the given discourse.”1
Geoff Eley, “Edward Thompson, Social History and Political Culture: The Making of a Working-Class Public, 1780–1850,” in E. P. Thompson, Critical Perspectives, ed. Harvey J. Kaye and Keith Mcclelland (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 12–49, 17.
Within the parameters of this definition, which is descriptive of the multiple agencies and fragmented nature of the public sphere in this period, this article focuses on how the Hamidian regime sought to unify this fragmented social and political space by promoting public participation in voluntary activities in the broader political arena.
Ottoman historiography, until recently, has produced neither empirically rich nor theoretically informed studies on such issues as civic culture, voluntary initiative, or the public sphere in the late Ottoman context. Nor has it explored the potential that such concepts hold for meeting a political regime's need for legitimation. One cannot fully explain this negligence by citing the much lamented governmental origins of most Ottoman sources. The problem is, rather, with the paradigms and conceptual frameworks that have informed most scholarship. Even today, Ottoman historiography, influenced mostly by a Eurocentric modernization paradigm, has operated within a dualistic conception of the state–society relationship and an accompanying conceptual East–West divide. In broad terms, this historiography has depicted the East, including the Ottoman past, as a place where cultural or historical particularities, whether those of a strong state in the form of “Oriental despotism” or the peculiarities of Islamic culture, have simply prevented the emergence of civil society and the conditions for a democratic politics based on popular consent.2
For a critique of the “Oriental despotism” concept, see Huri İslamoğlu-İnan, “Introduction: ‘Oriental Despotism’ in World-System Perspective,” in The Ottoman Empire and the World Economy, ed. Huri İslamoğlu-İnan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 1–24.
Such a Eurocentric modernization paradigm was perhaps not a necessary or inevitable idiosyncrasy of the Ottoman and Middle East studies field, but it has continued as an epistemological bent informing the historiographies of “Eastern societies” long after its most extensive deployments, and even after its critique.
During the past two decades, the dichotomous conception of the state–society relationship, with its accompanying East–West divide, has lost some ground while new approaches have gained currency. Revisionist approaches in British, German, Russian, Chinese, and Japanese historiography have drawn attention to the collaborations and loose boundaries between the state and civil society and, more important, have acknowledged the possibility that the state can be an ally and instrument in the process of the emergence of civil society. This new literature has demystified not only an image of the East as a place where civic culture is inherently weak, state power is strong, and politics is based primarily on coercion. It has also demystified the conception of a West as characterized by a strong civil society and a weak state, a society in which state power is based primarily on popular consent.3
Articles in the following study are helpful in this context: Frank Trentmann, ed., Paradoxes of Civil Society: New Perspectives on Modern German and British History (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000).
Released from the constraints of Weberian-modernizationist and Orientalist paradigms, which have implicitly advocated the convergence toward modernity of all societies while simultaneously ruling out most potential for this evolution among “non-Western societies,” revisionist historians have welcomed the opportunity to engage in a search for indicators of civic culture, intermediary groups, civil society, and the public sphere in these societies' pasts.
4 For a summary of such literature on China, see Frederic J. R. Wakeman, “The Civil Society and Public Sphere Debate: Western Reflections on Chinese Political Culture,” Modern China 19 (1993): 108–38. On Russia, see the articles in Edith W. Clowes, Samuel D. Kassow, and James L. West, ed., Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991). See also Joseph Bradley, “Subjects into Citizens: Societies, Civil Society, and Autocracy in Tsarist Russia,” American Historical Review 107 (2003): 1094–1123; Adele Lindenmeyr, Poverty Is Not a Vice: Charity, Society, and the State in Imperial Russia (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996).
The major achievement of this revisionist historiography has been the redefinition of modernization as a shared trajectory that can be analyzed through a set of shared conceptual tools, an attempt that aims to avoid both Eurocentrism and particularistic ethnocentrisms.
This paradigmatic reorientation, however, does not guarantee a resounding defeat for modernizationist and Orientalist approaches to state–society relations. Indeed, historians from various fields have recently begun to express discomfort with the more general quest to locate in “non-Western” societies' pasts any phenomenon identified with the civil society of the Western discursive tradition and with the search for a single trajectory of modernization.5
See the 1993 special issue of Modern China (vol. 19, no. 2 [April 1993]), which includes a paper presented at the “Public Sphere”/“Civil Society” in China? Conference, University of California, Los Angeles, 9 May 1992. For a critique of this scholarship on China, see Arif Dirlik, “Civil Society/Public Sphere in Modern China: As Critical Concepts Versus Heralds of Bourgeois Modernity,” Chinese Social Sciences Quarterly (Zhongguo She Hui Ke Xue Ji Kan) 3 (1993): 10–22.
However, it is apparent that such theoretical concerns have produced experiments with a concept of “multiple modernities” defined mainly in reference to an essentialized conception of cultural difference, an approach that is currently gaining wider academic currency.
6 For a recent articulation of the concept, see Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, Alternative Modernities (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001). The special issue of Daedalus (vol. 129, no. 1, 2000) on “multiple modernities” can also be consulted. For an extensive critique of the multiple-modernities paradigm, see Arif Dirlik, “Modernity as History: Post-Revolutionary China, Globalization and the Question of Modernity,” Social History 27 (2002): 16–39. Harry Harootunian provides another critique of the concept of alternative modernities and considers it “an outrageous classification”: Harry D. Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), xvi.
This concern, as part of a broader epistemological critique of modernity, finds sophisticated articulations in Dipesh Chakrabarty's recent depiction of “citizenship, the state, civil society, public sphere, human rights, equality before the law, the individual, distinctions between public and private, the idea of the subject, democracy, popular sovereignty, social justice, scientific rationality” as all bearing “the burden of European thought and history.”
7 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 4.
Attempts to reconceptualize state–society relations have recently gained currency in Ottoman historiography, as well. Especially in the past decade, Ottoman historians have begun to experiment with concepts such as the public sphere, civil society, and public opinion borrowed mainly from European historiography and to question the dualistic understanding of state–society relations. For instance, viewing early-19th-century Ottoman history through the lenses of the public sphere and public opinion has already shown potential not only for new insights into the Ottoman history, but also for a reconsideration of those concepts from a broader theoretical and world-historical perspective.8
See, for example, Cengiz Kırlı, “Coffeehouses: Public Opinion in the Nineteenth Century Ottoman Empire,” in Public Islam, ed. Dale Eickelman and Armando Salvatore (Leiden: E. J. BriIl, 2004), 75–97.
Similarly, studies of the women's press and other social domains that shed light on gender relations in the late Ottoman public sphere enable us to critically rethink late Ottoman history as well as our analytical tools.
9 See, for example, Elizabeth B. Frierson, “Unimagined Communities: Women and Education in the Late Ottoman Empire, 1876–1909,” Critical Matrix 9, 2 (1995): 55–90.
Another inclination in the field concerns redefining the public sphere in such a way as to make the insights it yields relevant to broader Middle Eastern and Islamic historical contexts.10
Dale F. Eickelman and Armando Salvatore, “The Public Sphere and Muslim Identities,” European Journal of Sociology 43 (2002): 92–115.
However, one may notice a culturalist tone in such approaches, which give chief explanatory power to cultural and religious understandings—the Muslim context, in particular—and conceive modernity as multiple insofar as it is defined mainly in the context of cultural or civilizational referents.
11 See, for example, Dale F. Eickelman, “Islam and the Languages of Modernity,” Daedalus 129 (2000): 119–35; Nilüfer Göle, “Snapshots of Islamic Modernities,” Daedalus 129, 1 (2000): 91–117.
My approach here will be a more politically oriented one that conceptualizes modernity as a common and shared larger global process and contingent on the historical context of power relations.
12 For such a concept of modernity as a shared process, see Huri İslamoğlu, “Modernities Compared: State Transformations and Constitutions of Property in the Qing and Ottoman Empires,” Journal of Early Modern History 5 (2001): 353–86.
Following Harry Harootunian, we can call it a “co-existing” or “co-eval” modernity—that is, “it shared the same historical temporality of modernity found elsewhere in Europe” and in other parts of the world.
13 Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity, xvi.
My approach also diverges from recent culturalist tendencies in historiography that repudiate the validity of the public-sphere concept altogether either because of its Eurocentric connotations or because it has been overused in ideological and teleological perspectives.
Despite these recent attempts to formulate alternatives to dualistic understandings of state–society relations and to Eurocentric versions of modernity, older paradigms continue to inform historical writing on the Ottoman Empire of the 19th century.14
For a recent critique of the dichotomous conception of state–society relations and “nationalist and statist historiography” as dominant paradigms within modern Ottoman Turkish history, see Engin Deniz Akarlı, “Stately Narratives on Turkey's Ottoman Past,” paper presented at the 115th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, Boston, 4–7 January 2001.
