Labor History and the Ottoman Empire, c. 1700-1922 Author(s): Donald Quataert Source: International Labor and Working-Class History , Fall, 2001, No. 60 (Fall, 2001), pp. 93-109 Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of International Labor and Working-Class, Inc. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27672740 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms and Cambridge University Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to International Labor and Working-Class History This content downloaded from 132.174.251.47 on Mon, 07 Feb 2022 21:23:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms LABOR HISTORY IN THE OTTOMAN MIDDLE EAST, 1700-1922 Labor History and the Ottoman Empire, c. 1700-1922* Donald Quataert Binghamton University, State University of New York Abstract This article surveys the evolution of labor history writing as an increasingly vibrant sub field of Ottoman history. It addresses labor historians outside of Ottoman history and for their benefit traces why and how workers almost completely were left out of Ottoman his torical writing until c. 1970. Thereafter, Ottoman historians have more frequently dis cussed workers and their histories. At first focusing on organized workers and their rela tions with the state, these writings then shifted to labor in action. Thus, Ottoman labor history writing paralleled, in many respects, that of other fields of history. More recently, attention has been given to non-guild, non-union labor?including women and children? and its activities in the workplace. Introduction The Ottoman Empire, emerging from the Anatolian highlands around the turn of the fourteenth century and enduring until after World War One, is one of the more remarkable states in global history. Born in the borderlands between a dy ing Byzantium and ephemeral Turkish principalities, the Ottoman rulers forged a new synthesis based on creative flexibility that welcomed all comers and steadi ly built a rich and powerful state.1 In c. 1500-1550, this empire arguably was the wealthiest and most powerful state system in the European and Mediterranean worlds. Thereafter, relative to the Atlantic states and economy, it fell on harder times, becoming the "Sick Man of Europe" at the end of the eighteenth centu ry. Although there were significant nineteenth-century successes in rebuilding state and military strength, the Ottoman Empire vanished in 1922. Specialists debate whether this final collapse derived mainly from external, imperialist pres sures or internal factors, such as the rise of nationalism. I, for one, take the view that arguments based on the power of nationalism have been overstated; indeed, the empire retained the loyalties of its subjects/citizens until the end.2 The experiences of an empire that survived deep into the age of the nation state offer labor history comparativists rich alternative perspectives on workers' culture, everyday life, politics, organization, and activism. During the nineteenth International Labor and Working-Class History No. 60, Fall 2001, pp. 93-109 ? 2001 International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. This content downloaded from 132.174.251.47 on Mon, 07 Feb 2022 21:23:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 94 ILWCH, 60, Fall 2001 century era of imperialism, vast chunks of Ottoman lands in the Balkans were lopped off. In the territories that were Ottoman in 1914?a small part of the Balkans, Anatolia, and the Arab and North African provinces?the Ottoman Empire remained fundamentally independent, although prey to the gunboat diplomacy and indirect financial control of Great Britain and the other western Great Powers. The province of Egypt was an exception, taking a more or less separate course, since 1805, from the central imperial state (remaining all the while under Ottoman suzerainty). In 1882, the distinction between the empire and the province became still greater as Britain occupied Egypt, both militarily and politically. With the exception of Egypt, the late nineteenth-century Ot toman Empire paradoxically resembled both Japan and China in its freedom of political and economic action.3 Like China, it suffered encroachments on its ter ritorial integrity and foreign interference in its domestic political and economic affairs, and it lacked a big factory industrial base. Like Japan, it enjoyed major power status and genuine autonomy of action in most decision-making areas. By 1914, the Ottoman Empire had recovered to the status of a second-rank Great Power, likely not dissimilar in strength from Russia and Austria-Hungary. In common with many states elsewhere in the world during the nineteenth centu ry, it was restructuring itself on a new basis, reshaping relationships with its sub jects/citizens and broadening vastly the scope of its activities and responsibili ties. From its inception until its demise, this was an agrarian empire and econo my. Three quarters of the inhabitants lived in the countryside and drew their liv ings from the soil and agriculturally related activities. Many, often cultivator families, also gained incomes from manufacturing and mining. During the nine teenth century, the basic economic profile remained in place, but there were im portant changes. Agriculture, especially in Egypt, underwent commercializa tion, thanks to rising international demand and urbanization, particularly of the port cities. Mining grew impressively, notably in the coal sector of Anatolia that came to employ ten thousand workers. And manufacturing underwent a signif icant transformation (see below) as it adapted to the industrializing West.4 Here, I wish to offer the Ottoman past for the consideration of labor histo rians, albeit with several caveats before we begin. First of all, I need to confess that the term "Ottoman labor history" is one of convenience, similar to that of "British/German labor history," and camouflages a host of important regional differences and locally distinctive cultures. Perhaps the flavor of this variety is suggested by the notion that Ottoman workers spoke and left records in a host of mother tongues, including Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian, Turkish, Armenian, Greek, Kurdish, Arabic, and Ladino. Over all of them rested the administrative hand of the Ottoman state, from the archives and documents of which histori ans derive their data, usually in the Ottoman language. Whether there actually is an Ottoman labor history is uncertain at this point, but it is helpful (and like ly correct) to assume so. Here, as should be clear by now, I consider Egypt to be within the purview of Ottoman historians. Since it fell under direct European control while the larger Ottoman Empire retained its independence, its inclu This content downloaded from 132.174.251.47 on Mon, 07 Feb 2022 21:23:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Labor History and the Ottoman Empire, c. 1700-1922 95 sion in Ottoman labor history should help us to isolate the importance of formal colonialism on labor in the Middle East.5 The second caveat concerns the actu al state of Ottoman labor history studies. As will be clear from the following, it has not quite emerged as a subfield in the way that there are separate labor his tory subfields in US or British or French history. Also, Ottoman labor history is still powerfully influenced by normative notions, which are based primarily on the state's vision of the role and character of labor. The actual nature of the Ot toman labor experiences remain rather unclear, somewhat less so for the very late period, after c. 1890. Since the baseline of comparison is uncertain and has not yet been established, it is difficult to discuss, much