Bureaucratic Reform in the Ottoman Empire: The Sublime Porte, 1789-1922

SIX: RESTORING POLITICAL BALANCE: THE FIRST CONSTITUTIONAL PERIOD AND RETURN TO SULTANIC DOMINANCE

Chapter Six RESTORING POLITICAL BALANCE: THE FIRST CONSTITUTIONAL PERIOD AND RETURN TO SULTANIC DOMINANCE Sadaretin inhilali, Ali Pa§a'nln irtihali iledir. The death of Ali Pa§a is the disintegration of the grand vezirate. Yusuf Kamil Pa§a, on learning of Ali Pa§a's death! Her memuriyetin vazaifi nizam-l mahsus ile tayin olunacaglndan her memur kendi vazifesi dairesinde mes'uldiir. Inasmuch as the duties of every official post will be determined by special regulation, every official is responsible within the limits of his duty. Constitution of 1876, Article 402 Milleti ikna ve miiessesat-l ahrarane ihdas edilerek Islahat icraslna <;ah§an pederilll Abd iil-Mecid'in isrine iktifa etmek istemekle meger yanllml§ imi§im. Ba'dema ceddim Sultan Mahmud'un isrini takib edecegim. Onun gibi ben de §imdi anhyorum ki Cenab-l Hakk'ln rlluhafazaslnl bana tevdi ettigi akvarlll kuvvetten ba§ka hi<;bir §eyle yiiriitrnek kabil 01mlyacak . I made a mistake in wishing to content Illyself with the example of my father, Abd iil-Mecid, who sought to carry out reforms by persuading the people and creating liberal institutions. From now on, I shall follow the example of my grandfather, Sultan Mahmud. Like hilll, I now understand that it is not possible to ITIOVe the peoples whom God has placed under IllY protection by any means other than force. Abd iiI-Hamid to a delegation of Deputies,just prior to proroguing the Ottoman Parliament, 18783 •" V I . • V" .V' l • .. 22I 222 Six. Restoring Political Balance The death of Ali Pa~a in 1871 marked not only a shift in th~ locus of power, and thus the beginning of a new political period, but also the first of a series of unsettling events that within a few years brought the empire to a state of danger and uncertainty even worse than the one in which the Tanzimat had opened almost forty years earlier. Ali's disappearance contributed to this destabilization by making it easier for the erratic and unbalanced sultan, Abd iil-Aziz, and his favorites to reassert their influence . What this reassertion could mean became apparent rather quickly with the two grand vezirates of Mahmud Nedim Pa~a (1871-1872, 1875-1876). A sometime protege of Mustafa Re§id Pa§a, but usually excluded from important position-and wisely so-during the Tanzimat, Mahmud Nedim now had his day. Having won the favor of the sultan, he used his power to break up the bureaucratic system of the Tanzimat by reorganizing key institutions and keeping personnel turnover in high office at such a high rate that the bureaucracy became paralyzed.4 Intellectual ferment and a variety of crises arising outside the irnperial "center" compounded the resulting confusion. Not only was there mounting effervescence surrounding the Young Ottoman movement, but more conservative kinds of opinion, including an Islamicist current opposed to the cosmopolitan Ottomanism of the Tanzimat and a pan-Islamist strain, also made themselves felt with increasing force. Underlying these developments was a serious deterioration of the economic situation . Agricultural crisis reached famine proportions in Anatolia and other parts of the empire in 1873-1875, while the government of Mahmud Nedim Pa~a found itself forced in 1875 to announce its inability to keep up the service of the immense foreign debt that had by then accumulated. The outbreak in the same year of a peasant revolt in Herzegovina and its subsequent spread to other Balkan territories seriously aggravated the situation , raising the threat of foreign intervention and war. Within the next several years, that threat and several others materialized in fearful conjuncture. In 1876 alone, there were three different sultans. Abd iil-Aziz was deposed, committing suicide a few days thereafter. Murad V, focus of constitutionalist hopes but badly shaken by the events then occurring, soon proved mentally incompetent and was also deposed after only three months. He was succeeded on 31 August 1876 by a littleknown prince named Abd iiI-Hamid. Restoring Political Balance 223 The Balkan troubles having continued to mushroom all the while, the new sultan soon found himself entangled in a disastrous war with Russia. As a direct or indirect consequence of this, he lost what remained in the way of practical control, and sometimes of formal sovereignty as well, over a list of territories that included Bessarabia, Rumania, Serbia, Bosnia, Herzegovina , Montenegro, parts of Bulgaria and Anatolia, Cyprus, and Tunis.5 The British occupation of Egypt in 1882 further extended the list. Thanks in good measure to the economic consequences of the war with Russia, Abd iiI-Hamid also saw his government lose control of a major part of its revenues with the creation in 1881 of the international Public Debt Administration , set up to serve the interests of investors in Ottoman government securities. Never since 1839 so deeply in doubt, the survival of the empire would not again be so threatened before the Young Turk period. In the meantime, there would be some opportunity to work out the implications of two attempts, both inaugurated during the decade following the death of Ali Pa~a, to bring the civil-bureaucratic pyramid of the Tanzimat back under effective political control. Both attempts represented responses to the threats that the empire had experienced, but both were also products of the politico-bureaucratic tradition of the empire and in particular of the reforms of the preceding period. One of these attempts aimed at creating controls of a characteristically modern type; one, at controls of a basically, but no longer totally , traditionalistic character. The first attempt appears in the constitutional movement in which the Young Ottomans figured so prominently; the second, in the resurgent sultanic despotism of Abd iil-Aziz in his last years and of Abd iiI-Hamid II (18761909 ). Triumphing over the constitutionalists in the short run, Abd iiI-Hamid in particular set the tone for the decades immediately following the catastrophes of the 1870s. Even under him, however, the constitutional experiment and the regulatory developments that lay behind it were never totally forgotten. In the present chapter, we shall first characterize these two attempts at the restoration of political balance. Placing particular emphasis on their significance for the evolution of the bureaucracy , we shall devote special attention to the Hamidian system, since it produced the greater immediate effect down to 1908. We shall then analyze organizational changes at the Sublime Porte and the related regulatory issues, and thus assess the significance Six. Restoring Political Balance of this complex period for the development of the politicobureaucratic tradition. DIVERGENT TENDENCIES IN EFFORTS AT THE RESTORATION OF POLITICAL BALANCE The First Constitutional Period The constitutional movement, in a sense, marked the culmination of all that had happened in the development of the politico-bureaucratic institutions of the empire since Ottomans first began to sense the need for a general reordering of the governmental system. The reforms of the Tanzimat contributed to the demand for constitutional government not only in a general way, through the steps taken toward creation of a more rational and regulated administrative system and through the development of institutions with representative and legislative functions, but also in the sense that various of the empire's territories or populations received what were either implicitly or explicitly constitutions during that time. This was true in the tributary principalities, among which Rumania possessed what was officially designated as the Rumanian Constitution of 1866, while Tunisia was under a constitution of its own for a few years in the early 1860s. Constitution or no, four territories-Tunisia, Egypt, Serbia, and Rumania-acquired at least quasi-parliamentary bodies during the same years. Organic statutes were drawn up for the special administrative regimes created in certain provinces or districts, such as Crete and Lebanon,6 as well as for the non-Muslim communities of the empire, which thus retained distinct communal institutions even as they began to enjoy the benefits of the newly proclaimed legal equality.7 With the general reassertion of the legislative function of the state as background, the promulgation of organic statutes for parts of the imperial system naturally suggested the regulation in similar fashion of the system as a whole. All the while, the growing awareness among Ottoman intellectuals of Western political ideas, and the continued demands from Western powers for reform as the price of political support , created added pressures for movement toward a constitutional system. With the Young Ottomans, in particular, there appeared an explicitly constitutionalist movement, capable of rousing a significant degree of popular support, if not yet of Divergent Tendencies 225 creating a genuine mass base. In the light of these facts, the promulgation of the Ottoman Constitution of 1876 seemed a natural response to the crisis of the times, much as the promulgation of the Giilhane Decree of 1839 had been to the Ottoman-Egyptian conflict of that day. The parlous state of the empire and the still limited acceptance of constitutional principles nonetheless left their marks on the constitution in a variety of senses. First, it was not solely the work of the Young Ottoman intelligentsia. Limited in numbers and influence, they had to compromise with a number of other interests. Those who actually had a hand in the drafting of the final document, whether as members of the official Drafting Commissions or otherwise, included Namlk Kemal and Ziya Bey (later Pa~a) among the Young Ottomans; a variety of senior civil officials, most notably Midhat Pa~a, distinguished by his record as a reformer in local administration and his constitutionalist convictions; a few generals; and high-ranking members of the religious establishment. There were also several anti-constitutionalists , of whom some of the most influential-the future Grand Vezir "Kiic;iik" ("Little") Said Pa~a or Ahmed Cevdet Pa~a--eouldbest be described as partisans of reform and legislation under the aegis of a sultanic enlightened despotism. Finally, there was the sultan himself. Not the least fateful circumstance attendant on the preparation of the constitution was the fact that the sultan under whom the Drafting Commission was finally formed was not the reputedly liberal Murad V, but rather Abd iiI-Hamid, whose avowals of support for the constitution were no more than a ploy by which to reach the throne. In the event, the constitution also suffered in being drawn up in a hurry, the drafting being sandwiched between Abd iil-Hamid's order of 7 October 1876 for the formation of a Drafting Commission and the beginning on 23 December 1876 of the Constantinople Conference , convoked at British instance to defuse a Russian threat of unilateral intervention in the Balkan crisis. The promulgation of the constitution on the very day that the conference opened was a spectacular but futile attempt to convince the assembled delegates that the empire was capable of reforming itself without outside interference.9 Given these pressures and the general state of development of the Ottoman polity at the time, it was only natural that the constitution contain not only an element of vagueness and impreci- 226 Six. Restoring Political Balance sion, but also certain provisions that would make it possible for the determined Abd iiI-Hamid, eventually dropping his mask, to neutralize it and its partisans. In many ways, it is true, the constitution demonstrated the extent to which concepts such as equality, guaranteed individual rights, and the rule of law had become established in the thinking of Ottoman statesmen. It contained something like a Bill of Rights, a section defining the "general rights of subjects of the Ottoman State" (arts. 8-26). Succeeding sections dealt with the rights and duties of ministers of state, officials, the Parliament and its two houses, and a variety of other questions, regulating many points and, as in the case of article 40 quoted at the head of this chapter, promising that many others would be regulated subsequently. Scattered through these provisions, however, were a number of critical loopholes. The most important had to do with the prerogatives of the sultan. His sovereignty remained unrestricted and his powers only partially defined. The constitution itself became law only by his sovereign decree.1o The right to continue legislating by decree was nowhere denied him, and his freedom to veto laws passed in the Parliament, where the power to initiate bills remained essentially in the hands of his ministers, was without check. Most dangerous of all was a provision inserted into article 113 at Abd iil-Hamid's personal insistence. This allowed the sultan, on the basis of information furnished by the police, to exile anyone on grounds of danger to the security of the empire .11 Failing to restrict the sovereignty of the sultan, the constitution fell short of transforming the structural feature of the Ottoman polity that had been the fatal flaw in the system of the Tanzimat statesmen. The constitution did mark a new stage in the drive to create a rational-legal order. The Parliament also displayed a level of independence, capability, and procedural orderliness that astounded contemporary observers and subsequent historians-perhaps unduly, given the prominence among the deputies of the same sort of notables who had dominated the local assemblies created during the Tanzimat and were thus men of some political experience and awareness.12 But the cards were stacked against the deputies and constitutionalists . Having used article 113 to get rid of Midhat Pa~a as early as February 1877, Abd iiI-Hamid exercised his right to dissolve the Chamber a year later without setting a date for new Divergent Tendencies elections, which article 7 of the constitution called for in such cases. The constitution per se was never revoked, and the Senate continued to exist in a vestigial way; but what was to be remembered as the First Constitutional Period (ilk Me$rutiyet) was over. Reassertion of Sultanic Dominance: The Palace System of Abd ill-Hamid What took its place, though adumbrated in the last years of Abd iil-Aziz, was a system of Abd iil-Hamid's own creation. On a certain level, this system displayed a strong affinity with the constitutional regime, and thus with the reformist legacy. Particularly in his earlier years, Abd iiI-Hamid was an avid reformer and legislator, intent in principle on improving the quality of administration. For example, in his Speech from the Throne at the opening of the first session of the Parliament, he identified an impressive series of issues on which bills were then being drafted in the Council of State for submission to the deputies. These included the internal regulations of the Houses of Parliament ; the electoral law; a general regulation for the administration of provinces and communes (nahiye); a law on municipal organization; bills on civil court procedure, the organization of the courts, and procedures for the promotion and retirement of judges; and a bill on the duties and retirement rights of officials in general (umum memurin).13 In this as in other periods, it is not usually possible to tell exactly where the initiative for such measures came from. Many of them are attributed, in one source or another, not to Abd iiI-Hamid but to such of his advisors as Kiic;iik Said Pa§a or Ahmed Cevdet Pa§a.14 It is nonetheless clear that Abd iiI-Hamid took close interest, and in some cases actually did take the initiative , in policy matters of this kind. Again to cite the Speech from the Throne at the opening of the Parliament, he not only spoke repeatedly of changes in procedures for the selection of officials, but also announced that he intended to use the resources of the Privy Purse (Hazine-i Hassa) to found a school for training officials who would be drawn from all classes of the population and promoted on the basis of merit. The immediate sequel to this pronouncement appears not to have been the founding of a new school, but rather the expansion of an existing one, namely, the School of Civil Administration (Miilkiye Mektebi, 1859), whose 228 Six. Restoring Political Balance growth in size and importance began at this tillIe and on the Sultan 's initiative.15 When we compare the short life and limited accomplishments of the Parliament16 with the volume of legislation ultimately produced during the Hamidian years, we have a measure of the commitment of Abd iiI-Hamid and those who worked under him to further elaboration of a rational-legal framework for the imperial system. In particular, the sultan's prompt action in the case of the School of Civil Administration, and the fact that he subsequently promulgated laws on most of the subjects mentioned in the Speech from the Throne, were clear indications that a new period in the regularization of administration was beginning . In the promised steps toward more precise regulation of the conditions of official service, indeed, the redefinition of the collective organizational aspect of tne various branches of the bure~ucracy again began to receive the kind of attention so conspicuously missing since the death of Mahmud II. The creation of the legislative outlines of something like a civil bureaucracy or civil service, in the sense that those terms were then beginning to acquire in the most up-to-date Western states, was to be a prominent feature of Abd iil-Hamid's efforts to bring the civil-bureaucratic pyramid back under effective political control. Full appreciation of Abd iil-Hamid's impact on the bureaucracy requires recognition of this fact. This, however, was only one aspect of a reign marked by a disconsonance of practice and principle quite as serious as that noted during the Tanzimat. If the Sublime Porte then formed the central element of a politico-bureaucratic machine in which processes of rationalization and systematization were used to extend the power of an unregulated oligarchy, under Abd iiI-Hamid the entire Porte and civil bureaucracy were subsumed into a similar but larger mechanism, centered in the palace. In this mechanism, the same kinds of processes were again used in much the same way; but since even the most important of the civil officials were now no more than subordinate members of the system, they felt the impact of this regulatory activity in a way that their predecessors had not. The spirit that dominated the legislative activity of this period was no more in harmony with any Weberian ideal of rational-legalism than was that of the leading figures of the Tanzimat . Indeed, it was ultimately a great deal less so. While Abd iil- Divergent Tendencies Hamid was not always as violent as we might infer from some of his statements and actions, he was a strange, complex, and psychologically unsettled man. That he was intelligent, willful, and industrious enough to do as he promised in following the example of Mahmud II is clear. The methodical way he followed government business, his interest in legislation and in plans of reform , and his political survival all reflect this fact. Yet, thanks in