Ottoman History Podcast - Did the Ottomans Consider Themselves an Empire?

Episode Date: November 5, 2012

with Einar Wigen 77. Whose Empire? The entity known today as the Ottoman Empire is often taken by historians as an exemplary model of an imperial state. Yet, until the nineteenth century, Ottomans had never referred to their state as an empire in their writings or bureaucratic records and diplomatic correspondences. In this podcast, Einar Wigen explores the curious absence of the term "empire" within the Ottoman vocabulary, explains how the concept entered Ottoman Turkish, and deals with some possibly equivalent Ottoman titles and designations that may be considered imperial. « Click for More »

Hello and welcome to another installment of the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Chris Grayton. I'm Timur Hement. Today our guest is Einar Vigan, a PhD student at the University of Oslo, working on Ottoman conceptual history. Einar, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks for having me. Our topic today is in the field of conceptual history, and specifically we're looking at the concept of empire and the question of, was the Ottoman Empire an empire? However, we're not going to be focusing on whether historians should call the Ottoman Empire an empire, but rather whether the Ottomans themselves

considered themselves an empire. This is actually an interesting topic from my own experience when I'm trying to translate a document that I've researched in the archives. I sit down, I think it's going to be pretty easy to translate the document. I understood every word. And then I sit down and I'm like, oh, Devlete Aliye. What do I translate that as? Do I say Ottoman Empire? And so my first question is really,

is there a translation for Ottoman Empire within the Ottoman vocabulary? And if not, what did the Ottomans call themselves? I think it's very important to keep separate the three questions. A, was the Ottoman Empire an empire? B, did they consider themselves an empire? And C, did they have a concept of empire? Because these are three different questions. Now, for the analytical question first, whether the Ottoman Empire was an empire, there's no question about that. In my mind whether the Ottoman Empire was an empire, there's no question about that. In my mind, the Ottoman Empire was an empire. Every single available model of what an empire looks like, at least that I'm aware of, the Ottoman Empire fills that.

I mean, would fulfill all the criteria for being an empire. of whether they consider themselves an empire is connected to the question of whether they had a concept of empire and whether they used that concept of empire in relationships, in their relations with others. For the late Ottoman Empire, especially in the 19th century, early 20th century, it was a very important point that they used l'Empire Ottoman in French it was a very important point that they used l'Empire Ottoman in French in their dealings with other polities, as well as on their banknotes, for example. There would be l'Empire Ottoman, or there would be Banque Impériale Ottomane, and there would be Banque Chargée Osmanie in Ottoman. So on this banknote, it would be obvious that these two are synonymous. But once you take them apart and they appear in different pieces of text, it's not so clear that the

Shahane would be entirely synonymous with Imperatorluk, for example. We would normally translate Shahane as royal or pertaining to a Shah, a king. But that doesn't really mean that the Shah would not be imperial in the sense that Shahanshah, for example, which is the Shah of Shahs or the Pardisha, who is the great king. So king of kings, the great king would be both ways of elevating yourself above other kings. And in that sense, I think that these titles could be called imperial in the sense that they're also claims to universal rulership. But there doesn't seem to be any kind of Osmanlı Imperatörlüğ until,

I'm not entirely sure when it shows up for the first time, and that's a very difficult or very dangerous claim to make. But the first really politically significant place I've seen it used is in the debates about the abolishment of the Ottoman Sultanate in 1923 in the Ottoman or in the Turkish National Assembly. And this is quite interesting because it's the first time I have seen the Ottoman state, the Ottoman territory and the Ottoman population subsumed under one concept that refers to all three in a sense that it is a political unit that has kind of stable borders and is an integrated thing. significant with the abolishment of the Sultanate, it would be anachronistic to translate your document as from Devleti Aliye, or at least if you write about it in modern Turkish, to say Osmanlı Imperatörlüğü. Christoph Neumann has a very interesting article called Devletin Adı Yok in Kogito in 1999.