less determine, the evo lution of the Ottoman labor force over time.6 This is important. For example, it is difficult to analyze the role of guild organizations in the later formation of la bor unions, syndicates, and strikes in the early twentieth century because we do not understand the nature of the guilds themselves (see below). Part A: Workers in Ottoman Historical Writing Until c. 1970 Labor history has been both ignored and mistreated in Ottoman historical writ ing. While the empire lived, this writing, both by residents of the empire and by foreigners, had been either disdainful of or outright hostile to labor history. Dur ing the first half-century of the post-Ottoman period, that is, until c. 1970, these trends continued both in the Turkish- and Arabic-speaking successor states and among scholars in west European countries and the United States. In the Sovi et sphere of the Cold War world (for example, Bulgaria), Ottoman workers re ceived more respectful, if sometimes ideologically distorted, attention. Around 1970, finally, writers in the Turkish and Arabic and west European/US circles began focusing some scholarly attention on workers. Here are some details, em phasizing mainly the period after 1700. The paucity of attention on Ottoman workers in part derives from the up per and then middle strata origins of most Ottoman-language chroniclers before and during the nineteenth-century expansion of literacy. Similarly, foreign au thors were of elite background on diplomatic missions to the Ottoman court, merchants doing business in the empire, or middle-class travelers. Speaking in the most general terms, these Ottoman and foreign writers recorded the deeds of the sultans, the royal family, and the administrative, military, religious, and cultural elites. The stuff of labor history, such as workers' activities and wages, their families and institutions, characteristically were left out?nearly totally (see below)?from this record keeping. After the Ottoman Empire disappeared in 1922, these prevailing emphases on elite groups continued under the influence of two intellectual traditions, the first of which was orientalism. The past of the Ottoman Empire in general and of its workers has been clouded by the continuing prevalence of Western stereo types concerning the Middle East. This is a complex story, with roots in the rise of a "Europe" that sought to identify itself as a superior entity and yet was con fronted with an extraordinarily sophisticated, powerful, and rich Middle East This content downloaded from 132.174.251.47 on Mon, 07 Feb 2022 21:23:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 96 ILWCH, 60, Fall 2001 ern neighbor that refused those claims. In the orientalist discourse that conse quently emerged in Europe, the cultural, political, and social institutions of the Middle East were falsely asserted to be stagnant, backward, and resistant to change. So, too, therefore, was the economy and those working in it. These no tions have been attacked and largely discredited, but their intellectual legacy lives on.7 And so, Ottoman history writing of the post-Ottoman period often has little sense of change over time, although this latter characteristic has been fading. In a sense, the "modernization" paradigm (the second intellectual tradi tion) that emerged to dominate?both in academic and US policy-making cir cles?Middle East and Ottoman historical writing in the mid-twentieth century derived from orientalism. Modernization theory essentially argued that change in the Ottoman Empire came from without, namely, from the West. Under the influence both of the modernization school and of the statist tradition already dominant in Ottoman history writing, scholars in the post-Ottoman era explored Ottoman history. Not surprisingly, they found their foci of attention among the westernizing Ottoman elites who were seen as the only agents of change in an otherwise inert and dying social, political, and labor formation. For several decades, in a trend that peaked in the 1960s, scholars reported on the actions of a handful of Ottoman leaders, seen as westernizers.8 Given this legacy of writing from the Ottoman and immediate post Ottoman periods, it cannot be very surprising that Ottoman workers rarely were present in the historical narratives. Their scant appearances, moreover, were marred/marked by a number of alleged characteristics that Ottoman workers were said to possess. First of all, an ethnic division of labor (inaccurately) was presumed to exist among Ottoman workers in which "we can discern distinct dif ferences among nationalities with respect to their choice of occupation, partic ularly the industrial arts."9 Thus, certain religious and ethnic groups were said inherently to have possessed certain qualities and consequently dominated par ticular categories of work. Muslims were seen as incapable of commercial activ ity and inept in manufacturing (except carpet-making); they were suitable only for agriculture, which they practiced in a primitive manner. (Turkish Muslims were said to be good soldiers and tough government administrators.) In non rural labor, particular non-Muslim groups?such as Armenians, Greeks, and Jews?were said to excel and predominate in specific tasks such as dyeing, tex tile production, or metal work.10 Second, the little research being done in labor history until c. 1970 heavily emphasized organized labor that was in the service of the state bureaucracy and military. Nearly uniformly, only workers who were members of guild-like organizations, which followed official dictates regarding provisioning of Ottoman soldiers and subjects, were considered. The focus was upon guild-like bodies (hereafter called guilds) that existed in Istanbul and a number of larger and smaller Ottoman cities, and which frequently provided goods and services to armies on campaign, the palace, and the state apparatus. Thus, thousands of pages of historical texts are devoid of the subjects of labor history, except when their organized lives intersected with the needs of the This content downloaded from 132.174.251.47 on Mon, 07 Feb 2022 21:23:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Labor History and the Ottoman Empire, c. 1700-1922 97 state.11 These guilds were considered to be (1) comprehensive in their control of Ottoman urban labor; indeed, some twentieth-century-scholars explicitly ar gued that no workers existed outside of these structures. In addition, these guilds were considered to be (2) rigidly restrictive and monopolistic; (3) religiously ho mogeneous; and (4) without political autonomy of any sort. Moreover, it was im plicitly assumed, and not really ever discussed, that (5) all the workers were males.12 And, without a great deal of evidence being presented, it also was as sumed that (6) the guilds featured the same apprentice, journeyman, master hi erarchy as in western Europe. The historical origins of Ottoman guilds are not clear. Similarly uncertain are the connections or (dis)similarities between pre-Ottoman guilds in the Mid dle Eastern region and those in east, central, and/or western Europe, India, or southeast Asia. Several researchers quite early inconclusively explored possible links between fraternal brotherhoods (ah?) founded in medieval, pre-Ottoman times and the formation of Ottoman guilds. These brotherhoods flourished in the absence of any state authority and had full political autonomy, but the guilds that came after allegedly were devoid of such autonomy. Unfortunately their work has not been added to in any significant manner during the past half-century.13 Thus, Ottoman labor historians during the pre-1970 period considered the guilds as creations of the state, brought