part to the unwholesome palace environment in which he was reared, and in part also to the circumstances surrounding his accession , he was distinctly paranoid. Reportedly afraid to handle any documents that had not been specially "disinfected," to drink any coffee or smoke any cigarettes not specially prepared before his eyes by servants who did nothing else, or to eat any food but that prepared in a special kitchen that served him alone, Abd iiI-Hamid used the tremendous powers that remained in his hands to protect himself from the objects of his fears. As a result, while major steps were taken during this period toward the creation of the outward forms of a rational-legal order, a quality of the mimetic and insubstantial continued to hang about these measures. As far as Abd iiI-Hamid was concerned , indeed, what mattered most was not obedience to the law but obedience to a sovereign will superior to the law.17 A general description of the political system that Abd iilHamid built up to assert his personal dominance would go far beyond the bounds of this study; but it is indispensable to say something about the form that the palace service assumed in this period and about relations between it and its imperial chief, on the one hand, and the civil bureaucracy of the Porte, on the other. If Abd iiI-Hamid stood in personal control of this system, YIIdlZ Palace formed its center in a larger sense. This palace was not new, but no earlier sultan had used it as his principal residence . The ultimate form of the various compounds and buildings at YlldlZ thus bore Abd iil-Hamid's own stamp. Halid Ziya U§akhgil has left an unforgettable, and perhaps overly negative, picture of what Ytldlz was like. He describes the walls-so high that cats could not climb over them, he says-that separated the private part of the palace from the part that dealt with the outside world. An atmosphere of absolute secrecy surrounded all that happened in the former. The part of the establishment that outsiders could visit consisted of a series of nondescript build- 23° Six. Restoring Politual Balance ings, among which considerable experience was required to know one's ,vay_ In this part of the palace, the most important locale was for a long time the office of the marshal of the Mabeyn (Mabeyn mii~iri), chief of the palace service. Cazi Osman' Pa§a, hero of the Battle of Plevna, held this post until his death in 1897, following which the position remained unfilled. The next most important component of the palace service after the marshal, and the real nerve center of that service after Osman Pa§a's death, was what U§akhgil calls the "big Mabeyn." As opposed to the more traditional "little Mabeyn," consisting of the personal servants of the sultan, this was the palace secretariat. Charged with the transmission of communications to and from the sultan, this soon became the most important bureaucratic agency of the Hamidian system, the senior secretaries being among the most powerful officials and among the few with direct access to the sultan. U§akhgil depicts the offices of the "big Mabeyn" in ludicrous terms. They were furnished with a miscellany of odd pieces from the private apartments, and permeated by the odors emanating from the dinner trays always waiting in some corner to be carried away and from the coffee-making continuously in progress among the servants in the basement. Such was the setting in which Ottoman officials and foreign dignitaries alike formed their impressions of ytldlz Palace as they waited endlessly to see the sultan's secretaries.18 It was at YlldlZ that the palace service reached the high point of its historic development. By 1908, the listing in the government yearbook of its more important members ran to almost forty pages. The listings include more than a score of palace secretaries (Mabeyn klitibi), ten or so chamberlains (kurena), the traditional personal servants of the sultan, enough military aidesde -camp (yaver) to fill sixteen pages, and a Privy Treasury (Hazine-i Hassa) with an organization more complex than those of many ministries.19 By one contemporary estimate, the palace organization included at least 12,000 people, not to mention 15,000 troops stationed in the vicinity for security.20 --rhe policy for which Abd iiI-Hamid sought to use this organization-a policy of which several sources name Kii<;iik Said Pa§a as originator and ultimately victim-was one of centralization , carried progressively to the point of "complete stultification of the Sublime Porte and ... concentration of the en- Divergent Tendencies 23 1 tire work of the Administration in his [Abd iil-Hamid's] own hands."21 Such was the degree of this centralization, in fact, that ambassadors, provincial governors, and military commanders22 were ultimately corresponding as much with the palace secretariat as with the ministries to which they were nominally attached . Where the conduct of foreign relations was concerned, said the sultan, the Ottoman foreign minister in Istanbul and the diplomats stationed abroad were of slight importance, as he himself, guided by "fixed principles," would conduct the foreign relations of the empire in direct dealings with the foreign envoys accredited to his court.23 It did not even matter who was the grand vezir, since, in the sultan's opinion, he was the real grand vezir. Abd iiI-Hamid once also described the Mabeyn and the Porte as operating like two separate states.24 It is not hard to tell which was the more powerful. In such a system, the character of those close to the throne was of critical importance, especially in the later years, when the sultan no longer ventured outside the palace walls more than a few times a year.25 At times, there were among the advisers of Abd iiI-Hamid men of the ability and probity of Kii~iik Said or Ahmed Cevdet Pa~a, or others of the tact and efficiency attributed to Tahsin Pa~a, first secretary of the Mabeyn from 1894 to 1908.26 The contrary was, however, more often the case, and a few examples will show how much what one ambassador called "the Palace ring"27 ultimately did to discredit both the sultan and his system. The second secretary in the Mabeyn during the later years of the reign was a Syrian known as "Arab" Izzet or izzet Holo Pa~a, who made himself so widely hated that he had to flee for his life at the outbreak of the Revolution of 1908. Once described as "the avatar of the 'Hamidian system,'" he owed his rise to a combination of corruption and cleverness. Repeatedly out of favor, he always found his way back. His greatest inspiration was reportedly the Hijaz Railway,28 a project that combined spiritual with strategic utility in a way that Abd iiI-Hamid found irresistible . Not all "palace creatures" were so clever, and the misdeeds of several caught up with them in spectacular ways even before 1908. One notable case centered on the Bedir Han family, onetime Kurdish chieftains whom a succession of sultans had attempted to integrate into Ottoman officialdom. In 1906, a dis- 23 2 Six. Restoring Political Balance agreement arose between the prefect of Istanbul, Rldvan Pa~a, himself a palace protege, and two members of this family: Abd iil-Rezzak Bey, then on the staff of the chef de protocole of the palace, and his uncle, Ali Samil Pa~a, commander of the Selimiye garrison at Uskiidar. Before the matter was settled, two shootouts had occurred in Istanbul, Rldvan Pa~a being killed in the second. In response to the pleas of his ministers for legal action, the sultan simply exiled the entire Bedir Han family without following prescribed judicial processes at all.29 Even worse were the incidents that culminated in the fall of Fehim Pa~a, one of Abd iil-Hamid's aides-de-camp and the chief of the secret police of the palace. Grandson of Abd iil-Hamid's former wet nurse and son of ismet Bey, who was a "milk brother" and thus particular intimate of the sultan, Fehim commended himself most of all for what one observer called "hereditary loyalty." This ascribed quality enabled Fehim, a pudgy, baby-faced psychopath,30 to rise rapidly to the rank of general of division ([erik) with special responsibility for maintaining the personal security of the sultan. Fehim placed a broad interpretation on this mission. Recruiting a "black band" of "agents" from the Istanbul underworld and turning his house into a prison where male "offenders" were tortured and females, as likely as not, were subjected to other abuses, Fehim instituted a system of terror and protection rackets. Borrowing a phrase from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Baron Iviarschall, the German ambassador, called Fehim the "Napoleon of Crime." Fehim's greatest mistake was in bringing himself to the attention of Baron Marschall. One incident, known as l'Affaire Marguerite , had to do with a beautiful circus performer whom Fehim "married," and who was a German subject. A subsequent case arose over whether 10,000 railroad ties belonged to a German merchant who had contracted for them, or to Fehim. Baron Marschall decided to make an issue of the latter question, and confronting the sultan in special audience, extracted the promise of an investigation. This resulted in an outpouring of evidence from government agencies that had been powerless to do anything up to that point, the exile of Fehim, and the dispersion of the "black band." One of the most fearful linkages in the palace system was thus broken.31 Among a number of disturbances that troubled the empire in 19°6-19°7,32 this was one more warning of the upheaval that was about to destroy the Hamidian regime. Divergent Tendencies 233 The enlarged palace organization at ytldlZ, dominated in principle by the sultan, but in fact to a great degree by the "palace ring," was thus the core of the Hamidian machine. In addition, there were a number of mechanisms that served to buttress the sultan's position and extend his control over Ottoman society in general, and over the bureaucracy in particular. As for mechanisms to control society in general, we can do no more here than allude to some of the more obvious. Clearly included among these was the regulatory activity that assorted so strangely with the real spirit of the system but was nonetheless useful as a means of implementing further reforms and tightening the sultan's grip. In addition, there was a strong reemphasis on the values basic to the legitimation of the sultan's position. With inherited claims to the sultanate and caliphate, Abd iilHamid was in a position to claim legitimacy for himself in a way impossible for the Tanzimat oligarchs. He did so very vigorously , but not simply in traditionalistic fashion. Rather, as the mounting volume of innovative legislation and the studied neglect of the official religious establishment indicate, his was a new use of the imperial tradition. In particular, the sultan's exploitation of the pan-Islamist theme was an attempt to appeal in new ways to Muslims everywhere, including non-Ottomans and even the heterodox.33 There is considerable evidence that this appeal was successful to some degree; but for those who did not respond to it, Abd iiI-Hamid had means of coercion at his disposal. The regular military establishment figures less in this respect than might be expected. So great were the sultan's fears of a strong military force that, with the chief exception of the units assigned to the palace, he inhibited most efforts at military improvement.34 Abd iiI-Hamid did, however, institute rigorous controls in the field of communications. The extension during his reign of railroad and telegraph lines, the former of obvious strategic value and the latter of comparable utility for the rapid transmission of orders and intelligence,35 was a notable feature of his efforts in this field. Also among the control mechanisms of the period was a rigorous system of press censorship, drawing for its implementation on a number of government agencies, and a system of spies and informers of which Fehim's band was only part. The reports of these spies, known asjurnal (from the Frenchjournal), occupied a great deal of the sultan's attention and, despite the manifest absurdity of many of them, greatly compounded his 234 Six. Restoring Political Balance anxieties. After the 1908 Revolution, "cartloads" ofjurnals were found at ytldlZ Palace, representing the work of a thousand informants or more, and ranging in subject as far afield as the alleged amours of a British ambassador.36 In many ways, then, the Hamidian system was a strange hybrid of the traditional and modern. It represents the most highly elaborated expression in Ottoman history of Eisenstadt's "splitup modernization" and thus also the clearest indication of the extent to which the patrimonial tradition could survive into the era of modernization and assume new forms. Still wedded, in its fundamental principles and its assumptions about the political process, to traditional concepts, the Hamidian neopatrimonialism was startlingly close in some of its methods to the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. The way in which Abd iiI-Hamid sought to maintain his control over the bureaucracy provides added illustrations of this point. To maintain this control, Abd iiI-Hamid drew on the mechanisms discussed above and others as well. Here again, regulatory processes were of particular importance and will require considerable attention in this chapter. To avoid mistaking their role in the Hamidian system, however, it is essential to recognize how the neopatrimonialism of the period affected the bureaucracy in other ways. The most fundamental point here seems to be that Abd iiI-Hamid was trying to seize control of the processes of social and political mobilization already established in the development of the bureaucratic pyramid and use them to maintain or restore the correspondence between polity and servile bureaucracy characteristic of the traditional state, thus eliminating any form of political activity not directly under his control. The point is nowhere stated in so many words; yet the evidence that this was Abd iil-Hamid's chief goal in the handling of his bureaucracy is voluminous. For example, his approach to patronage and the distribution of honors clearly supports this interpretation . Significantly, the official personnel records accumulated during his reign-these being one of the modernistic controls then instituted-provide the basis for our estimate that 50,000 to 100,000 men held civil-bureaucratic positions, at least nominally, during the years 1876-1908. But that was clearly far more officials than the empire could put to productive use. By the late 1880s, for example, the Foreign Ministry alone was said to have 467 officials, counting unpaid apprentice clerks in the Divergent Tendencies 235 central offices but not honorary consuls. This was several times the number then serving in the Foreign Office of the German Empire.37 While every office, as in the past, had its core of serious individuals, the rest were underemployed,38 if they showed up at all. By 1908, for example, one of the offices of the Foreign Ministry, that of Legal Counsel, had fifty nominal officials, most of whom did not even know where at the Sublime Porte the office was located ;39 and many offices of the period were too small to accommodate all their supposed employees.4o As if deliberately to break down bureaucratic discipline and morale, Abd iiI-Hamid had padded the payrolls to an unheardof extent with secret agents, sons, sons-in-law, or proteges of men of influence, and actual or potential members of the opposition , whom he sought by such means to buy off and neutralize .41 Matters reached the point where even a young man who had the traditionally optimal combination of assetsoutstanding personal ability coupled with membership in a family of good and long-standing civil-bureaucratic connectionsmight encounter severe frustrations in his career.42 Meanwhile, ranks and decorations rained in such profusion on those in favor at the palace that such honors gradually began to sink in popular esteem; and a young man who managed by some chance to land a good position was apt to find himself automatically suspect of being a palace agent.43 Having taken for himself the power concentrated at the apex of the bureaucratic pyramid during the Tanzimat, Abd iilHamid thus set about enlarging the organizations that composed that structure and filling them with those who had title to his favor or whom he wished to put in debt to himself. To maintain the subservience of all such persons was naturally one of his foremost objectives; and in addition to the means of coercion that he applied to all his subjects, there were a variety of techniques that served him specially, if not always successfully, for this end. Particularly for those who came close to him, the threat of force was never far from the surface; and the legal guarantees of the security of official tenure, granted in the 1830s, afforded little if any protection. A senior official summoned to the palace never knew when he might be sent from there straight into exile without being allowed so much as to bid his family farewell.44 No fewer than three of the men who served Abd iii-Hamid as grand 23 6 Six. Restoring Political Balance vezir became so harassed at various points in their careers that they took refuge in European embassies or consulates. These were Midhat Pa~a in 1881, Kii<;iik Said Pa~a in 1895, and Kamil Pa~a in 1907. In the case of Midhat, one of those whom Abd iiI-Hamid blamed for the deposition and death of Abd iil-Aziz, consenting to leave this refuge was an ultimately fatal mistake.45 To a degree, this kind of high-handedness extended into the lower reaches of the bureaucracy, as well. This was certainly apt to be true for anyone who had the misfortune to be the subject of an informant'sjurnal, as it was in general for all those whom the sultan regarded, for whatever reason, as his opponents. In Abd iil-Hamid's treatment of such individuals, there was, however, a recurrent inconsistency. At times, while ignoring long and faithful service, he would heap honors and high positions on men whom he identified as opponents. Others he would "appoint" to serve in "official posts," or simply to reside, in remote provinces under conditions of sometimes fatal hardship.46 In explanation of this behavior, Abd iiI-Hamid once said of a particular individual, "I know he is not a bad man, and no harm comes to me from him. But I am good to the bad ones, so as to escape their badness."47 This was obviously not always true; but it did create the possibility for men who had literary or polemical interests-and usually no other means of support-to turn this aspect of Abd iil-Hamid's behavior to account by fleeing to places beyond the sultan's control and publishing, or threatening to publish, works hostile to the regime. Abd iil-Hamid's sensitivity to the uses of the press made this into a conventional form of blackmail, with which it became one of the chief duties of the Ottoman embassies to COpe.48 Various observers have noted, without being able to explain, Abd iil-Hamid's vacillation between conciliation and persecution of those of whom he disapproved.49 In view of his apparent attempt to reintegrate all aspects of political life into the forms of an enlarged but again servile bureaucracy, the two modes of behavior appear simply as alternatives offered by the patterns of literary activity and