Aytekin, E. Attila.Tax Revolts During the Tanzimat Period (1839-1876) and Before the Young Turk Revolution (1904-1908)

     , Vol. , No. , .
© Donald Critchlow and Cambridge University Press 
doi:./S
e . a ttila a ytekin
Tax Revolts During the Tanzimat Period
(–) and Before the Young Turk
Revolution (–): Popular Protest and
State Formation in the Late Ottoman Empire
 e Ottoman Empire underwent a slow but decisive transformation from the
early eighteenth century onward.  e societal change observed during the
eighteenth century was accompanied by change in state structures during
the reign of Selim III (–) and Mahmud II (–).  e most com-
prehensive transformation of the Ottoman polity, however, took place during
the so-called Tanzimat period (–). While the subsequent long reign of
Abdulhamid II (–) put a halt to some of the trends for reform, the
society and the state continued to evolve.  e Hamidian period came to an
end with the Revolution of , which made the empire a constitutional
monarchy.
 e question of taxation was one of the issues the policymakers had to
deal with throughout the entire process of transformation. Tax-related
problems became especially pressing during two particular periods,  rst a er
the declaration of the Tanzimat edict in , and then during the last years of
Abdulhamid’s reign. State policies regarding taxation and the popular
reaction to them became one of the most important aspects of state formation
during the Tanzimat and pre- periods.
 is is not surprising given the signi cance of taxation for modern states.
First, the balance of state  nances, therefore many of its capacities, depends
on the state’s ability to tax the population. A large tax base, a sound taxation
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e . a ttila a ytekin | 
system, and of course a quiescent population are therefore critical for any
modern state to function properly. Second, the ability to tax also re ects a
state’s legitimacy in the eyes of the people. Coercion might not be su cient in
itself for taxation if the state does not enjoy a certain amount of legitimacy at
the societal level.  ird, taxation is a class issue. Who is taxed how much and
who enjoys the bene ts of the tax collected are questions that speak not only
to state structure, but also to the relations between upper classes and lower
classes.  e latter o en have a sharp sense of what is fair and what is not, and
that does in uence their attitudes toward state attempts at taxation.
 is article is roughly divided into two sections. In the  rst section,
I focus on the tax revolts that took place during the Tanzimat period; the
second section is about the tax revolts that preceded the Revolution of .
In both sections, I describe the general characteristics of the period and the
most signi cant revolts and discuss the rebels and their demands. I also
analyze the Ottoman state’s responses to the two waves of revolt.  e  rst
section also includes a theoretical discussion about the state-formation
approach.  e Tanzimat period and pre- revolts are comparatively
discussed in the Conclusion.
t ax r evolts in the t anzimat p eriod: t hree p erspectives on
l ate o ttoman h istory
 e Tanzimat is the name historians give to the period that began with the
declaration of the Imperial Rescript of Gülhane on November , , and
ended with the promulgation of the  rst Ottoman constitution in .  e
reform program initiated and implemented by the Ottoman state in this
period is also known as the Tanzimat .
 e Gülhane Rescript had a quite conventional preamble that attributed
the recent problems of the Ottoman polity to deviation from sacred law.
However, despite the traditional beginning and wording, the document was
indeed a radically original one, which set forth guarantees ensuring Ottoman
subjects security of life, honor, and property; called for a regular system of
taxation and speci cally the abolition of the tax-farming system; a regular
system for military service that would include non-Muslim subjects of the
empire; and equality between Muslim and non-Muslims.
 e rescript turned out to be the beginning of a great series of reform. In
the subsequent decades, a new, modern bureaucracy replaced the old one
and the number of state servants increased dramatically. Decision-making
processes were gradually democratized; a number of quasi-legislative councils
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 | Tax Revolts During the Tanzimat Period
with real powers were constituted at the center as well as in the provinces.  e
principle of equality before law was recognized, along with a new notion of
citizenship.  ere was a massive codi cation campaign in which either original
laws were enacted or foreign laws were adapted in the  elds of civil law, penal
law, commercial law, procedural law, and citizenship law. A gradual but
decisive process of secularization began, seen most clearly in the religious
courts’ loss of jurisdiction to secular ones. As we shall see, not all of these
steps taken as part of the Tanzimat reform program were successful; yet the
Tanzimat as a whole irreversibly changed the nature of Ottoman polity. It was
in fact the most comprehensive attempt at modern state formation in the
Ottoman Empire to date. Scholarship, therefore, has shown a high interest in
the period. In contrast, despite such interest, the Tanzimat reform program in
particular and the late Ottoman reforms in general have not been adequately
analyzed.
 is is partly related to the in uence of modernization theory, which
has, until recently, dominated the  eld of Ottoman studies.  e proponents
of this theory have seen in the emergence of modern Turkey a success story.
All the changes that took place in di erent spheres of life in the period,
from the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries, have been reduced to
“modernization,” according to which a couple of reformist sultans and a
handful of Western-minded bureaucrats tried to save the empire from collapse
by emulating the successful European model and restructuring its state along
those lines. In this story, the history of the Ottoman Empire from the late
eighteenth century onward becomes one of struggle between modernizers
and forces of reaction.
1 Dependency theory has been developed as an alterna-
tive to the modernization approach. An o shoot of dependency theory,
the world-system perspective, produced by Immanuel Wallerstein and his
colleagues at SUNY Binghamton from s, has had a short-lived, yet
important, impact on Ottoman studies.
