From 1826 to 1860, the Ottomans increased freedom of trade and lifted many of the restrictions on the domestic economy. After 1838, the Empire could boast of one of the most liberal regimes of international trade in the world. Imports damaged domestic industries in the early part of the century, but manufacturers adapted. Some sectors recovered and expanded after 1870, achieving record levels of production in the early 1900s. Imports did little damage to small handicraft producers for local markets, and the weaving industry flourished. State built factories that supplied the military proved inefficient and withered. Christians owned and worked the few private factories that existed, which exhibited capitalist efficiency, but rarely had more than ten employees.
Quataert lists three reasons for the lack of growth in manufacturing during this century: 1) War and emigration of non-Muslims to escape high taxes and oppression caused labor shortages. 2) Confiscation by the government, bandits and marauders discouraged manufacturers from investing. And 3) the populace as well as laborers opposed manufacturing out of a fear that factories would create more unemployment. It is curious that Quataert lists labor shortages as a cause for the lack of growth in manufacturing, since labor shortages in England spurred the creation of textile mills. But he may be correct in the Ottoman case in view of the lack of incentives to invest in factories and equipment. Without laborsaving equipment, manufacturers could increase production only by adding more workers.
In spite of its liberal trade policy, the Ottomans fell hopelessly behind the West in economic development. During most of the century, average European per capita G.D.P. grew by 0.9 percent annually, while per capita G.D.P. declined in the Ottoman Empire, Brazil, China, Mexico and India. Maddison estimated the per capita G.D.P. of Western Europe in 1870 at $1,974 in 1990 U.S. dollars. In the richest part of the Ottoman Empire, the European territories, per capita income had grown from $566 in 1820 to just $871 in 1870 Maddison wrote in The World Economy.
In spite of the heroic efforts of the Ottoman reformers of the mid-1800s, liberal economic theory remained little more than a coat of new make up on the face of ancient traditionalism. After 1860, the state’s Industrial Reform Commission partially restored the monopolies of the old guilds. Ottoman planners turned mercantilist and increased duties on imports while protecting domestic industries. In 1838, the state had charged a 3 percent tax on imports and 12 percent on exports. By 1914, the theory had reversed and the state charged 15 percent on imports and 1 percent on exports in Inalcik’s history. The Empire finally adopted mercantile economics long after the West abandoned it.
The Ottomans continued to spend huge sums on warfare in this century, but now they fought for survival, not expansion. The Empire spent fifty-three of 118 years, or 45 percent of the time between 1800 and 1918 at war, which caused labor shortages and left desperately needed crops unplanted. By 1811 the Empire had lost Egypt to Napoleon. Ottoman oppression of Christians in the European provinces boiled over into repeated rebellions until, with the aid of Russia and Austria, Ottomans lost their richest territories.
Russia chipped away at the Empire on its border. French anthropologist Bat Ye’or credits Russian success at defeating the once invincible Ottoman armies for the rise of the myth of Muslim tolerance for Christians and Jews. In fact, news of Muslim atrocities against Christians had energized the Russian armies who fought to bring relief to fellow Christians. But as the nineteenth century aged, European governments began to fear Russian encroachment on the Mediterranean, while memories of the once fierce Ottoman armies had faded. As a result, the British would fight the Crimean War to defend the Ottomans against the Russians, but European governments feared that their citizens would balk at fighting on the side of the Muslim Ottomans if news of atrocities against Christians in the Balkans became widespread. So to safeguard the balance of power in Europe and block the Russian advance toward the Mediterranean, European diplomats manufactured a propaganda machine to convince the public that Turkish rule over Christians in its European provinces was just and lawful; that the Ottoman regime, being Islamic, was naturally “tolerant” and well disposed toward its Christian subjects; that its justice was fair, and that safety for life and goods was guaranteed to Christians by Islamic law. Ottoman rule was brandished as the most suitable regime to rule Christians of the Balkans according to Bat Ye’or in “The Myth of a Tolerant Pluralistic Islamic Society.” The European propaganda machine succeeded so well that the myth of Muslim tolerance for non-Muslims persists today.