Especially within contemporary Turkish historiography, the state–society dualism continues to maintain pride of place, and one can distinguish within this paradigm two interpretative inclinations regarding the role of state. The first interpretation reifies the modernizing central state as the major agent of historical change, applauding, for example, centralization efforts carried out during the reign of Mahmud II (1808–39) and the Tanzimat period (1839–76). Historians of this school do not raise civil society or the public sphere as conceptual or historical problems. Rather, they consider the centralization and reform efforts of the 19th century as the major instruments responsible for progression toward modernity. Thus, the modernizing state laid the foundations for a Western-style social and political system, paving the way for the emergence of modern citizenship. Another emphasis within this school, at the opposite pole of the reified state as the agent of modernization and civic/political culture, is the masses, with their traditional and Islamic culture, pictured as the main impediment to progression toward modernity.
15 One could name Niyazi Berkes's The Development of Secularism in Turkey (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1964); and Bernard Lewis's The Emergence of Modern Turkey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968) as the best examples to this type of scholarship, which continues to retrace these traditional parameters of Ottoman Turkish historiography even today.
A second approach, conversely, blames the strong centralized state for the obvious weaknesses of Ottoman civil society. According to this approach, early-19th-century reform initiatives, particularly those under Mahmud II, weakened popular institutions such as the guilds, Sufi lodges, and artisan groups while, at the same time, recentralization throughout the century left emerging civil society vulnerable to encroachments by the state. As a result, the argument goes, “the patrimonial structure remained intact” until the beginning of the 20th century.16
Nader Sohrabi, “Historicizing Revolutions: Constitutional Revolutions in the Ottoman Empire, Iran, and Russia, 1905–1908,” American Journal of Sociology 100 (1995): 1383–447, 1391–92.
For example, Şerif Mardin recently argued that, during the Tanzimat period, “the Ottoman bureaucratic elite, while promoting a government of laws and facilitating economic enterprise, had not as yet given its own citizens the type of liberty that one associates with the growth of civil society in the West.”
17 Şerif Mardin, “Civil Society and Islam,” in Civil Society, Theory, History, Comparison, ed. John A. Hall (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), 278–300, 292. See also idem, “Power, Civil Society and Culture in the Ottoman Empire,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 11 (1969): 258–81.
Reşat Kasaba offers a slightly different version of this paradigm.
18 Reşat Kasaba, “A Time and a Place for the Nonstate: Social Change in the Ottoman Empire During the ‘Long Nineteenth Century’,” in State Power and Social Forces: Domination and Transformation in the Third World, ed. Joel S. Migdal, Atul Kohli, and Vivienne Shue (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 207–30. See also idem, “Economic Foundations of a Civil Society: Greeks in the Trade of Western Anatolia, 1840–1876,” in Ottoman Greeks in the Age of Nationalism: Politics, Economy, and Society in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Dimitri Gondicas and Charles Issawi (Princeton, N.J.: Darwin Press, 1999): 77–87.
He locates all the elements of a civic social formation in, for example, western Anatolia, a region with commercial ties to the expanding European economy and which experienced a geographical concentration of commercial wealth during the late 18th and most of the 19th century. Kasaba's argument is innovative in locating the social and economic foundations of an Ottoman civil society in a relatively early phase; in this he diverges from Mardin, who categorically denies the existence of civil society in Muslim and Ottoman cultural domains. However, Kasaba identifies separate “state” and “non-state” domains and pictures the relationship between the two in a familiarly dualistic fashion.
19 Kasaba's conceptualization of the “non-state arena” in terms of mainly ethnic and confessional communities—the Greek community of the Izmir region, the Armenians, and the Kurds—needs further consideration: Kasaba, “A Time and a Place for the Nonstate,” 227.
Thus for Kasaba, too, the centralizing state appears as a major impediment to an expanding civil society—or, at the very least, he sees the conflictual relationship between state and society as instrumental in narrowing the scope and basis of consent in Ottoman and Turkish politics.
20 The two approaches examined so far—one state-centered and the other society-centered—share a conception of a reified state defined as distinct and above society. Operating within such a paradigm, most scholarship in the field fails to discern how bureaucratization efforts and the accompanying social and political transformations of the 19th century constituted state–society relations contingent on power relations. It also happens that methodological problems engendered by this paradigm are apparent particularly in the historiography of the Hamidian period (1876–1909). For the majority of scholars who agree on the absolutist and despotic/autocratic character of the Hamidian regime, the concepts of civil society and the public sphere are considered irrelevant to the period. Moreover, historiography on the Hamidian period in Turkey is politicized, with scholars divided in support for or opposition to the so-called Islamic policies of the sultan.21
For an overview of scholarship on the Hamidian period, see Selim Deringil, “New Approaches to the Study of the Ottoman Nineteenth Century,” in Abdullah Kuran İçin Yazılar, ed. Çiğdem Kafesçioğlu and Luciene Thys-Şenocak (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 1999), 345–48. See also Gökhan Çetinsaya, “Çıban Başı Koparmamak: II. Abdülhamid Rejimine Yeniden Bakış,” Türkiye Günlüğü 58 (1999): 54–64.
Historians with ideological motives for identifying with Hamidian policies largely lack theoretical concerns and do not make an issue of civil society or the public sphere. Historians in the other camp portray Hamidian policies, which encouraged a patriarchal-type loyalty of the state's subjects, as a force of regression from the set trajectory of the construction of modernity and civic culture among Ottoman subjects.
22 It is not surprising that the title Berkes uses for the section covering the Hamidian period is “The Reaction, 1878–1908”: Niyazi Berkes, Development of Secularism, 253–322. As an article title from the late 1980s suggests, recent scholarship has modified this prejudiced approach to Abdülhamid II. Stanford Shaw, “Sultan Abdülhamid II: Last Man of the Tanzimat,” in Tanzimat’ın 150. Yıldönümü Uluslarası Sempozyumu (Bildiriler) (Ankara: Millî Kütüphane, 1989), 179–97.
For historians who subscribe to this paradigm, the Hamidian period represents a perfect match between the sultan's search for popular approval from the masses and the paternalist and traditionalist Islamic culture of those masses. According to Niyazi Berkes, “[T]he foundation of Hamidian rule was the great mass of the people—with all their beliefs and superstitions, and also their sense of honor and decency.”
23 Berkes, Development of Secularism, 258.
To borrow a concept from Jürgen Habermas, this “plebiscitary-acclamatory” form of autocratic politics, a fair descriptor for the character of the Hamidian regime, was considered to be intrinsically likely to engender conservative consequences, thus hindering a democratic politics—that is, an expansion of civil society and the public sphere.
24 For how Habermas employs the concept “plebiscitary-acclamatory form of regimented public sphere” for both dictatorships in highly developed industrial societies and Bismarckian policy of inclusion of the universal franchise in the newly founded German empire, see Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), xviii, 145. Habermas's reasoning here resembles Berkes's analysis of the popular aspect of Hamidian politics.
Only after the overthrow of Abdülhamid II, the argument continues, did the new constitutional regime establish a political atmosphere appropriate for the expansion of the public sphere/civil society in the Ottoman domains by improving civil rights and securing them through constitutional amendments.
25 Viewing the Hamidian period and the Second Constitutional Era as presenting an absolute dichotomy regarding the state and society relationship is still a persistent methodological habit of established scholarship. See, as an extreme example, Aykut Kansu, The Revolution of 1908 in Turkey (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1997).
Such interpretations of Ottoman history risk missing the dynamic character of social and political life under Abdülhamid II, as well as that regime's willingness to expand the public sphere as part of its search for legitimization. Historians are hardly likely to associate absolutist and autocratic regimes with a vibrant public sphere and an expanding civil society, since the latter are mostly identified with democratic practices and participatory politics. This article will argue that serious consideration to the public sphere under the Hamidian regime could contribute not only to a study of state–society relations during the late Ottoman Empire, but also to a rethinking of the concept of the public sphere within a broader world-historical context, specifically within a late-imperial and monarchical framework.
As mentioned earlier, this extending and reworking of Habermas's ideas outside the context in which he developed them has become possible only since the emergence of a critical body of work on public-sphere concept itself and since the critique of Orientalist epistemology enabled scholars to seek insight beyond the conventional frameworks. There is no doubt that since the 1989 translation into English of Habermas's early work Strukturwandel der Öffentlicheit, the public sphere as an analytical tool has had an enormous influence on history writing. In its classical formulation of the early 1960s, Habermas's concept dealt mainly with the democratic ideal embodied in the early bourgeois public sphere, which emerged from his search for universal normative principles to undergird a theory of deliberative democracy. For Habermas, the public sphere is an opinion-shaping zone of rational–critical argumentation. However, social historians have revised Habermas's concept substantially and ascribed broader meanings to it, emphasizing multiple and competing forms of public spheres, as well as their gendered character.26
Geoff Eley, in his now classic article, provides an assessment of a body of literature that has emerged since the publication of Habermas's work, which “sometimes confirms, sometimes extends, and sometimes undermines” Habermas's argument: Geoff Eley, “Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the Nineteenth Century,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), 289–339. Harold Mah's recent article provides a critical examination of how historians have applied Habermas's theory in their work: Harold Mah, “Phantasies of the Public Sphere: Rethinking the Habermas of Historians,” Journal of Modern History 72 (2000): 153–82.
