Ottoman Empire and the Postcolonial Debate

One objective of my research is to situate the analysis of the Ottoman Empire in postcolonial politics and theory, since the Ottoman Empire even though not directly colonized was subject to European colonialist endeavors. The Ottoman Empire was located at the near margins of the emerging industrial capitalism like other powers, such as Russia and Austria-Hungary.³ It was initially much neglected by the study of Orientalism and subaltern studies, as an imperialist aggressor itself, or at least not as affected by European colonialism. Both views hinge on each other, but are not helpful to sufficiently explain Ottoman politics and the society, as the Ottoman Empire clearly was subject to European imperial endeavors and at least informal colonial politics. I think, that a crucial part to understanding Ottoman modernity is its place in the colonialist setting.

Since the late 1990s it has become more common to scrutinize Turkey and the Ottoman Empire through the perspective of postcolonial studies. The field became so extended that some review essays appeared summarizing the discussion.⁴

Vangelis Kechriotis argues for a critical application of the postcolonial agenda to Ottoman studies in order to make visible how “history and culture are utilized in politics in order to forge patterns of hierarchy” for the “study of power structures across diverse ethnic or religious boundaries.”⁵ In his essay on postcolonial studies and the Ottoman

3 On this location of the Ottoman Empire in the European political geography see Brian Silverstein,

‘Sufism and Governmentality in the Late Ottoman Empire’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 29, no. 2 (30 August 2013), 174.

4 See Vangelis Kechriotis, ‘Postcolonial Criticism Encounters Late Ottoman Studies’, HISTOREIN 13, no.

0 (27 May 2013): 39–46; Fatma Müge Göçek, ‘Postcoloniality, the Ottoman Past and the Middle East Present’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 44, no. 3 (2012): 549–63, doi:10.1017/S0020743812000529.

5 Kechriotis, ‘Postcolonial Criticism Encounters Late Ottoman Studies,’ 43. See also Reina Lewis,

2 Ottoman Modernity and Bourgeois Culture: The Era of the Fez

Empire, he points out that the Empire wasn't included since it was considered as “not effectively colonized.”⁶ Kechriotis considers the first endeavors to include the Ottoman Empire into the study of colonialism and its ramifications as undertaken by historians of the nineteenth century as one of the colonizing states rather then colonized itself, rather critical. In “Ottoman Orientalism” Usama Makdisi argues that “Ottomanists, […] have paid little attention to a notion of Ottoman imperialism”⁷ that Ottoman elites employed in the effort to create a modern nation-state. To make his point Makdisi uses the Ottoman perception of Arab lands as uncivilized and backward by Istanbul-centered Ottoman reformers who in contrast constructed Ottoman modernity as civilized and progressive. Kechriotis opposes Makdisi's proposition that this Orientalist othering of some groups of Ottoman society decisively led to the formation of Turkish national identity.⁸ Similarily, Selim Deringil argues that the Ottoman elite adopted the mindset of its Western European enemies, a process he terms “borrowed colonialism.”⁹ Yet, in Deringil's view “within this context colonialism was a 'survival tactic' and, therefore, the Ottoman Empire was very different from “the aggressive industrial empires of the West.”¹⁰ Indeed contributed the new dress codes also to the construction of an internal Other of Ottoman modernization that lacked the qualities necessary to challenge European claims to superiority. This 'backwardness' was considered as an obstacle to challenge western European hegemony.

Deringil emphasizes the impact of European colonialism on Ottoman self-perception. He shows that during the Hamidian era, the reign of Abdülhamid II, the Ottomans elites were keen about their international reputation and made efforts to counter Orientalist

Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel and the Ottoman Harem (London [u.a.]: Tauris, 2004), 4, on the inclusion of the Ottoman Empire and Turkey into postcolonial studies and Deniz Kandiyoti, ‘Some Awkward Questions on Women and Modernity in Turkey’, in Remaking Women : Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East, ed. Lila Abu-Lughod (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1998), 270–88; Deniz Kandiyoti, ‘Postcolonialism Compared: Potentials and Limitations in the Middle East and Central Asia’, International Journal of Middle East Studies 34, no. 2 (May 2002): 279–97.

6 Kechriotis, ‘Postcolonial Criticism Encounters Late Ottoman Studies’.

7 Ibid., 40; Usama Makdisi, ‘Ottoman Orientalism’, American Historical Review, no. 107 (2002): 768–96.

8 Kechriotis, ‘Postcolonial Criticism Encounters Late Ottoman Studies,’ 41. I do not agree with Kechriotis' critic of Makdisi's assessement, but believe that this kind of othering it is central, not just to the formation of Turkish modernity, but to modernity identity in general.