2 With their stress on economic relations,
world-system scholars have shown that the late Ottoman Empire cannot be
understood solely in terms of political modernization.  eir works that focus
on the incorporation of the Ottoman lands into world capitalism have pointed
out those aspects of the transformation of Ottoman polity that had hitherto
been in the dark. In contrast, using world-system theory to analyze late
Ottoman history has its problems, some of which are related to its basic
concepts.  e concepts of “incorporation” of the Ottoman Empire into the
world capitalist system, or, even more so, the “penetration” of capitalism into
the Ottoman territories, suggest that the process was essentially external to the
Ottoman social formation.  us, the contribution of the studies in uenced
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e . a ttila a ytekin | 
by the world-system approach to Ottoman studies has been overshadowed by
the implicit assumption on which they are based: the internal dynamics of the
empire was not strong enough to create a profound change by themselves.
Although the world-system approach by and large lost its appeal among
Ottomanist historians, terms such as “incorporation” became staples especially
in the analyses of the nineteenth-century Ottoman economy.
In contrast to the world-system approach that made a strong entrance to
the  eld yet le the scene largely unnoticed,
3 the modernization approach
has been subject to sustained criticism. As a result, the more open forms of
the modernization approach have been largely abandoned in the last two
decades. Many of its less-explicit assumptions, however, continue to exert
their in uence on the study of the Tanzimat period.  e Tanzimat is still
seen as just another step in a series of reform attempts that stretched from
 (the accession of Selim III) to  (the establishment of Republic of
Turkey). Moreover, it is still common to consider the Tanzimat reform pro-
gram as a state initiative formulated and implemented top-down by state
o cials.
4 In a similar vein, the social unrest that followed the declaration of
reforms is seen as mere reactions to it.
5 Balkan nationalist historiographies,
by contrast, have tended to see the post- Tanzimat uprisings in the Balkans as
part of, or prelude to, the “national awakening” led by nationally-conscious
urban intellectuals and middle classes. Both approaches have relegated
cultivators to being passive recipients of (national or central) state-building
projects of the elite.
 e modernization approach, therefore, has refused to look into the
social dynamics of late Ottoman reform.  e world-system perspective, on
the other hand, has conducted the analysis at too high a level of abstraction
and failed to address the internal dynamics of development. In this article,
I discuss the outlines of an alternative approach to late Ottoman history,
derived from the state-formation approach developed by sociologist Derek
Sayer (with his colleague Philip Corrigan and also Harvey Ramsay) based on
a close reading of the works of Marx and Engels as well Weber and Durkheim.
 eir approach is particularly suitable for the empirical study of historical
phenomena as it assumes that concepts are empirically open-ended and
necessarily historical.  is means that to de ne a social phenomenon, in the
 nal analysis, is to write its history.
6  ere is no ground for excluding any
kind of social relation from being a relation of production, or for assigning,
a priori , some social relations to “base” and others to “superstructure.”
7
According to Sayer, the question of what is a relation of production could
only be resolved for particular historical forms using empirical criteria.
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 | Tax Revolts During the Tanzimat Period
 eir approach contravenes both the liberal notion of state, which views
it structurally separate from the (civil) society, and the Marxian views that see
the state either as an instrument in the hands of the ruling class or super-
structural.  e state-formation approach stipulates that the state, instead, is
necessarily and internally related to capitalist economy. Although state forms
appear separate from the economy and above the society, the former appear-
ance is a result of the fetishized nature of social relations under capitalism,
and the latter is related to the organizing role of the state under the capitalist
mode of production: “ e State within capitalist production, regulates and
orchestrates—in short, organizes— in such a way that the de ning material
characteristics of capitalist production relations (individualization, formal
equality, and a host of social forms) are made to appear the only way those
social activities could be conducted and arranged.”
8 In fact, the state could
organize only by appearing outside economy and above sectional interests in
society.
In their major historical study,  e Great Arch , Corrigan and Sayer apply
this perspective, which sees the state not as a thing but as a rei ed, organized,
imposed, and regulated form of social relations of production to English state
formation.
9  ey underline that English state formation did not consist only
of repression. Legal regulation, that is, the law, and moral regulation also
played a signi cant part in the long process of English state formation from
medieval to modern times. Legal and moral regulation reduces all people
to individuals and delegitimizes and even criminalizes alternative forms of
existence.  ey create a sense of sameness and commonness while keeping
deep social divisions intact. During state formation, the nation as a politically
de ned entity is also created. On the one hand, nationalism disintegrates
other identities and subjectivities.
10 On the other hand, those who are deemed
worthy to be included in the political nation are included and those who are
considered unworthy or dangerous are excluded or disciplined through
jurisdiction.
11 In the English case, this double process of inclusion-exclusion
was imposed most importantly on the working class and women.
Corrigan and Sayer show that state forms are extremely  exible and, as
such, they are constructed through struggle and contention between actors.
One aspect of this contentious process is “the constant ‘rewriting’ of history
to naturalize what has been, in fact, an extremely changeable set of State rela-
tions, to claim that there is, and has always been, one ‘optimal institutional
structure’ which is what ‘any’ civilization needs.”
12 To turn to the Ottoman
case, the preamble of the Tanzimat rescript is quite revealing in this respect.
 e authors of the text are at pains to argue that they are o ering nothing new
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