into being to facilitate its control and as sure provisioning of its needs.14 Content with describing the links to the state, the scholars studying guilds paid scant attention to how these bodies might have changed over time. Indeed, little was revealed regarding their internal struc tures. And, since the guilds were considered to be important only insofar as they served the state, the dynamics among members and possible mutual aid func tions were left unexplored. Other than these discussions, labor history was con fined to a few articles on workers in various government arsenals or factories. Usually the presence of guild workers was recorded on two different types of occasions. The first involved times when the state prepared for war. On these occasions, it relied on guilds in the Istanbul capital (and elsewhere) to provide the supplies and materials and often the manpower to process or manufacture these supplies and materials in the field. Here, workers are presented to receive praise or criticism for their role in aiding the state, and then vanish again.15 On the second type of occasion, workers enter the narrative as participants in protests or revolts against conditions or a particular sultan or high-ranking offi cial. Here, the workers are given some significance because of their intrusion into elite politics. Sometimes they are righteous instruments against adminis trative injustice, while at other times they appear as irrational actors blindly, of ten corruptly, lashing out.16 Once the particular revolt ended, however, the workers faded from historical view. Part B: Workers in Ottoman Historical Writing Since c. 1970 Ottoman labor history emerged as part of the larger shift in history writing in Europe and the United States. A new generation of historians, born of the de This content downloaded from 132.174.251.47 on Mon, 07 Feb 2022 21:23:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 98 ILWCH, 60, Fall 2001 mocratization of the university and initially inspired by E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1963) and the search for so cial justice during the 1960s, participated in a larger historiographical shift to wards history from below.17 Many younger scholars turned to the history of the weak and began writing their stories. In Ottoman history, however, this tenden cy mainly expressed itself in the form of studying economic history, an indirect means of learning about the non-elite groups who are so elusive in the histori cal record. History from below remained very unusual. The focus on economic history, for its part, produced fine studies about commerce, agriculture, and, to a lesser extent, manufacturing and mining.18 But there has been little concern for the individuals and groups working in those sectors. Merchants received some attention, but peasants, artisans, miners, and others have not. The narra tives of Ottoman history even now are inhabited by few representatives of the popular classes. A number of factors help account for this state of affairs. The first concerns the tendency to uncritically use the major source of documentation available, the Prime Ministry Archives of the Ottoman state in Istanbul. While stupefy ingly rich, they are the creation of bureaucratic and military officials who wrote about what concerned them and their state. Workers appear in the state docu ments as objects and producers of wealth, but rarely as agents with everyday lives beyond those as taxpayers. These state-generated sources present only one view of the past. Also, the sheer quantity of central Ottoman archive documents often entrapped scholars, causing them to ignore relevant evidence located else where, for example, in provincial locations, Europe, and the United States. Of course, these are problems common to many historical fields. But the achieve ments of Alltagsgeschichte (the history of everyday life), for example, and of US and European labor history in general demonstrate that the obstacles to good history from below can be breached with considerable success. There is anoth er obstacle to Ottoman labor history writing, one shared with labor historians of Asia, Africa, and others outside of the m?tropole. Namely, the sources used are often those prepared by authors from a different cultural tradition. These Eu ropean and American authors?consular officials of the various European gov ernments as well as the Levant Company and other commercial agents?viewed the Ottoman Empire through the prism of their own, different concerns and cul ture. Thus, Ottoman historians who today are examining those from below have a double disadvantage. First, in common with very many other labor historians, they heavily depend on sources generated by a class distinct from the workers. And second, they also must utilize materials generated not only by a different class, but also of a different and sometimes hostile and condescending culture as well. The obstacles to writing good Ottoman labor history are not insurmount able, but there are obstacles perhaps less frequently encountered by most read ers of this journal. Another factor that inhibits the maturation of Ottoman labor history con cerns the nature of history writing that still prevails in most Ottoman successor states. Syrian, Rumanian, Greek, Iraqi, Bulgarian, and Egyptian historians, for This content downloaded from 132.174.251.47 on Mon, 07 Feb 2022 21:23:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Labor History and the Ottoman Empire, c. 1700-1922 99 example, have generally been too willing to simply denounce the Ottoman lega cy as degenerate, destructive, and, oddly enough, also irrelevant. Thus, at one level, the Ottoman past (and its workers) in general are not seen as worthy of examination. And, at another level, the writing of Ottoman history in these countries has repeatedly been bent to serve the agenda of the new state, which is incorrectly seen to have little, if any, legacy from the Ottoman period. While this tendency is obviously not unique to Ottoman history writing, this situation does seem somewhat worse because, until very recently, there has been little ac knowledgement that such is the case.19 With the emphasis on nation-state for mation, there has been little room for the study of workers, except those in the service of the state. Take, for example, the modern Turkish state, the nature and evolution of which powerfully has shaped the writing of Ottoman history. In the process of its formation from the 1920s to the 1950s, the emerging Turkish republic es sentially excluded popular participation. It restricted political activity to a small elite, crushed labor movements and made them illegal, and kept peasants out of the political process. Government and elite suspicion of the popular classes was exacerbated because of the new Turkey's enmity toward the adjacent So viet Union, self-proclaimed standard-bearer for the workers and peasants of the world. Worker and peasant demands and activities inside Turkey were also easily labeled as communism, and thus dismissed out of hand as dangerous and traitorous to the state. As a corollary, an effective censorship and self-censor ship regarding labor history came to prevail in Ottoman historical studies, and not only among Turkish nationals. Ottoman society and economy appeared in an odd light, discussed almost solely in reference to the state, which each docile ly served. Hence, the emphasis on guild workers that I discussed above. Just as workers in Turkey (actually) were carefully monitored and overseen, research on Ottoman workers depicted them solely as examples of elaborate govern mental control systems and little more. Thus, there has been little labor histo ry writing in Ottoman