Factories monopolized the attention of economists and politicians of the Ottoman Empire during the nineteenth century, but four-fifths of the Ottoman population continued to earn their livelihood from the land. Absolute production increased along with the population and the amount of newly plowed land, but farming techniques changed little. A few farmers irrigated and saw increases in production from three to eight times, but due to insecurity from bandits, marauding private armies and greedy governmental officials, few employed the technique. As late as the 1950’s, only 24 percent of farms used iron plows in Turkey, the country with the most advanced agriculture in the Middle East. The remainder used wooden plows with iron tips.
Early twentieth century
The twentieth century opened with the Ottoman Empire still considered a military power, though a weak one. The Empire’s subjects had become wealthier than at any other time in history, but the growth had not occurred at the rapid rate enjoyed by Europeans. In 1913, the per capita income in the Empire was one-twentieth that of the British, one-tenth that in Europe, one-fifth that of its former provinces, Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece, and one-seventh that of Rumania according to Inalcik.
Manufacturers had survived the flood of European and American imports and continued to expand, although government owned factories had collapsed under the weight of their own inefficiency. Still, the manufacturing sector was small. In 1911, the Ottomans had many spinning mills, but they spun just four thousand tons of cotton yarn per year, which amounted to one-fourth of total domestic consumption. Mills that wove the yarn into clothe made only 2 percent of the Empire’s needs, Inalcik wrote.
Then, a disaster struck the manufacturing sector that would take the Turks half a century to recover from. Before the turn of the century, the demand for Islamization of the Empire and the expulsion of non-Muslims had emerged. As a result, Turks murdered 200,000 Armenians in 1896. But the few private factories left in the Empire belonged primarily to Christians of Greek and Armenian descent who were fairly wealthy by Turkish standards. The 1913 census revealed that Christians owned 80 percent of all Turkish enterprises.
As world war approached, the clamor to cleanse the Empire of non-Muslims swelled to a crescendo. In 1915, the government deported the Armenian population from the interior of the country and caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands. Reprisals during World War I led to more deportations and deaths. By the end of the war, it is estimated that over one million Armenians had been killed. Half a million Greeks had fled. By 1924, less than one-tenth of the non-Muslim population of 1908 (2.5 million) remained, Quataert wrote.
Because Christians owned most of the factories in the Empire, their death, deportation and emigration destroyed manufacturing, but no Muslims waited in the wings to take over. The once thriving silk industry provides an example of the devastation. In the Bursa region, Muslims cut down the mulberry trees in which silkworms grew and used them for firewood. Then they planted tobacco in the fields. Cocoon production plummeted from four million kilograms in 1913 to 300,000 in 1922. Though the departing Christian owners had left the silk spinning mills intact, Muslims burned and looted them instead of continuing to operate them. In 1921, the silk weaving industry produced one-fifth of its normal 30,000 kg of raw silk, Quataert wrote. As a result of the atrocities committed against the Christians, Turkey lost all of its export oriented manufacturing, while domestic manufacturing would not reach pre-war levels until long after the end of World War II. Muslims refused to enter manufacturing because
of the ancient stigma against it and commerce, which is the reason Christians and Jews dominated it. The path to success lay through the military and government service, as always.
In the 1920s, little had changed in Turkish agriculture since the days of the Ottomans, but a growing population demanded more food. The lack of productivity growth meant that the production of greater quantities of food required more people working on the farm, but agriculture faced a severe labor shortage. Rather than improve productivity on the farm, the state ordered townspeople to the countryside to help, foreshadowing Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China during the 1960s.
1929 brought the end of free trade in Turkey with the imposition of high tariffs on imports. The government nationalized the railroads, which the British had paid for and built. As a result, foreign capital that had financed reconstruction fled the country and large manufacturing collapsed. The state adopted a policy of central planning after the Soviet model in the 1930s and built factories, but workers had high rates of absenteeism, high turnover and low work discipline. During World War II, the real income of workers declined 30 to 50 percent and the middle class began to argue for an end to state control of the economy. In the 1950s and beyond, the American example began to grow in importance as American aid and investment invaded the nation.
