Despite these many symptoms of crisis, the Ottoman Empire was weakened but not broken by these successive problems, experiencing a modest recovery during the eighteenth century. Thus there are signs in the Ottoman world of a revival of population and economy, together with evidence of some new directions. In the Peloponnese, for example, the demographic low point of 125,000 inhabitants after the Venetian conquest was made up progressively during the subsequent Ottoman reoccupation, reaching by the Greek War of Independence in 1821 an impressive figure of 400,000 people. Once again, though, the general trend is shared with the rest of Europe, and indeed some of the economic developments are a response to Western stimuli. A famous Mainland Greek example of regional prosperity in this period is presented by the cotton and silk textile villages of the Thessalian hill and mountain periphery (Lawless 1977, Petmezas 1990, Kizis 1994), which showed remarkable growth between 1750 and 1815 (see Chapter 21). To avoid the general temptation to attribute this solely to inbuilt ethnic Greek talent we can note that similar foci of productivity are also active in Anatolia and other Ottoman provinces at the same time. These are symptoms of wider growth and investment. Moreover, as Petmezas shows, the decline and collapse of the Thessalian textile centers and other foci elsewhere in the Empire owe most to the growing effectiveness of Western European competition, and the lack of technological development within these industries themselves in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, rather than to the dead hand of Ottoman control. Elsewhere however, it has been argued that Ottoman trade and industry could adapt to encroaching globalization through modifications to their existing practices, with positive long-term effects, as in Syria.
The development of later Ottoman industry has been discussed in the framework of proto-industrialization. This is a concept characterizing the expansion of domestic industries producing goods for non-local markets which took place in many European regions between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries (Ogilvie 1993), was often rural, and lacked advanced technology or centralized factories. Although some see this phenomenon as laying the basis for widespread true industrialization, critics comment that most such experiments rarely succeeded in competing with dominant Western industrial towns. The Greek version appears to fit this scenario.
The long-term effects of such negative internal developments laid the seeds of the ultimate break-up and then demise of the Ottoman Empire. The weakness of the central government increased, in parallel to the rising dominance of the local provincial elites — the regional governors (pashas) and the landowning elite (ayan). These regional magnates, who dominated provincial administration and controlled most of the surplus production, exercised increasingly arbitrary power. By the mid-eighteenth century the ayans were formally charged by the state with regional administration and security, town-provisioning, tax-collection, and the dispatch of troops (Sigalos 2004). Feeding the lucrative demand from Western Europe for agricultural products and raw material for textile production, the larger landowners exported major amounts of regional surpluses illegally, weakening internal supplies and industry. Stimulated by the growing importance of international trade, Balkan merchants likewise sidestepped the moribund and non-entrepreneurial control systems of guilds maintained by the Ottoman state. They obtained rights to deal with foreigners through berats or official permits: these were issued to consuls and ambassadors of foreign powers and then distributed to clients amongst indigenous Christian communities. In any case scholars suggest that a considerable amount of production eluded taxation altogether.
This increase in the “core-periphery” economy, in which the Ottoman world supplied cheap materials in return for expensive manufactures and luxuries from the West, was partly encouraged by the state in order to appease Western Christian nations, who now had the military advantage over their Islamic neighbor. Yet there were some positive signs during this period. Local manufactures could sometimes compete with Western factory products, at least within the Empire, due to cheaper labor and traditional quality skills, as well as through meeting specific local cultural needs. The arrival of maize from the New World during the seventeenth century boosted crop production, being a hardy and flexible plant which expanded the food base. Other novel crops such as cotton, tobacco, and sugar were now being grown widely in the Ottoman provinces and were in high demand in more temperate countries unsuitable for their growth. A vigorous land trade developed between the Balkans and Western and Central Europe in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, primarily for wool and cotton, and it was communities in the upland regions of North and Central Greece who came to control much of this (Lawless 1977). The historic mountain-town of Arachova near Delphi, a popular tourist venue today, preserves something of the character of these boom-towns and villages.
The positive picture which is emerging for this era has a downside, because it raised new challenges to the previously beneficial, official mentality of tolerant multiculturalism in the Ottoman world. The Early Empire produced a widely prosperous and satisfied society in town and country over most of Greece. The undoing of this system in almost every respect began to encourage two developments of historical importance, but which must be kept separate.