studies, even with the "old" labor history school empha sis on the shop floor, organized workers, and workers in action. An Ottomanist equivalent to Eric Hobsbawm's Workers' Worlds of Labor (New York, 1984), in my view, literally was unthinkable until very recently. Indeed, the study of workers still is a vaguely illegitimate academic enterprise among some Ot tomanists. Having belabored (!) what's wrong with Ottoman labor history, let me now examine its character and achievements over the past decades. To begin with, since the late 1960s and early 1970s, there has been a greater willingness to see workers as actors in their own right and not merely as extensions of the state. Also, the blatant stereotyping regarding the alleged ethno-religious division of labor is being discarded, although the process is halting and incomplete. Re search has shown that particular divisions of labor in one town or area are quite different in other communities, even those quite nearby. Thus, Armenians per haps dominated cotton cloth weaving in one community, while Muslim Arabs predominated in a second, and Turks together with Greeks and perhaps also Ar This content downloaded from 132.174.251.47 on Mon, 07 Feb 2022 21:23:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 100 ILWCH, 60, Fall 2001 menians controlled the same craft in a third location. And sometimes, no one group prevailed. Hence, there are divisions of labor that are particular to a place but not to the empire as a whole. Here, Kirh's analysis (below) of the importance of chain migration in determining who controlled a work site is important. In ad dition, Ottoman historians have been examining a number of other important issues including: the class struggle and formation of the working class; the na ture of the guilds; international competition and the transformation of Ottoman labor; the importance of unorganized labor; and the importance of women.20 Some encyclopedic works in Turkish first focused on the search for the working class, an important sub-theme of Ottoman labor history and a familiar one to readers of this journal. This search has several manifestations, including the focus upon labor that, late in the Ottoman period, organized into unions and syndicates, and labor in action?familiar themes among earlier generations of US labor historians. Appearing at a time (the 1960s) when labor sympathies of ten were personally dangerous to hold in Turkey, the first works chronicled and described the labor strikes that occurred between c. 1860 and 1914. A break through study appeared in 1970 detailing the formation of workers' and leftist organizations in the late Ottoman, early republican Turkish eras. In a similar vein, a mid-1980s study traced the story of Egyptian factory workers' (ultimate ly unsuccessful) struggle against the state and capital. These and other works, in cluding a more thorough analysis of late nineteenth-century Ottoman labor un rest that appeared in the early 1990s, share several concerns.21 Theirs was an emancipatory narrative, with a viewpoint from the Left of labor as a liberating, progressive movement. This group focused on workers in action, often engaged in strikes, and, as a corollary, on those organizing or about to form labor unions or syndicates. And, also as a corollary, some writers were concerned about the success or failure of the workers in the political arena, in their ability to wrest political power from the state nomenclatura. On the one hand, that search for an Ottoman working class likely was chimerical. After all, the so-called "work ing class" has existed for only a brief period in world history, and many labor his torians now agree that labor does not necessarily evolve naturally toward a form of self-conscious, organized, big factory work. Rather, such workers globally are the exception. Indeed, as many of the above works have demonstrated (contrary to their explicit intent), organized Ottoman factory workers seeking political power have been the exception, and formed the minority of the actual Ottoman work force. Factory workers of every sort formed a tiny fraction of the non-agri cultural work force. The "real story" where most of the actors are present lies elsewhere in the period of concern here (since 1700); it often involves unorga nized workers in small-scale work sites. On the other hand, we should not aban don the study of the Left and of workers in action, since those activities have shaped late Ottoman history. They do constitute vibrant examples of workers as agents of change, as participants in struggles that helped shape both the charac ter of the labor force and the Ottoman state itself. Since 1970, the reality of guilds has become somewhat more nuanced and complex, but there are still enormous uncertainties. Case studies from differ This content downloaded from 132.174.251.47 on Mon, 07 Feb 2022 21:23:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Labor History and the Ottoman Empire, c. 1700-1922 ent regions have demonstrated that guilds were often religiously mixed organi zations, consisting of varying mixes of Christians, Muslims, and Jews. Indeed such heterogeneity appears commonly and can no longer be seen as odd or un usual. Also, the Ottoman terms translated as guild?such as lonca, esnaf and ta'ife? have come under greater scrutiny. In the nineteenth century, esnaf'was perhaps the most commonly employed term.22 Use of the term esnaf as a short hand reference for nineteenth-century guilds has become very problematic since research has revealed important differences in its meaning over time and place. Sometimes being in an esnaf meant membership in a hierarchical orga nization that had officers, fixed prices, and maintained a community chest that offered assistance to sick members and widows. Such esnafs sometimes were sub-divided by city district. But even in such cases, it is unlikely that guilds ful ly enveloped the labor force of the particular community. Guilds were very im portant in some, but not all, Ottoman towns and cities of significant size. The presence of tightly organized guilds in Istanbul, the imperial capital, is now be ing acknowledged as somewhat idiosyncratic and atypical, a response to the special needs of this huge and politically sensitive center.23 Other esnafs have been shown not to possess these organizational and functional features. In some locations (including the Istanbul neighborhoods studied by Kirh), the term es naf sometimes contained little meaning beyond a place of business or being in a particular profession, not unlike membership in a chamber of commerce. The Kirh contribution in this volume demonstrates that tightly organized guilds in the capital coexisted with esnafs that may have had no organizational structure whatsoever. Some of these existed only in the minds of state officials, as a tax collection convenience for the state. Persons recorded together in a tax register labeled the "X esnaf" might never have met, much less participated in communal actions. That is, in some cases, the term esnaf meant only to pay tax es for engaging in an economic activity. Equally, such an esnaf register might have been a roster of those possessing the legal right to carry out that craft or service. Various guilds enjoyed real political autonomy in many provincial loca tions?the Balkans (Seres), Anatolia (Bursa), and the Arab provinces (Damas cus)?and it is likely that some did in imperial Istanbul itself. Whether these different guild forms are part of an evolutionary scale or are concurrent but dif ferent forms is unclear. The latter is likely the case. At the same moment that guilds of varying forms and structures existed in numerous towns and cities, guilds apparently were absent