The myth of Muslim supremacy
Official history, that which dominates other versions because the state crafted it and forced it on citizens Soviet style, or simply popular history because it tells the story most people want to hear, is often myth according to British historian Herbert Butterfield. Official history portrays the Ottoman Empire as a story of the decline of a once great civilization, but it contains myth, as well. The Turks had inherited their advanced science from the Arabs, who inherited it from the scholars of conquered Byzantium, Persia and India. Arab math came from Hindus in India. The legacy of the ancient Greeks passed through the Byzantine Empire and appeared in Arabic as a result of the translations of Christians writing in Arabic, as the historian Rodney Stark noted in How the West Won:
The scholar Mark Dickens pointed out that the Nestorians “soon acquired a reputation with the Arabs for being excellent accountants, architects, astrologers, bankers, doctors, merchants, philosophers, scientists, scribes, and teachers. In fact, prior to the ninth century, nearly all the learned scholars in the [Islamic area] were Nestorian Christians.” It was primarily the Nestorian Christian Hunayn ibn Ishaq al-‘Ibadi (known in Latin as Johannitius) who “collected, translated, revised, and supervised the translation of Greek manuscripts, especially those of Hippocrates, Galen, Plato, and Aristotle into Syriac and Arabic,” in the words of William W. Brickman. As late as the middle of the eleventh century, the Muslim writer Nasir-I Khrusau reported, “Truly, the scribes here in Syria, as is the case of Egypt, are all Christians...[and] it is most usual for the physicians...to be Christians.
Western scholars continue to refer to the ancient Apostolic Church of the East as “Nestorian” because it embraced Nestorius’ views in the debate on the human and divine natures of Christ and opposed those of Cyril of Alexandria. Nestorius, following his mentor, Theodore of Mopsuestia, argued that Christ had two natures, human and divine, united in one person. Cyril argued that the divine and human natures were fused into one nature. Of course, there is no way to settle such a dispute because the Bible does not address it, but theologians in that era thought they could reason their way to absolute certainty on such issues and that their human reasoning was equal to that of the truths of Scripture. Nestorius offered the better logic but lost the debate because Church councils determined “truth” by a vote of the majority and none of Nestorius’ supporters were present.
The Council of Ephesus in 431 denounced Nestorius’ theology as heresy and with it condemned the Syrian speaking Apostolic Church of the East, which once stretched from Jerusalem to Beijing and from southern India into Russia and shepherded tens of millions of Christians. However, Nestorius did not present his views at the council and only a straw man version fabricated by Cyril was offered. Nestorius was never the “Nestorian” condemned by the council according to Dietmar W. Winkler and Wilhelm Baum in The Church of the East: A concise history. The Church of the East did not take part in the Council of Ephesus and felt no obligation to enforce it. The West has ignored this church because the illegal Council of Ephesus declared it to be heretical. The Church of the East allowed the followers of Nestorius to immigrate rather than face death at the hands of their “Christian” brothers.
The Apostolic Church of the East had formed what many scholars consider to be the first universities six centuries ahead of Europe at Nisibis and Gundeshapur in Persia in the fourth century. Those schools were so successful that popes tried to replicate them centuries later. The universities taught theology, philosophy, medicine, astronomy and mathematics and developed most the “Arab” scholars of the Muslim Golden Age. Later, the church created a similar school at Baghdad.
Hunain ibn Ishaq, the most important of the East Syrian translators, was the son of an apothecary from the Arab tribe of Ibad, a lecturer at the medical academy in Baghdad and a deacon of the Apostolic Church of the East. He made great advances in the treatment of eye diseases, which were common at the time. He wrote a Book of Logic and a history of the world from Adam to his own time (661). He resisted attempts at converting to Islam in spite of the social and financial benefits, and authored a defense of Christianity. His greatest contribution may have been to the Arab language, according to Winkler and Baum: “Through the development of neologisms and the borrowing of foreign words, he created an academic Arabic terminology and transformed Arabic from the language of the Bedouins into an instrument in which complicated scholarly problems could be expressed. The medical historian Withington referred to Hunain as the ‘Erasmus of the Islamic Renaissance.’”