of relations between sultanic master and official slave in the patrimonial tradition of the ruling class. As Abd iiI-Hamid pursued his policy of turning the state once again into a patrimonial household, the contrast between the growth of the bureaucracy and the economic resources available for its support added further irony to the fate of the officials of Divergent Tendencies 237 this period. The state was officially bankrupt, although this did not mean that there were no resources available. The sultan had the reputation of being exceptionally astute in the management of financial affairs, and the Privy Treasury was a well-run as well as a large organization during this reign.50 Simultaneously, developments in agriculture led to some increase in revenues, and the credit of the state improved to the point that it could again borrow abroad.51 This hardly provided the means for solving all the problems of the official salary system; but it did, particularly given the added possibilities offered by nonmonetary forms of reward, enable Abd iiI-Hamid to manipulate his officials in economic as well as other ways. Some examples will illustrate how he did so. While attempts were ostensibly made in the 1880s to systematize salary levels, no large-scale or lasting effect resulted. Not only were officials with certain types of qualifications or ethnocultural characteristics discriminated against, but the range of nominal salaries remained phenomenally wide. For most of the period, even the median nominal salaries in the civil bureaucracy were probably barely above subsistence level for a small family, while the highest salaries were many times the median.52 To compound this inequality, only the high-ranking officials received their salaries regularly and in gold, as opposed to the worn and barely identifiable coins of inferior metal that the less fortunate received, when they got anything.53 Nor was there much that the average official could do to protect his economic interests in the face of these problems. Those not close enough to the sultan to benefit directly from his munificence had to try to form "connections" with someone who was. In this sense, the economic policy of the state toward its officials assumed that they had personal and familial relations of the type implied in the model of the patrimonial household. Another thing that could make a difference was the specific agency in which the official served. Since collection and disbursement of revenues were still not centralized in the Ministry of Finance, the luckiest officials were those who worked in revenue-collecting departments such as Finance, Posts and Telegraphs, Customs, or Land Registry; for payment of the salaries of their own employees was one of the first priorities of those departments. For those who served in the provinces, the prosperity of the province made a corresponding difference. Six. Restoring Politual Balance Only in the richer ones, says U~akhgil, did the year have twelve months.54 There were some problems of the compensation system, however , that could not be escaped; for it is clear that Abd iiI-Hamid not only knew about the malfunctional aspects of the system, but actually used them for his own ends. His prodigality with ranks and decorations was one form of legerdemain useful in stretching the available economic resources, especially as the recipients had to pay fees, if not also bribes, to get such honors. To officials whom he favored, Abd iiI-Hamid often also assigned extra salaries, which were regularly paid, out of the Privy Treasury. The rare man whose conscience became troubled by the supplemental payments would not dare to decline them; for the sultan would regard such an act not as laudable, but rather as a sign of independence--exactly what the extra income was intended to eliminate.55 Otherwise, when salary payments were made through normal bureaucratic channels, they were carefully orchestrated so as to have optimal effect in stimulating feelings of gratitude and loyalty. Usually coinciding with major religious festivals or other occasions when the government was anxious to have a show of good will, each payment was treated as "a special act of grace on the part of the Ruler, announced in the newspapers and celebrated almost like a national holiday."56 This futuristic use of salary payments as a form of "mood control " is one of the clearest expressions of the manipulative element in Abd iil-Hamid's compensation policy, but there were other expressions, as well. Unable or unwilling to pay his officials regularly, Abd iiI-Hamid condoned peculation among the lower officials, condemning it even verbally only among those of high rank and large salaries.57 In practice, as Arab izzet or Fehim Pa~a well knew, he condoned it among the latter, as well. Meanwhile , Abd iiI-Hamid also widened the breaches in the traditional , but already battered, immunity of the official class to taxation. This he did through a variety of measures relating to revenue stamps and stamped papers, the use of which he commanded in such purely internal transactions of the bureaucracy as the compilation of personnel files or the issue to individuals of the vouchers (suret) used to acknowledge their entitlement to a certain sum by way of salary. At times, he also exacted special salary deductions for purposes such as the building of the Hijaz Railway.58 Organizational Development 239 Ultimately, nothing makes the despotic character of Abd iilHamid 's relationship with his bureaucrats more apparent than the economic plight in which they found themselves and the way he played on it. It was not reasonable to assume that the bureaucracy that had produced the Young Ottomans would endure this treatment indefinitely without protest. Yet, Abd iil-Hamid's triumph over the constitutionalists was sufficiently thorough that thirty years passed before his system could be overthrown. As a result, while the years 1871-1908 were characterized by efforts to restore political balance, these efforts clearly displayed contradictory tendencies. Steps toward rational-legalism and modernization of the polity were more characteristic of the early years and culminated in the parliamentary episode. Efforts at implementation of a neotraditionalist conception of the polity were more typical after 1878. But since the effort at sultanic reassertion was already apparent in the last years of Abd iil-Aziz, and since the promulgation of new laws continued even under Abd iiI-Hamid, the two tendencies cannot be neatly segregated out into chronologically distinct subperiods. Rather, as despotic and irrational tendencies became more pronounced under Abd iiI-Hamid, legislative activity continued at the same time and began to display, on even grander scale than during the Tanzimat , the aspect of a means by which to tighten and extend the control of a dominant and unrestricted power. Having thus far emphasized the negative side of the badly "split-up" Hamidian polity, we must now go on to a closer examination, first, of the organizational development of the Porte between 1871 and 1908 and, then, of the steps taken in the same period toward further regularization and systematization. The political patterns that we have discussed up to this point will provide us with a perspective for these analyses, which will have as their chief goal to assess the implications of the more rational developments of this period for the long-term evolution of the politico-bureaucratic tradition. ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE SUBLIME PORTE DURING THE FIRST CONSTITUTIONAL PERIOD AND THE REIGN OF ABD UL-HAMID The way in which Abd iiI-Hamid attempted to seize control of the bureaucratic pyramid and confine within it as nearly as pos- Six. Restoring Political Balance sible the entire politically conscious segment of Ottoman society points to the essential qualitative difference between the growth in the civil bureaucracy during his reign and that which occurred under the bureaucratic empire builders of the Tanzimat. The organizational development of the Porte nonetheless continued after 1871 and to a degree represented one of the more positive aspects of the period. There were gains in the evolution of some of the formal organizational structures and in the growing prevalence of new kinds of organizational concepts first noted on a small scale in preceding decades. More significantly, while this process did not continue to the full extent that the constitution demanded, and while regulatory documents would not supplant the government yearbooks as the principal source from which to reconstruct bureaucratic organization until the Young Turk years, there was a perceptible increase in the extent to which there were formal laws and regulations to govern the structures and define the missions of the various agencies. Under Abd iiI-Hamid, the growing elements of rationality had less and less to do with setting the overall tone of official life. Yet those elements formed valuable increments to the political and bureaucratic heritage left to later generations. A survey of the Porte as it had come to be by 1908 will illustrate these points. Figure VI-l provides a basic graphic reference for this discussion and, to set the Porte in larger perspective , again includes the palace and the other major civilbureaucratic agencies.59 The Grand Vezir and His Staff The constitutional episode and the reign of Abd iiI-Hamid changed the grand vezirate to varying degrees in both theory and fact. Had the liberals among the drafters of the constitution had their way, the grand vezir as traditionally known would have passed into history and been replaced by a prime minister (ba~ vekil-the same title that Mahmud II used in his attack on the grand ve~irate in 1838). This prime minister would then have selected the other ministers, who would collectively have disposed of extensive administrative powers.60 As finally promulgated , however, the constitution still designated the highest bureaucratic office in traditional fashion as the grand vezirate (sadaret), although without mentioning the concept of "absolute delegacy" (veluilet-i mutlaka). The appointment of the other FIGURE VI-I. ORGANIZATION OF THE CIVIL BUREAUCRACY AND ITS RELATION TO THE PALACE, 1908 - - - - Enclosed organizations are part of Sublime Porte. * Not included in the council of Ministers (some bodies of unclear status omitted) COUNCIL OF STATE ($ura-Yl Deulet) COUNCIL OF MINISTERS I • I (Civil-Bureaucratic Ministries Outside the Sublime Porte) (Meclis-i Vilkelii) • i i ' High Comm. for Finance STAFF OF GRAND VEZIR High Comm. for the Hijaz Railway High Comm. for the Aid Fund of Sublime Porte COMMISSIONS UNDER PRESIDENCY OF SULTAN High Comm. for Refugees CIVIL OFFICIALS COMMISSION (Memurin-i Millkiye Komisyonu) DOMESTIC SERVICES ("Little Mabeyn 'j AIDES-DE-CAMP (Yaveran-l Kiram) SULTAN (Padi§ah) CHAMBERLAINS (Kurena) PALACE SECRETARIAT (Mabeyn Kitabetleri, "Big Mabeyn '} PRIVY TREASURY (Hazine-i Hassa) Six. Restoring Political Balance ministers was still to be by sultanic decree, with the result that there could be no collective ministerial solidarity; and the powers of the grand vezir and the other ministers were only vaguely described.61 The constitution thus failed to redefine the grand vezirate in any very thorough way. The liberals did not cease their efforts to effect fundamental changes, and Abd iiI-Hamid did appoint prime ministers, rather than grand vezirs, on several occasions. But he lost no time in divesting the newer title of the significance that men such as Midhat Pa~a aspired to give it. Abd iil-Hamid's first appointment of a prime minister occurred in February 1878. The Parliament had just been suspended, the Russians were at the gates of Istanbul, the wintry city was swarming with refugees, and Ahmed Vefik Pa~a, offered the grand vezirate, would only accept it on condition of the change of title and the adoption of the principle of collective ministerial responsibility .62 His successors, however, were unable to maintain either the title or the principle. For example, Hayr iiI-Din Pa~a, serving with the title of grand vezir, fell in 1879 over his attempt to defend the principle of collective ministerial responsibility. His successor received the title of prime minister, but the composition of his cabinet was largely spelled out, as Abd iiI-Hamid was often to do, in the decree of appointment.63 By 1882, when the title of prime minister passed out of use for the last time, it had ceased to make any difference; and the issue of collective ministerial responsibility, which had no basis in the constitution of 1876 anyway, was dead for the remainder of the reign. These events heralded the progressive decline in the importance of the grand vezirate and of the Porte in general. One expression of this was changing patterns of tenure in the grand vezirate, as in many other offices. Between the death of A.li Pa~a (1871) and the Young Turk Revolution (1908), there were thirty-two grand-vezirial incumbencies by nineteen men, most of them still civil bureaucrats.64 For about a decade after the death of Ali Pa~a, whose last grand vezirate had lasted over four years, turnover was very rapid. From Ali's death until the dismissal of Ahmed Vefik in 1882, there were twenty-three incumbencies by fifteen men. Thereafter, as the Hamidian system became more firmly established, turnover slowed dramatically, and there were only nine incumbencies by five individuals-of whom Kii~iik Said Pa~a had already served as grand vezir before 1882-in the Organizational Development 243 years before the 1908 revolution. During this interval, there were two grand vezirs with incumbencies of as much as six years each.65 Yet length of tenure no longer entailed the kind of power Ali had enjoyed. The job had degenerated so much, indeed , that Ferid Pa~a, grand vezir from 1903 to 19°8, once said that his situation made him envious of the stevedores (szrzk hamallarz) working on the Istanbul wharves.66 As the grand vezirate declined in power, the accumulation of a bureaucratic staff directly subordinate to the grand vezir and distinct from any other ministry nevertheless continued along much the lines noted in the preceding period. By 1908, there were under the grand vezir a number of offices that had already emerged before 1871, some of them having undergone changes or reorganization since, plus one or two others that had either emerged or passed under his authority only more recently. Of the offices already noted during the Tanzimat, the yearbooks continue to attest the existence through 1908 of the post of undersecretary (miiste~ar) to the grand vezir; the receiver (amedz), supposedly presiding over almost fifty clerks divided into four classes; the Office of the Cor:responding Secretary (Mektubz) of the grand vezir; a Cipher (Sijre) Office, presumably corresponding to the earlier Telegraph Office; the Records Office (Bab-z Ali Evrak Odasz); and the Archives (Hazine-i Evrak) of the Sublime Porte. Also still serving under the grand vezir were the master of ceremonies of the imperial Divan (te~r~fatz-i Divan-z hiimayun) and several assistants of his in charge of decorations or medals (n~an memurlarz). In the field of ceremonial, there had, however, also been a new development reflecting the shift in the locus of power and the consequent organizational elaboration of the palace. In the retinue of the grand vezir, there had emerged something like a supervisor general of protocol (te~rifat-z umumiye nazzrz). This post had existed more or less from the beginning of Abd ulHamid 's reign,67 although its relation to that of the master of ceremonies of the imperial Divan is not clear. From the late 1870S on, the new post was held by the same man who served as translator of the imperial Divan (terciiman-z Divan-z humayun) and secretary for foreign correspondence in the Mabeyn (Mabeyn-i hiimayun tahrirat-z ecnebiye kdtibi). The need for a secretary for foreign correspondence in the palace, and the fact that the men who successively held this combination of posts had their actual Six. Restoring Political Balance offices there, are added reflections of the extent to which procedures for the conduct of official business, especially that of diplomatic character, had changed since the Tanzimat.68 In the way of recent additions to the grand vezir's suite, there was now also a staff of military aides (yaver)69 and a special translator to the grand vezir (tercuman-z sadaret-i uzma).70 The military aides are a new sign of the old tendency toward imitation of the sultan's household. The need for a translator must reflect the increasing organizational differentiation at the Porte.71 For, although its nominal chief now served at the palace, the Translation Office of the Sublime Porte continued to exist where its name implies. It remained under the foreign minister, however, and was the only traditional chancery office that did not eventually become a part of the grand-vezirial entourage. In contrast, the oldest of the scribal bureaus, referred to by 1908 in the plural as the Offices of the Imperial Divan (Divan-z Humayun Ak,lamz), had in the 1880s made precisely that shift. There were also organizational changes within the office, or group of offices, as it was ultimately more accurate to call it. While all of the component sections remained under the supervision of the beyli/tfi, some of those noted in 1908 were new, at least in form. These include a Registry Section (Divan-z Humayun Kuyud Odasz) and another for Provinces in Privileged Status (Vilayat-z Mumtaze Kalemi).72 In a way both sad and amusing, inal, who served in the latter, likened it to the colonial office of another state. More nearly, it resembled a foreign ministry for dealing with territories that had yet to consummate their break from the empire.73 Two others of the Offices of the Imperial Divan were old ones: the Section for Important Affairs (Muhimme Odasz), created in 1797 and now including the officials (tugrake~) charged with drawing the imperial cipher, and the Office of the Imperial Divan proper. Following a reorganization of 1900, the traditional subdivisions of this last office also survived within it, with some alterations and additions, as a number of "desks" or "tables." There were six of these, their differentiation providing a measure of the continuing influence in this office of the old, documentoriented conceptions of organization. The roles assigned to the six "desks" were the drafting of documents (tesvid, "blackening "); production of fair copies and registration (tebyiz, "whitening ," and kayd); preparation of summaries (hulasa); the keeping Organimtional Development 245 of certain undefined types of registers (defter); preparation of brevets of appointment (ruus); and assignment of benefices in land (tahvil). The total number of clerks provided for in the order for this reorganization is forty-six, and the numbers assigned to the "desks" ranged from the twenty listed for fair copies and registration to the three still occupied at the opening of this century with the vestigial survivals of the traditional Ottoman system of benefices in land.74 The political eclipse of the grand vezirate thus did not halt the kinds of organizational development previously associated with that office. Conciliar Bodies-The Council ofMinisters The same was true of a number of other organizations, including the major conciliar bodies. Among these, the continued convocation in times of stress of special, ad hoc consultative assemblies provided a striking reminder that the early form from which so many of the councils of the Tanzimat had derived was still not forgotten. 