| This dissertation investigates the consolidation and dismantling of the Ottoman ancien regime. It treats policy, political economy, socio-organizational structures, and political discourse as an integral part of the project of state building during the eighteenth century. The study begins with an examination of the historiography of the Ottoman "empire." Rather than a period of undifferentiated decline and political decentralization, this study argues that the Ottoman state in the eighteenth century, like other polities of the time in Asia and Europe, renegotiated its relationship with society by decentralization of fiscal agency. From 1695 until the Tanzimat (1839-40), the life-term tax farming system, or malikane mukataa, was an important institutional component of Ottoman rule. Revolving around an Istanbul-based financial and credit nexus, the malikane system perpetuated a unified, if asymmetrical, set of linkages between center and periphery. On the one hand, by offering contracts on highly liquid, commercial and proto-industrial revenues in the capital, the malikane system encouraged central state elite participation in provincial economies. On the other hand, by reserving many small-scale rural resources for provincial tax-farming markets, it promoted the integration of the provincial gentry into the matrix of imperial control. The study concludes by reinterpreting the period from 1793 to 1807 (the Nizam-i Cedid, when Istanbul initiated a program of "modernization" or fiscal and administrative centralization) in the light of this new approach to center-periphery relationships. The construction of a modern state apparatus not only entailed dismantling the decentralized apparatus of the ancien regime but also reinventing the historical record, particularly a rewriting of the relationship between the old regime tax-farming gentry and the Ottoman central state. |