in other urban areas with similar demographic and manufacturing profiles. Since all these cities were ruled by the Ottoman regime, such variations suggest that the local culture, not state policies, primar ily shaped labor structures.24 This issue seems important. If guilds were neither omnipresent nor homogeneous in form and if labor indeed possessed different structures and forms in the various areas, can guilds be central to our efforts to construct an "Ottoman labor history"? In the end, it is likely that the Ottoman guild system is more the illusion of historians than historical reality. We need to look to such factors as local labor traditions, market conditions, and (as the This content downloaded from 132.174.251.47 on Mon, 07 Feb 2022 21:23:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 101 102 ILWCH, 60, Fall 2001 contributions by Kirh and Chalcraft demonstrate) chain migration from the provinces. And we need to problematize still further the term esnaf. The question of guilds and their fate when confronted with competition from abroad has occupied some attention and debate, specifically, the transfor mation of Ottoman guilds with the influx of textile imports from India during the eighteenth century and the rising tide of European textiles and other goods. This debate, moreover, has been made more complex because the late eigh teenth and early nineteenth centuries were also an era of profound crisis for the Ottoman state and economy, in ways that are not always related to the issue of international competition. The original argument?that under the impact of the West both Ottoman guilds (wherever and in whatever form they existed) and manufacturing collapsed and disappeared?is being modified. During the era of internal crisis and mounting international manufacturing competition in the late eighteenth/early nineteenth centuries, guilds in several important cities be came more structured, hierarchical, and restrictive than they had been in the past.25 In Damascus, textile guilds fell into extreme internal conflict: Guild mas ters, themselves squeezed for profits, pressured their journeymen, who finally revolted and struck against their masters.26 (See also the contribution by Zarinebaf-Shahr.) The ultimate fate of guilds varied considerably. Until the end of the empire, manufacturing guilds remained important in Istanbul and nu merous towns and cities of the Anatolian, Balkan, and Arab provinces.27 For ex ample, in the latter region, transformed craft guilds at Damascus and other lo cations survived with significant memberships into the period of French and British occupation after World War One.28 Elsewhere, however, guilds and crafts declined or collapsed altogether. For example, the famed guilds of Ango ra mohair weavers in Ankara and of wool cloth makers in Sal?nica completely disappeared when confronted with west European competitors. As these destructive processes took place, other profound transformations were reconstructing the Ottoman labor force. Craft replaced guild. In addition, the manufacturing work force became decreasingly male, urban, organized, and workshop-based. Ottoman workers were increasingly female, outside of any for mal labor organization, and located in the rural countryside, in homes as well as workshops. On the one hand, labor with some or all of these features?female, unorganized, and rural?had long been present and did not appear de novo with European capital and trade in the Ottoman lands. In the sixteenth and seven teenth centuries, merchants were organizing putting-out networks that operat ed outside the jurisdiction of the guilds and of the state. During the eighteenth century, artisans fled of their own accord from one important manufacturing center (Tokat, in northern Anatolia) to smaller towns and villages to lower their production costs. In this case, the flight was sparked not by foreign competition, but the heavy and insensitive hands of Ottoman tax farming officials.29 Female workers who supplied guilds with processed materials, such as the mohair spin ners of Angora/Ankara in the eighteenth century, were a routine part of the Ot toman manufacturing scene. (See the contribution by Zarinebaf-Shahr.) However, and visibly so by the early decades of the nineteenth century, the This content downloaded from 132.174.251.47 on Mon, 07 Feb 2022 21:23:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Labor History and the Ottoman Empire, c. 1700-1922 importance of manufacturing labor that was non-guild, female, and rural accel erated dramatically. The number and significance of artisan-shopkeepers?who likely had characterized Ottoman manufacturing?declined while that of arti sans working under the control of others rose concomitantly. Take the shoe makers of imperial Istanbul, for example. The industry had nearly disappeared by c. 1850, but more than recovered in the subsequent fifty years. By then, the shoemaking guilds were largely gone. But local shoemakers had not only re gained the Istanbul market, but exported to the provinces, including Egypt.30 They now worked in decentralized workshops under a master-owner. Merchants placed orders and provided the materials. Each workshop employed five to fifty male and female workers, each engaged in a quite specific task, working for very low wages. More generally, let us take the textile sector. As elsewhere in many areas of the globe, textile production was the leading manufacturing sector, and is used here to illustrate the patterns of Ottoman manufacturing labor. By the nineteenth century, most workers spun and wove for the domestic market. (The famed Ottoman textiles had disappeared from international markets.) Two examples will suffice here. At well-watered Trabzon on the Black Sea coast, women wove silk cloth and printed head scarves for merchants, while at Alep po on the edges of the Syrian desert, girls and women worked for male master weavers. In the export industries, the patterns of female labor working for oth ers are still more clear and impressive. Two export-oriented industries, silk reel ing and carpet making, grew impressively after c. 1830. At the late Ottoman peak of the silk industry, more than 30,000 young girls and women spun silk, mainly in western Anatolia Bursa and in the Lebanon. Unusually for the Ottoman world, these silk workers labored in mechanized factories, whereas most Ot toman labor found work outside "factories." In the carpet making industry, there were 60,000 workers in all phases of the industry in 1914, including wool prepa ration, dying, spinning, and knotting (weaving). Before the vast commercial ex pansion of the industry that began in c. 1830, women and men, in homes and workshops, carried out the crucial task of knotting more or less equally. At that time, most knotters in one area might be men while women dominated nearby. But as Ottoman and foreign merchants scrambled to meet skyrocketing de mand, they recruited only women (increasingly non-Muslim) to knot the rugs. In both the domestic and export sectors, rising female labor meant cheaper la bor input and lower final costs. Thus, Ottoman textiles remained globally com petitive, but at the price of the greater exploitation of (increasingly female) labor. Thus, guilds in manufacturing declined in significance during the later Ot toman period when guild masters seem less important, while merchants became more visibly active in the control of production and labor. On the contrary, their importance in the transport sector increased both in absolute numbers and in terms of their relative importance in the organized labor force. Ottoman trans port guilds were possibly more cohesive in 1900 than they had been for centuries. Indeed, by focusing only