75 On balance, however, what was more characteristic was the further evolution of the conciliar bodies, as shown by the disappearance of some of the smaller ones into bureaucratic agencies, the emergence of the short-lived Parliament , and the adaptation of conciliar forms to serve the functions of control that the Tanzimat reformers had so much neglected . To look first at the Council of Ministers, the uncertain state of its development during the Tanzimat and the determination of Abd iiI-Hamid were enough to keep it from assuming anything like the form that the liberal constitutionalists sought to give it. Not only did Abd iiI-Hamid make sure that the grand vezirs did not regain the control that the Tanzimat statesmen had exercised over ministerial appointments, but it has been said that he deliberately appointed ministers who would be unable to get along with one another and then encouraged them to spy and inform on their colleagues.76 The degree of cohesion, power, or independence that the Council of Ministers enjoyed during this period thus had narrow liInits. Yet, the council did develop in some ways, and it retained some degree of importance. For one thing, the composition of the council stabilized to a considerable degree, at least after the accession of Abd iilHamid . The yearbooks from his reign are remarkably consistent Six. Restoring Political Balance in showing the council as consisting of the grand vezir or prime minister, the head of the religious establishment (jeyh iii-islam), the chairman (reis) of the Council of State, the ministers of foreign and internal affairs, and-from civil-bureaucratic departments outside the Porte-the ministers of justice, finance, education, pious foundations, and the combined portfolio of trade and public works. The undersecretary of the grand vezir was also regularly included. The ministers of the military departments -war (Bab-z Seraskeri), artillery (Tophane mii~iriyeti), and usually navy (bahriye)-were members, as wel1.77 The old practice of swelling the council with ministers without portfolio died out in this period, the last person so mentioned being the elderly Ahmed Cevdet Pa~a (d. 1895).78 With this stabilization in the composition of the council, there appears also to have gone a reduction, at least after the accession of Abd iiI-Hamid, in the rate of turnover in ministerial positions. We have already cited evidence of this in the grand vezirate. In the Ministries of Foreign and Internal Affairs, there were even longer incumbenCIes . Given the altered political conditions of the Hamidian regime, this slowing of ministerial turnover was a sign of diminished political importance. Yet the Council of Ministers still had a role to fill. Cevdet Pa~a, for example, blamed the fall of Abd iil-Aziz in part on the insistence of Mahmud Nedim Pa~a as grand vezir on attributing all government acts, whatever reaction they were likely to provoke, to the sultan. In a way recalling d'Ohsson's comments of a century earlier about the divan of the grand vezir, Cevdet said that the Council of Ministers was like a curtain between the palace and the people. The sultan should appear behind decisions that would be well received by the populace; for others, this curtain should be the only visible backdrop.79 Abd iiI-Hamid was intelligent enough to apply this reasoning, and the Council of State provided him with a procedural system ideally suited for doing so. According to a ruling ofJuly 1872 on procedures for the enactment of new legislation, all laws and all later amendments were to be taken under study first in the Council of State, then in the Council of Ministers, and were subsequently to receive approval in the form of a decree of the sultan .80 The constitutional system, had it lasted, would obviously have led to modification of this procedure. And it is no doubt true that Abd iiI-Hamid decided the most important matters, as Organizational Development 247 well as many trivial ones, by himself. But there were large volumes of time-consuming business that had to be left to some lower echelon. The format of the legal acts of the years between the suspension of the Parliament and the Young Turk Revolution makes clear that the system prescribed in 1872 was operative in case after case.81 The ministers thus may not have enjoyed great power or independence under Abd iiI-Hamid, but it does not follow that they had nothing to do or no role in shaping the voluminous legislation of the period. The Council ofState Where their respective roles in legislation were concerned, the system of 1872 also indicates that the relationship of the Council of Ministers to the Council of State ($ura-Yl Devlet) remained in this period much like that of the ministers to the earlier legislative councils of the Tanzimat. The chief difference was the locus of the higher power that dominated these bodies. Concurring in this interpretation, the British ambassador wrote of the Council of State in 1906 that it retained "almost the scope and functions of a Legislative Assembly," although in practical terms, the fact that it had no legislative initiative and that appointments to it were controlled by the sultan made its independence "very limited ."82 Along with these elements of continuity, however, the Council of State also underwent substantial changes. Particularly during the interval between the death of Ali Pa~a and the accession of Abd iiI-Hamid, it became a political plaything of rival grand vezirs . Mahmud Nedim and others who were opposed to the legacy of the Tanzimat and the constitutional movement would attack the council and try to reduce it in size and functions. Midhat Pa~a and other grand vezirs identified either with the Tanzimat elite or the constitutional movement would restore the council to something like its former state. The result was a good deal of thrashing about, but as the opening of the Parliament approached , the council began to assume the role of preparing the bills that were to be submitted for debate in its two houses.83 With the Parliamentary episode past and the Hamidian regime progressively more firmly consolidated, the Council of State began to take on that stability which, as with the Council of Ministers, hinted at loss of power, if not necessarily at a lack of work to do. Under its original regulations, the Council of State Six. Restoring Politil:al Balance was divided into five sections (daire) for Civil Affairs (Miilkiye) , Reform Legislation (Tanzimat) , Public Works (Najia) , Finance (Maliye), and Adjudication (Muhakemat). In addition, there was a supporting staff that included a head secretary (b04 katib), who was classed as a member of the council. Under him were a number of what Young refers to in French as adjoints (muavin) and auditeurs (miiltizzm) , as well as a sta~ of clerks divided into bureaus for purposes such as preparation of minutes and reports (Mazbata Odasz) or keeping the files (Evrak OdasZ).84 In 1880, in an effort at economy, the sections of the council proper were reduced to three for Internal Affairs (Dahiliye) , Reform Legislation (Tanzimat), and Adjudication (Muhakemat).85 Of these, the Adjudication Section had a complicated list of responsibilities in the hearing of appeals from other tribunals and in administrative justice. These functions appear to have resulted over a period of time in the emergence of a series of Courts of First Instance (Bidayet), Appeal (istinaf) and Cassation (Temyiz), although it is difficult to tell when these became fully differentiated from one another and from the Adjudication Section itself.86 A decree issued in 1897 gave the Council of State and its major component agencies what appears to have been their final form for the period. This provided again for three administrative sections, though not exactly the same three as before. One was to be a Section for Civil Affairs (Miilkiye). It corresponded essentially to the earlier Section for Internal Affairs (Dahiliye) and also assumed responsibility for investigating complaints about the conduct of administration and for resolving conflicts among administrative agencies. In addition, the Section for Civil Affairs had a kind of second-echelon review over the actions of the other two sections. The responsibilities of these sections were Finance (Maliye) and Reform Legislation (Tanzimat). The decree did not detail their functions very clearly, although it included indications that the mission of the Section for Finance lay in issuing concessions (imtiyazat) , making contracts (mukaveltit) , and levying taxes, while that of the Section for Reform Legislation had to do with drafting laws and regulations. As concerns administrative justice, the decree provided that the Adjudication Section (Muhakemat Dairesi) and the existing Court of First Instance (Bidayet Mahkemesi) were to become "entirely independent" (biitiin biitiin mustakil) from the council, and Organizational Development 249 that courts of First Instance (Bidayet), Appeal (istinaj), and Cassation (Temyiz) were to be organized separately. These were to be under the "supervision and administration" of the Ministry of Justice and under the presidency of the chairman of the Council of State. The decree promised the preparation of a special set of regulations for these courts, but nothing of the sort seems ever to have come to light. To judge from the evidence of the yearbooks , the net effect of these changes on the judicial side of the council was the disappearance of the Adjudication Section and the substitution for it of the three courts. Thus, for the remainder of Abd iil-Hamid's reign, the Council of State consisted of three sections for Civil Affairs, Finance, and Reform Legislation, and three administrative courts for each of the echelons of the normal process of trial and appea1.87 There were also a number of supporting agencies not mentioned in the decree of 1897. Along with Young's audiU!urs (miillizzm) and the secretarial staff-the adjoints (muavin) seemingly having disappeared-these included several categories of specialized, technical personnel. Such were the public prosecutors (miiddei-i umumi) and examining magistrates (miistantzk) of the administrative courts.88 In addition, there was a Conflict of Jurisdiction Council (ihtillij-z Merci Enciimeni), which was made up of representatives of both the Council of State and the regular Court of Cassation and had as its mission the resolution of conflicts of jurisdiction between the regular courts (mehakim-i lidiye) and the administrative courts of the Council of State.89 There was also a Grand Jury (Heyet-i jttihamiye).90 Finally, there was an interesting body known as the Statistical Council of the Sublime Porte (Bab-z Alilstatistik Enciimeni) , presided over by the chairman of the Council of State and drawing its members from among his colleagues and from the Ministries of Foreign and Internal Affairs. More than its title implies, the Statistical Council had a part in the Hamidian system of controls in ways that will require further comment elsewhere.91 The Council of State thus continued its evolution as the chief legislative body of the empire and the central agency of administrative justice. Had its regulations been faithfully observed, it would still have been a relatively small organization. The decree of 1897 provided, for exampie, that the Section for Civil Affairs include eight members-soon increased to fourteen-with the chairman of the whole council as their head, that the Sections 25° Six. Restoring Politual Balance for Finance and Reform Legislation each have a vice-chairman (reis-i sani) and six members, and that the Courts of First Instance , Appeal, and Cassation have their own presidents (reis) and four, six, and eight members, respectively. Such was the attitude of Abd iiI-Hamid toward bureaucratic appointments that these limits had been exceeded several-fold by 1908.92 Even with this featherbedding, however, the council remained a functioning organization, a fact affirmed by the tremendous volume of legislation that emanated from it. The Parliament In a sense, the Parliament should have marked both a culmination to the historical evolution of the conciliar bodies and an important step toward fuller implementation of the representative principle first introduced in the local consultative assemblies created during the Tanzimat. Had the Parliament developed in this way, however, both its houses would still have existed in 1908; and they would not have been listed as organizational components of the Sublime Porte, from which they had originally been quite distinct, except perhaps to the extent of drawing secretarial support from that quarter. In fact, the prorogation of the Chamber of Deputies (Meclis-z Meb'usan) in February 1878 meant that nothing of the Parliament existed thereafter except the Senate (Heyet-i Ayan), and that in attenuated form. The constitution provided that the members of the Senate were to be appointed for life by the sultan and were to receive a salary of 10,000 kurus per month, a handsome sum, though short of ministerial-level salaries. Following the prorogation of the chamber, Abd iiI-Hamid continued to make appointments to fill senatorial vacancies until 1880. Since the Senate had nothing to do, however, senatorial positions became mere sinecures for loyal servants of the sultanate . Fifty-one men were appointed to the Senate in all, but their numbers began to dwindle after 1880, and by 1908 there were only three left.93 The listing of the Senate among the components of the Porte is thus a reflection of the atrophy of parliamentary institutions and is otherwise without practical significance . The Ministry o.fthe Interior In the last chapter, we noted the discontinuities in the history of the central organization of this ministry during the Tanzimat Organimtional Development 25I and traced them partly to the determination of the reformers to concentrate as much power as possible in the smallest number of hands, partly to the concrete difficulties of projecting a new administrative system over the whole of the empire. After 1871, problems of the same sorts continued and in some cases worsened . The Ottomans saw their control ended, or threatened, in increasing numbers of provinces. The most serious of these problems, the Armenian troubles of the 1890s, created severe disruption not only on the imperial periphery, but in the Anatolian heart of the empire and in the capital itself. All the while, palace domination of internal administration made itself felt to such a point that the Ministry of the Interior ceased to have more than fragmentary authority over provincial administrative cadres.94 The extent to which this ministry, like others, became bent to its subordinate role is well symbolized in the character of Mehmed Memduh Pa§a, who served Abd iiI-Hamid as Minister of the Interior from 1895 to 1908. Author of a number of literary works, some still valued as historical sources, Memduh Pa§a had previously been governor general (vali) of several provinces. Serving in this capacity at Sivas (1889-1892), he distinguished himself, according to a British account, for "shameless venality" and provocation of the Armenian issue. Memduh had reportedly won the favor of Abd iil-Hamid even before the latter's accession by submitting confidential reports, a practice that Memduh subsequently continued. One of the first of Abd iil-Hamid's informers, Memduh as minister was known for servility toward his superiors and for the hauteur he showed his subordinates. Thoroughly hated, he was persecuted in rare fashion after the Revolution of 1908 as part of the "wreckage of despotism" (enkaz-z istibdad).95 The circumstances in which Memduh Pa§a flourished naturally had their effects on the evolution of both the general system of local administration and the central organs of the Ministry of the Interior. In local administration, no change of such fundamental character as the Provincial Administration Law of 1871 reached the point of application during this period. The constitution of 1876 did provide for a new regulation of local administration on a basis of separation of powers and decentralization (literally, "broadening of discretion," tevsi-i mezuniyet, art. 108). The Chamber then passed a new provincial administration law during its first session, only to have the sultan return 252 Six. Restoring Political Balance it for reconsideration during the second, which did not last long enough to perform this task. Reportedly, a mixed commission of Ottoman and foreign officials drafted a new provincial administration law in 1880, but it was neither applied nor published in the official series of Ottoman legal texts. The only reforms actually applied dealt merely with facets of the local administrative system. These included measures on the provincial courts; the institutions to be set up at the fourth and lowest of the administrative echelons (the "commune" or nahiye); or the ways and means of eliminating common causes of complaint by the dispatch ofjudicial inspectors, the inclusion in the local gendarmerie of members from the various ethnoreligious communities, and the restraint of unauthorized fiscal exactions. Many measures had to do with the qualifications of local administrative personnel and the procedures \for their appointment and promotion; such matters will require discussion in a later section on personnel policy. The field of municipal administration witnessed further refinements of the system set up for the city of Istanbul, as well as an attempt to create a pattern of urban administration for provincial cities. As time passed, necessarily , there were increasing numbers of acts aimed at the specific problems of such localities as Crete, eastern Rumelia, or the controversial provinces of eastern Anatolia. The irresponsibility of the palace system at the highest level, and the intractability of many of the local problems at the lowest, defined the narrow limits within which such efforts at administrative reform bore fruit in this period.96 Meanwhile, in Istanbul, the central organs of the ministry developed in ways reflecting the political tendencies and reformist emphases of the period. After an initial interval during which the post of minister again vanished, references to a minister of the interior reappeared in the yearbooks in 1878,97 although the listing of his staff continued through the 1880s to be indicative of small numbers and limited organizational articulation. Of the elements that had emerged within the ministry during the Tanzimat , only the undersecretary (miiste~ar) and corresponding secretary (mektubl) continued to exist, as did the traditional "agents of the gate" (kaPl luihyasl) or representatives of the provincial governors general at the Porte. The roles of both the "agents" and the corresponding secretary pertained to communications between the ministry in Istanbul and the officials subordinate to Organizational Development 253 it in the provinces. Given the still limited development of the central organizational structures of the ministry, the existence of two channels of communication between the provincial authorities and the center seems ironic. The weakly developed central agencies