Such concepts may diverge considerably from the Habermasian original in including the political activities of a variety of social groups, mostly of the “plebian” classes. Geoff Eley's attempt to merge the “public sphere” with a Gramscian notion of “hegemony” was innovative in this regard and has inspired social historians since its formulation.
27 Eley, “Edward Thompson.” See also Geoff Eley and Keith Nield, “Why Does Social History Ignore Politics?” Social History 5 (1980): 249–71.
In addition, the cultural twist that historians have given to Habermas's thought during the past decade has drawn attention to new themes to be considered as public-sphere activities, such as festivals, parades, rituals, and other forms of public performance.
28 The following review article is most helpful in delineating the contributions of cultural historians to the application of Habermas's theory in historical studies: John L. Brooke, “Reason and Passion in the Public Sphere: Habermas and the Cultural Historians,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 29 (1998): 43–67.
While the public-sphere concept has been fruitful in lending visibility to the clearly public and civic activities of previously unnoticed groups, one should not omit the public and civic activities of ruling groups, as in the pursuit of organizing popular consent, renewing and reproducing hegemony, and legitimizing themselves. It is the contention of this study that defining the public sphere as a realm in which power is manifested in symbolic and discursive forms, as when the ruling elite pursues hegemony through the mediation of public performances, may assist historians in integrating the study of “high politics” with the study of society and culture at the grass-roots level. Such an approach would find no particular methodological conflict between an autocratic regime and a dynamic public sphere. Rather, in the Ottoman context, a dynamic public sphere was, in fact, one of the key elements of the Hamidian regime's legitimation strategies.
VOLUNTARY ACTIVITY AND THE HAMIDIAN REGIME: A POLICY OF CONTROL AND CONTAINMENT
It is customary to describe the Hamidian regime as an autocratic and despotic one because of, among other reasons, the sultan's so-called arbitrary and oppressive policies toward voluntary initiatives of all sorts. Historians who have examined this period retrospectively from the context of the post-1908 constitutional regime share the assumption that, although Abdülhamid might have been a modernizing sultan in the Tanzimat fashion, his despotic policies hindered the liberalization or democratization of Ottoman politics. This surprisingly consistent and single-minded assessment of Abdülhamid and his rule is belied by the regime's tolerance for—and, often, direct involvement in—a high level of voluntary activity for various purposes, especially fund-raising campaigns.
Defined literally, the word “iane” means aid or assistance.29
See Sir James W. Redhouse, A Turkish and English Lexicon (Constantinople: H. Matteosian, 1921).
Interestingly,
iane in the late Ottoman context encompasses a broad spectrum of social and political activities—public assistance, indigence and disaster-relief efforts, and patriotic campaigns for public projects—whose initiators may be the local government, the palace, any other social agent, or a combination of these.
30 A brief survey of the Ottoman newspapers of the 1890s, for instance, yields the following: Hicaz Demiryolu İanesi, Tesisat-ı Askeriye İanesi, Girid Muhtacini İanesi, Mecruhin-i Askeriyeye İane Serqisi, Hindistan İanesi, İane-i Şiteviyye, İane-i Umumiye.
In the governmental lexicon of the mid-19th century,
iane was mostly used for ad hoc taxes of various kinds.
31 For example, through iane-i umumiye the Ottoman governments in the mid-19th century imposed an extra tax on the population to overcome financial difficulties: see Ali Akyıldız, Para Pul Oldu: Osmanlı’da Kağıt Para, Maliye ve Toplum (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2003), 83–103. In 1834, Mahmud II issued iane-i cihadiye as a compulsory contributory tax to finance the newly established reserve army in the provinces: Musa Çadırcı, Tanzimat Döneminde Anadolu Kentleri’nin Sosyal ve Ekonomik Yapıları (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1991), 144–45. For various iane cases as tax, see also Tevfik Güran, Tanzimat Döneminde Osmanlı Maliyesi: Bütçeler ve Hâzine Hesapları (1841–1861) (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1989).
Although
iane retained this meaning until the end of the empire, as in the case of the educational contribution tax (
maarif ianesi), during the late 19th century its association with voluntary philanthropic activities at the grass-roots level became more widespread. The Hamidian regime took a flexible approach toward this growing voluntary dynamism and preferred to control and limit it rather than attempt to suppress it. Hamidian policy may thus be summarized as one of tolerating and integrating such initiatives into the regime's power strategies while containing them through strict supervision. This approach demonstrates the double-edged and contentious nature of the late Ottoman public sphere in that the regime often attempted to mold those “bottom up” initiatives to serve its own political concerns.
While empire-wide campaigns were mostly organized “from above”—that is, by the sultan and his palace bureaucracy—iane campaigns of the late Ottoman period were not solely the result of government initiatives. Ottoman subjects also organized such campaigns: residents of a neighborhood or a provincial town, representatives of various confessional communities, or voluntary societies of various sorts. A cursory examination of the official documents of the Hamidian period reveals a remarkably high volume of public activity with philanthropic aims, with lotteries, concerts, and balls being the major forms of fund-raising activities among both Muslim and non-Muslim Ottomans.32
The lottery (lotarya) was a widely used form of philanthropic activity during the Hamidian period. For a detailed study of its origin and uses in different social and political contexts, see Mete Tunçay, Türkiye’de Piyango Tarihi ve Milli Piyango İdaresi (Ankara: Milli Piyango İdaresi Yayını, 1993).
One can observe incidences of lotteries for philanthropic purposes in Ottoman domains as early as the mid-19th century. In this early period, the government did not intervene in such activities as long as they retained a purely philanthropic goal. By 1857, as for-profit lotteries began to multiply, along with disputes between lottery organizers and their customers, the government attempted to prohibit all forms of lottery.33
To what extent the government was successful in this attempt at this blanket prohibition is open to question, especially as regards the small-scale lotteries organized for charity in various parts of the empire. During the Hamidian period, activities of this sort increased considerably, especially in non-Muslim communities; in response, governments of this period employed various devices to keep such activities under control.
One strategy that Hamidian-period governments employed to control the number of initiatives of this sort was the use of bureaucratic application procedures, as in the lottery organized by the local Jewish community in Izmir to raise funds for a recently founded community school. The government's attitude toward this initiative was typical. The Izmir Chief Rabbinate (İzmir Haham Başı Kaymakamlığı) presented a petition to the governorship of Aydın requesting permission to organize the lottery in September 1890. Instead of making an immediate decision, the governor passed the petition on to the cabinet of ministers in Istanbul for consideration, showing his reluctance to shoulder the decision alone. This was a widely used technique to indirectly show muted disapproval of such activities and, perhaps, discourage a number of them through postponement. After brief deliberation, the cabinet gave the necessary permission but lowered considerably the amount of money permitted to be raised and ordered close supervision of the activity by the local governor.34
Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi/Prime Ministry Archives (hereafter, BOA), Meclis-i Vükela Mazbataları (hereafter, MV), 57/52, 1308.S.6 (21 September 1890).
It appears that the government was concerned with the benevolent activities of the Jewish community in the province of Aydın because local organizations had been using such activities as a cover for various political goals.
35 BOA, Yıldız Esas Evrakı, Sadrazam Kamil Paşa (hereafter, YEE), 86-6/590, 15.6.1314 (11 November 1897); 86-8/767, 2.7.1316 (18 October 1898); 86-8/785, 29.7.1316 (13 December 1898).
On another occasion, a lottery was organized for a vocational school on one of the Aegean islands (Sisam Beyliği) mainly populated by Greeks. The Ottoman government discovered the activity only when the police detained three individuals in Malkara, a town in the province of Edirne, with a large batch of lottery tickets that had been printed in Sisam. However, since Sisam had an autonomous political status, the government did not have the authority to intervene.
36 BOA, MV, 111/41, 1323.Ra.26 (31 May 1905).
One can find numerous examples throughout the empire of fund-raising campaigns organized to benefit local community schools, such as that of 1897 when the governorship of Selanik granted permission for a lottery to be organized by the local Greek community for the Greek School in Siroz, a subdistrict of Selanik.
37 Cüneyd Okay, Osmanlı Çocuk Hayatında Yenileşmeler, 1850–1900 (Istanbul: Kırkambar Yayınları, 1998), 38.
On 31 May 1905, the Ottoman cabinet used the Sisam Beyliği incident in a restatement of its policy toward lotteries.38
BOA, MV, 111/41, 1323.Ra.26 (31 May 1905).
The initial policy, enacted on 5 February 1883, delegated full responsibility to the local governors, authorizing them to give permission for the lotteries to be held but limiting the amount any lottery could raise to 50,000 Ottoman piasters. Government permission was required for lotteries that involved amounts greater than this.