They're written in Kogito in 1999. Basically, his argument is that there was no institutionalized single concept for the Ottoman state. They used all sorts of different concepts. And as anyone who's read Ottoman documents will attest to, the Ottomans did not really, really like concise ways of expressing themselves. So a question I'd like to ask is, was the Ottoman Empire, as we say in English or L'Empire Ottoman in French, an exonym the way that Turkey, the name of the modern country of Turkey, also started out as an exonym, sort of a flat term that refers to both the government and the people and is used by outsiders to identify a certain political space. There is a discourse in the late Ottoman Empire that's in French

and mostly geared towards foreign audiences. And they use L'Empire Ottoman, which they've taken up basically from the French. And some authors such as Zia Gökalp, for example, he writes Turkiya with an aleph, the way the Italians pronounce it. They have a prehistory coming from European languages. And these interpretations, for example, nation-state interpretations of state names come from, I believe, French and possibly Italian. Not as much from Italian, although the pronunciation may come from there or may come from Greek. I don't know. But there is certainly something in the sense that Turkey or Türkiye has been something that's been used by foreigners to designate the Ottoman Empire

before they used it themselves. And the meaning of this concept, when it entered the Turkish language or Ottoman language, comes with some of the semantic connotations that it has in these other languages. And so one of the basic points of conceptual history is that you never choose the historical and semantic context of your statements. So basically the meaning of your concepts can be interpreted by reference to a history which you don't choose yourself. And so when the Ottomans speak about the Devletiali, that has a different connotation than Ottoman Empire or Lempi Otoman. So these are different interpretations of maybe, let's call it the same historical entity, same polity, but they mean different things in different contexts. And these meanings and the interpretations that come with them move, Especially in the 19th century,

there's an increased tendency of translations between different languages. And so the meaning of der Blättjärje increasingly becomes attuned to French interpretations or English to a lesser extent, but mostly French interpretations of that concept and so you see a tendency where it starts absorbing more and more interpretations that come from French. You don't get the whole French concept in one go because you can't take the whole French historical and semantic context with you when you translate a French text into Ottoman or take a French concept into Ottoman. The same problem is there when you try to translate an Ottoman archival text into modern day English. The first thing is the sentence doesn't add up. That's the first rule of the whole.

I've tried with the Tanizmat edict and that that's a horrible I think it's four sentences or something like that and it's really difficult to get the grammar to go the grammar doesn't fit the English language and every single concept every single word has a different historical context than the English language

equivalent so they're not perfectly equivalent and when you add them up, easy maths here, but the thing is, when you put them all together, the historical, the meaning of the historical context in compound becomes very different from the result you have when you've translated that charter into English. So it sounds like one of the distinctions you're trying to draw is between the empire as a functioning polity, as a functioning collection of people and institutions and economies and movement and all of these things that make up life and the kinds of language that we use about an empire.

Could you talk a little bit more about that? Yes, I think it's very important to keep analytically distinct the categories we use as historians or social scientists in the present day and use to measure or to give meaning to polities in the past, and an investigation of the historical semantics that they used at the time. So the distinction you're drawing is between the categories that we use in our own work, in our particular present, and the ways in which particular words became meaningful within a certain historically and geographically specific context. Yes, I'm drawing a distinction between the language we use and the language our sources use. So basically, what kind of meaning was there in the sources in terms of what was empire there?

Was there empire? And I think that the extent to which the Ottoman Empire, which I'm now using analytically, was referred to as an empire is almost, is extremely difficult to find any kind of Osmanlı-Imperatorial loop prior to the 1920s. One of the reasons for this is that the Ottoman Empire emerges in a different political tradition, I believe. So for those of you who are listening and your minds haven't completely exploded from finding out that the Ottoman Empire never existed, I think it's important here to mention that the concept of empire in the modern sense, as it was being used by French and Germans and Americans and British actually is not an age

old concept in the West. Certainly it draws on notion of empire from the Romans. So getting back to the historical context, I'd like to know when did, for example, France start using the term of empire? Why did they apply it to themselves? And why did they apply it to the Ottoman Empire? So the whole question of empire in what international relations scholars, so with something called the English school, call international society, which is something that coalesced around European norms in the, let's say, from the 17th century onwards, is that there is a claim to prestige. You want to be as far up in the hierarchy as possible.

