Ottoman History Podcast - Tax Administration in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire

Episode Date: April 5, 2023

Linda Darling hosted by Sam Dolbee | In this episode, Linda Darling discusses the history of tax administration in the early modern Ottoman Empire, and how attention to it can open up a broad range of questions about technology, governance, and military power and, in the process, dispell simplistic stereotypes such as the "Sick Man of Europe." In addition, she speaks more broadly about her path to Ottoman history, her studies with Halil Inalcık, and how she came to write a book about tax administration. In closing, she touches on what projects--on the cusp of retirement--she is thinking about now.. « Click for More »

The sick man of Europe. Everyone's heard of him. The Ottoman Empire, once invincible, was no longer able to fend off the armies of Europe. Weak sultans allowed power to pass into the hands of slaves, eunuchs, and women. Corruption rotted the bureaucracy with devastating effects on administration, tax collection, and military effectiveness. Inflation and chaos in the monetary system created suffering throughout society and havoc in the government budget. Banditry, rebellion, and jelali revolts disrupted revenue collection and provincial governance, causing whole villages to disappear. European explorations reduced the empire to an economic backwater, while European

military might chipped off ever larger pieces of Ottoman territory. Through all this, the Ottomans' smug sense of superiority and the heavy hand of religion prevented them from imitating European technology and scientific achievements until it was too late. Modernizing reforms were unable to strengthen the sick man sufficiently to resist the impact of the West. The Ottomans stagnated and declined, falling in the end to Western imperialism. The sick man, however, is a strong man.

It's the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Sam Dolby. And that voice you just heard is Linda Darling, a professor of history at University of Arizona, reading the first lines of her 1996 book, Revenue Raising and Legitimacy. This is the last thing I wrote in the book, Unnamed Calling. I was telling him about the book, the manuscript was finished, I was about to send it in, and he said, oh, The Sick Man of Europe. And I said, oh, the sick man of Europe, that's how I should start. Because everybody will think that. I've got to counter that. I've got to start them off turning that down, saying, I'm going to revise this idea. You don't know what you're writing until you've written it. Of course, at Ottoman History Podcast, we've wanted to interview Linda Darling for a long time. But one of the reasons we finally got around to it was a request from an astute undergraduate listener for more episodes on taxes. I explained that to Linda when we met, and here's how she responded. In case you can't hear, she told me she sort of does taxes.

In case you can't hear, she told me she sort of does taxes. I do tax administration. I do people who collect taxes, who assess and collect taxes, and what they do with that. So, dear listener, we heard you and we talked with Linda Darling. In today's episode, we'll discuss how she came to write that book about tax administration, her revisionist approach to the question of Ottoman decline, and what, on the cusp of retirement, she's thinking about now. My grandmother grew up in what's now Lebanon was Syria then, and in the very late Ottoman period. And my uncle, who was enamored of technology in the 50s, got this tape recorder. And he decided to interview my grandmother and record it.

And the thing I remember from it, he asked her about the Ottomans. And, you know, were they a problem in her village? And she said, no, they came around once a year and collected taxes. And that's how we saw them. There's a relationship there. But that wasn't why I went into it. In fact, I wasn't going to go into it. Here's my story. I was deciding to go back to graduate school because I couldn't get a decent job in the 70s. All I could get was dumb secretarial jobs, which after two months became boring. I had a teaching credential, but there weren't any jobs.

There were five, no, there were jobs. There were 500 applicants for every job, and you needed political poll to get one. I didn't have it. So I needed another credential, and I was reading history at the time. I loved English history, but I thought there's going to be 500 applicants for every job. Let me go into something that's less overpopulated. Vertice on the Middle East. So I thought, Middle East, okay, I can do that. I already like the food. I'd be happy to learn Arabic since it's sort of my background. Let's do that. So I started learning Arabic and I started applying to graduate schools. The week that the applications went in was the great snowstorm of 1978. Most of the schools that I sent to never got the mail. And the University of Chicago did, and they wanted to accept me. So that was great. And I went there intending to study

