3 Politics of Identity during the Hamidian Period
3.1 Headgear of Employees of Foreign Companies in the Ottoman Empire
My analysis is guided by the following questions: what kind of identities and subjectivities these interventions seek to produce? What kind of activities of its subjects the Ottoman provincial or central administration regarded as problematic? and finally -what kind of interests and agency become visible on side of the individuals or subjects who are targeted by these state interventions?
3.1 Headgear of Employees of Foreign Companies in the Ottoman Empire
In September 1887 (1303) the Ottoman state reorganized the granting of concessions to foreign companies concerning dress and citizenship of their employees.9 These regulations coincided with the first wave of direct foreign investment in the Ottoman Empire, which occurred between 1888-1896.10 The government requested a survey on the kind of dress worn by employees of these companies, since such reports would not exist yet. The companies specifically targeted, were the Rumeli Railway company and the company for the supply of water in Istanbul.11 It had been observed that all of their employees donned hats.12 Both companies, as proceeds from the minutes of
9 BOA MV. 24/36; BOA DH.MKT. 1451/63.
10 Zürcher, Turkey, 84-85.
11 Two thirds of this investment of foreign capital was in railways, see Ibid., 85.
12 This situation is nicely documented in a photograph taken 1891 at the construction site of the railway from Istanbul to Ankara, constructed by the Ottoman Anatolian Railway Company, which had been established by the Deutsche Bank. Students of the Military Academia visit the sites. Many of the workers depicted wore hats, most of them brimmed felt hats, some also peeked caps (on the margins of the picture some persons' crumbled fezzes and turbans appear, it isn't clear if they were railway workers, too), see Engin Özendes, Photography in the Ottoman Empire: 1839 - 1923, 1st ed., (İstanbul:
YEM Yayın, 2013), 230-231.
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the Council of Ministers,13 had mostly foreign employees and in addition many non-Muslim Ottoman employees. The practice of wearing hats would lower the chance for Ottoman Muslims to get employed and earn a living. Thus the Ottoman state wanted to link the granting of concessions to foreign companies to the preservation of the Ottoman dress code and imposed the wearing of the fez obligatory for all employees of foreign companies, regardless if they were Ottoman citizens or not. The contract of the water supplier was to be reworked according to the new measures.14 Exempted from both prescriptions, Ottoman citizenship and the wearing of the fez, were memurin-i feniyye, foreign engineers, and experts employed by the Ottoman government, who secured the transfer and implementation of imported technologies from European countries.15
As Cevdet Kırpık, who dealt with these cases in his study on labour in the Ottoman Empire, shows that the decision made by the Council of Ministers was implemented in the following years.16 Concessions granted to foreign companies now contained clauses that stated that besides engineers, experts and management, all workers had to be Ottoman citizens, even though the implementation of these restrictions wasn't always achieved.17 Kırpık remarked that next to purpose of securing employment opportunities for Ottoman Muslim workers,18 another dimension of the obligatory wearing of the fez was to secure national sovereignty on a symbolic level.
The Ottoman government attempted to regain or preserve economic and political control through this intervention in the politics of dress. Concessions to foreign companies were only granted if they respected this symbol of Ottoman sovereignty.
Their economic activity on Ottoman territory should not give them political power. If employees of the respective companies wore the hat, they would be shifted to European control. They were on a certain level no longer Ottoman subjects and citizens but under the authority of the states to which the companies belonged
This is also an example which allows us to elaborate on the meaning of the hat which carries here the dimension of foreign investment and the Ottomans' ambivalent
13 The principle executive and legislative council of the Ottoman Empire introduced by Mahmud II.
14 BOA DH.MKT. 1451/63.
15 See Cevdet Kırpık, ‘Osmanlı Devleti’nde İşçiler ve İşçi Hareketleri (1876-1914)’, (unpublished doctoral thesis, Süleyman Demirel Üniversitesi, Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü, 2004), 48.
16 Ibid., 48.
17 In some concessions this was further restricted to just engineers; on the obligation to wear the fez see Ibid., 65-69; and on clauses regulating the employment of Ottoman workers Ibid., 166.
18 Kırpık, ‘Osmanlı Devleti’nde İşçiler ve İşçi Hareketleri (1876-1914),’ 65.
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attitude towards it.19 It also becomes apparent that the religious dimension cannot be separated from it. Thus the restriction of Ottoman sovereignty and its economic power is symbolized by the wearing of the hat of the employees of foreign companies who are mostly Christians.20 While the Ottoman state was not interested in preventing foreign investment, quite the opposite, it sought to set the conditions.21 But the European hat was thereby not just a symbol of the intrusion of European capital but also its counterpart, the European workers movement.
Besides the creation of employment opportunities for the Ottoman workforces, apparently the Ottoman authorities feared the spread of socialist ideas by European anarchist workers.22 Thus the employment of Ottoman workers was also meant as a measure to prevent strikes and other forms of workers' resistance. Hence in regards to Westernization, what the Ottoman state supported was the import of European technologies of power for its own purpose, and the conscious and active fight against ideas that question authority and which could be of use to the Ottoman population. The same question also delimited equal treatment of Ottoman Muslim and non-Muslim workers. Non-Muslim Ottoman workers seem to have been more active in union activities together with foreign workers, and on that account have been dismissed from their workplaces.
The wearing of the hat by engineers was not regarded as dangerous as it was for the workers. It shows that from the Ottoman perspective, one hat was not like the other.
On one hand, the hat of the engineers and other experts was tolerated because of the need and desire of the transfer of technology and knowledge, which the Ottomans deemed necessary. On the other hand, the hat of the workers and their radical/critical ideas had to be kept out. It depends on which kind of hat and who wears it, because it
19 While the Ottoman government favored foreign investment, its terms were set to Ottoman disadvantage; see Findley, Turkey, Islam, Nationalism, and Modernity, 139; and Şevket Pamuk, The Ottoman Empire and European Capitalism, 1820-1913 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987).
20 Foreign investment came along with a colonialist division labor, where companies were run by Europeans, the middle management consisted of Europeans and Ottoman Christians, and most of the laborers were Muslim Ottomans, see Findley, Turkey, Islam, Nationalism, and Modernity, 168.
21 Yet, that was a difficult task because due to the capitulations Europeans in the Ottoman Empire were exempted from Ottoman Law. See Ibid., 139. In addition, European companies negotiated in these concessions for extremely favorable conditions for themselves. One example of such was the building of railways, where a kilometer guarantee payment was granted to them, thereby eliminating almost all risks for the investors. See Zürcher, Turkey, 85.
22 See Kırpık, ‘Osmanlı Devleti’nde İşçiler ve İşçi Hareketleri (1876-1914),’ 70 and Findley, Turkey, Islam, Nationalism, and Modernity, 168.
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can be assumed that the workers' hats were not the same as those of the engineers.
Thus the rift constructed by the hat was not just along religious lines; it also pointed at the question of class. The hat was regarded a threat not only to national sovereignty but also as a threat from the lower classes who questioned the claim to power/privileges of the ruling class.23