And those claims to prestige are usually formulated either when they're not formulated in terms of land or wealth, they're also formulated in terms of descent. So in order to claim that you're an empire, you need to claim some sort of imperial descent, what is in Latin called translatio imperi. And the Ottoman Empire had claimed to know less than three such Translations Imperi, all of which were geared towards different audiences and were used slightly differently at different points in time in Ottoman history. The first one was that of the steppe nomads, which the Ottomans employed around the time of the Timurid invasion of Anatolia. And they used that to legitimize their rule

vis-a-vis Turkic nomads who were likely to go over to Timur. And drawing on these steppe imperial traditions, they were trying to bolster their own legitimacy. Now at the Battle of Ankara, that didn't work, and the Turkic nomads went over to Timur and defeated the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid I. After this, the Ottoman Sultans continued employing this hakan, which was very much, it's an imperial title in the sense that it lays claim to universal rule. But as far as I know, there's no empire connected to that. There is an imperial title, but there's no empire. One of the key distinctions that you're trying to draw is between the titles that we use for rulers and whether or not those titles are associated

with a particular spatial domain. Exactly. That is my point. And so this is early 15th century. Now with the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, Mehmed II starts using Kaysash, various Basileus was used by Suleiman, for example. And all of these titles are geared towards people who've grown up or who come from elites in the balkans or western anatolia and who

come from a byzantine imperial or byzantine tradition and were used to ruling for the Byzantines or were the Byzantines' middlemen. The Ottomans drew on this set of Byzantine concepts and used them and employed them to bolster their own rule and their own legitimacy vis-à-vis all these former Byzantine aristocrats. The third such translational period is that of the Caliphate. I'm not sure whether it was actually taken up or whether it was attached to this conquest of the Abbasids in Egypt, who were conquered in 1516 and 1517. who were conquered in 1516 and 1517.

And by the Abbasids you mean simultaneously the Mamluks. This is the same invasion, right? That's the same invasion. The point is that the Mamluks did in fact not have a translational empire. So they were not ruling in their own name. They were ruling in the name of a dynasty that had a translatio imperi. So this descent from another empire is a very important legitimizing device for claiming prestige vis-a-vis other polities. And so the Ottomans used these in different historical settings, in different contexts, vis-a-vis different kinds of audiences

they needed to get on board in order to bolster their rule. Now, I believe that it is the Ottoman inclusion in what is called international society that is really the historical context for when they started using these European concepts overall. Now, this is not to say that the Ottoman Empire was distinct or had no influence from Europe prior to this. They clearly had a common history with a lot of the different polities that were around them. with a lot of the different polities that were around them. Venice, they had a lot of contact with Venice. The Habsburgs, who were also claimants to the Roman imperial title.

They used very much the same concepts to legitimize their own rule. But they did not necessarily relate to claims in languages formulated outside Persian, Arabic and Ottoman. They did only to a very little extent care about what was written in French about them until, you know, at least the 18th century. There seems to be this kind of, there's a very interesting story about an Ottoman ambassador coming to Paris and saying that I did not come here. When he's told to see the foreign minister, he wants to see the French king. And he's just brushing him off and saying, I'm not here to learn how France is ruled. I'm here as the envoy of the Sultan, so just show me the king.

I'm here to see the king, that's the whole point. And so the way that these claims were formulated in Ottoman, and that was the most important language for claiming rule, shifted in the 19th century towards French. There was also some interaction or intertextual linkages went to French as well as going to Persian and Arabic, which I think is an extremely important change which changed the Ottoman conceptual apparatus of rule. I think it's also important to remember that when we're talking about even

Europe, that Europe itself is a concept that is clearly developing and changing. And with time, it accrues a certain set of institutional practices. It involves certain ways of organizing populations. It involves the claiming of a certain heritage, both in common or as set up against someone else or something else. And so I think one of the interesting things that your work is potentially bringing out, or this conversation is beginning to raise, is really the slipperiness of these categories that we use, or that we can use relatively automatically in our kind of everyday practice. Exactly, and that's why it's extremely difficult to talk about, because keeping the Ottoman Empire analytically distinct from the concept of empire,

and keeping empire analytically distinct from claims to an imperial title, these are extremely difficult to talk about. And it should not be forgotten that also there are many other examples of this in European history. For example, the Habsburg emperor not only did he lay claim to some of the same titles as the Ottoman sultans, Habsburg emperor not only did he lay claim to some of the same titles as the Ottoman sultans, he also had a full page of different kinds of titles that he used. He was the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. There would also be the Marquis of this place. He would be the, I don't remember what the aristocratic title of the Habsburg main state, all these things. You also have the Japanese emperor, who is the main focus of the Japanese national anthem.