of the ministry must have been supplemented to some degree, however, by the Section for Civil or Internal Affairs , which continued to,exist in the Council of State. And this is not to speak of the palace secretaries, whose tendency was to bypass the central organs of the ministry entirely and deal directly with provincial authorities. Between the 1880s and Igo8, the central organization of the Ministry of the Interior developed a good bit further, if in curious ways that show how it served the Hamidian system. The yearbook for 1g0898 lists a number of offices as forming parts of the ministry: the Office of the Corresponding Secretary, which by this time had one or more sections for correspondence by telegraph or cipher; other offices for filing (Evrak Odasz) and accounting (Muhasebe Kalemi); and a branch of the system created in this period for the maintenance of official personnel records (Sicill-i Ahval Subesi). There were also several special commissions , as well as other, miscellaneous institutions or groups of functionaries attached to the ministry. These categories include an otherwise unknown body called something like the Commission for the Expedition of Business and Reforms (Tesri-i Muamelat ve Islahat Komisyonu); a "Special Commission" (Komisyon-z Mahsus) , whose membership suggests that its mission lay in internal espionage; a Purchasing Commission for the ministry (Dahiliye Nezareti Mubaayat Komisyonu); the "agents of the gate" (kapz Juihyasz); and the administrative and medical staff of a poorhouse (Dar ul-Aceze) that Abd iiI-Hamid had founded. In particularly prominent positions were two other agencies of obvious importance in the Hamidian system of controls: the Domestic Press Directorate (Matbuat-z Dahiliye Mudiriyeti) and what was called the General Administration of Population Registration (Sicill-i Nufus idare-i Umumiyesi). Of these last two agencies, the Domestic Press Directorate included by 1g08 a director with five assistants; five examining clerks (mumeyyiz); more than a dozen inspectors (mufettis) responsible for supervision of newspapers, printing establishments, and theaters; and a couple of file clerks; as well, presumably, as an unlisted phalanx of secretaries. Clearly, this office exercised 254 Six. Restoring Politi£al Balance the responsibilities assigned to the Ministry of the Interior in the Draconian system ofcontrols, interministerial in scope, set up by the Press Laws of the period.99 While it is not always possible to be certain from the yearbooks which offices are simply subsections of others, the General Administration of Population Registration appears to have been even larger than the Press Directorate. There was by this time a welter of legislation on matters of etat civil,100 the recordskeeping demands of which are reflected in the size and organizational complexity of the agencies at work in that field. What appear to be the subordinate sections of the General Administration of Population Registration run to nine in number. Some of them had geographically defined responsibilities pertaining to Istanbul (Der Saadet Kalemi) or the provinces (Vitayat Kalemi); others specialized in specific transactions such as the issue of travel permits (Murur Kalemi),1°1 passports (Pasaport Kalemi) , or the compilation of population statistics (istatistik Kalemi). As of 1908, the central organization of the Ministry of the Interior , with its elaborate systems for population registration and control of the press, and its less-developed and overlapping systems for dealing with local administrative authorities through the Office of the Corresponding Secretary and the "agents of the gate," thus reflects the warping and inhibiting effect of the Hamidian despotism on the development of this branch of administration . Comparison with the even more rudimentary conditions of 1871 indicates, however, that limited progress had been made toward developing a central institutional core for the ministry. Even more significantly, although the Press Directorate and the General Administration of Population Registration were clearly parts of the Hamidian system of controls, they reflect the further progress of a new orientation in organizational development, already noticeable in a few cases in the preceding period. This amounted to a shift of emphasis away from the old document-oriented patterns and toward others defined more in terms of the roles of the bureaucracy in relation to the larger society. Although no really coherent and rational system of internal administration could come into existence until the palace despotism and the composite imperial structure had been replaced, the provincial administration law of 1871 and the small gains perceptible during this period in the Ministry of the Interior did provide some elements for such a system. Organizational Development 255 The Foreign Ministry While the relative prominence that it had once enjoyed in comparison with other civil-bureaucratic agencies had declined in some respects, as of 1908 the Foreign Ministry was still the most highly evolved of the organizational components of the Sublime Porte. By the same token, the new kind of organizational orientation that we have just noted in the Ministry of the Interior, and that had already appeared in the Foreign Ministry to a limited degree during the Tanzimat, had asserted itself there much more strongly with the passage of additional decades. In the process, the central agencies of the ministry began to take on the aspect of a series of directorates, recalling those of modern, Western foreign ministries, with missions differentiated in terms ofjurisdictional areas or goals external to the bureaucratic system as narrowly defined. As Figure VI-2 suggests, however, this change was still only partially complete at the time of the Young Turk Revolution, and there were other organizational problems that still awaited solution. Now, even more than during the Tanzimat, this was true of the working relationships among the various agencies of the ministry. Indeed, the proliferation of agencies had begun to imply a need to combine them into functionally related groups through which a more effective control of operations could be maintained. Of course, the ministry, and the Porte in general, would have to reemerge from the state of stagnation into which Abd iiI-Hamid had plunged it before it would be possible to solve problems such as these. Comparison of Figures V-2 and VI-2 shows that the central offices of the Foreign Ministry still included a number of organizations that had already existed in 1871, although changes of various sorts had occurred in all of them. This was true, first of all, of the posts of minister and undersecretary, as they settled into their appointed places in the Hamidian scheme of things. After more than twenty changes of incumbent between 1871 and 1885, the post of minister was almost entirely monopolized from 1885 to 1909 by two men, Kiird Said Pa§a (1885-1895)-so called to distinguish him from the grand vezir, Kii<;iik Said-and Ahmed Tevfik Pa§a (1895-1909).102 Both of them could be described as men who managed to live with the Hamidian system without being tainted by it. With "no great diplomatic talent or profound knowledge of affairs, but possessing a complete COffi- FIGURE VI-2. ORGANIZATION OF THE FOREIGN MINISTRY, 1908 I FOREIGN MINISTER 1 (Hariciye Nazm) H UNDERSECRETARY (MUste~ar) I I I I I H I TRANSLATION OFFICE OF THE TURKISH CORRESPONDENCE FOREIGN CORRESPONDENCE CHEF DE PROTOCOLE EMBASSIES (7) SUBLIME PORTE OFFICE OFFICE (Biiyiik Elt;ilik, Sefaret-i Kiibro) (Bab-z Ali Terciime Odasl) (Mektub~i Hariciye Kalemi) (Tahrirot-z Hariciye Kalemi) (Hariciye Tefjrifat£;lSz) H LEGATIONS (10) I I (Orta Elt;ilik, Sefaret) DIRECTORATE OF NATIONALITY ACCOUNTING OFFICE FOREIGN PRESS DIRECTORATE DIRECTORATE OF MIXED LEGAL AFFAIRS ~ COMMISSIONER FOR BULGARIA I (Tabiiyet Kalemi Miidiriyeti) (Hariciye Muhasebeciligi) (Matbuat-l Ecnebiye Miidiriyeti) (Umur-l Hukuk-z Muhtelita Miidiriyeti) (Bulgaristan Komiseri) I ~ CONSULATES GENERAL I I I I DIRECTORATE OF LEGAL COUNSEL OF PERSONNEL (B~ $ehbenderlik) CONSULAR AFFAIRS CIPHER DIRECTORATE THE SUBLIME PORTE RECORDS DIRECTORATE ($ifre Kalemi Miidiriyeti) (!Jab-z Ali Hukuk Miifjavirleri, (Sicill-i Ahval Miidiriyeti) H CONSULATES I (Umur-z $ehbenderi Miidiriyeti) Istipare Odasz) ($ehbenderlik) 1 H VICE-CONSULATES I DIRECTORATE OF ($ehbender Vekaleti) COMMERCIAL AFFAIRS (Umur-z Ticariye Kalemi Miidiriyeti) COMMERCIAL AGENCIES I (Tiiccar Vekaleti) I I COMMISSION FOR THE SELECTION ADMINISTRATIVE COMMISSION MINISTRY OF HEALTH OF FOREIGN MINISTRY OFFICIALS dntihab-z Memurin-i Hariciye ddare Komisyonu) (Szhhiye Nezareti) Komisyonu) I PROVINCIAL FOREIGN AFFAIRS DIRECTORS (Vitayet Hariciye Miidiirii) Organizational Development 257 mand of his features, unruffled urbanity of manner, and a composure that no crisis has yet been known to disturb," '-revfik Pa§a won praise of a sort as "an ideal Minister for Foreign Affairs under a regime which has reduced the role of that functionary to that of a buffer between the Palace, whence the foreign policy of the Empire is directed, and the representatives of the foreign powers." A former diplomat, Tevfik was also to serve as grand vezir on a nUInber of occasions between 1909 and 1922.103 An even longer tenure of office was to the credit of the perennial undersecretary of this period, Artin Dadian Pa§a, who held that post first in 1875-1876, again in 1883-1885, and then continuously from 1885 until his death in 1901.104 Also surviving from the Tanzimat were the three bureaus that then bore basic responsibility for the written business of the ministry: the Translation Office of the Sublime Porte, the Turkish Correspondence Office, and the Foreign Correspondence Office. These, too, had undergone certain changes. For example , the fact that the translator of the imperial Divan now served at the palace meant that the nominal deputy chief of the office, the first translator (miitercim-i evvel), was now its effective head. The Foreign Correspondence Office, in turn, had changed in losing its old character as an Armenian enclave. In addition, Mehmed Nuri Bey, director there from 1892 to 1908, reportedly provided Abd iiI-Hamid with what the minister and undersecretary did not, namely, "the window through which the Palace observes and controls all that goes on in the Ministry and, so far as his [Nuri's] influence extends, in the Diplomatic circles of Constantinople." Son of a French renegade named Chateauneuf , Mehmed Nuri was by the same account: "a prominent centurion in the legions of Palace spies, amongst whom he ranks high for the quality of his reports, which he has the talent of making both interesting and agreeable to the taste of the Sovereign. Under an agreeable, cultivated and even refined exterior , he is corrupt and unscrupulous in the extreme."105 In ways such as these, the Turkish and Foreign Correspondence Offices and the r-rranslation Office of the Porte underwent the deforming effects of palace dominance. Nonetheless, their missions remained in principle unchanged; and they continued to grow not only in size but also in internal differentiation, as attested by the appearance in each of a director for important affairs (miihimme miidiirii).106 Six. Restoring Political Balance In addition, of the offices known in 1871, those of the chif de protocole of the Foreign Ministry, of Nationality, and of Accounts also continued to exist, as did what had been the Foreign Press Office. Now styled a directorate, this last bureau performed functions that are not easy to distinguish from those of the Domestic Press Directorate in the Interior Ministry. An official description of the late 1880s does attribute a distinct mission to the Foreign Press Directorate, namely, to deny harmful statements in the European press and to inform foreign nations about the policies and progress of the Ottoman state.107 This office nonetheless actually became a part of the Ministry of the Interior for a time in the 1890s, the Domestic and Foreign Press Directorates then being listed one after the other in the official yearbooks. The Foreign Press Office must thus have been useful to the sultan in his efforts to control the press, as the Domestic Press Directorate certainly was.10B Of the offices that formed parts of the ministry in 1871, two others had disappeared only in the sense of assuming other forms. What had been the Records Office (Hariciye Evrak Odasz) had been replaced by separate sections in a number of other offices and therefore does not appear in Figure VI-2. The Turkish Correspondence Office had one section, headed by the Foreign Ministry records director (Hariciye evrak muduru), the title borne by the head of the former Records Office of the ministry. There were also records directors, presumably with smaller staffs, in the Translation Office, Foreign Correspondence Office, Directorate for Consular Affairs, Foreign Press Directorate, Directorate of Nationality, and the Office of Legal Counsel. To judge from regulations issued for one of these records sections, their functions lay in controlling the flow, retrievability, and security of documents on current affairs.109 The organizational decentralization of Foreign Ministry personnel working in records management hints again at the ongoing struggles of the government to cope with the mounting volume of official paperwork. In one other case, an office mentioned in 1871 was abolished or reassigned to a different ministry, but then replaced by another bureau of seemingly similar character. The office in question was headed by a functionary known in 1871 as the secretary for foreign affairs (hariciye klitibi) and later by the more explicit title of secretary for foreign legal affairs (deavi-i hariciye Organizational Development 259 kdtibi). Evidence from the Foreign Ministry personnel files indicates that this office was either abolished or reassigned to the Ministry ofJustice in 1880, but was replaced by something called the Office of Mixed Legal Affairs of the Foreign Ministry.110 This acquired the status of a directorate by 1908. The details are not clear, but these changes are probably related in some way to a general reorganization of the judicial system in 1879.111 In any case, the Foreign Ministry yearbooks describe the mission of the Office of Mixed Legal Affairs as production of legal opinions on certain types of cases arising between Ottoman subjects and foreign nationals-thus cases "mixed" in terms of the nationality of the contending parties-and certification and transmission of relevant documents.112 In addition to these offices, a number of others developed by 1908. To a degree, this occurred predictably by differentiation among the functions of a preexisting bureau, specifically the Foreign Correspondence Office, itself an offshoot of the Translation Office; and it is interesting to note the extent to which the new kind of organizational orientation, mentioned above, came into view as this subdivision of functions progressed. Such were the origins of the Office, later Directorate, of Consular Affairs, created in 1873 and then described as "dependent on" the Foreign Correspondence Office, which presumably had handled the French-language correspondence of the ministry with both its consular and its diplomatic agencies up to that point. The new office was to be responsible for the correspondence of the ministry with the consular corps, receipt of consular reports, production of semiannual statistical reports on commerce and navigation based on the data contained in these reports, and a political information service. A document of 1880 makes clear that the office did not immediately live up to this program; yet the creation of the agency marked the start of a new effort to organize and regulate the workings of the consular system.113 By 1908, the office, or directorate as it had become, had acquired a sizable staff, led by supervisory officials of longfamiliar kinds. It also had its own records management section, and a special staff of consular inspectors, headed by a European known as Graziani Efendi.114 The inspectors performed a function defined under a regulation for the Ottoman consular service first promulgated in 1881 and amended many times thereafter .115 260 Six. Restoring Political Balance Probably next in order of emergence among the offices of the Foreign Ministry was what appears in Figure VI-2 as the Cipher Directorate and is almost certainly to be identified with an earlier Telegraph Office. This, in turn, was yet another outgrowth of the Foreign Correspondence Office, in which as late as 1880 there had been simply a head clerk for telegraphy (telgraf ciheti ser kalfasz).116 Several other offices also emerged at indeterminate points in the early 1880s. One such is the Office of Legal Counsel (jstiJare Odasz), under the dual headship of two senior jurisconsults known as the legal counsellors of the Sublime Porte (Bab-z Ali hukuk milsavirleri). Under them were a number of assistants (muavin, presumably also supposed to have legal qualifications) and a staff of the more familiar clerical types (hulefa). In cases involving individuals of different nationalities, the Office of Legal Counsel had responsibilities that are difficult to distinguish from those of the Office of Mixed Legal Affairs. The basic responsibility of the legal counsellors, however, was to provide opinions, when requested, on legal problems arising in the relations of the empire with other states. The role of the legal counselIors thus recalled the traditional one of the beylik{i and the Office of the Imperial Divan in checking individual transactions for conformity to the terms of the applicable treaties or grants of concessions to foreign states.117 In more modern terms, however , the legal counsellors were the advisors of the Ottoman government in international law. A good measure of the extent to which Ottomans perceived this as a new role is the fact that the first incumbents of the two legal counsellorships were foreigners . The "nationalization" of these posts only occurred in Abd iil-Hamid's last years, with the appointments of Gabriel Noradounghian, who was to become the empire's only Armenian minister of foreign affairs (1912-1913) and is now remembered as the compiler of a published collection of diplomatic documents, and ibrahim Hakkl Bey (later Pa~a), a future grand vezir and a pioneer of modern legal studies among the Turks.11B More or less contemporaneous in origin with the Office of Legal Counsel was the Personnel Records Directorate, another branch of the system set up under Abd iiI-Hamid to keep systematic personnel records. Last to emerge of the offices and directorates that were part of the ministry by 1908 was the Directorate of Commercial Affairs, Organizational Development first mentioned in the yearbooks in 1896-1897.119 This may have been an offshoot of the Directorate of Consular Affairs, and thus of the Foreign Correspondence Office and the Translation Office; but evidence on this point has yet to come to light. In addition to these offices and directorates, finally, the central organs of the Foreign -Ministry as of 1908 included two special commissions, as well as a body which, though nominally a separate "ministry" (nezaret) , is perhaps best envisioned as a third organization of similar sort. The Commission for the Selection of Foreign Ministry Officials