9 Selim Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire 1876 – 1909 (Tauris, 1998), 165; and Selim Deringil, ‘They Live in a State of Nomadism and Savagery’: The Late Ottoman Empire and the Post-Colonial Debate’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, no. 2 (2003): 311–42.

10 Kechriotis, ‘Postcolonial Criticism Encounters Late Ottoman Studies,’ 39.

2 Ottoman Modernity and Bourgeois Culture: The Era of the Fez

representations in the international media. At the same time, they orientalized their own periphery.¹¹ Ottoman efforts to manipulate its international image show the impact of colonialist discourse on the Ottoman Empire and an Ottoman understanding of colonialism that was “[…] as complex as interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings.”¹² These Ottoman politics scrutinized by Deringil deal with the question of how to counter European imperialism with regard to discussions on the desired degree of Ottoman Westernization. I think Deringil's account on Ottoman self-perception is helpful and crucial for the study of dress, because many of the implications of his study come into effect here. Nevertheless, the adoption of colonialist attitudes by local elites towards their respective population is not a case of Ottoman exceptionalism, but appears in many different colonial settings, as we will see later.¹³

In my own point of view, the colonialist experience deeply shaped Ottoman and Turkish state- and identity-building, but from different dimensions. The Ottoman elites reproduced colonialist discourse and practices. Nevertheless, the Ottoman Empire was not a colonialist state in the same sense as the Western imperialist states which drew economic surplus and other kinds of power from their colonialist dominance in the Middle East and elsewhere. Even though the Ottoman state tried to adopt and was partly successful in adopting colonialist practices, the state and its inhabitants were in a deeper sense affected by western European colonialist politics. Nevertheless, the adoption of colonial practices by the Ottoman Empire had far-reaching consequences that can be traced to this day, be it in the construction of identities, bodily practices, everyday life, and state- and nation-building.

Kechriotis himself argues for a comparative approach and against a model of Ottoman exceptionalism: in comparison with parameters set by the “imperial turn” in historical research, the Ottoman Empire should be compared to other empires,¹⁴ as should the

11 See Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains, therein especially Chapter 6 and 7 “Ottoman Self Image Management and Damage Control” and “The Ottoman Self Portrait,” 135-165: Ottoman diplomats fought popular Orientalism, such as theater plays, by demanding from high officials to stop performances of these plays, see Ibid., 142-143.

12 Eward Said, Orientalism as quoted by Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains, 136. See also Edward William Said, Orientalism, Repr. with a new preface (London [u.a.]: Penguin Books, 2003).

13 This phenomenon is one of the main objectives of Partha Chatterjee's study on nationalism in India.

See Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton:

Princeton Univ. Press, 1993).

14 That entailed questions such as: Was contempt towards Balkan peoples similar or same as European

2 Ottoman Modernity and Bourgeois Culture: The Era of the Fez

perspective that was provided by the presence of other empires in the Ottoman Empire taken into account, such as the impact of the capitulations or status of extraterritoriality for many individuals.¹⁵ Loss of ground in the international power balance led to the use of the capitulations for interventions in Ottoman domestic affairs. Non-Muslim subjects could profit from the presence of colonial powers. In Kechrioti's view, “this describes a picture where the ruler and the ruled, the colonizer and the colonized, the dominant and the subaltern, were continuously changing roles.”¹⁶ That also concerns Ottoman politics of dress where these power relations were negotiated through the question of headgear.

Moreover, the Christian middle class' sense of superiority and its mission civilisatrice within their vision of Ottoman society beyond nationalist and separatist passions lead to fissions between ethnically distinct elites. This led to rivalry between ethnically-marked middle classes and their claims to Ottomanism and concerns that the Young Turk version of Ottomanism would bring competing concepts of it to extinction.¹⁷ These different concepts of Ottomanism became for instance negotiated in the conflicts between proponents of the hat and those of the fez or other pieces of headgear. Furthermore Kechriotis asks whether the debate about colonialist overtones in Ottoman discourse can be extended from the 19th century to the period after 1908, with its critique of Tanzimat reform endeavors, and a new kind of bureaucratic and military elite. He also asks if the emergence of a new middle class which sought to take over control of lower classes, and the new hegemony established by these middle classes had the quality of internal colonialism. I think that its definitely worth to extent Kechriotis considerations on the colonialist mind set of Ottoman elites to the Young Turk period.¹⁸ In terms of politics of dress and the question of headgear this becomes especially apparent in the promulgation of the Turkish hat law in 1925 and its orientalist othering of those who did not comply to these kind of social etiquette.

colonial attitude? What were the economic dimensions of Ottoman imperial structures? See Kechriotis,

‘Postcolonial Criticism Encounters Late Ottoman Studies’.

