The socio-economic history of Syria in the nineteenth century has often been studied in relation to Europe and separately from its Ottoman context. In particular, this scholarship has understood non-Muslim commercial and financial elites as essentially external to Ottoman political, economic, and social structures, often portraying them as agents of European imperialism, as pre-modern usurers or as proto-nationalists. My paper will challenge these common portrayals by discussing the role of Christian and Jewish merchant-bankers in the financial administration of Damascus and in local and trans-regional credit markets. These business elites sought to seize the new opportunities offered by the rapid increase in grain export in the Damascus hinterland in the middle of the nineteenth century as well as the introduction of new methods and instruments of credit and revenue-raising by the provincial treasury of Damascus, such as paper money and treasury bonds. As the economy of Damascus came to rely extensively on short-term credit, non-Muslim merchant-banking families managed to use their expertise and access to local and trans-regional financial markets to emerge as a new class of speculators and investors whose services became crucial to the provincial economy and financial governance of Damascus. Drawing on a broad range of sources, many of them previously unused by scholars, including Ottoman official correspondence and reports, peasant petitions, Arabic-language court records and European consular records, my paper will focus on the activities of these Christian and Jewish financiers in the rural periphery of Damascus as tax-farmers, land-owners, and money-lenders. I will examine the various ways in which they sought to extract debt from peasants, including common channels of litigation in the shar‘i and commercial courts, as well as drawing on connections with Ottoman officials and/or on consular representation, and even forced payment and violence. The cases I will present suggest that although these families enjoyed the status of European protégés, drawing on consular intervention was not necessarily the most efficient or preferred course of action in their business and legal activities; rather, more often, they relied on their close connections with Ottoman officials and business partners and on Ottoman legal institutions. By using an imperial framework of analysis and by drawing primarily on Ottoman sources, my paper will reconsider more broadly the position of non-Muslim elites in the Ottoman Empire, and will challenge still-influential Eurocentric assumptions concerning the extent of foreign power in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Middle East.

In 1911, the Kavala Tobacco Congress organized its first public meeting to pronounce its intention to act as a sort of mutual aid society for the tobacco-cultivating and export-oriented mercantile community of the port city of Kavala and its hinterlands. At this gathering, nearly all the notable families of the city and the prominent religious figures of the region spoke or stood by in defensive solidarity for the collective rights of the working peoples living there. Imams, priests, and rabbis agreed on the urgency of defending the multi-confessional community of the city against the exploits of finance capitalism orchestrated from Vienna and channeled through Istanbul. It would seem that concerted efforts since the 1870s to accumulate capital via the tobacco industry achieved an unintended goal in mobilizing the population and creating the circumstances within which mass politics would emerge. In addition, the manner in which political identities would congeal was not based solely on sect or language but on class and the particular relationship one cultivated with financial institutions and the doyens of industry. The Régie Company, a conglomerate of European financial institutions, had received a monopoly over tobacco sales for the entirety of the empire. In order to ensure that Ottoman merchants and cultivators played by the rules of the Régie, the company established its own private police force (kolcular) which was responsible for ensuring adherence to its book of codes (nizamname). This violent mode of accumulating capital relied on preconceived ideas about the sectarian identity of the local population. For example, in the 1880s the Régie sought to sideline Greek Orthodox employees in favor of the Muslim population on the island of Lesbos, just a day’s journey south of Kavala. Premised both on the more numerous tobacco-trading networks that local non-Muslims could access in Egypt and Syria and on privileges they enjoyed under European capitulatory protection, the result of this decision was the partial sectarianization of local peoples based on financial interests. By looking at the seemingly contrary modes of political identity formation in Kavala and Lesbos, I argue that sectarianism, and the politicization of identity more generally, is historically variable and that financial apparatuses mobilize both for and against sectarian tendencies. More importantly, finance capitalism plays a significant role in the creation of the conditions enabling the emergence of mass politics and transforming sectarianism and nationalism into modes of political being.