39 Tunçay, Türkiye’de Piyango Tarihi ve Milli Piyango İdaresi, 51–52.
Although this moderate policy was reaffirmed in 1905, an imperial decree of 16 March 1906, just a year later, brought a greater restriction. This new decree clearly illustrates the regime's increasing concern about the popularity of such public activities in Izmir and the surrounding regions where the Greek, and to some extent Jewish, populations were concentrated.
One also notices in this decree evidence of the increasing use of a discourse of morality. In writing that “the use of lotteries to raise money for philanthropic purposes is in principle illegitimate, and since it is a way of cheating the people, the government should find a way to prohibit Ottoman subjects from resorting to this avenue,” the government labels the lottery a form of gambling and, as such, immoral.40
BOA, Irade Hususi, 70/1324.M.20 (16 March 1906).
One can find signs of a similar way of thinking among the Ottoman literati in earlier periods. According to Ebüzziya Tevfik, for instance, the lottery was an open form of gambling, a social disease that caused numerous harms to the social body.
41 Ebüzziya Tevfik's article was published in Mecmua-i Ebüzziya in 1882. For the full text of this article, see Tunçay, Türkiye’de Piyango Tarihi ve Milli Piyango İdaresi, 53–55.
The centrality of this morality or ethics-based argument in Hamidian policy suggests that the government did not have the need or desire to employ direct means of repression. Yet this is not an issue of incapacity in policing. Rather, as will grow clearer through the examples cited later, it appears that the regime was aware of the effectiveness of more complex and nuanced techniques of social control. This is apparent in the fact that these techniques were used to mold the initiatives to serve the sultan's ruling strategy.
While a disapproving tone continued to dominate the elite's attitudes toward lotteries, government policy remained flexible, especially regarding those activities organized by non-Muslim community leaders on behalf of their communities.42
For example, the local governors of Izmir continued to organize lotteries for the local vocational school. From 1887 until 1906, Hamidian governments granted permission for various such lotteries.
43 The Izmir Vocational School (Izmir Sanayi Mektebi), as was the case with most other vocational schools, was in reality a reformatory. For more on these vocational schools, see Bayram Kodaman, “Tanzimat'tan II. Meşrutiyet'e Kadar Sanayi Mektepleri,” in Birinci Uluslarası Türkiye Sosyal ve İktisat Tarihi Kongresi (Ankara: Meteksan Limited Şirketi, 1980), 287–96.
It would appear that the Hamidian regime's careful balance of cordiality and oversight in its relations with these communities' representatives contributed to making possible the regime's policy of tolerance toward their philanthropic activities. In this sense, the Armenian patriarchate's fund-raising campaign for the community hospital at Yedikule in Istanbul is revealing. Throughout the 1890s, the patriarchate organized annual public fund-raising concerts at the Municipal Concert Hall at Beyoǧlu-Tepebaşı. While the regime did not find this activity suspicious and usually granted permission, it did not stop monitoring the concerts. Between 1904 and 1906, for instance, the sultan allowed such concerts on the condition that the events be held under the supervision of the mayor (şehremini); the mayor was even ordered to attend in person.44
BOA, İrade Dahiliye, 16/2.Z.1322 (7 February 1905); BOA, Yıldız-Sadaret, Resmi Maruzat (hereafter, YARES), 134/103, 1323.12.7 (2 February 1906); BOA, YARES, 135/18, 1324.1.8 (4 March 1906); BOA, İrade Hususi, 87/25.M.1324 (21 March 1906).
Along with this close surveillance, the sultan was careful to portray himself as the patron of this and similar philanthropic activities, enhancing this image with the customary practice of imperial gift giving to religious communities during their holidays. These gifts were distributed as charity to indigent non-Muslim subjects of the empire.45
Official documents on this issue are available in print format in Vahdettin Engin, Sultan Abdülhamid ve İstanbul'u (Istanbul: Simurg, 2001), 74–80.
The sultan appears to have been aware that the expansion of philanthropic activity among non-Muslim Ottomans could weaken his authority in the field of social assistance. Yet he was willing to take this risk while seeking to influence the expansion of the “philanthropic public sphere” in such a way as to fit his own power strategies, which included portraying himself as the protector of Muslim and non-Muslim Ottomans alike.
46 I borrowed the term “philanthropic public sphere” from Jean H. Quataert, Staging Philanthropy: Patriotic Women and the National Imagination in Dynastic Germany, 1813–1916 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001).
At the same time, the Ottoman government's cautiousness in its policy toward voluntary initiatives among non-Muslim communities was consistent with its anxiety about separatist political activities within those communities, since such humanitarianism, from the government's point of view, could easily turn into seedbeds of separatist nationalism. Regardless of the role that this concern might have played in the shaping of the Ottoman policy, what is important here is the Hamidian regime's consistency in controlling and containing voluntary activities among all sectors of Ottoman society.
The Hamidian government's political discourse of proper moral conduct was characterized by both flexibility and extensiveness. The fact that one can observe moral arguments directed also at Ottoman Muslims is indicative. In fact, the regime's approach to such fund-raising activities among Muslims sometimes seems more rigid than that employed for non-Muslims. In 1893, the general director of the Tobacco Régie arranged a fund-raising party for the poor residents of Büyük Ada, an island in the Marmara Sea. Archival documents reveal that the prospect of this event was greeted with great excitement among the Muslims of the capital, which aroused the sultan's concern. He sent strict orders to the cabinet to prohibit it, citing a cholera epidemic in the capital as justification. However, another imperial decree shows that the sultan's main concern was the popularity of this and similar social activities among the Muslim subjects of the empire.47
BOA, Yıldız Mütenevvi Maruzat (hereafter, YMTV), 82/117, 28.2.1311 (10 September 1893); BOA, İrade Hususi, 43/1311.Ra.8 (19 September 1893); BOA, İrade Hususi, 47/9.Ra.1311 (20 September 1893).
As this decree makes clear, the regime's anxiety regarding its Muslim subjects' inclinations toward a Western lifestyle, as shown in their enthusiasm for balls and similar social events, was in line with its policy of strengthening the “moral character” of the empire's Muslim subjects.
48 Benjamin Fortna, “Islamic Morality in Late Ottoman ‘Secular’ Schools,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 32 (2000): 369–93, 379.
The immediate intention of the government was to check the influence of foreign missionaries and Western culture in general among Muslim subjects.
49 For an evaluation of the Hamidian regime's concern with the missionary activities in the Ottoman domains, see Selim Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876–1909 (New York: I. B. Tauris, 1998), 112–34.
This and similar government actions functioned to enhance the “moral regulatory capacity of the state,” especially in the field of voluntary activities.
50 I borrowed the concept “moral regulatory capacities of the state” from Felix Driver, Power and Pauperism: The Workhouse System, 1834–1884 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
Despite its restrictive, moralistic political discourse, the Hamidian regime was surprisingly tolerant of philanthropic activities organized by, or under the control of, the educated sectors of Muslim society. Examples of this were numerous such activities arranged by popular periodicals of the time, most of which were under the sultan's patronage. In the pages of Hanımlara Mahsus Gazete (Ladies' Own Gazette) and Çocuklara Mahsus Gazete (Children's Own Gazette), for example, one could find examples of philanthropic voluntary activities, if modest in scope. In 1895, for example, Hanımlara Mahsus Gazete initiated a fund-raising campaign for contributions to the trousseau expenses of poor orphan girls.51
Hanımlara Mahsus Gazete, no. 31, 4 Kanun-ı Evvel 1311/16 December 1895.
Donors' names and donation amounts were published in subsequent issues of the journal. These lists reveal that the campaign was not simply an upper-class phenomenon; women from non-elite sectors of society and low-ranking civil servants and their wives constituted a majority of the participants. This fact is consistent with a general tendency of the women's press during the late 1890s, when that sector was “taken over by hundreds of professional journalists and school teachers drawn from non-elite sectors of society.”
52 Elizabeth B. Frierson, “Mirrors Out, Mirrors In: Domestication and Rejection of the Foreign in Late-Ottoman Women's Magazines (1875–1908),” in Women, Patronage, and Self-Representation in Islamic Societies, ed. D. Fairchild Ruggles (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 177–204, 181.
A certain Remziye Hanım, for example, once vice-director of the Beşiktaş Girls' School, then appointed as a teacher to a school in Izmit, donated 100 Ottoman piasters in cash. Another donor was Sadık Efendi, a doorman at the Ministry of Finance.
53 Hanımlara Mahsus Gazete, no. 31, 4 Kanun-ı Evvel 1311/16 December 1895. For the remaining part of the list, see also Hanımlara Mahsus Gazete, no. 55, 14 Mart 1312/26 March 1896.
In another initiative,
Hanımlara Mahsus Gazete called on its readers to fund journal subscriptions for girls' schools in various districts of the capital or for indigent girls in such schools. Since the journal's subscription fee was very low, even women of modest means were able to participate. Another example of popular-journal–based philanthropy was the campaign of January 1897 to purchase clothing for poor orphans organized by
Çocuklara Mahsus Gazete and supported by
Hanımlara Mahsus Gazete.