and the Administrative Commission, the membership of which consisted only of the directors or top supervisory officials of other offices of the ministry , evolved out of a Foreign Ministry Council (Encumen-i Haru;iye). Created in 1885, this progressively acquired a miscellany of functions: monitoring the conduct of current business, purchasing, and supervision of appointments. About 1900, this council was subdivided into an Administrative Commission, which inherited responsibility for the first two functions of the former council, and the Commission for the Selection of Foreign Ministry Officials, which assumed responsibility for the third.120 Like the Personnel Records Directorate, the Commission for the Selection of Foreign Ministry Officials and its counterparts in other ministries figured as branches of the system, centered in the Civil Officials Commission shown in Figure VI-I, for the control of appointments and other personnel actions in the civil bureaucracy. In turn, what had come to be known as the "Ministry of Health" dated back, as did the history of its association with the Foreign Ministry, more or less to the creation of the quarantine system in 1838. From about 1880 on, the foreign minister also became the "minister of health," presiding in that capacity, at least nominally, over a Board of Health (Meclis-i Umur-z Szhhiye) made up of Ottoman officials and representatives of the other states that had diplomatic relations with the empire. Under this board, in turn, stood several clerical offices. The Board of Health was the scene of ongoing contention, thanks to the divergence of views among its international membership. The Ottomans wanted strict quarantine measures; the Europeans, animated by more up-to-date medical ideas and a keener sense of the economic costs of delays in quarantine, fought for more lenient terms. These differences gained in importance from the Six. Restoring Political Balance growth of trade and from the concerns raised, both among Muslims and among Europeans who controlled Islamic territory, by the annual pilgrimage to Mecca.121 By 1908, then, these were the elements that composed the central organization of the Foreign Ministry. There is no evidence that any particular effort had been made to pattern this structure after any European example. Indeed, there is no documentary evidence that the officials of the Ottoman Foreign Ministry made any close study of the organization of the corresponding agencies of European governments before 1908. This may help to explain both the continued prominence of longfamiliar types of personnel-head clerks (ser ka(fa), examining clerks (milmeyyiz) , directors of important affairs (milhimme mildilril ) , and so on-and the lack of any discernible system for coordinating the work of the various departments. Yet, it is significant that the more recently created agencies had begun to assume a jurisdictionally defined or problem-oriented character, as opposed to the old pattern of specialization in production of particular types of documents, or, in this ministry, of working in a particular language. Alongside the old, there were now also new types of officials with new kinds of technical expertise and duties extending beyond the old paper-pushing routines. And the new bureaucratic roles were appearing at all levels, from humble cipher clerks, to consular inspectors, to the proud legal counsellors of the Porte. The lengthy evolution that lay behind this ministry makes it possible to see here with particular clarity how much the civil bureaucracy had begun to be oriented away from the traditional, introspective activities, centering on maintenance of the inherited cultural patterns of the imperial tradition , and toward varieties of administrative action that affected the world outside the offices with new intensity and in a variety of new ways. As in the preceding period, this change should have found particularly clear expression in the agencies of the ministry outside Istanbul, although what was usually in fact more obvious was the subordination of these agencies to the workings of the Hamidian system. The provincial personnel, as before, were the provincial foreign affairs directors and their translators. While officials of this type still did not appear in every province, the Foreign Ministry yearbook for 1888-1889 lists both foreign af- Organizational Development fairs directors and translators in three provinces in the Aegean region, as well as translators in sixteen other provinces. Halid Ziya U~akhgil, who served for a time as assistant to the foreign affairs director in Izmir, has left his usual vivid picture of the job. Its duties dealt almost entirely with squabbles over the claims, then practically universal among the non-Muslims of the city, to foreign nationality.122 From the standpoint of the foreign minister in Istanbul, a subject of almost equal disagreeableness was the relationship of the provincial foreign affairs directorships to his ministry, as opposed to that of the interior. Inadequately defined in the law of 1871 on provincial administration , this question gave rise to a feud that occupied the two ministries on into the Young Turk period.123 The situation of the foreign affairs directors is thus instructive not only of the erosion of Ottoman sovereignty within the empire, but also of the increasing potential for jurisdictional conflicts as the government grew in size and organizational complexity. Most important of the agencies outside Istanbul, obviously, were the diplomatic and consular missions, which had grown in number significantly by 1908. In the case of the embassies and legations, the reason for the growth was primarily the acquisition of independence by several of the Balkan states-Rumania, Serbia, Montenegro-as well as the accreditation of ministers to some of the smaller western European states-sometimes to more than one at a time. At various times during the period, there was also a variety of something like "commissioners" (komiser) , representatives of the Porte in places of which it did not acknowledge the independence. The only one of these serving under the Foreign Ministry in 1908 was in Bulgaria.124 The diplomatic corps had thus grown, but it is no surprise to learn that the chiefs of some of the missions were really representatives of the palace and therefore neither professional diplomats nor career officials of the Foreign Ministry. These palace diplomats ranged from men of some ability and polish, like Salih Miinir Pa~a-a quondam associate of the Young Ottomans who for years was concurrently ambassador to France and minister to Switzerland and Belgium-to such unsavory secret agents as Nikola Gadban Efendi, or Necib Melhame-who won the disapproval of more than one of the governments to which he was accredited and eventually found himself ostracized by the corps Six. Restoring Politi1;al Balance diplomatique in Sofia.125 Others represented the palace in the sense of being military men appointed to posts that had, from the sultan's point of view, largely military interest. This was the case in 1908 of Tevfik Pa~a in Berlin, ibrahim Fethi Pa~a in Belgrade , and Ahmed Fevzi Pa~a in Cetinje.126 All of these were general officers and titular aides-de-camp to the sultan. Still others "represented the palace" in spite of themselves, as virtual exiles. Such were the eccentric Kec;ecizade izzet Fuad Pa~a, minister in Madrid,127 or the great poet-Abd iil-Hak Hamid, to whom European diplomatic posts for years provided suitableand from the sultan's viewpoint, suitably remote-settings for indulging his tastes for wine, women, and song.128 Like the number of diplomatic posts, that of consular positions also increased over the years between 1871 and 1908. Although the impossibility of distinguishing honorary from salaried posts in the listings included in the government yearbooks usually precludes determination of the number of professional consular officials, a more detailed source of 1888-1889 mentions 76 salaried consular officials.129 By 1908, the number had risen to over 100 in all grades from consul general down to chancery clerk. This does not count the commercial agents, who corresponded to the ordinary consular officials as the commissioners mentioned above did to the regular ambassadors, and were in 1908 found only in three Bulgarian towns.130 It may be questioned if Ottoman interests were adequate to support a consular establishment of this size, and it is clear from a variety of sources that padding had gone on in the consular service, as elsewhere. Still, most of the salaried consuls were in neighboring countries such as Greece, Rumania, Russia, and Iran, where the empire did have considerable interests of commercial and other kinds. These interests fueled a persistent official concern for the improvement of the consular service. One expression of this interest was a series of regulatory acts that will require closer scrutiny in the next section. With the proliferation of bureaus and commissions at the Porte and the extension of the networks of agents in the provinces and abroad, the organizational development of the Foreign Ministry continued even during the years of sultanic reassertion. Under a sovereign intent on assuming most of its responsibilities for himself, the ministry could hardly reach a state of comprehensive structural rationalization. Yet here, perhaps Organizational Development more than in other agencies of the Porte, the elements required for any effort to achieve such a state had come into existence. Commissions under the Presidency ofthe Sultan Had the Sublime Porte continued to develop during this period simply along previously established lines, a description of the grand vezir and his staff, of the major conciliar bodies, and of the Ministries of the Interior and Foreign Affairs might well have provided an exhaustive portrayal of its organizational elements . In fact, however, the same force that interfered with the operation of these institutions and thwarted the development of the Parliament also affected the Porte in at least one other significant way, the result of which appears in Figure VI-l as the Civil Officials Commission and the commissions under the presidency of the sultan. A discussion of these bodies, which, though ostensibly attached to the Porte, were directly subordinate to the sultan and not at all to the grand vezir,131 must conclude our survey of the Porte as it had come to be in 1908. To begin with the commissions under the presidency of the sultan: their regulations indicate that they were really interministerial in character and that the sultan himself appointed their members. The origin of all these bodies seems to have lain in the special importance that Abd iiI-Hamid attached to their missions. This is most obviously the case of the Hijaz Railway Commission (Hicaz Demir Yolu Komisyon-z A.lisi). The same must also be true of the Refugee Commission, the regulations of which identify it as the High Commission for Islamic Refugees (Muhacirin-i jsliimiye Komisyon-z A.lisi), implying that its mission was resettlement of Muslims fleeing from lost provinces and, perhaps, from other lands under non-Muslim control. The importance of such a function for Abd iil-Hamid's religious policy, as for the maintenance of order, requires no comment.132 The fact that izzet Pa§a, the infamous second secretary of the Mabeyn , was a member of both these commissions and also of the High Commission for Finance (Maliye Komisyon-z A.lisi), said to have become a sort of headquarters of the abuses it was supposedly founded to eliminate, provides an added indication of how close these bodies really were to the sultan.133 The Aid Fund of the Sublime Porte (Bab-z A.li Teshiliit Sarulzgz), in turn, was one of the economic mechanisms through which the patrimonial sovereign manipulated his official servants. Perhaps 266 Six. Restoring Political Balance the first form of this body was a commission set up in 18go to administer a fund capitalized by deductions from salaries and used to make loans to officials who had suffered from hardships such as fire and earthquake. One hint of Abd iil-Hamid's attitude toward his bureaucracy and of his possibly special interest in maintaining good will among officials serving in the capital is that while all civil officials were subject to the deductions used to capitalize the fund, loan and repayment transactions could be conducted only in Istanbul.134 To the extent that the fund became operative, here, surely, was one more disadvantage of assignment to remote localities. The terms of two sets of regulations drawn up somewhat later for the Aid Fund of the Sublime Porte are somewhat different. The first of these regulations, dating from 18g6, provides that the members and clerical assistants of the commission come only from among the personnel of the Council of State and the Ministries of Internal and Foreign Affairs, that only personnel serving at the Porte be eligible for the benefits of the fund, and that it draw its capital from a list of sources beginning with an ostentatious donation of 2,000 liras in gold by the Sultan. In these regulations, the role of the fund was to assure the making of salary payments. In the last set of regulations issued under Abd iiI-Hamid, the fund, still administered and capitalized in more or less the same way, again appears as a loan fund. 135 In any case, the loan fund resembled the other special commissions in performing a function of particular interest to the sultan. For patronage of the fund offered him a means by which to maintain his image as the benevolent protector of his official servants, even if he could not or would not make the salary system fully operative.136 Civil Officials Commission The most important of the special commissions where the relations of Abd iiI-Hamid with his officials were concerned, this body played a central role in the establishment of sultanic control over appointment and promotion in the civil bureaucracy. Although it did not acquire the form shown in Figure VI-l until 18g6, the Civil Officials Commission was the end product of a development going back to the foundation around the year 1871 of a Commission for the Selection of Civil Officials (jntihab-z Memurin-i Miilkiye Komisyonu). The yearbooks vary for Organizational Development several years as to whether this commission was simply "at the Sublime Porte,"137 part of the staff of the grand vezir,138 or under the Ministry of the Interior.139 Regulations drawn up in the early 1880s and revised on a number of subsequent occasions make clear, however, that what appears to have been the same body was then under the supervision of the Ministry of the Interior and had as its mission the selection of certain types of officials to serve in the three lower echelons of the four-tiered local administrative system.140 The evolution of this commission seems to have had parallels in other ministries. At least in the Foreign Ministry, as we have seen, there was a Foreign Ministry Council (Enciimen-i Hariciye) created in 1885 and given supervision of recruitment, among other things, and a more specialized Commission for the Selection of Foreign Ministry Officials, which emerged with the subdivision of the older council around the turn of the century. In the meantime, efforts to systematize personnel procedures acquired another dimension with the creation of a modern system of personnel records (sicill-i ahval). Cevdet Pa~a claimed credit for founding this system in 1877, while serving as minister of the interior. He alluded to what was rather obviously its true function in the Hamidian scheme of things by speaking of it, as do a number of other early sources, not as a "register of biographies " (sicill-i ahval) but rather as a register of morals or good conduct (sicill-i ahltik).141 J.~ central commission to supervise this system came into existence at first as an element of the Ministry of the Interior,142 and branch offices appeared in other departments . By 1891, there were fifty-seven branches, including those mentioned already as parts of the Ministries of Foreign and Internal Affairs.143 The Civil Officials Commission, created in 1896, became a central agency to supervise both appointments and the personnel records system. To the extent that the agencies previously in charge of these two functions survived in recognizable form-as the appointments commission of the Ministry of the Interior seemingly did not-they became subordinate elements of the new commission. Its stated purpose made its place in the Hamidian system of controls very clear. It was to process nominations of "civil and financial officials" appointed by imperial decree. As with the earlier commission in the Ministry of the Interior, there were to be cases excluded from the purview of the new body. 268 Six. Restoring Politil;al Balance The most important of these were described rather vaguely as the higher central officials and the provincial governors general (menaszb-z divaniye ricali ve vilayat-z ~ahane valileri, art. 6), whom the sultan would appoint either on his own initiative or on the nomination of the grand vezir. The least important of the excluded cases were defined only by implication: those whose appointments did not require an imperial decree and were thus at the discretion of governors general or other comparable officials . In addition to its role in appointment making, the Civil Officials Commission was also to be responsible for analysis of reports submitted on officials by inspectors and for certain matters related to the trials of officials, although duties of this last kind overlapped powers of the Council of State and were shortly taken away for that reason.144 An expression in organizational form of the familiar tendency to create new systems, rationally structured and defined by law, to enlarge the span of control of a supreme power that continued to operate in terms of the traditional, patrimonial discretionalism , the Civil Officials Commission was thus clearly intended to enable Abd iiI-Hamid to extend his direct control over personnel actions falling beyond the range of which he could otherwise have maintained cognizance. This characteristic of the commission forms a natural point of transition from discussion of formal organization to that of new developments in regulation and systematization, particularly in the field of personnel policy. But before we go on, it will be worthwhile to summarize the significance of the organizational changes that occurred at the Porte between 1871 and 1908. The evolution of civil-bureaucratic· institutions had in fact progressed in some noteworthy ways. Some changes were little more than regressive features of the sultanic reassertion, to be sure. These include the fate of the Parliament, the effacement of ministerial power, and the overelaboration of mechanisms for control of the press. In contrast, other changes sorted out previously unsolved problems, or further refined institutional mechanisms created in earlier periods. Here we note the completion of the reassignment of the offices of the traditional grandvezirial chancery-with the rrranslation Office of the Sublime Porte as a lone but logical exception-from the staff of the foreign minister to that of the grand vezir. Also to mention are the progressive amendments in the organization of the Council of State and in its roles in legislation and administrative justice, 1. Fa<;ade of the Sublime Porte on the Side Facing the Golden Horn, an Ottoman View, c. 1867. The "C;reat C;ateway" to the compound enclosing the Porte (111. 