15 On the capitulations see Mübahat Kütükoğlu, ‘The Ottoman-British Commercial Treaty of 1838’, in Four Centuries of Turco-British-Relations. Studies in Diplomatic, Economic and Cultural Affairs, ed. Ali İhsan Bağış and William M. Hale (Beverley: Eothen Pr, 1884); and Elias H. Tuma, ‘The Economic Impact of the Capitulations: The Middle East and Europe: A Reinterpretation’, Journal of European Economic History 18, no. 3 (1989): 663–82.

16 Kechriotis, ‘Postcolonial Criticism Encounters Late Ottoman Studies,’ 42.

17 Ibid., 43.

18 The Young Turk period here defined as the period from 1908 till the end of the one party regime in Turkey in 1950. See Zürcher, Turkey; and Erik J. Zürcher, ‘Young Turks, Ottoman Muslims and Turkish Nationalists: Identity Politics, 1908-1938’, in Ottoman Past and Today’s Turkey, ed. Kemal H. Karpat (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 151–179.

2 Ottoman Modernity and Bourgeois Culture: The Era of the Fez

Fatma Müge Göçek emphasizes as well the strength of a postcolonial approach that concentrates on power relations in order to dismantle them by analysis of power-knowledge relations. At the same time she questions postcolonial theorie's ability to fully grasp Ottoman modernity.¹⁹ The aim of postcolonial theory was “destabilizing the detrimental impact of 18th- and 19th-century western European modernity on the rest of the world,” deconstruct Western hegemony, and challenge and question its impact.²⁰ Thereby, it enabled to depict the fluidity and flexibility of social boundaries, and it challenged “Eurocentric, Orientalist formulations that had reified differences and divides, anachronistically mapping onto the empire binarisms introduced much later by European colonial rule.”²¹ She assesses that sometimes it was difficult to differentiate between Western and domestic practices, and thus the local content of European colonial impact remained unclear. Moreover would a focus on Ottoman formal political power neglect how different groups negotiated power and relations between them. Erroneously, the motor of change in the Ottoman realm, she argues, was often located in Europe. An issue that was as also criticized by Isa Blumi in his various studies, that I will later refer to.²² Yet Göçek in this essay criticizes Blumi for constructing a monolithic West opposed to the Ottoman Empire. I would rather suggest that the problem is that Göçek in contrast to Blumi conceptualizes the Ottoman Empire as something apart from the West. Whereas I consider the West as created by various dynamics within the Empire itself or within global dynamics in which the Ottoman Empire participated.²³ Yet she rightly points out and my studies also later will show, that

“the nature of the interaction between the Ottoman state and its officials on the one side and the local populace on the other was complex, in that it significantly varied not only from one province to the next but also over time.”²⁴

19 Göçek, ‘Postcoloniality, the Ottoman Past and the Middle East Present’.

20 Ibid., 550.

21 Ibid., 552.

22 See Isa Blumi, Rethinking the Late Ottoman Empire: A Comparative Social and Political History of Albania and Yemen, 1878 - 1918, 1. ed., Analecta Isisiana 67 (Istanbul: Isis Press, 2003); Isa Blumi, Foundations of Modernity: Human Agency and the Imperial State, Routledge Studies in Modern History 9 (New York [u.a.]: Routledge, 2012); Isa Blumi, Reinstating the Ottomans: Alternative Balkan Modernities, 1800-1912, 1st ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

23 See Göçek, ‘Postcoloniality, the Ottoman Past and the Middle East Present,’ 555.

24 Ibid., 555.

2 Ottoman Modernity and Bourgeois Culture: The Era of the Fez

She negates the usefulness of a postcolonial approach to grasp these dynamics, and argues that “Blumi dismisses provincial variation in regard to relations with Western actors.” On the other hand I think that Isa Blumi's studies simply focused on local agency in relation to the central state's and Western dominance, various appropriations, and resistance to modern forms and practices. These were really helpful to think through my own cases which deal with center-periphery relations. Albeit, Göçek, similarly in my opinion to Blumi whom she actually criticizes, takes a critical stance towards the term modernization and its application to all different phenomena of Ottoman governance appearing in the period considered as modernization of the Empire. This provides a special challenge to the analysis of phenomenons of modernization, because they are just too easily considered from a Eurocentric analytical point of view as emanating from and resulting in Western dominance of which the Ottoman Empire was excluded per se. And yet, hegemonic power structures indeed went along not only with the East-West dichotomy but as well traverse. Thus, the complexity of the Ottoman concept of governance is quite compatible with postcolonial theory rather than beyond its scope, as Göçek argues.²⁵