on textiles and manufacturing, scholars risk missing a dynamic part of the Ottoman labor story. Transport workers have received some This content downloaded from 132.174.251.47 on Mon, 07 Feb 2022 21:23:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 103 104 ILWCH, 60, Fall 2001 attention in Ottoman labor history. (See the contribution in these pages by Chal craft.)31 Ottoman commerce increased some sixteen-fold in the nineteenth cen tury, offering a powerful stimulus to the growth of the transport labor force. As the nineteenth century proceeded, ambitious construction projects rendered a number of Ottoman ports?including Izmir, Alexandria, Port Said, Sal?nica, Beirut, and Izmir?accessible to the increasingly large and capacious steam ships. To these flocked thousands of men for employment in the expanding ports, as stevedores, boatmen, and (in the case of the Chalcraft article) coal heavers. At imperial Istanbul, there were patterns of transport labor migration that dat ed back centuries, bringing workers from eastern Anatolia as well as the Black Sea coast for work that lasted from a single season to many years. In this case, the transport workers lived communally in bachelor quarters, intermittently visiting their homes and families before permanently returning to the village. But in Sal?nica, also an old, well-established port city, the porters were drawn from the local population and resided in the city with their families. Beginning in 1908, the Young Turk political elites built alliances with port workers in many Ottoman cities, using them as instruments of political power and intimidation. This coalition is reminiscent of an earlier one in Ottoman history, that between the Janissaries and the urban workers.32 Railroads, for their part, came to employ several tens of thousands of work ers as (almost exclusively European) capital built a modest network in most of the empire but, in Egypt, one of exceptional density. Foreign capital in railroad construction and the technological requirements skewed formation of the labor force in ways that are familiar to labor historians in many other areas of the globe, including the United States. These foreign corporations, in recruiting white-collar employees who worked in the offices and stations, hired about equal numbers of Europeans and Ottoman Christians. In soliciting workers for em ployment on the trains, engines, and in the repair shops, they overwhelmingly hired Ottoman Muslims.33 More generally, this stratification pattern of Europeans and non-Muslims at the top of the job hierarchy and Muslims at the bottom prevailed in the European-capitalized enterprises that proliferated in the late Ottoman period. These enterprises formed the modern sector of the Ottoman economy, and in cluded steam-powered flour mills, breweries, food processing plants, textile mills, banks, railroads, steamship lines, and utility companies. Altogether, these employed well over 100,000 employees and workers?persons who were partic ipating in a labor stratification the opposite ofthat prevailing in official Ottoman circles where Muslims had dominated and non-Muslims had been in a subordi nate position. We cannot know which pattern would have prevailed in the end; Ottoman labor and Ottoman society at large were in transition from one form of hierarchy to another, but the evolution was halted by the destruction of the Ottoman Empire after World War One. Here, let me return to and amplify some points of the preceding discussion regarding the declining and rising fortunes, respectively, of guilds in the manu facturing and transport sectors. In July 1908, the "Young Turk Revolution" This content downloaded from 132.174.251.47 on Mon, 07 Feb 2022 21:23:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Labor History and the Ottoman Empire, c. 1700-1922 toppled the autocracy of the ruling sultan, promising a new era of justice and equality.34 A "strike wave"?of more than 110 recorded strikes?erupted in nu merous Ottoman cities. This strike wave indeed crystallizes the evolution of Ot toman labor to that point. As many as half of the strikes were in sectors just cre ated by foreign capital (especially railroads, the modernized ports, and in the new food processing factories). In these sectors labored both Ottoman subjects and workers (and employees) from west, central, and east Europe. These for eigners clearly helped establish unions and syndicate forms of organization that organized the strikes in these sectors. But a large number of strikes also occurred among workers such as bakers with longstanding ties to the guilds. A task for Ottoman labor historians is to identify the workplace culture that framed and mobilized, within several weeks, strikes among workers of so many different oc cupations and locations. How were the frameworks of mobilization connected to the actually remaining structures, or vestiges or memories of structures, of the Ottoman guilds? And did union and syndicate forms of organization intersect with the existing Ottoman forms? The evolutionary path such hybrid organiza tions may have taken is difficult to see because the Ottoman state stepped in to co-opt or crush the strikers and passed legislation restricting strikes.35 Shortly thereafter, World War One erupted and then, in 1922, the Ottoman Empire van ished. Following are three contributions to Ottoman labor history?by Chalcraft, Kirh, and Zarinebaf-Shahr. The article by Chalcraft will be seen as the most fo cused on exclusively labor history topics, while those by Kirh and Zarinebaf Shahr demonstrate that Ottoman labor history often is still enmeshed in larger issues concerning social and economic history and has not quite attained the sta tus of a separate sub-field within Ottoman history. The general applicability of these studies is uncertain since the main geographic focus of all three is Istanbul and Cairo, great capital cities of an empire and a very rich province. At the least, we can compare their findings with those of the labor history of London, Paris, St. Petersburg, Vienna, and perhaps Berlin. Chalcraft takes as his focus a group of workers created by European capi tal and action, similar to some earlier research on labor in the port works, rail roads, and other foreign corporations in the Ottoman world. Like the port work ers and stevedores of Istanbul, these coal heavers were unskilled workers in the emergent transport sector that expanded so rapidly in the later Ottoman peri od. Thus, in common with these earlier works, he reminds us that textile work ers are only part of the story of nineteenth-century labor. But he departs from these studies in an important way: For him, worker protests derive more from the ongoing political transformation of the state than emerging capitalist rela tions of production. And so, he seeks to uncouple those protests from capital ism, and instead emphasizes their connection to the state-building efforts then occurring in Egypt. For Chalcraft, labor history is not necessarily progressive. Workers can and do find themselves trapped. And yet, he shows, they adroitly maneuvered in the spaces created by the evolving state. Changes in the state trig gered transformations in the nature of workers' grievances. As the state adopt This content downloaded from 132.174.251.47 on Mon, 07 Feb 2022 21:23:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 105 106 ILWCH, 60, Fall 2001 ed a reformist, centralizing agenda, the coal heavers appealed to these same goals to obtain redress of their own grievances. Refreshingly, he is able to use the workers' own voices, as expressed in petitions to the state, in his analysis. Kirh's contribution is important for the light it sheds on the actual content