54 Çocuklara Mahsus Gazete, no. 46, 6 Ramazan 1314/8 February 1897.
The intended audience of the campaign was obviously the youthful readers of the journal; subsequent issues show that nearly all the participants were young readers.
55 Ibid., no. 47, 9 Ramazan 1314/11 February 1897; no. 48, 13 Ramazan 1314/15 February 1897; no. 49, 16 Ramazan 1314/18 February 1897; no. 50, 20 Ramazan 1314/22 February 1897.
The sultan's policy of flexibility toward grass-roots philanthropic activity, which could be described as less repressive than selective, was also noticeable in the area of voluntary organizations. In most cases, Abdülhamid II employed a lenient though cautious approach while simultaneously seeking to establish his patronage over these societies. Through this strategy, he aimed to turn the expanding philanthropic field to good advantage by disseminating an image of himself as a caring monarch.
56 Nadir Özbek, Osmanlı İmparatorluğu'nda Sosyal Devlet: Siyaset, İktidar ve Meşruiyet (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2002).
As long as the sultan was convinced that the societies' leadership was in safe hands, he tolerated them and even, at times, encouraged them by providing imperial gifts.
57 According to one estimate, more than forty philanthropic societies were established between the years 1876 and 1908: see Mehmet Ö. Alkan, “Ölçülebilir Verilerle Tanzimat Sonrası Osmanlı Modernleşmesi” (Ph.D. diss, İstanbul Üniversitesi, 1996).
The Philanthropic Sisterhood Society (Beyne al-Nas Fukaraperver Uhuvveti), founded by a group of Christian women some years before 1887, is a case in point. The society apparently had a close relationship with the chief imperial physician, Mavroyani Pasha, who convinced the sultan of the loyalty of the society's founders and secured for them a substantial quantity of imperial donations, totaling 50 liras.
58 BOA, YMTV, 26/25, 22.7.1304 (16 April 1887).
As we learn from one of the society's petitions to the sultan, dated 16 April 1887, its purpose was to provide assistance to indigent Christian women; this included setting up a sewing atelier to provide work relief.
59 Among other societies established during the Hamidian period was the Greek Women's Philanthropic Society of Beyoǧlu (Beyoǧlu Rum Cem
iyet-i Hayriye-i Nisvaniyesi),
60 Serpil Çakır, Osmanlı Kadın Hareketi (Istanbul: Metis Yayınları, 1994), 45.
and the Kadıköy Philanthropic Society (Kadıköyünde Müesses Fukaraperver Cem
iyet-i), established in 1886 by four Armenians.
61 1886 Senesinde Kadıköyünde Müesses Fukaraperver Cemiyetinin Ana Nizamnamesi (Istanbul: Fazilet Basımevi, 1940).
Most of these societies were organized at the local or district level and often boasted surprisingly high membership figures. A document from 1896 mentions a dispute between two such societies—one in Hasköy, a neighborhood mostly populated by Jewish subjects, and the other in neighboring Piripaşa—regarding encroachment on each-other's territory.
62 BOA, Irade Hususi, 5/1314.B.1 (7 December 1896).
Their claimed membership levels are indeed remarkable, with the Hasköy society claiming 1,000 members and the Piripaşa society, 600. The document notes that the government was expected to play the role of arbiter in their dispute. In addition, there were societies founded by Muslim women. One of these was called Women's Compassion (Şefkat-i Nisvan), a society founded in Selanik in 1898 by Emine Semiye, daughter of the famous historian and statesman Ahmed Cevdet Pasha.
63 Çakır, Osmanlı Kadın Hareketi, 43–46.
These modest but numerous fund-raising campaigns, along with the societies established by both non-Muslim and Muslim Ottomans of the Hamidian period, are constituent elements of a stronger and more extensive public sphere, introducing a new dynamic of social and political transformation. While it would be unrealistic to attempt here a summary of the dispositions of the Ottoman public sphere prior to the Hamidian period to trace a larger historical context for this trend, the following example may offer a comparative insight into the general direction of these changes. In 1875, Ayine, a women's journal, organized an iane campaign whose purpose was to collect clothing for the Ottoman Reserve Army in Selanik.64
Ayine, no. 5, 30 Teşrin-i Sani 1291/12 December 1875; and Ayine, no. 6, 7 Kanun-ı Evvel 1291/19 December 1875.
Donors were the wives and daughters of high civil officials or notables, demonstrating the largely upper-class composition of the Ottoman public sphere at that time. The cases examined earlier, from the later Hamidian period, illustrate that the public sphere by then had expanded to include non-elite sectors of society.
MONARCHY AND CONSTRUCTING A PUBLIC SPHERE
As seen so far, the Hamidian regime kept an eye on voluntary dynamism at the grass-roots level and employed flexible policies to control and contain it in an expanding public sphere. In addition to this reactive strategy, the Hamidian regime also engaged in more pro-active attempts to encourage late Ottoman civic life and shape it to its own political needs. A major instrument here was fund-raising campaigns organized on the initiative of the sultan and his immediate palace bureaucracy. These empire-wide campaigns were designed for a variety of purposes, such as poverty and disaster relief, projects in the areas of public services and the military, and those fostering patriotism. Through such activities the Hamidian regime provided Ottoman subjects with social-welfare services, over time endowing the regime with some of the functions of a welfare state, but a “surrogate” one in the sense that it fulfilled some of the functions of a welfare state with almost no supportive institutional infrastructure.65
For a detailed study of social-welfare practices during the Hamidian period and the concept of “monarchical forms of Ottoman welfare system,” see Nadir Özbek, “The Politics of Welfare: Philanthropy, Voluntarism and Legitimacy in the Ottoman Empire, 1876–1914” (Ph.D. diss., State University of New York at Binghamton, 2001).
Most of these campaigns, planned and executed in an ad hoc fashion, also clearly served as orchestrated manifestations of monarchical power in the public sphere. Thus, while many understand the public sphere in the sense proposed by Habermas in
Strukturwandel der Öffentlicheit—as a retreat of the state from certain fields, as with the abolition of press and theater censorship—the context examined here presents a strong argument, almost to the contrary, for admitting the possibility that in-place power structures can facilitate the evolution of a public sphere. Perhaps for now, at least, the somewhat paradoxical phrase “monarchical public sphere” can suffice to identify this particular historical context.
The sultan's fund-raising campaigns were of two major kinds: social-assistance–type, to be discussed later, and support for the military and war-related relief efforts such as caring for war orphans and disabled soldiers, and other public works. A well-known example of the second type was the Hejaz Railway Campaign (Hicaz Demiryolu I
ānesi).
66 William Ochsenwald, The Hijaz Railroad (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1980). Ufuk Gülsoy, Hicaz Demiryolu (Istanbul: Eren Yayınları, 1994), 57–105. Murat Özyüksel, Hicaz Demiryolu (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 2000), 81–111.
This railroad had symbolic significance because it was to connect the Anatolian railway system to the Muslim holy places in Hejaz Province. The campaign for it, which was carried out throughout the Muslim world, aimed to build the Hejaz railway with only domestic or Muslim financial sources—that is, without borrowing from the European market. With this project, Abdülhamid also aimed to boost his public profile not only domestically but throughout the Muslim world.
67 There is an extensive body of literature and debate on the Pan-Islamic policies of the sultan. I will note only two: Selim Deringil, “Osmanli İmparatorluğu'nda Geleneğin İcadi ve ‘Muhayyel Cemaat’ ve Panislamizm,” Toplum ve Bilim, no. 54–55 (1991): 47–64; and Cezmi Eraslan, II. Abdülhamid ve İslâm Birliği (Istanbul: Otuken Yayınları, 1992).
The campaign thus served to promote the sultan's Pan-Islamic policy and to generate feelings of solidarity among Muslims worldwide while emphasizing the sultan's role as the spiritual leader of all Muslims. With its political message, this particular campaign had a greater chance of success in securing the loyalty of the masses to the monarchical regime, in addition to encouraging a participatory public sphere.
Sultan-initiated fund-raising campaigns in the area of social assistance such as poor and disaster relief were in most cases orchestrated as public performances of sultanic generosity. Sultanic generosity toward indigent subjects was certainly not an invention of the Hamidian period. What are new in the Hamidian period are the sultan's efforts to expand imperial philanthropy and integrate it with more modern and popular conceptions of rulership.68
See Özbek, “The Politics of Welfare.”
As mentioned earlier, through these philanthropic performances the sultan's bureaucracy sought public loyalty by propagating the image of the sultan as a benevolent monarch and familiar paternal figure. Throughout the sultan's long reign, he and his bureaucracy exercised various forms of munificence, both traditional and innovative, to create a rich repertoire of acts of imperial giving. While a detailed examination of the complex system of Hamidian gift giving is beyond the scope of this study, the following example of a disaster-relief effort may serve to illustrate how Abdülhamid II dealt with the realm of social welfare in line with the objectives described earlier.