19th century Lebanon. The person who taught 19th century Lebanon left right before I got there to go to a think tank in Washington. And they didn't replace him for 10 years. So much for that idea. I went through all my coursework with basically no advisor. And right at the end, the last month of coursework, I was sitting in class with Halil Analjik, the number one person in Ottoman history in the world at that time. It was a hot day in May. The sun was streaming through the windows and dust moats were filling the air. And we were trying to translate an Ottoman document. I think none of us had really done our homework. And finally, he got tired of trying to pull out of us what we didn't have in

us. So he pulled out this notebook and started reading from it. And what he was reading was a whole list of the documents that he had worked with in the archives. And he would read out a type of document and explain it and then say, okay, how would you do history with this document? And one of the things that he mentioned was six documents of the internal correspondence of the finance department. And lying in bed at night, looking up at the cracks in the ceiling, I thought, if you could get the internal correspondence of the finance department, you could figure out what they were doing and what they thought they were doing. And whether their assessment of what they were doing agreed with that of the British advisors who wrote all these terrible things about Ottoman finances, about corruption and bribery and all that kind of thing.

I said, OK, that's what I'll do. I'll look at the finance department. I had several ideas that didn't pan out. Halfway through my research I hit a brick wall. And then finally I found this document in a register that was addressed to the assessor of the Arboretum tax in the 17th century. And it told him where to go, what to do, exactly how to assess the tax, who to count, who not to count, why he was doing it, how he was supposed to compile the results, and what he was supposed to do with that compilation when he was done.

There's so much potential out there. There's so many possible things that you could find. And when you find that thing that you go, aha, that's only one of many possible finds. But it's the find that sets you in a direction. And so it becomes the key discovery. And it revolutionized the way I was thinking of approaching this. I thought, okay, if I can do procedures, if I can figure out the procedures, then I'll have a handle on what the finance department

was doing. And I can compare from the organized and solvent empire of the 16th century to the disorganized, corrupt, and insolvent empire of the 17th century, I could see that transition. Instead of thinking about looking from the outside, I was looking from the inside. And I was looking at how they did their work, not what their work was, but how they went about it and how they thought about it. And that turned out to be successful.

What I found was not what I expected to find, but what I found was that the finance department did not disintegrate. That it competently dealt with a whole set of new problems that the 17th century presented to it. That they developed new procedures. That they reprogrammed old procedures. That they called things by the old names, but they were doing them differently. That they created new sets of registers.

New approaches to tax collection to deal with the problems that they faced in the 17th century. The big one is the Jalalis, these people who are disrupting communications through between Istanbul and the provinces. And the way that the finance department dealt with that was instead of carrying money from the provinces to Istanbul to be dispersed, which would get robbed along the way, people would make off with the funds, they wouldn't ever reach the treasury. Instead, they started sending messages. You collected these taxes, now do this with them. Give them to this person. Give them to this province. Spend them on this purpose. And so instead of sending money back and forth, they sent letters.

They sent orders, which argues for a more fully developed road system, a more fully developed courier system. A little change in the way that the finance department did things affected a whole lot of systems that were either already in place and they had to change or develop new ones. There's a mythical change that everybody talks about that I did not find. And that is the transformation of Timars into tax farms. Timars are essentially grants of land revenue to military people, cavalrymen, in lieu of salary.

Instead of paying them out of the treasury, they grant them the right to collect certain taxes over a certain area. Now, at the end of the 16th century, these cavalrymen were starting to become obsolete. The development of handheld gunpowder weapons had progressed to the point where they were more effective than bows and arrows. And so the army was shifting to gunpowder weapons. Well, cavalrymen at that point could not use gunpowder weapons. They scared the horses.

They got black powder all over their uniforms. And also, they weren't very good at aiming. So you had to get off the horse and set up a tripod to shoot these things. But they were vastly increasing the number of foot soldiers. Because not only were they anxious to have more people with gunpowder weapons, people with gunpowder weapons. The empire had increased in size enormously from two provinces to 34, 36, 37. Every province had to have a garrison. The border was enormous. That had to be garrisoned. The cities had to be garrisoned because there was urban unrest. And then they needed people for the actual army and provincial forces for the provincial governors, of whom there were now almost 40 instead of two. So the number of foot soldiers had to vastly increase. The difficulty was the foot soldiers were paid in cash.

