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Chapter One INTRODUCTION: THE SUBLIME PORTE AND THE SCRIBAL SERVICE AS ELEMENTS OF STATE AND SOCIETY Miilk durmaz eger olmazsa rical LaZlm amma ki ricale emval The state cannot stand without statesmen But the statesmen must have wealth Nabi, Hayriye 1 •', V I . • .r ..... t · .. In the administrative tradition of the Islamic world, the imperial institutions of the Ottoman Empire hold a place of special importance . The overall continuity of that tradition means that the Ottoman imperial system was the product of a development that had been in progress ever since the rise of Islamic civilization and that drew in notable respects on pre-Islamic roots, as well. The tradition had perhaps passed its classic phase before the Ottoman state emerged, and the Ottomans at their height were not the only contemporary power to preserve it. But preserve it they did, making contributions of sometimes unexcelled importance to its further elaboration. In later centuries, when the two other great empires of the late traditional Islamic world, those of the Safavids in Iran and the Mughals in India, were collapsing, the Ottoman Empire survived to become the longest-lived of the three. Despite the increasingly manifest obsolescence of the imperial form of political organization, the Ottoman Empire also became the only one of those states to continue the evolution of the administrative tradition without break into the era of modernization . The radical reforms through which the Ottomans of the nineteenth century attempted to come to grips with the consequences of their decline and with the altered circumstances of the world they lived in thus form a bridge, unique in its kind, 3 4 One. Introduction over which the millennial development of the Islamic administrative tradition continued into the twentieth century. The final collapse of the state, by sweeping away what was left of the antiquated superstructure of multinational empire, has not so much denied as reaffirmed and brought more clearly into view the significance of the efforts of nineteenth-century statesmen to reform and revitalize their tradition. This point is clearest in the history of the Turkish Republic, for decades the most dynamic and viable of the modernizing Islamic polities of the Middle East. Despite the traumas attendant on imperial collapse , however, benefits of the late Ottoman reforms also scattered over what are now the other successor states, both Middle Eastern and Balkan. Examples range from early nationalist leaders trained in the higher schools of Istanbul2 to laws and law codes that were first promulgated by Ottoman reformers and have in some cases remained in force in the other successor states after being superseded in the Turkish Republic.3 Even in Iran, the one major Middle Eastern state never integrated into the Ottoman imperium, efforts at reform, both under the Qajars and under Reza Shah, displayed the marked influence of Ottoman and later republican Turkish example. The Ottoman reforms of the nineteenth century are thus of pivotal importance not only for the history of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic, but also for the entire history of the administrative tradition of the Islamic world. These reforms are also significant in a larger sense, as well. If we except Russia, whose traditional culture had much in common with that of the West, the Ottomans come to the fore as the first modernizing society of the non-Western world and one of the few such societies to retain any degree of independence during the nineteenthcentury age of imperialism. In view of the Ottomans' geographic position and the level of their interaction in all periods of their history with Europeans, theirs, too, is an exceptional situation. But their experiences during a century and a third of administrative reform must have implications for the study of the efforts of other peoples, the world over, who have launched comparable efforts only more recently-at times under even less promising circumstances, and often without any resource equal to the indigenous tradition that the Ottomans had behind them. Full appreciation of the Ottoman administrative reforms thus depends on examining them in a deep chronological perspective Introduction 5 and comparing them with the experiences of other societies. Yet the scale of the Ottoman administrative system and the limited amount of scholarly research thus far devoted to it stand in the way of full realization of any such goal in a single work. The study that follows will therefore take as its goal the explanation and analysis of one quintessentially important phase of these reforms : the development of the...

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