The Japanese national anthem does not appear to have very much to do with Japan at all. It's all about the emperor. God Save the Queen in Britain is a similar issue. And it's also interesting when we get to these Translaciones Imperi that the claim to being an empire by virtue of descent from the

steppe is not unique to the Ottoman Empire. All sorts of other polities have done this. One of them is the Mughals. The Mughal Empire, centered on Delhi, was also... Mughal is the same word basically as Mongol, and they traced the lineages back to Timur and Genghis Khan

via different routes, but the point is that they were descended from the Mongols, and they were imperial by virtue of being, or their claim to fame was that they were descended from Mongol rulers. Now, when the Queen Victoria of Britain became Empress, she did not become Empress of Britain. The British Empire had only an empress of India. And this was the Translation Imperii went from the Mughals to Victoria. It was only They beat the mutiny in 1856-57 and got the Badisah out. And then it took some 20 years before Victoria claimed basically being the Empress of India, and the title that they used was very similar to that used by the Delhi-based Mughal Empire.

Well, this gets back to what you said at the beginning, that the Ottomans were employing different titles to interact to their different audiences for their rule. They're willing to call themselves different things and sort of define themselves in a differentiated way for a differentiated population. And as you said, it's not unique that all of these early modern states were, as they were becoming what we as historians call empires, there's a, without calling themselves empires necessarily,

there's this process of name collection, so to put it simply. Title collections, which the Ottomans did too. They had, you know, there's letters from Suleiman going to Francois, where he has this whole long list of titles, and he goes, you, the bay of the province of France. So one of the things we've been talking about is say the emergence in especially the 19th century of a new vocabulary of rule a new vocabulary of political legitimacy before we got started

talking today you had mentioned a little bit about this, say, tripartite system of state, population, and territory. And I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that and why thinking about this language of rule in terms of state, population, and territory helps, doesn't help, kind of the challenges and opportunities that it provides i think it's very important to keep these and or these concepts separate because this whole idea of states having an inside and outside there is foreign policy and there is domestic policy is a very new thing and therefore it's very important not to subsume various aspects of a state its territory its populations and the various relationships of subject ruler or subject middleman ruler type of relationships and subsuming them under one concept and calling that as if that was a nation state that had an inside and an outside, and they were functionally separate. As if there was a very distinct inside and an outside.

You can go, when you cross state borders now, you will walk across customs. Everything will be different to a certain extent there would be a different flag and all these things maps have different colors all of this stuff banal nationalism basically and trying to when we use one concept to describe all sorts of aspects of the state, the territory, and the population, then we implicitly draw on this whole conceptual field and this historical context when we speak about something where it's probably not to be found. And I think the story that you told a little bit earlier about the Ottoman ambassador showing up in France and saying, I need to see the king,

and being told, well, you can see the foreign minister. What that's speaking to is actually kind of the encounter of two different ways of thinking about the state, about political rule, about legitimacy. In one, we have the ambassador seen as a personal extension of the sultan, and by extension, what we might think of as the devleti andiye. On the other hand we might have the foreign minister as representative of a state that by the point this Ottoman ambassador arrives has moved something beyond the famous I am the state, the famous pronouncement of I think Louis XIV. I am the state, the famous pronouncement of, I think, Louis XIV,

that total identification of the French state in that moment with the figure of the king. The story, what you're pointing to, is moving a moment in which we have an encounter of two different ways of thinking about not only the state, but about the way that people are empowered to act in the name of that state. That's correct. My main point of saying this is that the Ottomans did not have, you know, the Ottoman state affairs were conducted in Ottoman

and also drawing mostly upon concepts that were embedded in other texts and mostly not integrating French political vocabulary at that point in time was just considered ridiculous and not, you know, that's got nothing to do with us. And that relationship changed over time and took about two or three hundred years. And suddenly every aspect of Ottoman, what was then becoming foreign policy policy was formulated in terms of French texts. It may have been formulated in Ottoman text and then translated as it went abroad, but basically it's in French. Or at least the political concepts are mostly in French when they interact with other countries. with other countries. And this is not historically unique in that I think most English language states today

would just send out their letters in English and just expect the recipient country to know English. And whether or not Afghanistan has a different political vocabulary, it's the English conceptual setup that's relevant, that's seen to be relevant. And it's seen to be relevant... Because of the power relation. Because of the power relation. Then that's the whole point.