And where is that cash going to come from? Nobody yet has researched the payment system for the foot soldiers, but certainly that's part of the problem. And a lot of the taxes that were collected in the provinces went toward expenses in the provinces, repairs to walls and fortifications, bridges and roads, public services of all kinds, as well as payments for people in the provinces who were paid out of treasury money. So by keeping the money in the provinces, they were both avoiding the risk of the Jalalis and also changing the payment system in the empire. So we see a system that is far from being merely corruption, as some would have it, but rather a financial situation

dynamically changing in response to existing conditions and connected to a number of broader issues, including both infrastructure and military. It's been said in print that the well-conducted surveys and beautifully written registers of the 16th century give way to messy-looking registers and absence of surveys in the 17th century, and that proves that the Ottomans can no longer do what they used to do. Their ability to govern their empire has declined, or their will, perhaps. But my research into taxation showed something entirely different. It showed that what was happening was not a refusal or an inability to keep on doing what they had been doing, but rather the advent of something new. In that period that I was talking about, when they stopped sending

money back and forth and they started sending pieces of paper, another thing that happened was that they stopped doing the kinds of tax assessment that they did in the 16th century. That didn't mean they stopped doing tax assessment. They started doing new kinds of tax assessment. Because of the expansion of the, largely because of the expansion of the foot soldiers with gunpowder weapons who were paid from cash in the treasury, the treasury expenses began to expand enormously. And so the central treasury had to have a new source of income. They already had this occasional tax that went to meeting military expenses in times of war. Well, times of war had become pretty constant. And so they expanded this form of occasional taxation into

an annual tax during the 1580s and the war with Iran. And this is the Abodezidivaniya. And that demanded a new kind of collection system, a new kind of assessment, and a new kind of collection, for which they did do surveys. So they didn't stop doing surveys, they did different surveys. And they didn't stop producing records, they produced different records. And those avarice surveys exist in the archives to prove that indeed they did them. And assignment of the collection of this money and its disbursement on state expenses is recorded just as meticulously as to Mars used to be recorded that it had been given to the feudal cavalry.

They were still being given, but they had lost their military importance. And with that, they lost their political importance. They became a secondary system within the Ottoman Empire. What became politically important was the collection of cash taxes for the treasury so that they could pay their foot soldiers. And so it didn't really matter to the central treasury if they surveyed using the old system anymore. The people who were awarded those funds collected from the areas that they were awarded to,

but the government didn't need to know because it was no longer a government concern. So the shift in the concerns of the government was really what was behind the shift in the type of records that were being used. I can't talk about the shift in penmanship. A key institution in the midst of all of this change was the tax farm. Tax farming had existed in the empire from the beginning, and it went back into previous Islamic empires as well. It was used for taxes that you couldn't assess. You could only guess at, like bridge tolls, for example. How do you know how many people are going to cross the bridge in a year? You don't. And so you can't really say this is going to yield so much. It's a guess. So you allow people to guess, and you take the highest bid, naturally enough. If the person who bid that much fails to meet the

bid, he has to pay the difference out of his own pocket. If, on the other hand, he's undershot, and in fact can collect more legitimately, he gets to keep the difference. If he starts extorting people for more, they'll start complaining to the government, and then the government will get after him. So it's not necessarily an extortion system, although it has that tendency. But the government kept watch. When they started using the system on areas that had been previously assessed by survey, they used the surveys as the basis for the bids. So they were well aware what those taxes could yield. And if somebody bid twice as much, they knew that it was unreasonable. It's also a system for a small bureaucracy.

As long as the majority of the taxes were being used for cavalry payments, it was the cavalry who were collecting the taxes. As that started to shift because of the changes in the military, they needed more other people to become tax collectors. But they couldn't expand the bureaucracy. They'd have to pay them. Whereas tax farmers do it voluntarily. They're allowed a salary from what they collect. And that salary is specified in their contract. They're also allowed a scribe to help them with their collection, and his salary is also specified. So it's not a free-for-all. In the 17th century, it's not only the Ottomans, but many countries started expanding their systems using tax farming.