2) is just beyond the Jeft extremity of the building as sho\vn here. What appears over the left-hand wing of the building as a dome with two Ranking minarets belongs to a large mosque in the vicinity, probably Aya Sofya. The small structure to the right is the little mosque kn(HVn as the Naill Mescit. 2. l~he Bab-I Kebir, or "(~reat (~ateway:' to the C=on1pound Enclosing the Buildings of the Sublilne Porte, c. 1 H30s. The structure at the right is the Alay Ko~'kii, or "Parade Pavilion," built at an angle in the walls enclosing Topkapl Palace so that the sultan or other palace figures could easily observe parades and processions like that shown in the print. 3. Reception of a European Envoy by the (~rand Vezir, c. 17905 4. Interior Scene in the Residence of an Ottoman Dignitary (Miisellim) at Ala~ehir in Anatolia, c. 183°5 5. Mustafa Re~id Pa~a (1800-1858) 6. Ke<;ecizade Fuad Pa~a (1815-1869) 7. Mehlned Enlin Ali Pa~a (1815- 8. Abd iil-Halnid II (1876-19°9) 1871 ) j....~, 9. C:rowd outside the C)ffices of the C;rand Vezir Following the C:LTP Raid on the Sublime Porte, January 1913. l~his portico is on the uphill side of the Sublime Porte, the side facing away from the C;olden Horn, and belongs to what appears in Ill. 1 as the righthand \ving of the building. l~his wing still survives and now houses the offices of the governor of Istanbul. Regulation and Systematization or the limited progress toward elaboration of a central structure for the Ministry of the Interior. Still other changes pointed toward a general modernization of organizational concepts. Lack of coordination among departments was becoming a problem in the Foreign Ministry; but what stood out more, to speak of the Porte as a whole, was the progressive substitution for the old, document-oriented organizational patterns of new ones expressed in terms of modes or areas of interaction between the bureaucracy and the larger society. Of greatest ultimate significance is a change implicit in the variety of regulatory texts which require discussion in consideration of the Council of State, the special commissions, or some of the components of the Ministries of Internal and Foreign Affairs. For what the growing numbers of these documents signify is the gradual closure of the time lag between conceptualization and initial implementation of new organizations and programs, on one hand, and their comprehensive regulation, on the other. FURTHER STEPS TOWARD REGULATION AND SYSTEMATIZATION Formal promulgation of laws and regulations was, of course, not enough to make a rational-legal order. Responding to this fact, Osman Nuri Bey, author of one of the more perceptive exposes of the Hamidian system to appear in the wake of the Revolution of 1908, gave succinct expression to a central problem in the evaluation of the laws and decrees of the fallen reginle: Today, if the archives of the Sublime Porte were examined, such comprehensive and detailed decrees would appear on the measures to be taken for the reform and greater prosperity of the state and for the maintenance of order that one ''''ould suppose, upon reading them, that Abd iiI-Hamid really thought day and night of nothing but assuring the perfect comfort and happiness of the state and its people. Yet, one would also suppose that his orders were not or could not be applied because of the ill will or inability of the authorities at the Porte and in the provinces. Osman Nuri went on to blame the nonenforcement of these measures, not on the ministers at the Porte, but on the palace and on the practice of direct, secret communication between it and the agencies nominally subordinate to the ministers.145 Our survey of the workings of the Hamidian political system 27° Six. Restoring Political Balance indicates the substance behind these observations and enables us to appreciate the resentments which this situation engendered in men such as Osman Nuri. The interference of the palace secretaries and spies, coupled with the way the sultan sought to dominate and use new organizational and procedural systems, did a lot to project the traditional repression of bureaucratic initiative into a new era and, in general, to hamper efforts at more effective administration. Nevertheless, the laws and decrees of the Hamidian years produced a positive impact in some ways that Osman Nuri's interpretation overlooks. As is already clear, the laws and decrees did become at least partially effective where they served the interests of the sultan. Even where they did not become fully operative, they provided a conceptual basis for the eventual transformation of the existing system and an implicit critique of its internal contradictions. A survey of the regulatory measures of the period, beginning with those on personnel policy and going on to others that regulated and instituted controls over the workings of formal organizational and procedural systems, will yield a fuller idea of how the laws and decrees of which Osman Nuri spoke served the interests of Abd iiI-Hamid and, at the same time, contributed to the longer-range development of the administrative tradition. Again, as in the last chapter, it is appropriate to recall that such a survey throws light not just on the condition of the Sublime Porte, but also on the general state of the civil bureaucracy. Legal Outlines of a Rational Personnel Policy During this period, routine questions of official discipline gradually ceased to receive as much attention as they did in the personnel policy of the Tanzimat, and concern shifted to more basic issues. Indeed, since Abd iil-Hamid's neopatrimonialism and the liberalism of the constitutionalists shared the premise that the bureaucracy needed to be brought under a kind of political control that had not existed during the Tanzimat, it is not surprising that Abd iiI-Hamid and his advisors contributed to the collective restructuring of the civil bureaucracy more significantly than anyone since Mahmud II. It was during this period that the general rules of official service, promised in the Reform Decree of 1856, began to become law in significant quantity; and many of these measures proved worthy of retention or elaboration after 1908. A survey of the civil-bureaucratic Regulation and Systematimtion 27I personnel measures of the Hamidian years, including the system for keeping personnel records, the laws on promotion and retirement of civil officials, and those on the compensation system, quickly reveals their significance for the development of the bureaucratic tradition. To govern the workings of the personnel records system, there were two sets of instructions, the first issued in 1879, the second in 1887.146 These instructions began by dividing the civil officials of the empire into two imprecisely defined categories. The first consisted of "men of influence" (sahib-i rey), holding posts such as ministries, presidencies of councils or courts, or headships of departments. The second consisted of all other civil officials. Probably deriving from the differences in the procedures that Abd iiI-Hamid intended to follow in appointment of officials of these two types, this distinction also had an effect on the records-keeping system. Records on officials of the first class were to be submitted directly to the central Personnel Records Commission at the Porte, where they would be examined, verified as necessary, and then registered in special registers. The files of officials of the second class would first be registered--or sometimes, in fact, conserved in the original-in the branches of the personnel records system set up in the various ministries and provinces. Those records would only subsequently go on to the central commission for registration and addition to its registers. The personnel files in the Foreign Ministry archives in Istanbul, and the almost two hundred large registers remaining in the prime ministers' archives from the central commission, give massive evidence of the generally faithful observance of these stipulations. The instructions also specified the form of the questionnaire that was to be the basic document in each file. This questionnaire was a large sheet of paper divided into boxes. The column of boxes on the right contained the printed questions which the respondent was to answer in the wider boxes running down the middle of the sheet. To the left was another column of boxes intended for "observations" by the individual's superiors. The questions called for the names of the respondent and his father; the rank and position of the father, if an official; the family name if the respondent belonged to a well-known family (sulale); the respondent's date of birth; an account of his education, with certified copies of his diplomas to be attached; a listing of the 272 Six. Restoring Political Balance languages he knew, with self-rating as to whether he was capable of using the written form of the language for official purposes (kitabet etmek) or merely of reading or speaking the language; and a listing of any literary works he had written, with a note as to whether they were published or not. Following all this, there was to be a chronological account of the respondent's official service. This was to include dated entries for changes in salary or other forms of compensation as well as for changes of position. Periods out of office were to be listed, with the cause of the loss of the previous position and note of whether or not the respondent received an unemployment stipend (mazuliyet maasz). Those who had worked in private business were to include that experience, as well. Each respondent was to note, appending all relevant documents, whether he had ever been subject to complaint or prosecution and, if the latter, what the outcome was. He was then to sign and seal his questionnaire.147 The regulations on the personnel records system further specified that utmost care was to be taken, as the records accumulated , to verify and register the information they contained . There were to be no erasures in the registers, and the officials authorized to make corrections were to sign them. The Personnel Records Commission was to undertake any correspondence necessary to verify doubtful points, a responsibility that sometimes generated twenty or more letters on a single file.148 So that the files could be kept up to date, the Personnel Records Commission and its branches were also to receive notice of all personnel actions.149 This system was, of course, not without its flaws. So great was the concern for supervision of the records that signatures of up to nine officials sometimes appear below even banal additions to a dossier, whether there are deletions or not. In addition, the procedure for keeping the files current was never adequate for recording events-such as publication of additional literary works, or death-that did not result from initiatives taken within the bureaucracy. Where officials were dismissed or prosecuted for some offense, as occasionally happened, their records usually degenerated into an incomprehensible snarl.150 Ottoman officials also tended to gloss over the reasons for their loss of position ;151 their superiors, to reduce their evaluative comments to a string of the laudatory adjectives that typically conclude the entries in old-fashioned, Ottoman biographical compendia. Regulation and Systematization 273 Yet the importance of the personnel records is indisputable. Nothing like them had ever existed before. Operating in facilities so wretched that they could hardly even protect .their records from the elements, and ultimately saddled with such other duties as the publication of the official yearbooks,152 the officials of the Porte who were chiefly responsible for the personnel records system nonetheless produced one of the largest and most uniform collections of biographical data ever created in the Islamic Middle East. The value attributed to this system at the time is reflected in the volume of documentation concerning it in the YI1dlz Palace Archives, as well as in the progressive creation of analogous systems for categories of officials not covered by the originalone.153 For a more precise appreciation of the role of the personnel records in the making of personnel decisions, we must, however, consider another complex of regulatory acts that had as their ostensible purpose a comprehensive regulation of conditions of civil-bureaucratic recruitment and service. While measures of this type ultimately proliferated, the basic text in this field is a Decree on the Promotion and Retirement of Civil Officials (Memurin-i Mulkiye Terakki ve Tekaud Kararnamesi), first promulgated in 1881. That version was superseded by another of 1884, of which various articles were amended on a number of subsequent occasions.154 This decree was, in fact, a curious document. It was divided into two sections, of which the first dealt summarily with conditions of appointment and promotion, while the second dealt with the creation of a modern kind of Retirement Fund (Tekaud Sandzgz), to be financed by deductions from salaries. Given the dual character of the decree, it will be profitable to consider the first section together with other measures of the period on related subjects and to discuss the second section later, in connection with other provisions on compensation systems. The first section of the decree began by specifying basic requirements about the age, nationality, and education of applicants for appointment. Except in special cases, they were to be Ottoman subjects, aged at least twenty, or sixteen in the case of unsalaried apprentices (mulazzm) , and they were either to present their diplomas or be examined by a board of officials. Part two of this section spelled out basic requirements of official discipline and concluded with articles explaining the personnel re- 274 Six. Restoring Political Balance cords system and forbidding ministers and governors general to appoint their relatives to serve under themselves. Part three of the first section went on to specify procedures for promotion. All officials, except graduates of the School of Civil Administration , were to begin at the lowest grade in their respective services and accomplish a specified amount of time in grade prior to promotion. The only exceptions were to be for provincial governors general, ambassadors, and secretaries of embassy--eases in which the sultan presumably intended to retain a discretional appointment-making power for himself. The various positions, the decree continued, were to be grouped in ranked classes, among which officials would have to work their way up. Parts four and five of the first section went on to specify the causes for which an official might be dismissed from his office and the conditions of eligibility for an unemployment stipend (rnazuliyet rnaaSl), and then to refer to the regulations and laws that specified procedures to be followed when officials were suspected of offenses . One of the laws promised in Abd iil-Hamid's speech from the throne at the opening of the first Ottoman Parliament, this decree , incompletely elaborated though many of its provisions were, was the closest the Ottomans would come before the collapse of the empire to the production of a single, comprehensive "civil service law." Through the promulgation of other laws and regulations, the development of a rational system of personnel administration nonetheless continued. Such measures covered a considerable range of topics. Among them, perhaps the most basic in importance were the regulations issued for the various boards and commissions for the selection of officials and those pertaining to educational qualifications for appointment. In the first of these categories, instructions or regulations were issued in this period, as we have noted, for at least two of the appointment-making bodies then created: the Commission for the Selection of Officials in the Ministry of the Interior and the Civil Officials Commission, set up in 1896 to take charge of civil-bureaucratic appointments more generally. Both documents excluded certain categories of appointments from the cognizance of these commissions, but went on to prescribe orderly procedures to be followed within the zones of competence that remained. The various instructions and regulations for the first of these Regulation and Systematization 275 two bodies, for example, went into considerable detail about how it was to conduct its business, keep its records, and prepare the documentation on those it nominated for appointment. Similarly, the regulations set out the qualifications for appointment , posing specific requirements for the cleanness of the candidate 's previous record, his educational qualifications, and the accomplishment of specific amounts of time at one level of service prior to promotion to the next. The positions for which this commission was to select nominees were those of secretary (tahrirat miidiirii) at the second highest local administrative echelon (liva, sancak) and chief administrative officer (kaymakam, miidiir) at the next to lowest (haw) and lowest (nahiye) .155 The regulations of 1896 for the central Civil Officials Commission were less specific about some of these details. This is very likely a reflection of the broader competence of the new body, which, as may be recalled, was responsible for all civilbureaucratic appointments that required an imperial decree and were not made directly at the initiative of the sultan or grand vezir. Its regulations nonetheless required that the Civil Officials Commission set up a fixed pattern of procedure. Appointments were to be proposed by the ministries within which they fell (presumably by the appointment boards of those ministries), then forwarded, after investigation of the candidates' dossiers, from the Civil Officials Commission to the palace, and finally ordered by imperial decree.156 Along with the copious evidence on patrimonial discretionalism and caprice in Abd iil-Hamid's use of bureaucratic patronage , there is evidence to indicate that these appointment-making systems did become operative. There is nothing contradictory about this, for the mission of the commissions was to select candidates who conformed to the sultan's expectations and whom the latter would then appoint as he saw fit. The opposition that liberals at times directed against the measures for systematizing appointments is surely best understood as a response to this kind of palace domination of recruitment and promotion.157 In any case, the entries in the personnel records, from the creation of the Civil Officials Commission onward, reflect the more or less faithful application of its regulations.15s Tahsin Pa§a, long-time first secretary of the Mabeyn, also provides corroborating evidence on this point. He tells, for example, how the appointment commission would send its nominations to the palace, together Six. Restoring Political Balance with copies of the personnel dossiers on the nominees. Abd iilHamid would have the official biographies read to him and was especially keen to determine whether the nominees were graduates of the School of Civil Administration (Miilkiye Mektebi ). Commenting to Tahsin on his role in the improvement of that school, Abd iiI-Hamid once observed with pride that while persons of uncertain qualifications and affiliations had formerly been appointed to provincial posts, now only graduates of the school were.159 This was an exaggeration. Yet, the interest of the sultan in improving the quality of administrative personnel and tightening his control over appointments is clear, as is the way in which the appointment commissions served him in these efforts. Abd iil-Hamid's emphasis on the School of Civil Administration also underscores the importance of developments in education for the overall evolution of personnel policy. The School of Civil Administration was Abd iil-Hamid's pet educational institution ; but this was a period of many important gains, including major extension of the systems of lower-level schools and the opening of such important higher-level institutions as the empire 's first modern law school (Hukuk Mektebi, 1878) and university (Dar iil-Fiinun, 1900).160 In these developments, the close equivalency in Ottoman minds between education and government service found expression in a number of new ways. Where the School of Civil Administration is concerned, what is most interesting in this connection is the clear preference given its graduates. 