This paper explores the common paths modernization in the administration of cities has taken in the nineteenth century world. Taking the concept of the ‘global middle east without boundaries’ as a guiding light, it situates the Ottoman Tanzimat city within the context of nineteenth century European urbanization. Fuelled by industrialization and middle class formation, big cities in nineteenth century Europe experienced gigantic levels of population growth and urban development. Ottoman town centers, first led by port cities, underwent very similar developments in the second half of the nineteenth century, as seen in the case of Bursa—the historic capital of the Empire with symbolic significance to the ruling dynasty. The Tanzimat reformers in their quest to save the Empire from disintegration looked increasingly to European forms of knowledge to build their armies, bureaucracies, and cities. Urban development became one of the obsessions of these reformers where they could showcase their achievements to both the European and Ottoman public. While eyeing European capitals for examples of modern municipal reforms they also sought to instill an Ottoman identity onto physical public space. This paper brings together the process of global municipal developments and the Ottoman project to create an original synthesis out of the interaction of the foreign with the domestic. In particular, it looks into the case of Ahmed Vefik Pa?a who became the legendary Vali of Bursa in the second half of the nineteenth century. Transferred from his post in Paris as the Ottoman ambassador during the heyday of Baron Haussmann—the infamous creator of the modern Parisian landscape—Vefik Pa?a became inspector general to western Anatolia with special orders to supervise the reconstruction of Bursa after a destructive earthquake wiped out the beautiful panorama of the former Ottoman capital city in 1855. Primarily using documents from the Prime Ministry Ottoman Archives along with the UK National Archives and the Archives Diplomatiques of France, this paper tells the story of how various actors interacted during Ahmed Vefik’s tenure in the early 1860s. It argues that the urban reforms of Tanzimat were the crux of what the reform movement stood for: increasing the infrastructural power of the state by administrative, financial, and technological reform; using this infrastructural power to restore order and security in social life including the provision of public health and hygiene; and creating an aesthetic landscape resistant to urban disasters for the enjoyment of the public gaze.

In this paper, I examine how post-revolutionary Ottoman satirical press used symbols of technology such as hot air balloons, airplanes and automobiles in order to criticize the Young Turk regime. For this purpose, I analyze cartoons and stories that were published in a satirical journal called Kalem (Pen). My reason for choosing to focus on satirical press is to be able to understand the social and political anxieties that appeared after the 1908 constitutional revolution. I argue that while the non-satirical periodicals were mostly unable to criticize the post-revolutionary CUP government, some Ottoman intellectuals used satire as a means to circumvent censorship and raise criticism. After the constitutional revolution, the CUP government initiated a propaganda campaign in which Abdülhamid II and his reign were associated with ignorance and backwardness. Using the latest technology, the CUP government organized balloon and airplane flights in Istanbul for the purpose of convincing the public about the new regime’s open-mindedness and modernity. The non-satirical mainstream press was also vigorously celebrating those new machines and arguing that the Young Turk Revolution was a crucial step towards the Empire’s modernization. Satirical journals, on the other hand, were not convinced. Kalem published several cartoons and satirical stories criticizing the Ottoman public’s excitement over balloons, airplanes and automobiles. By publishing cartoons about balloon failures and automobile accidents due to user ignorance, the contributors to the journal underlined the fact that the Ottoman public was still largely uneducated, and therefore not ready for modern machines. To be able to circumvent censorship, the satirists also used malfunctioning hot air balloons and airplanes as metaphors for the newly opened Ottoman parliament and the constitutional regime. By directly attacking these technological symbols of the new regime, they criticized the CUP and implied that as long as the old mentalities continued to exist, it would be impossible to make real reforms. Therefore, a detailed analysis of Kalem will display the post-revolutionary anxieties and concerns of Ottoman intellectuals that were often times neglected by the non-satirical Ottoman press.