69 Idem, “Imperial Gifts and Sultanic Legitimation During the Reign of Sultan Abdulhamid II, 1876–1909,” in Poverty and Charity in the Middle Eastern Contexts, ed. Mine Ener, Amy Singer, and Michael Bonner (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 203–20.
Following the earthquake of 1898 in Balıkesir, a provincial town in the Marmara region, the sultan immediately took the initiative. With an imperial decree, he first established a special private commission headed by one of his personal advisers, Vehbi Pasha. This commission immediately departed for the disaster area with 50,000 piasters provided by the sultan.
70 Sabah, no. 3009, 7 April 1898.
Simultaneously, another aid commission was established within the Istanbul municipality to solicit donations throughout the capital.
71 From 4 February to 8 March 1898, the newspaper Sabah published, on its front page, a long list of contributions by civil servants and the Istanbul public.
The sultan's commission returned to Istanbul after about two months of relief work in the region and presented the palace with its report and a special letter from the victims expressing their gratitude to the sultan for his generosity.
72 Sabah, no. 3009, 7 April 1898.
It is noteworthy that, rather than empowering the local authorities to deal with the crisis, Abdülhamid preferred the more personally aggrandizing method of taking the emergency-response planning and implementation into his own hands. One can easily glean from newspapers of the period how skillfully the sultan orchestrated the relief campaign as a demonstration of his direct, personal concern with the problems of his needy subjects. His closest aides' presence in the earthquake region; his assuming personal command of the operation; and his immediate cash donations all contributed to putting the sultan's own signature on the relief effort, thus linking the figure of the sultan to the well-being of his people.
In addition to their impressiveness as acts of a generous individual, the success of sultanic benevolence also depended on the extent of public involvement, through which this image of the sultan found a broader audience. To stimulate participation in fund-raising campaigns, the Hamidian bureaucracy saw to it that the daily newspapers published the list of donors and their donations on their front pages. Such lists published after the Balıkesir earthquake show that this campaign, as with numerous other, similar efforts, provided the opportunity for Ottomans from widely different sectors of society to join the rest of the population in efforts for the public good. At the same time, it is fair to assume that individuals participating in these campaigns also had motives rooted in their local social and political settings, each “local public” incorporating various individual or group interests. These “local publics” in the Ottoman Empire are, of course, vast and various. Of interest for this article is the Hamidian bureaucracy's attempt to integrate them into an overarching imperial political realm, with the fatherly and compassionate sultan as its unifying symbol.
Part of this venture has to do with creating the fantasy of a single public sphere out of the fragmented, empire-style political and social landscape. The multiple local public spheres and newspapers and periodicals of the time played a crucial role in this endeavor. However, newspaper coverage of Abdülhamid II's philanthropic performances may be misleading in at least one respect: while they consistently represented the sultan's philanthropic performances as success stories, these strategies of power did not always run smoothly, as dissatisfaction with the fund-raising campaigns was not lacking among his subjects. However, to find evidence of this dissatisfaction—on which the press remained silent—one must go to the archival sources. They show that discontent emerged when Ottoman subjects with lower income levels—urban workers and artisans and state employees with low salaries—were obliged to participate in campaigns with cash donations.
The winter relief campaign of 1891 is one example. Assistance in the form of fuel to the poorer residents of Istanbul during the winter months was a familiar element of the Hamidian repertoire of imperial gift giving, repeated almost every year. In 1891, the sultan's chief staff at the palace established an aid commission (iane-i şiteviyye komisyonu) to solicit donations. As usual, Abdülhamid was the first and largest donor. However, participation in this particular campaign, archival sources show, was not always voluntary. For example, a group of artisans petitioned the palace to complain about the amount of the contributions the commission was asking of them. This complaint resulted in a minor investigation to determine whether the commission had used excessive coercion in its solicitations. In fact, one can find many examples in the archival sources of popular discontent with various iane campaigns. Yet while even carefully planned initiatives may have soured some of his subjects, as in this case, the sultan was often prudent enough to take matters into his own hands and decree that the officials stop pressuring the poorer artisans for donations.73
BOA, YMTV, 47/177, 23.6.1308 (3 February 1891).
WAR, PATRIOTISM, AND THE HAMIDIAN PUBLIC SPHERE
Constructing a public sphere with patriotic overtones, an important aspect of the sultan's strategy of power, manifested itself as an ambiguous venture at various moments of the Hamidian period, such as that following the Ottoman–Greek war of 1897. The “Thirty Days” war of 1897 had its cause in a long-simmering conflict between the Ottoman Empire and the Greek state over Crete. Exploited by Greek irredentism, the conflict ultimately turned into an open military clash between the Greek state and the Ottoman Empire.74
For the history of this particular conflict, see Ayşe Nükhet Adıyeke, Osmanlı İmparatorluğu ve Girit Bunalımı (1896–1908) (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2000). See also Bayram Kodaman, ed., 1897 Türk-Yunan Savaşı (Teselya Tarihi) (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1993); and M. Metin Hülagü, Türk-Yunan İlişkileri Çerçevesinde 1897 Osmanlı-Yunan Savaşı (Kayseri: Erciyes Üniversitesi Yayınları, 2001); Colmar Freiherr Von Der Goltz, Osmanlı-Yunan Harbi (Osmanlı-Yunan Seferi 1313/1897), ed. İbrahim Yilmazçelik and Ahmet Aksin (Izmir: Akademi Kitabevi, 2001). See also Theodore G. Tatsios, The Megali Idea and the Greek Turkish War of 1897 (Chicago: East European Monographs, 1984).
This was the only major military encounter of the Hamidian period other than the war with Russia in 1877–78, and it contributed to the need to refashion Ottoman public opinion along patriotic and militarist lines.
While the press censorship of the period is well known, it appears that the newspapers and periodicals showed a certain degree of initiative and played a crucial role in this process. Even a quick survey gives the impression that writers and editors took their roles very seriously, acting almost as if they were part of an organized public-relations campaign. With the apparent intention of improving the self-esteem and dignity of the Ottomans, who were felt to be in need of restoration after the disastrous Russo-Ottoman war of 1877–78, the newspapers emphasized Ottoman military prowess in their detailed accounts of developments from the war front. Coverage of the home front, however, was aimed at integrating it with the war, turning the two fronts into a single “national” one. Servet-i Fünun, a major illustrated literary journal, featured reports on the enthusiasm of Istanbul residents as they greeted the arrival of wounded soldiers en route to hospitals in the city. According to one such report, thousands of Ottomans gathered at the railroad station to welcome the soldiers with great excitement, shouting, “Long live my padişah!”75
Servet-i Fünun, no. 322, 1 Mayis 1313/13 May 1897. On the enthusiasm of the population and the mass demonstrations cheering the Ottoman army, see Sadri-Sema, Eski İstanbul Hatıraları, ed. Ali Şükrü Çoruk (Istanbul: Kitabevi, 2002), 193.
Thus, such coverage had the effect of representing the unity of the military and the wider population with the sultan as its commander in chief.
War medals performed a similar function. The sultan awarded the “Greek War Medals” (Yunan Harbi Madalyası) to 190,000 individuals, military and civilian, who had contributed to the war effort.76
Hülagü, Türk-Yunan İlişkileri Çerçevesinde 1897 Osmanlı-Yunan Savaşı, 123.
Press coverage of the award ceremonies seems intent on enhancing feelings of confidence in and familiarity toward the sultan, represented as a combination of father figure and commander in chief. Abdülhamid is reported as addressing the soldiers in the first person singular, just as a father would address his children, during the ceremonies, and newspapers published full texts of speeches in which the sultan described the Ottoman populace as a large family with himself as the father.
77 The sultan was not present at the ceremony. His first secretary, Tahsin Paşa, read the speech. For the full text of the speech, see Servet-i Fünun, no. 336, 24 Temmuz 1313/5 August 1897.
He went further to declare that his feelings for each Ottoman who had been wounded or killed were no different from what he would feel toward his own sons. This projection of a paternal bond between the sultan and his subjects, one of the central themes of the Hamidian political discourse, encouraged the manifestation of this monarchical public sphere as an imagined familial community. Mohammad Tavakoli-Targhi identifies a similar process in late-19th-century Iran, where, as in the Ottoman Empire, this “familialization” of political discourse should not be confused with patrimonialism in the Weberian sense. In Tavakoli-Targhi's words, “[T]he metaphoric refiguration of the [sultan] as familial father was a corollary to the nineteenth-century centralization of state and publicizing of royal authority.”
78 Mohammad Tavakoli-Targhi, “From Patriotism to Matriotism: A Tropological Study of Iranian Nationalism, 1870–1909,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 34 (2002): 217–38, 223.