The works of Christian and Jewish scholars had been translated into Arab and Turkish, but “this learning continued to be sustained primarily by the dhimmi populations living under Muslims regimes...as the remarkable historian of Islam Marshall G. S. Hodgson noted, ‘those who pursued natural science tended to retain their older religious allegiances as dhimis, even when doing their work in Arabic,’” according to Stark in How the West Won.
Muslim architecture had been adapted from the Persian and Byzantine, using churches as templates for mosques. Avicenna, an influential Muslim philosopher, was a Persian, as was Omar Khayyam and al-Khwarizmi, the father of algebra. Bakht-Ishu and ibn Ishaq, leaders in Muslim medicine were Christians while physicians were trained at the Christian medical center at Nisibus in Syria. Masha’allah ibn Athari was a Jew. “What may have misled so many historians is that most contributors to ‘Arabic science’ were given Arabic names and their works were published in Arabic, that being the official language of the land,” Stark wrote.
Differences in their approaches to Aristotle emphasize the gap between European and Ottoman cultures. Muslims considered the physics of Aristotle to be authoritative and infallible. If reality refused to comply with Aristotle’s teachings, “those observations were either in error or an illusion,” Stark wrote. In contrast, European scholars eventually considered Aristotle’s works as a good beginning but something they could improve upon. Christian scholars advanced their reputations by finding good reasons to disagree with Aristotle. As a result, European science continued to advance until it gave birth to modern science while the Ottoman Empire descended into dogma and superstition.
Westerner mercantilists had tried for centuries to explain the relative decline of Spain only to learn from economics that Spain never declined because it was never truly great; it was always medieval. Muslims have asked for centuries why the Ottoman Empire declined, yet they continue to refuse to face the glaring truth, as Stark explained:
What has largely been ignored is that the culture could not keep up with the West because so-called Muslim culture was largely an illusion, resting on a complex mix of dhimmi cultures. As soon
as the dhimmis were repressed as heretical, that culture would be lost. Hence, when Muslims stamped out nearly all religious nonconformity in the fourteenth century, Muslim backwardness came to the fore.
Waves of anti-Christian and anti-Jewish rioting and murder swept across the Muslim world in the 14th century, by the end of which ...only tiny remnants of Christianity and Judaism remained scattered in the Middle East and North Africa, having been almost completely destroyed by Muslim persecution. And as the dhimmis disappeared, they took the “advanced” Muslim culture with them. What they left behind was a culture so backward that it couldn’t even copy Western technology but had to buy it and often even had to hire Westerners to use it.
Tamerlane virtually destroyed the Apostolic Church of the East and its universities. Without its Christian and Jewish scholars, the Ottoman Empire remained frozen in its medieval ways while the West advanced. Even the casual reader of the economic history of the Ottoman Empire cannot ignore the major themes of economic policy that changed little throughout four centuries. The military learned too late that conquest had been defeated as a sound economic development policy. The government never trusted control of the economy in the hands of the ra’aya, and except for a brief period in the middle of the nineteenth century, strangled the economy with price controls, regulations and monopolies. High taxes, corrupt officials, and the lack of law and order destroyed entrepreneurial effort. A modified form of feudalism persisted into the twentieth century.
But the Ottomans did not invent these policies of economic management; they inherited them. All ancient civilizations had followed the same general principles, including the Chinese and the Japanese, until the late nineteenth century. In broad strokes, the policies constituted the traditional economic policies that empires had followed for millennia. Before the sixteenth century, all of Europe followed the same principles. Afterward, much of Europe and Russia remained stuck in traditional economics until the twentieth century. During those four centuries, Europeans journeyed from a position of cowering in fear of Ottoman assaults to acting as adviser and defender of the crumbling empire. The military power needed to defeat Ottoman armies grew in step with the wealth of nations and individuals. At the same time, individual freedoms flourished in Europe while languishing in the Empire.
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