The French were the biggest ones. Their tax farming system took over the whole country. The English used it for their port taxes. Spanish used it. Everybody used it. It was not an exceptional system for the Ottomans. When it became exceptional was in the 18th century when they started putting more and more of the taxes

into the tax farming system and allowing people to become tax farmers for life rather than continually bidding on these tax farms. That's kind of outside the purview of my work, but it was an attempt to actually regulate and bring under government control this system which had been essentially privatized, which had privatized tax collection during the 17th century. which had privatized tax collection during the 17th century.

It's a shift. It's a definite shift. They're not doing the same things that they did before, but it's not because the empire is declining. It's not because they're weaker than they were. It's not because they're more immoral than they were. It's because the ecology is changing. The systems of military and civilian production are changing and the empire's adapting to that. In the mostly British image of the Ottoman Empire,

one of the big elements is the corruption of the Ottomans. And by corruption, the English usually mean bribery. To think that the empire is built on bribery and corruption, you know, you can automatically wipe it off and discount it. But is it? But is it? But is it? Is that the way to look at the ornaments? And that's really what impelled my first book.

No, it's not the way to look at the ornaments. If you look at what they're doing, the problems they're facing, and the ways that they're trying to solve them become the key. In fact, that's really what I base my teaching on. The Middle Easterners are people too. They face many of the same problems that we face. They may solve them differently, but they solve them differently because they're solving them with different resources. And this is how they're doing it and this is why. I don't often talk about that directly, but it lies behind the way I structure all my courses,

that similarity, that struggle that we're all engaged in to make our world better, to make our lives better, and how different people go about it differently. and how different people go about it differently. Linda Darling's training, along with her teaching, has also shaped her second book, entitled A History of Social Justice and Political Power in the Middle East, The Circle of Justice from Mesopotamia to Globalization,

published in 2012 with Rutledge, which, as the title suggests, has a huge scope and footnotes of truly monumental proportions. I had had very eclectic training because, as I said earlier, I went into Middle Eastern studies to be a modernist. And when that failed, I started working with the professor who taught the early Islamic period. So then I was studying all this early Islamic stuff, Abbasids and Umayyads. I liked the Umayyads a lot. The idea of the circle of justice was something that I had learned about in my training. All my professors believed in it. They all taught it in

different ways. When I went back, I realized that I had gotten it in the Ottoman class. I had gotten it in the courses on the Iranian world. I had gotten it in the courses on the Arab world. People I didn't even know in the department had written articles basically about it. in the department had written articles basically about it. So it was something that my faculty believed in. And also, when I went back and looked at the materials themselves, there it was. It just really popped out. As I said, my training had been very broad, because my intentions shifted throughout my training. I had studied with modernists. I had studied with early Islamic people, and I had studied with early modernists.

So I had that background anyway. And I was actually very glad to both have a teaching job where I could teach the whole thing and not just one narrow part of it and to be able to write a book that encompassed all my training in that way, it was nice to be able to do that and to be able to put together all those pieces and to see the history of the Middle East as not separate histories of dynasties, but as a history of a part of the world.

Retirement is coming soon, and I asked Linda about her plans for the future. This is my last year of teaching. I have one year of research leave after this, and then I'll be retired. I really didn't think I was going to do this, but just physically, to do this but just physically it's become hard. I also I want more time to write. I have at least three books in me that need to come out and I just don't have time to do them. There are too many demands on me. I'm gonna start saying no to things. I haven't much in the past because I thought it was my duty. I thought now that I'm an older professor, I need to review younger people's work. It's part of moving the field along.

And it's where I can make a contribution to say this is really good. This needs correction. And so I haven't refused to do that, because I think that's really important. I haven't refused to go and speak, because I think I want people to know what I know. I want people to hear what I think. I haven't refused to read people's stuff and mentor them, and because God knows I didn't get enough mentoring as a student. And people need that. And I've had people that really needed both the friendship and the guidance that I could provide.