One of the most important instruments used by the sultan's bureaucracy to recruit the masses for the war effort along the lines of a patriotic, participatory mobilization was the fund-raising campaign for war orphans and the families of wounded soldiers (Evlad-ı Şüheda ve Malulin-i Güzzat-ı Şahane İnanesi). The campaign was organized as an exhibition for which Ottomans were encouraged to donate cash or items to be displayed and then sold. To encourage donations, newspapers published the campaign registers showing donors' names and donation amounts. These registers, a public display of the generosity of the participants, also shed light on the social topography of this evolving public sphere. The empire-wide campaign attracted participation from a broad spectrum of Ottomans, providing opportunities for those from far-flung provinces, administrators, high- or middle-ranking public servants, and influential local figures to participate collectively in a patriotic action. The Hamidian bureaucracy used the occasion to promote Ottoman patriotism; the war had been won, and now it was time for Ottomans to express their gratitude by honoring the war orphans and the families of disabled soldiers who had made sacrifices for the fatherland (vatan). This campaign was thus of the kind to foster feelings of unity between the people and the state and of belonging to an imagined imperial community. The Hamidian state used this opportunity to promote the notions of a harmonious state–society relationship, of a patriotic Ottoman identity, and of the sultan as symbolically embodying the unity of the Ottomans.
It appears, then, that this fund-raising campaign simultaneously performed two inter-related functions. First, by involving even the distant provinces of the empire, it helped to expand the territorial boundaries of what I am calling the monarchical public sphere. Second, while disseminating an image of a political community that included the broad masses, it also served to demonstrate public approval and support for the regime. Of course, how deep or extensive this support was is less important than the virtual effect that such a staging appeared capable of creating within the wider population. In reality, as mentioned earlier, what the sultan and his bureaucracy were aiming at in constructing this paternalistic yet participatory public space around such campaigns was a unification of the widely diverse local communities throughout the empire.
The lists of thousands of Ottoman donors from all corners of the empire, together with their donation amounts, published as part of the relief campaign for orphans and families of the wounded, shed light on the characteristics of the public sphere that the Hamidian regime was attempting to construct and consolidate. A significant aspect of the campaign was that Abdülhamid II himself was the major contributor, almost 6 percent of all funds raised coming from the Privy Purse.79
BOA, YMTV, 194/100, 24.CA.1317 (30 September 1899).
After the sultan, the next major contributors were his close associates, high-ranking ministers, and the Ottoman consuls. Indeed, these lists provide a kind of profile of the political community or monarchical public sphere that the Hamidian regime aimed to establish in an imperial context, since they represent a new form of unity of Ottoman society in spite of its very diverse socio-economic and ethnic-religious constituents. The twenty-sixth register, for example, includes the names of high-ranking Ottoman military and civil officials and consuls along with those of ordinary civil servants, together with their widely differing donation amounts.
80 Sabah, no. 2973, 2 March 1898.
Another list published in
Sabah on 18 January 1898 reflects the same diversity: Baǧdadi Samizade Mehmed Hamid Efendi, a student at the Military Academy and apparently the son of a notable from Baghdad; Ekrem Beğ, the owner of a philatelic journal in Istanbul; Ali Efendizade Halil Efendi and Haydar Efendi, son of Hacı Ahmed Efendi, Ottoman merchants at Rustov; and the wife of the director of Saint Joseph High School were among the participants listed.
81 Ibid., no. 2930, 18 January 1898.
Another significant feature of the war-relief campaign was its administrative geographical extent, with donation-collection committees located in all of the Ottoman provinces. Moreover, local government offices played an important role in administering the campaigns in the provinces. Participation levels were noteworthy in the major provinces of Edirne, Syria, and Mosul,82
Ibid., no. 2982, 11 March 1898; no. 3014, 12 April 1898.
while Kayseri, Maraş, Zeytun, and Sinop are examples of smaller districts where the level and amount of donations were also significant.
83 Ibid., no. 2979, 8 March 1898; no. 2982, 11 March 1898.
Campaigns were even organized in a number of small villages.
84 On 11 March 1898, Sabah featured the amount of contributions for the villages of Elbistan and Pazarcık, two subdistricts of Maraş Province: see ibid., no. 2982. Similar examples are available in issues of this and other newspapers.
These cases appear to show a correlation between the presence of an administrative infrastructure and the emergence of a public sphere in the provinces. Far from substantiating the notion of the state–society relationship as an innately dichotomous one, a public sphere appears to be capable of developing in the context of an extensive, robust, and even centralized administration.
The campaign in Sinop, a small subdistrict on the Black Sea, provides a snapshot of what we might call a typical Ottoman provincial public sphere at the end of the 19th century. The list of Sinop contributors published by Sabah on 15 February 1898 resembles a catalogue of the many departments and positions in local government in the region and of civil professional sectors such as artisans, small retailers, bank-branch managers, merchants, and respected residents of every neighborhood.85
Ibid., no. 2958, 15 February 1898. Although it is only a partial list, it includes the names of ninty individuals from the town.
This particular register lists 91 individuals, with donations ranging from 2 to 108 piasters, for a total of 2,052 piasters, a remarkable figure for a provincial subdistrict such as Sinop. Among those 91 individuals, 15 account for almost half the total (each giving 40 piasters or more). Ali Vehbi Efendi, the chief secretary at the office of the provincial treasury; Hacı Hüseyin Efendi, a judge at the local court; and Süleyman Efendi, an accountant at the treasurer's office, were singled out for their contributions of about 100 piasters each, while Ekmekçi Salih Usta, a baker, could afford only 2 piasters. Among individuals who gave 5 piasters, one can see the names of Rasim Efendi, an artisan; Kadir Usta, another baker; Hacı Mustafa Usta, a locksmith; and Mustafa Efendi, the mufti of Meydan, a neighborhood of Sinop. Most of the other contributors who were listed with donations of 20 piasters were mid-ranking public servants or employees in the private sector, such as Mithat Efendi, police lieutenant; Abdullah Efendi, police officer; municipal physician Kamil Efendi; post-office director Abdülkadir Efendi; and Burhaneddin Efendi, an employee at the local branch of the Public Debt Administration. Thus, the provincial public sphere as manifested through this campaign was not limited to a specific group or stratum. Instead, it reflected the social diversity of the local populations.
Another feature of the campaign in Sinop is that it was carried out in several neighborhood of the town, with, for example, ten individuals representing Cami
-i Kebir Mahallesi and fifteen individuals from Meydankapı Mahallesi. Most of the donors from Cami
-i Kebir Mahallesi were small artisans who made relatively small contributions, while donation amounts suggest that Meydankapı Mahallesi was a mixed neighborhood of prosperous and humble residents. Most likely coordinated and promoted by the elected neighborhood leaders (muhtar), the campaign brought rich and poor Ottomans together, even at the neighborhood level, thus unifying them for a patriotic cause as loyal subjects of the sultan.
The fund-raising campaign for war orphans and the families of wounded soldiers thus appears to have made a major contribution to the Hamidian bureaucracy's attempt to lend a patriotic color to the sultan's ruling strategies and political discourse. Moreover, the masses were mobilized for a common goal of special significance: the soldiers and their families who sacrificed their lives for the sake of the fatherland (vatan). Vatan in the Hamidian context had definite territorial connotations and was imagined as a political community with the paternal figure of the sultan as its symbolic center. The Hamidian bureaucracy carefully merged this patriotic imagination with the current patriarchal political discourse, creating an association between the patriotic duty of each individual toward the homeland and his or her fellow citizens with loyalty to the fatherly figure of the sultan. Hamidian political language was personalized to such an extent that it can be characterized as expressing a “patriarchal patriotism.” Hasan Kayalı makes a helpful distinction between the patriotism of this period, for which the focus of loyalty was the Ottoman sultan, and what he calls the “state patriotism” of the Second Constitutional Period (1908–18).86
Hasan Kayalı, Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism, and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire, 1908–1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 13. With this distinction Kayalı aimed to emphasize both continuities and changes between the two periods separated by the revolution of 1908.
Patriotism, as is true for any identity-based ideology, is socially redefined on a continual basis, and the Hamidian regime appears to have been remarkably successful in the design and implementation of the charitable activities examined here, which gathered momentum for “war patriotism” while propagating and enhancing the public profile of the sultan.
Hamidian patriotism, however, presented a certain number of uncertainties and ambiguities. The sultan promoted a patriotism backed by dynastic and imperial motives, advocating it as an alternative ideology to various sorts of particularist nationalisms then in developing stages in the empire. This alternative basis for unity may indeed have been critical especially during the war with Greece, when the Ottoman Empire included a significant Greek Orthodox population, since it appears that in encouraging a larger role for a unified public sphere, the Hamidian government sought in particular to not antagonize its Orthodox subjects. A Sabah news item on the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem's contribution to the war-relief campaign, with its special symbolic significance, is a case in point. The Sabah article seeks to make the important distinction that, while a war was being waged against the Greek state, all Ottoman subjects—regardless of their ethnic and confessional identity—were united behind the sultan.87
Sabah, no. 3103, 10 July 1898.
There had been earlier examples of the sultan's concern with the sensibilities of Greek-speaking Ottoman subjects, as shown, for instance, in his prohibition of celebrations of Istanbul's conquest in the early stages of his reign.