of the term esnaf, on the question of what constitutes a worker, and on the sub ject of labor history. In his work, esnaf members include those who owned the means of production and employed others as well as those who did not. Some who did not own instead rented their shops from third parties and employed oth ers. Still other members, notably boatmen and porters, did not require such shop spaces, did not add value to a product, and lived solely from the labor of their bodies.36 It is likely that most of those producing goods and services in the gen eral Ottoman world fell into these categories of Kirh's esnaf. As already stated, esnaf in this sense may indicate only tax paying status. Whether or not they were members of a formal guild structure, however, is a different matter. Guilds over time probably became decreasingly common in the craft sectors and increasing ly so in transportation (where unions/syndicates/associations began to emerge). Kirh, significantly, also illustrates the crucial role of labor migration in the life of the imperial capital and as a determinant in labor patterns. Here he challenges and refutes the hoary notion of an ethnic/religious division of labor. People worked together in his Istanbul neighborhoods not because of shared religion or ethnicity, but because they came from the same village or town in the pro vinces. As he puts it, regional allegiances are central for understanding the com position of the work force at a particular work site. His analysis of the connec tion of the Janissary military corps, instigators of a host of Istanbul revolts during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, to Muslim shopkeepers similarly adds much to Ottoman labor history. Kirh's evidence that Janissaries were commonly shopkeepers overturns assumptions that they were linked only to propertyless urban workers, and forces us to reconsider the nature of their in surrections and the role of labor in Ottoman political history between 1700 and 1826, when a sultan destroyed the Janissary Corps. And finally, his discussion of gardeners reveals the importance of this group in the urban workforce and, to boot, offers a wonderful picture of the complex rural-urban life in one of the largest cities in the world at the time. Here is much grist for the comparativist's mill. Zarinebaf-Shahr's article contributes both to Ottoman women's history and labor history. It helps to normalize women as workers and ordinary, everyday participants in the economic life of the Ottoman Empire. Ottoman elite and higher-ranking women so far have received the bulk of the attention from schol ars, although the outlines of women's participation in the workforce are becom ing somewhat clearer. There is still considerable apathy or resistance to women workers' history, in part because of the nature of Ottoman history writing in gen eral and because so much energy in Ottoman labor history has been expended on the organized workforce, which (apparently) systematically excluded female workers. And so, her analysis of women workers, shopkeepers, and economic agents fills important lacunae. Her material is doubly important, for much of it This content downloaded from 132.174.251.47 on Mon, 07 Feb 2022 21:23:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Labor History and the Ottoman Empire, c. 1700-1922 107 concerns the eighteenth century, allowing us to compare earlier patterns with those of the better-known subsequent era. She vividly illustrates the fear that guildsmen held of female workers outside their organizations. More specifical ly, the complaints of journeymen against women workers may suggest the pow er of merchants or the changing role of masters in organizing production. Her revelations of the divisions between journeymen and masters within guilds dur ing the eighteenth century offer evidence that otherwise has been scarce in Ot toman labor history scholarship.37 Thus, she adds considerably not only to our picture of women workers in (textile) production, but also the mechanisms used by Ottoman manufacturers to meet domestic and international competitors. In the process, she helps us to better understand the role, importance, and activi ties of the labor force in the Ottoman economy after 1700. NOTES * My thanks to Mel Dubofsky, Tom Dublin, and the Ottoman labor history seminar at Binghamton University for their helpful comments. 1. Donald Quataert, The Ottoman Empire, 1700-1922 (Cambridge, 2000). 2. Ibid., 186-90. 3. After 1882 and until 1914, when the tie to the Ottoman Empire was severed as Britain declared a protectorate, Egypt, in most senses of the term, was a British colony. 4. Halil Inalcik with Donald Quataert, eds., An Economic and Social History of the Ot toman Empire, 1300-1914 (Cambridge, 1994). 5. Whether or not later nineteenth-century Egypt should be considered still Ottoman is a bit of a conundrum for specialists, as suggested just above. Since the career of Muhammad Ali Pash (d. 1848), Egypt in some but not all respects functioned as an independent entity. It re mained nominally under Ottoman suzerainty after the British occupation of 1882, until the British declaration of a protectorate in December 1914. In many respects, however, Egypt re mained closely tied to Istanbul and the two labor histories are often similar. The inclusion here is intended to promote closer comparisons between the researchers in the Egyptian provinces and the Ottoman Empire as a whole. 6. A notable exception, which is both richly detailed and provocatively analytic, of earli er Ottoman guild history is Eunjeong Yi, "The Istanbul Guilds in the Seventeenth Century: Leverage in Changing Times" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2000). 7. Edward Said's Orientalism (New York, 1978) was the opening salvo in the attack on such stereotypes. While orientalism has faded, no paradigm has emerged to frame discussions in Ot toman and Middle East history. 8. Notably, Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (London, 1960), and later editions. 9. A 1917 account by A. J. Sussnitzki in The Economic History of the Middle East, 1800 1914, ed. Charles Issawi (Chicago, 1966), 115. Halil Inalcik, in a number of studies dating from the early 1960s, pointed to a vital and active Muslim participation in trade and industry, and di rectly contradicted the prevailing assumptions about the division of labor. See his works cited in the bibliography of his contribution to Inalcik with Quataert, eds., An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire. 10. For a more detailed presentation and critique, see Donald Quataert, Ottoman Manu facturing in the Age of the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, 1993), 7-15. 11. Of course there are exceptions. Some writers, usually non-Ottomans, were interested in economic topics and wrote about workers. Usually, however, these characterizations were laced with the stereotypes described below. 12. H. A. R. Gibb and Harold Bowen, Islamic Society and the West, vol. 1, 2 parts (Lon don, 1950-1957). But see the fine critique of most of these points in Yi, "The Istanbul Guilds." 13. See the various works by Franz Taeschner, for example, "Futuwwa, eine gemein schaftsbildende Idee im mittelalterlichen Orient und ihre vershiedenenen Erscheinungsfor men," Schweitzerisches Archiv f?r Volkerkunde 52 (1956):122-58. Cemal Kafadar is currently This content downloaded from 132.174.251.47 on Mon, 07 Feb 2022 21:23:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 108 ILWCH, 60, Fall 2001 working on this subject of guilds and their origins; for his earlier efforts, see "Yeni?eri-Esnaf Relations: Solidarity and Conflict" (M.A. thesis, McGill University, 1981). 