On the one hand, the rising economic and political power of regional elites encouraged them to demand and take a greater political role versus the central government, using the official support of the agents of foreign powers as protection. This led to the development of a prosperous middle and upper class throughout the Aegean region (Lawless 1977). For others, the entire Ottoman system was brought into question, especially as it was magnates and traders within ethnic networks who were asserting their new power and wealth, encouraging them toward concepts of nationalism, inspired by the model of Western nation-state formation. In the case of Greece, the very limited inroads of Islam and a selective adoption of Ottoman culture, taken with the never-extinguished continuity of Greek language and the Orthodox Faith, created a natural stimulus for a revival of Hellenism (“Greek-ness”), as a focus for a potential struggle for ethnic independence. This Hellenic concept was especially cultivated abroad, amongst emigres and Greek commercial networks, where foreign intellectuals and politicians with a Classical education were receptive to the concept of a great nation from Antiquity, now held in chains by an alien and non-Christian power.
Yet the situation on the ground was much more complicated: in the area of the modern state of Greece a bewildering mix of populations existed well into the nineteenth century, with major survivals even today. Orthodox Greeks were matched in most regions by other communities: not just by a minority of genuine Turkish immigrants, but other groups such as the Albanians who had colonized vast areas of the countryside in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, the Slav communities of the north of the country both resident and immigrating from the sixth century through Ottoman times, and the Romanian-speaking Vlachs. There were also other more specialized groups, for example Armenian and Jewish commercial settlers, the latter forming the dominant community in the great city ofThessaloniki. One virtue of the Ottoman system was the deliberate cultivation of multicultural coexistence. European nationalism brought with it many advantages, but with it came an intolerance of groups seen as not belonging to “the nation,” a recipe for oppression, expulsion, and even ethnic cleansing. Both Greece and the Balkans, as well as Anatolia, were to experience these forces when the Ottoman Empire eventually broke up into competing and aggressive nationalisms fighting for a share of its territory.
The implications of these historical trends at the local and regional level, would be that we might expect signs of demographic and economic recovery in the eighteenth-century tax records for Boeotia and other Greek provinces, and in the archaeological record. However, as a result of the decay of administrative structures, later Ottoman tax archives are less plentiful and more summary, with correction factors required for inadequate recording and tax evasion. Nonetheless the limited records for Boeotia, supplemented by Ottoman figures reported by Western Travelers, do indeed suggest a rise in village populations above the seventeenth-century nadir. A clearer sign of a growing prosperity amongst the middle and upper class comes from the study of domestic housing in Aegean towns, and to a lesser extent in the country, as Sigalos’ recent overview (2004) reveals.
Inexorable outside forces were nonetheless undermining the Ottoman Empire’s capability of holding together as the Modern World began to form: the long rise of capitalism and global trade, industrialization and commercial farming, radical changes in the administration ofstates, in educationand citizenship, allwere impacting into the provinces and major cities of the Empire out of its ever-increasing interactions with Western European countries. A state-within-a-state had already developed with the nexus of magnates and merchants in close contact with this wider world, economically, socially, and often politically. The constraints of Ottoman regulations and its obviously declining competitiveness in every sphere forced government programs of internal reform, with varying degrees of success.
Modernizing the army, experiments in parliamentary democracy, radical overhauling of the education system, and increased opening-up of markets to global trade, were carried out by the Ottoman Empire, but the results were imbalanced (McCarthy 1997). The wide support for Westernization in sociopolitical and economic affairs was contrasted with a related feeling of growing nationalism amongst the ethnic and religious communities whose continued existence and self-awareness had formerly been one of the sustaining strengths holding the Empire together. Would the Ottoman State modernize to its citizens’ satisfaction, before the alternative road to self-improvement offered by its fragmentation into independent nations won through? Western powers were likewise in two minds about these options. A pliant, weak Ottoman state provided optimal conditions for profitable exploitation by Western traders, bankers, and factory-owners, whilst a mosaic of struggling new nationstates might provoke wars amongst themselves and between the Great Powers. The Napoleonic conquests with their superficial yet effective promotion of freedom from tyranny, and the wide appeal amongst European Enlightenment and then Romantic writers and intellectuals for human rights and ethnic traditions, had energized large sectors of Aegean and Balkan society into a desire to attain greater freedoms. For most, it seems, change was certainly long-needed and desirable, but to be sought through radical reform of the Ottoman state. It was probably still only a minority who envisaged change through revolutionary uprising and the creation of new nation-states.
The Greek Revolution of 1821-1830 was a victory for the nationalists, followed through the rest of that century and into the first two decades of the twentieth by the break-up into new nation-states of the rest of the Ottoman world. Even the Turkish populations in the heartlands of Anatolia and the hinterland regions of the capital Istanbul were led to turn their backs on everything Ottoman political and social culture had stood for, being refocused by their charismatic leader Kemal Ataturk into a newly-created Turkish nationalist and secular state. However it was merely Southern Greece (without Crete and the Ionian Islands) which formed the new Greek state in 1832: other parts of the country only gradually left Ottoman control (Color Plate 22.1) over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
World History