Recent scholarship elaborated the colonial context of Ottoman modernization. This is not to neglect Ottoman agency and self-interest in the modernization project, but to pay attention to historical, cultural, social, and economic conditions under which they took place. This leads to the question in which way postcolonial and subaltern studies dealing with directly colonized territories might be applied to the informal colonialism exercised on the Ottoman state and its population. In his essay, Boğac Ergene asks what a postcolonial critique of subaltern studies may have to teach Ottoman historiography.²⁶ He concluds that the methodological contributions made especially by Gyan Prakash and Gayatri Spivak opened up opportunities to reread Ottoman sources and overcome their limited scope to make the heterogeneity of discourses visible. He is especially interested in the question of how to read subaltern voices from (state) archival documents. To put it in more general terms: how to make subaltern voices visible, and in that context, how to conceptualize relations between different strata in society and what that implicates on

25 See Ibid., 557.

26 Bogac A Ergene, ‘Maduniyet Okulu, Post-Kolonyal Elestiri ve Tarihte Bilgi-Özne Sorunu: Osmanli Tarihciligi için Yeni Dersler Mi? [Subaltern Studies, Postcolonial Critic and the Subject-Object Problem in History: New Lessons for Ottoman Historiographie]’, Toplum ve Bilim, no. 83 (Atumn /2000 1999).

2 Ottoman Modernity and Bourgeois Culture: The Era of the Fez

the historian's relation to the subject of history and to knowledge. These questions refer to the matter of if subaltern subjects have the ability to speak at all, which are related to points Gayatri Spivak put forward in her discussion of sati.²⁷ Another question touches subaltern-elite relations and the permeability of cultural and socio-economic boundaries.

This includes an approach which regards the category of subaltern not as a homogeneous entity, but as undetermined, hybrid, and fluid. These questions also become relevant when looking at incidences related to headgear that are recorded in state archival documents: How was the wider population concerned with the spread of modern bourgeois dress and manners? How did this play out in the interrelation between the state and its populations?

In terms of subaltern-elite relations, Ergene refers to Stuart Hall's concept which stresses interaction and dialog and the crucially “mimic” character of these relations. He also drew on Florencia Mallon's approach on the reading of subaltern voices from archival sources by applying a postmodern literary analysis rather then trying to extract the truth from these materials. This kind of approach creates a dialogical relation between the historian, his subject, and the sources. The quest is making subaltern voices visible, and that aims at countering colonial and nationalist history which ignored them.

This comes along with some specificities as to where to find the voices of the subalterns if no documents exist, and poses the question of if “the rebel always speaks the language of the oppressor.”²⁸ Thus there is a need for the application of methods which make visible the “subaltern hidden transcript” through revealing “blind spots, ruptures, and silences” in hegemonic discourses.

In historiography about the Ottoman Empire, leftist historians in the 1960s to 1980s struggled with countering the existing narration which idealized Ottoman social relations in terms of social cleavages. They analyzed Ottoman society with a historical materialist approach and its focus on modes of production. That enabled them to make social struggles visible, yet it neglected non-economic factors of social structure and the religious and cultural diversity of Ottoman society.²⁹ The latter is also the case in my

27 See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Rosalind C. Morris, eds., Can the Subaltern Speak?: Reflections on the History of an Idea (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

28 Ergene, ‘Maduniyet Okulu, Post-Kolonyal Elestiri ve Tarihte Bilgi-Özne Sorunu: Osmanli Tarihciligi Icin Yeni Dersler Mi? [Subaltern Studies, Postcolonial Critic and the Subject-Object Problem in History:

New Lessons for Ottoman Historiographie],’ 34.

29 Ibid., 44.

2 Ottoman Modernity and Bourgeois Culture: The Era of the Fez

analysis, that shows how cultural symbols like headgear attained meaning within a complex and diverse social system, without disregarding the economic conditions behind their spread and appropriation as well their proscription.

The neglect of culture and religion by the leftist historiography left the impact of Islam and its language as a variable in social struggles, as Ergene put it, to conservative and nationalist academics. In the 1990s different approaches emerged, such as Linda Darling's, that shed a light on Islam as a legitimating factor of the dynasty and the state.

These authors pointed out that Islam and its customs functioned to unite the state and its subjects, and achieve social peace expressed in the notion of the “just and genuine Muslim state.”³⁰ Ergene yet suspects another problem here, which was the lack of a

These authors pointed out that Islam and its customs functioned to unite the state and its subjects, and achieve social peace expressed in the notion of the “just and genuine Muslim state.”³⁰ Ergene yet suspects another problem here, which was the lack of a