14. For example, see the studies by Gabriel Baer, "The Administrative, Economic and So cial Functions of Turkish Guilds," International Journal of Middle East Studies 1 (1970):28-50; and Gibb and Bowen, Islamic Society and the West. For an argument that guilds are a product of Middle Eastern social needs rather than state requirements, see Bernard Lewis, "The Islamic Guilds," Economic History Review 8 (1937-38):20-37. 15. There is a considerable body of literature in Turkish. In English, see Mehmet Gen?, "Ottoman Industry in the Eighteenth Century: General Framework, Characteristics, and Main Trends," in Manufacturing in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey, 1500-1950, ed. Donald Quataert (Albany, 1994), 59-86. 16. For example, see S. J. Shaw and Ezel Kural Shaw, A History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1976-1978). 17. See the introductions in Zachary Lockman, ed., Workers and Working Classes in the Middle East (Albany, 1994); Ellis Jay Goldberg, ed., The Social History of Labor in the Middle East (Boulder, CO, 1996); and Donald Quataert, ed., Workers, Peasants and Economic Change (Istanbul, 1993). 18. See Inalcik with Quataert, eds., An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Em pire for a summary of economic historiography. Ottoman women's history is still in its infancy; see Madeline Zilfi, ed., Women in the Ottoman Empire: Middle Eastern Women in the Early Modern Era (Leiden, 1997). 19. An interesting effort to place history writing in Turkey in its historical context is Halil Berktay, "The Search for the Peasant in Western and Turkish History/Historiography," in Halil Berktay and Suraiya Faroqhi, eds., "New Approaches to State and Peasant in Ottoman Histo ry," The Journal of Peasant Studies 18 (1991):110-84, esp. 137ff. Also see Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York, 1997). 20. A host of important topics remain unaddressed or have been scarcely touched upon, including, for example, peddlers. 21. Oya Sencer, T?rkiye'de is?isinifi (Istanbul, 1969); Mete Tuncay, T?rkiye'desolakimlar (Istanbul, 1967), and various later editions; Joel Beinin and Zachary Lockman, Workers on the Nile (Princeton, 1987); Yavuz Selim Karakisla, "The 1908 Strike Wave in the Ottoman Empire," Turkish Studies Association Bulletin 16 (1992): 153-77. See also the sources cited by Chalcraft in his article in this volume of ILWCH. 22. See Donald Quataert, "Ottoman Workers and the State, 1826-1914," in Workers and Working Classes in the Middle East, ed. Lockman, 23-7. Earlier, ta'ife may have been more com monly employed. See Yi, "The Istanbul Guilds." Labor historians need to examine the relative frequency of the various terms over time and whether or not changing usage reflects the mount ing presence or absence of organized, hierarchical structures. If esnaf indeed is the more com mon late Ottoman term, is this merely a vocabulary change, or does it reflect more profound alterations in the nature of the Ottoman work force? 23. Even there tight state control cannot be assumed. For autonomous guild actions in seventeenth-century Istanbul, see Yi, "The Istanbul Guilds." 24. Here I can list only a few of the works. Suraiya Faroqhi has been notable for her ear ly efforts at history from below, both that of women and of workers. For more recent contri butions, see her "The Fieldglass and the Magnifying Lens: Studies of Ottoman Crafts and Craftsmen," Journal of European Economic History 20 (1991):29-57; and also Faroqhi, "Eigh teenth Century Ottoman Craftsmen: Probl?matiques and Developing Sources" (unpublished paper, c. 1998). Also, see two collections important for their introductions and contributions: Lockman, ed., Workers and Working Classes in the Middle East; and Goldberg, ed., The Social History of Labor in the Middle East. Also, Onur Yildirim, "Craft Guilds in the Ottoman Em pire (c. 1650-1826)" (unpublished research paper, Binghamton University, 1990), 13. 25. Faroqhi, "Eighteenth Century Ottoman Craftsmen." In addition, she argues that these guilds concentrated labor in relatively large workshops. 26. Sherry Vatter, "Militant Textile Weavers in Damascus: Waged Artisans and the Ot toman Labor Movements, 1850-1914," in Workers and the Working Class in the Ottoman Em pire and Turkey, 1839-1950, ed. Donald Quataert and Erik J. Z?rcher ("London, 1995), 35-57. 27. Sherry Vatter, "Journeymen Textile Weavers in Nineteenth-Century Damascus: A Collective Biography," in Struggle and Survival in the Modern Middle East, ed. Edmund Burke III (Berkeley, 1993), 75-90, and sources therein. 28. This is one of the major conclusions of Quataert, ed., Workers, Peasants and Econom This content downloaded from 132.174.251.47 on Mon, 07 Feb 2022 21:23:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Labor History and the Ottoman Empire, c. 1700-1922 109 ic Change. For a more recent and comprehensive treatment of the shift from guild to craft, see John Chalcraft, "Crafts and Guilds in Egypt, 1863-1914" (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 2001). 29. Yiiksel Duman, "Notables, Textiles and Copper in Ottoman Tokat" (Ph.D. diss., State University of New York, Binghamton, 1998). 30. The Istanbul case is from Quataert, ed., Workers, Peasants and Economic Change. Chalcraft, "Crafts and Guilds in Egypt," tells a very similar story of the Cairo shoemakers. 31. Quataert, ed., Manufacturing in the Ottoman Empire, focuses nearly solely on textiles. For transport workers, see Donald Quataert, "Labor Policies and Politics in the Ottoman Em pire: Porters and the Sublime Porte, 1826-1896," in Humanist and Scholar: Essays in Honor of Andreas Tietze, ed. Heath Lowry and Donald Quataert (Istanbul-Strasbourg, 1993), 59-69; and Donald Quataert, Social Disintegration and Popular Resistance in the Ottoman Empire (New York, 1983). And also see Chalcraft, "Crafts and Guilds in Egypt." 32. For example, Robert Olson, "The Esnaf and the Patrona Halil Rebellion of 1730: A Realignment in Ottoman Politics?" Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 17 (1974):329-44. 33. Quataert contribution in Inalcik with Quataert, eds., An Economic and Social Histo ry of the Ottoman Empire. Also, this hiring pattern was replicated in the hiring patterns of the 6,000-person work force employed by the Ottoman Public Debt Administration, created to oversee Ottoman state repayment of foreign loans after 1881. 34. The deteriorating economic conditions in which the revolution occurred have been ig nored nearly totally and scholars have emphasized only its overtly political origins. See Don ald Quataert, "The Economic Climate of the 'Young Turk Revolution' of 1908," Journal of Modern History 51 (1979): D1147-D1161. This article is reprinted in Quataert, ed., Workers, Peasants and Economic Change, 49-62, and sources therein. 35. Yavuz Selim Karakisla, "The Strike Wave," 153-77, and also his "The Emergence of the Ottoman Industrial Working Class,1839-1923," in Workers and the Working Class in the Ot toman Empire and Turkey, ed. Quataert and Z?rcher, 19-34. 36. Well worth further study is the question of ownership of the boats and relations be tween the boat owners and boatmen if these were not the same. On the related issue of migra tory labor, see, Christopher Clay, "Labour Migration and Economic Conditions in Nineteenth Century Anatolia," Middle Eastern Studies 34 (1998):4,1-32. 37. See also Yi, "The Istanbul Guilds." See also Vatter, "Journeymen Textile Weavers"; and Vatter, "Militant Textile Weavers," which offer a rich analysis of such conflicts during the nineteenth century. This content downloaded from 132.174.251.47 on Mon, 07 Feb 2022 21:23:18 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 
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