88 Engin Deniz Akarlı, “The Problems of External Pressures, Power Struggles, and Budgetary Deficits in Ottoman Politics under Abdülhamid II (1876–1909): Origins and Solutions” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, Princeton, N.J., 1976), 39.
Despite these thoughtful attempts, however, the Hamidian regime was hesitant to take radical measures—for example, as regards non-Muslim Ottomans in the military. Despite various legislative attempts starting in 1855, no serious effort appears to have been made to include non-Muslims in the armed services before 1909.
89 Carter Findley, “The Acid Test of Ottomanism: The Acceptance of Non-Muslims in the Late Ottoman Bureaucracy,” in Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society, Volume 1: The Central Lands, ed. Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc., 1982): 339–68.
While the government drafted thousands of volunteers among Muslims and non-Muslims to counter the Serbian uprisings in 1876 and to fight in the Russo-Ottoman war of 1877–78,
90 Ufuk Gülsoy, Osmanlı Gayri Müslimlerinin Askerlik Serüveni (Istanbul: Simurg, 2000), 115–24.
no attempt appears to have been made to accept non-Muslim volunteers during the Ottoman–Greek war of 1897. And while Albanian notables volunteered to support the Ottoman army with their own troops in the war of 1897,
91 Goltz, Osmanlı-Yunan Harbi, 25–29.
these troops were “organized more on the model of mercenaries than citizen-soldiers.”
92 Craig Calhoun, “Nationalism and the Public Sphere,” in Public and Private in Thought and Practice: Perspectives on a Grand Dichtotomy, ed. Jeff Weintraub and Kumar Krisha (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 75–105, 96.
Although the imperial government might have benefited from a more inclusive patriotic policy, the war with Greece aroused public sentiment and made the Muslim masses more vulnerable to political agitation with nationalist overtones.93
For a detailed study of Selanik during the Ottoman–Greek war of 1897, and particularly the Jewish community, see Noémi Lévy, “Salonique et la guerre gréco-turque de 1897: le fragile équilibre d'une ville ottomane” (Memoire maitrise, Universite Paris 1, 2002). Lévy demonstrated how the elite of the Jewish community exploited the sultan's fund-raising campaign for the war orphans. The local Jewish elite stimulated Ottoman patriotism in Selanik to improve its relationship with the Ottoman center while ensuring its authority in the city.
Thus, a redefinition of patriotism with a more nationalist coloring and with Islamic content became a real possibility. There are indications that the Ottoman literati of the time worked energetically toward reshaping public opinion and redefining patriotism along these lines. Poems by well-known poets such as Tevfik Fikret, Nigar Hanım, Mehmet Emin, and Ali Ekrem are illustrative in this regard.
94 Sadri Sema, Eski İstanbul Hatıraları, 196–99.
This body of poetry had great influence on the Ottoman youth as well as on the public at large, and it doubtless strengthened nationalist sentiments among the public, encouraging people to volunteer for military service or to participate in patriotic campaigns at home. Mehmet Emin's poetry is instructive in this regard. He wrote in simplified Turkish and took the wider public as his audience. Most of his poems have patriotic and nationalist tones. One of his best known is titled, “
Ben bir Türküm! (I am a Turk!).” In 1898, he collected these poems into a volume titled,
Türkçe Şiirler (Poems in Turkish).
95 Fevziye Abdullah Tansel, Mehmed Emin Yurdakul’un Eserleri-ı, Şiirler (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1989), 3–42.
Such cases demonstrate the complexity and rapidly changing contours of different political imaginations.
CONCLUSION
New light on late Ottoman social and political dynamics shed by the philanthropic activities examined here can open the way to qualitative rethinking of the conceptual tools that historians have employed in their examination of politics in late-19th-century imperial and monarchical contexts. This study has been undertaken in the hope of contributing to the literature on the public sphere as a conceptual tool produced by social and cultural historians of the past two decades, literature that has radically modified Habermas's original concept and broadened the scope of “the political” in definitions of the public. The discussion here, however, diverges from tendencies among the social and cultural historians in one major respect: the emphasis has not been put on the democratic connotations of the public sphere in its multiplicity. Instead, the public sphere is conceived as a site of contention among divergent and particularistic interests that is subject to appropriation for powerful social and political interests. This becomes apparent only when viewing the public sphere as a political realm that gave the ruling elite new opportunities to show their power and hegemony through the mediation of public performances. As these emphases indicate, the major concern here has been not simply to signal the presence of an incipient but apparently dynamic public sphere or civil society in the late Ottoman Empire, in particular, and the need to be alert to the possibility of such formations in imperial and monarchical contexts more generally. Rather, the concern has been to show how a monarchical and autocratic regime manifested and legitimized itself in the public sphere.
It is true that the public sphere and civil society are concepts open to misuse when they are weighted with various historiographical and epistemological preferences so that the terms become “not merely descriptive but prescriptive: terms of a discourse that [seeks] to produce its object in accordance with varying social interests and ideological orientations.”96
Dirlik, “Civil Society/Public Sphere,” 14.
In view of this, the public sphere, as defined here, allows us to repudiate both state- and society-centered teleological narratives of Ottoman modernity and to evaluate how authority is constituted as legitimate and exposed to popular view in the late Ottoman imperial and monarchical context. As a new perspective on the picture provided by Ottoman and modern Turkish historiography, the domain of philanthropic activities has revealed a lively field of voluntaristic behavior during the Hamidian period. This example of Abdüldhamid II's efforts in encouraging voluntary activity demonstrates that the expansion of the late Ottoman public sphere was contingent not only on social change in the so-called non-state arena, but also on the dynamics of high politics—that is, the strategy of power and legitimation needs of the ruling elite and that elite's vision of the kinds of concepts that would most usefully unify and lend identity to the populations within its jurisdiction.
One can argue that there are discrepancies on many levels between the analytical use of the public-sphere concept and the actual socio-political configurations of imperial–dynastic regimes such as that of the Hamidian-period Ottoman Empire. In his study on nationalism and the public sphere, for example, Craig Calhoun dismisses the possibility that there can be a unified public sphere within an imperial context. Using the Austro-Hungarian and, to some extent, the Ottoman empires as historical examples, he describes how the institutionalization of the public sphere can occur only within the context of a national imagination. For Calhoun, only “parts of empires can be transformed into nations by the creation of quasi-autonomous public spheres.”97
Calhoun, “Nationalism and the Public Sphere,” 96.
It is true that throughout the 19th century both empires were overwhelmed with the problems posed by separatist nationalist movements. The Ottoman government's response to these challenges was Ottomanism, which could be considered a variant of “official nationalism” in Benedict Anderson's sense, or “state-patriotism” in Eric Hobsbawm's sense.
98 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 80–100.
Imperial visions such as Ottomanism may not appear to be viable political projects in retrospect. Yet regardless of its feasibility, the Ottoman Empire, like other imperial regimes of the late 19th century, was engaged in constant attempts to integrate and configure its dominions into one all-encompassing modern national state. “Ottomanism”—which displayed, among other inclinations, Islamic overtones during the Hamidian period—should be considered as a corollary to this attempt.
99 In his latest book, Karpat broadly articulates such a view: Kemal Karpat, The Politicization of Islam: Reconstructing Identity, State, Faith, and Community in the Late Ottoman State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 323.
The failure of imperial “imaginations” as alternatives to particular nationalisms was less a matter of lack of initiative in integrating dominions than of the administrative capacities of the states and the relative power of separatist nationalisms and interstate rivalries. Contrary to the implications of Calhoun's line of thought, I have argued here that constructing a public sphere with monarchical backing, resulting in a monarchical public sphere and fulfilling some of its goals, proved to be a viable project. Indeed, the public sphere described here was the only possible domain in which imperial objectives—such as a Hamidian Ottomanism, with its overtones of fatherly and imperial largesse together with Islamic values—could be manifested. This is apparent especially in the voluntary philanthropic activities promoted mainly by the sultan and his bureaucracy that followed the Ottoman–Greek war of 1897, along with other philanthropic campaigns of the period. Yet given the reality of the “quasi-autonomous public spheres” in which separatist nationalisms were imagined and organized, constructing a public sphere at the imperial level with monarchical and patriotic dispositions appears to be an ambiguous project. For one thing, the prospects of such a project were obviously rapidly being undermined, both within and around the empire, by the spread of the doctrine of the nation-state, with its constitutional and plebiscitary form of government. In addition to the growing tension between nation and empire-based politics, Abdülhamid's ambitions to unify the empire's diverse polity through this unique combination of directed mobilization and paternalistic policy were also weakened by other more general political dynamics, such as the “discrepancy between a phantasy of a unified political subject and a reality of particular social groups.”
100 Mah, “Phantasies of the Public Sphere,” 155.
Author's note: I am indebted to Tracy Lord for her assistance in preparing this article. I also thank five anonymous readers for IJMES for their useful comments.
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