What we haven't spoken about, which I probably should say something more about, is that this is all about power. The whole point of starting to use the French vocabulary is that the Ottomans have to start competingulating your claims to rule in terms in concepts that the Europeans will understand and accept, then you will probably not get over the standard of civilization and your territory and your subjects will be up for grabs by European colonial states. Which was a real threat. I mean, you had the day of Algeria invaded by France in 1830. And there are numerous occasions when the Ottoman Empire was saved by the threat of intervention or direct intervention of European imperial states. some sort of claim that they were civilized or they were an empire or all sorts of different things in order to say, you know, we're here, we're like you, we formulate our policy in terms

of the same rhetorical devices as you do. Please come save us or at least respect our territorial integrity or just chop off a few territories and let us, you know, remain mostly intact. We actually talked about this now that I remember in episode 68 with Zach Foster about the history of the name of Palestine. And it's actually interesting because Zach was talking about how in all sorts of ways the word Philistine was used in Arabic and Turkish during the Ottoman period, but it mainly shows up in the archival record when there's the new uh terjme odasa the translation office and they are translating documents from european countries such as

britain and france that are referring directly to places like philistine and the translators just simply render them directly into adamant rather than translating always as like uh villa kudus or vilayat is safad or whatever it was at the time so because they wouldn't be overlapping you wouldn't get the same semantic connotations through if you take Philistine, if you take Palestine

you translate that into whatever administrative area there was there, the whole meaning would change, that document wouldn't mean the same when you get it into ultimate it wouldn't anyway that's my point but you would get much closer to to the original meaning if you invent or if you take the the concept itself or the word itself and start using that as as a concept that's coming from the outside and that's the case with a lot of

these different things and i think tajamildas is probably a very important place to look for a lot of these concepts when they were translating letters coming in and so what do you do like you said with when you have in the in the document do you translate it as the ott document, do you translate it as the Ottoman Empire? Do you live it as Devlet Yali? Or do you do as the old British Orientalists would probably have done, just write Turkey? And I mean, you see that sometimes happening now too. I see people write the Ottoman state for that.

So my question actually, you know, some maybe some of our listeners probably are writing a term paper with this in the background and are scrambling to remove all the Ottoman empires from the text. Can we at least keep Ottoman? Was there a consistent use of the reference to Ali Osman or some kind of Ottoman-ness? Not in the sense that the young Ottomans would have thought of, but... I think the place to look is to Stavnoiann's article, and I think his key point is that there was no one established word for the state. There were all sorts of different state names that changed over time.

There was Devlet Yali, there was Devlet Yali Osmaniye, there was Ali Osman, there was Mimali Kimarusem, and my well-protected domains. There were all these different concepts that we used either by themselves or in combination with other concepts. In good Ottoman style, you would never leave a noun on its own. You'd also double it up. You can describe it a little bit.

Flowery language was very much appreciated in in most of the ottoman empire's history and so you would try not to repeat the same word twice you would try not to so if that's the whole point then you wouldn't get an established singular concept it's very difficult to have if there is a stylistic convention saying that you must never use the same concept or same word twice or same concept twice in a text then you would never really use the same word through the whole document and you end up with all these various names well i know you've created a bit of a headache for myself well for you for yourself but that's your own

fault but for us as well i mean obviously conceptual history of the ottoman empire is not very developed and now listening to this conversation i'm sure everybody's just thinking about all of the words that they've taken for granted to mean one thing and now wondering if any of them mean anything but anyway that's all the time we're going to have for today. But I know I want to thank you for coming on the podcast again. It was a really great conversation. Thank you for having me.

That's all for this installment of the Adam in History podcast. Until next time, take care.