And I've been happy to do it because I'm always interested in what other people are doing anyway. I also asked about her sense of the field and how it's changed. The emphasis on intellectual and cultural history is welcome, but not at the cost of throwing out socioeconomic history, which was pretty much done. We've got to find a way to integrate the two. We've got to get documents back into people's research. And I see places where they are,

but I also see places where they're just disregarded or considered unworthy of attention. Also, of course, every generation rebels against the previous one. So there's that. Yeah, cycles. But also, I think the influence of people who push that kind of research is not as strong as it used to be people are investigating other things the field is more diverse than it used to be if you didn't do what was fashionable you were out

but it's much more diverse now because of the introduction of new topics, new questions, the interest in formerly disregarded periods. Everything's about the 18th century now. Not everything. There's a lot about the 19th century, but there's much more about the 18th century than there used to be. And pretty soon we'll get around to revising our mythology of the 18th century as well. And of course, I had to ask about those three books. The one I'm writing now compares literary and documentary sources that, it turns out, don't say the same thing at all. And I hope we're going to revise the way that we think about

the 17th century, possibly the 16th as well in some cases. In this case, it's about who is getting government privileges, who's being recruited into the military, who's getting money. The advice writers are advising the sultan to change his ways because the wrong people are getting in and getting privileges. And the documentary record shows that they're not right in that assumption, that this is a cover for some other complaint,

or it's an exaggeration, or it's just trying to downgrade their factional rivals. It's really not what they say it is. So we'll see how that project comes out. The second project is something that my advisor suggested to me when I was a student and totally intimidated me, which was this. We have some early Ottoman finance documents. some early Ottoman finance documents.

We also have some very late Mongol finance manuals. We don't have their finance documents, but we have three manuals that explain how they did their finance documents. And in fact, one of them we know, they're all found in Ottoman archives, and one of them we know the Ottomans had because they recopied it in 1412 in Bursa. And so we know that they were using it as a model.

Can we track the transition from the Mongol finance manuals to the Ottoman finance documents and see to what extent they did imitate the Mongol system, to what extent did they make changes, to what extent was the Ottoman system based on the Mongol system. The Mongol finance manuals, or at least one of them, has been translated into Turkish, so I can now read it. They're all in Persian.

That's why I wish I'd taken Persian, and I didn't. By the way, if you think you might possibly need a language in the future, take it now, because you never will later. That's my lesson for today. The third one is more fanciful. A friend and I visited Chios last summer. To get to Chios, you either have to go to Athens or Czesman. We went to Czesman. There's this wonderful Ottoman caravanserai that's been made into a hotel. We stayed there. It's next door to a wonderful Ottoman castle. We toured the castle.

At the end, there's a booth where you can buy souvenirs and pamphlets. So we're looking for some history, right? There wasn't any. We had the same experience in kiosks. We could find Byzantine kiosks, Greek kiosks, Italian kiosks, Crusader kiosks, modern kiosks. Nothing on Ottoman kiosks. So we decided we were going to write those histories. I took Cheshire and she took chios.

I'm going to write a history of Cheshire. And guess what? There are documents in the archives on Cheshire. And fortunately for me, it means I have to go back. That's too bad. I know. It was wonderful wonderful it was a great place and I can't wait. I have never regretted a moment of being an optimist. It was definitely the right thing for me and after a previous lifetime of not knowing what to do, being bored

by everything, everything going nowhere, being anonymous has been wonderful. Before the interview started and we turned the mics on, Linda told me she was going to Hem and Haw and I reminded her of this at the end. I know, but you started out asking me about a story I've told a million times. So I asked you boring questions? With exciting results. I think that's a good note to end on. I think that's a good note to end on. That's Linda Darling. Her books are Revenue Raising and Legitimacy and A History of Social Justice and Political Power in the Middle East.

Her articles are far too many to even try to name here. Of course, you can find more information, including a bibliography, on our website, ottomanhistorypodcast.com. That's it for this episode. Until next time, take care. Sous-titres par LaVacheSquid Thank you.