'The regulations of the school, which Abd iiI-Hamid claimed to have dictated himself,161 specified the eligibility of its alumni for appointment to a list of offices, including those of secretary of embassy, consul, and kaymakam or chief administrative officer at the next to lowest echelon of the local administration (kaw). These provisions were actually printed on the diplomas that the school issued its graduates. In an interesting reworking of the traditional terminology for brevets of appointment , the highest grade of these diplomas was termed miilazemet riiusii. Literally suggesting the brevet (riius) of a supernumerary (miilazzm), this was then translated into French as baccalaureat.162 There does not appear to have been any other school under Abd iiI-Hamid of which the graduates had access to office on such privileged terms. Yet the state could not fill every office named in the regulations of the Miilkiye with one of its graduates Regulation and Systematiwtion and had to make allowances for those who had won their qualifications in other schools or by experience. A number of measures appeared on cases of such types. What is most striking about these measures is the gradual but clearly discernible upgrading of requirements. Ultimately, at least a secondary (idadiye) education was demanded from the chief administrative officers at even the lowest of the four levels of the local administration (nahiye), and an examination system was created for many types of appointees. This system surely did not operate with full vigor. Even in the best-ordered Western bureaucracies of the era, with much more strongly developed educational systems to back them up, examination systems did not always function rigorously . Yet the documentation indicates that demand for promotion by examination was sufficient to permit the stiffening of the formal requirements until they included much of the curriculum of the School of Civil Administration and a broad range of information about governmental organization and law.163 Thus, while the Decree of 1884 on Promotion and Retirement of Civil Officials was in many ways no more than a rudimentary sketch for a general systematization of personnel policy, a variety of measures on related issues, particularly on the operations of the selection boards and on the educational requirements for appointment, helped to fill in needed details. More than that, these measures became operative, at least to a degree, precisely because they served the sultan in his efforts to dominate the bureaucracy . Ultimately, of course, even the best-conceived personnel policy could not function effectively without a rational and operative compensation system to support it. The intractability of the economic problems of the times, and the way in which it suited Abd til-Hamid to play on them, inhibited the development of this dimension of personnel policy. Even here, however, there are reforms, and to a degree practical improvements, to cite. Reforms in this field began with a decree of 1880 on official salaries. One of many attempts to economize by cutting salaries, and presumably also a product of the financial maneuverings leading up to the creation of the foreign-dominated Public Debt Administration, this was perhaps the closest approach in this period to the general classification of official positions demanded in the "Decree on the Promotion and Retirement of Civil Officials ."164 The decree on salaries ordered a twenty percent cut, Six. Restoring Politil;al Balance supposed to be compensated for by a contemporary reform of the coinage,165 following which salaries were to be paid in sound money rather than the debased coin in use up to that time. The decree then went on to offer a comprehensive classification of bureaucratic positions, at least outside the palace, with specification of the salaries for the positions in each class. The extent to which such a schematization could prevail against the realities of the economic situation and of the resurgent sultanic patrimonialism is well indicated by the fact that no more seems to have been heard of this kind of regulation, except for an amendment of 1884,166 although there were additional salary cuts at later dates. At least in the civil bureaucracy, this was, however, the first attempt to elaborate something like the comprehensive salary table or barem (from the French bareme) later created under the Republic. In addition, there were subsequent attempts to regulate or refine various ancillary aspects of the compensation system. These included measures on the procedures for the assignment of unemployment stipends (mazuliyet maa~l )167 and of travel pay and per diem.168 Most important, however, was the creation under section two of the "Decree on the Promotion and Retirement of Civil Officials" of a modern system of retirement pensIons. The basic concept of this system was that anyone who served in the civil bureaucracy should, after thirty years, be entitled to retire with a pension determined on the basis of his salary over a given period and financed by a five percent salary deduction. The decree and its many subsequent amendments, all of which pertain to the pension system, also included a tangle of intricacies about persons who belonged to one branch of government service but served in another, those whose careers predated the creation of the system, retirement for reasons of illness, the entitlements of surviving dependents, the organization and administration of the fund, and the investment of its capital. Like so many other measures, this pension system appears to have become operative to at least some degree but to have led a problem-ridden existence. The continued amendment of the articles of the decree is, in its way, a sign of the accumulation of experience in their implementation. Perhaps more ambiguously , the importance of the system found tangible expression in the growth of a separate nezaret to administer it. This was surely Regulation and Systematization 279 a "supervisorship" rather than a "ministry," although the organization in question was quite large by 1908.169 Whether this size boded good or ill for the administration of the fund is unclear , but there were other developments that clearly meant no good. It was not long, for example, before the Ministry of Finance was borrowing from the Retirement Fund.170 The reasons for this are none too clear, but the mere occurrence hints that the salary deductions for the retirement fund were becoming no more than another tax on the bureaucracy. This supposition seems to find confirmation in the recollections of A~<;ldede Halil ibrahim, whose experiences at earlier points in his lengthy career have enlightened us on so many occasions. At a time when he had passed retirement age "by leagues" (fersah gefmi§se de), he was still making his way to his office, half blind, bent over his cane, and trusting in the dervish saints (erenler). It was well known, he said, that the Retirement Fund could not pay its pensions .171 In the case of the pension fund, as in other respects, the attempt to create a modern system of official compensation indicated that the drive for systematization had exceeded what the practical administrative capabilities and material resources of the state could support. To survey the field of personnel policy more generally, however, the last decades of the nineteenth century witnessed noteworthy developments. In addition to the measures pertaining to compensation systems, these included the creation of a modern system of personnel records and the first steps toward a comprehensive regulation of conditions of recruitment and promotion in the civil bureaucracy. For Abd iiI-Hamid, measures such as these could be no more than means to the end of consolidating his control over an enlarged but again servile bureaucracy. Like the lingering inequalities in conditions of service as encountered by the various bureaucratic subgroups described in the last chapter, this primacy of sultanic will over law points to the obvious limits of regularity in official personnel policy during this period. Yet, even under the Hamidian neopatrimonialism, and partly to serve its ends, the concern for rationality had gained new ground. Steps toward Regulation and Control in Other Fields That these developments in official personnel policy were part of a larger pattern is already apparent from the growing extent to which regulatory acts assume a place among the sources from 280 Six. Restoring Politi£al Balance which we trace the evolution of the formal organizational'apparatus of the Porte in this period. This fact means that we have already introduced many of the organic regulatory documents of these years and have begun to comment on the new trends in organizational thinking that they imply. It remains only to add certain points on the extent and limits of this kind of regulatory activity, the qualitative change that it implied, and the way this change expressed concern for the reinstitution of controls over the actual operations of the bureaucracy. One basic point deserving brief mention is that the drive for overall regulation of the politico-bureaucratic system was in some respects even stronger than the regulations that we have specifically cited would indicate. Even after the parliamentary episode, there were continuing efforts to produce the broad range of administrative law promised in the constitution of 1876. Along with the innovations in personnel policy, there were, for example, comprehensive regulations enacted for a number of major agencies outside the Porte: the two Houses of Parliament, and the Ministries ofJustice, Finance, Public Works, and Pious Foundations.172 For the major agencies of the Porte, with the exception of the Council of State and the special commissions , there seems to have been nothing of comparable scope; but this was not for want of trying in certain quarters. There was, for example, at least one ambitious attempt, undated but probably attributable to the years 1871-1878, to draw up a comprehensive set of regulations for the Foreign Ministry .173 That there were similar efforts to regulate the most important civil-bureaucratic institutions is also clear from a draft law, dating from the brief grand vezirate of Hayr iiI-Din Pa~a (1878-1879), on the duties of the various ministers and of the Council of Ministers. Embodying the principle of collective responsibility , advocacy of which provoked Hayr iil-Din's fall, and assigning vastbut minutely defined responsibilities to the grand vezir and his colleagues, this document assumed a resurrection of the Parliament and a real limitation of the sultan's prerogatives .174 r-rhe continuing struggle between Abd iiI-Hamid and the liberals, on into the 188os, over the character of the grand vezirate suggests that this ill-starred proposal must not have been the only one of its kind. In any event, it is clear that the demand for regularization was greater, at least in some circles, than the measures actually promulgated would indicate. Regulation and Systematization This fact has to be weighed, ofcourse, against the limits within which organizational and procedural patterns actually did undergo reform in this period. T'he clearest indication of these limits is in the vital field of finance, where any would-be reformers were still far from having sufficient power or knowledge to solve some of their most fundamental problems. As the empire slid into bankruptcy, circumstances did not help. Steps toward financial rationalization did occur, but their significance for the civil bureaucracy and the administrative tradition in general was often oblique or ironic. Some of the efforts at fiscal rationalization grew out of the constitutional movement and Ottoman initiatives to forestall the official avowal of bankruptcy. '"fo be noted here are the powers that the constitution gave the Chamber of Deputies over budgeting and other financial matters, the regulations of the Ministry of Finance, the attempt to create an independent Board of Audit (Divan-z Muhasebat) , and the attempt of 1880 at comprehensive systematization of official salaries.175 Official bankruptcy led, in turn, to the establishment of the foreign-dominated Public Debt Administration, set up in 1881. Its powers a major breach of Ottoman sovereignty, the administration assumed control of six major revenues of the empire, applying them to the service of the foreign debt. Except insofar as they figured among the bondholders, as some did, Ottoman officials could have benefited from this agency only through the provisions requiring division of surplus revenues with the imperial government, or through observation of a new example of European-style administrative efficiency. However grudging Ottomans may have been to admit it, the debt administration must have exerted some such demonstration effect. For it ultimately employed several thousand Ottoman subjects, paying them regularly . The number of revenues the organization collected also increased over time for various reasons, partly because the Ottoman government elected on occasion to use the debt administration as its own collection agent.176 rfo translate the lessons that could be learned from the Public Debt Administration into Ottoman practice, however, was no easy matter. Not only did the debt administration control a large and growing share of the revenues, but Abd iiI-Hamid created a split in what remained of the Ottoman economy. For himself, he developed a rationally run, personal financial empire within the Six. Restoring Politual Balance empire. This was based on a vastly extended network of crown estates ((ijtliJuit-l humayun)-the reassertion of the sultan's claims to ownership of the land is another neopatrimonial motifand was administered through the Privy Treasury (Hazine-i Hassa).177 Only what was left of government finance fell within the purview of the minister of finance; but since there was still no progress toward centralized control of receipts and expenditures , his authority was negligible. The effect of this situation on the government budgets, which should have been among the most important instruments of rationalization and control, is self-evident (cf. the Appendix).178 How this state of affairs affected individual officials is already clear from discussion of the compensation system. Financial problems thus continued to figure as an almost insurmountable obstacle in the way of regulatory efforts. What makes this more unfortunate is that the drive for rationalization and control was gaining in other respects, not only in scope but also in sophistication. To be sure, some of the regulatory acts of the period continued to perpetuate traditionalistic organizational concepts179 or to be incomplete or defective in composition .180 But this was less typical than in the past. Good examples of the qualitative improvements in the regulatory acts of this period, and particularly of the growing emphasis on monitoring the actual performance of the bureaucracy, appear in two sets of documents, one pertaining to the consular service, the other to the field of official communications. Including organic regulations for the service, a set of instructions detailing consular responsibilities, tables listing the fees to be collected for various transactions, and a ruling on leaves, the consular regulations display an innovative character which becomes quite clear if we recall the traditional scribes or the consular and diplomatic officials of Selim III. The consul envisioned in these documents was a salaried professional and either an alumnus of the School of Civil Administration or a graduate of another school who had proven his qualifications by examination . He did not engage in trade. He performed specified services for a defined geographical area and was subject to periodic inspection. He knew how to perform the social and ceremonial obligations of his post correctly and tactfully and to conduct his official business and correspondence, not only according to Ottoman conventions, but also according to those spelled out in Regulation and Systematization de Clerq's Guide des consulats.181 The consul kept his files in prescribed order and reported periodically to the ministry on specific matters relating to commerce and public hygiene. Most importantly, he provided an intricately detailed list of services to Ottoman subjects in his district. These services included aid to and repatriation of the indigent, a lengthy list of functions having to do with shipping, and performance of all the transactions -delivery of passports and visas, registration of births, marriages, deaths, and so forth-required under the Ottoman laws on population registration.182 It does not require a great speculative leap to conclude that this image of the consular official was made in Europe, and measurement against these standards of most of the Ottoman consuls in the Aegean region, around the Black Sea, or in Iran would probably have produced a sad contrast. To judge from the complaints of a man who was clearly one of the better consular officials of the time, it was also true that Abd iii-Hamid had a hand in preventing the implementation of these measures by turning the chief function of the consuls, as of the diplomats, into "police surveillance" of the Ottoman subjects in their districts .183 Yet, enough correspondence passed between the Foreign Ministry and the consulates over matters relating to these regulations to indicate that they did have some effect.184 Indeed, it is possible to document at least a few cases in which consular officials lost their positions for abuse of office.185 To judge from the memoirs of Paker and Soylemezoglu, we must conclude, too, that there were beginning to be consular and diplomatic agents who set out for their posts with an image of themselves much like the one projected in the regulations. A new concept of the bureaucratic professional was emerging, and it was emerging in a context that demanded an unprecedented degree of control and accountability in the working of bureaucratic institutions. At times, this new emphasis appears in the controls included among the range of functions that officials were to perform for the larger society. This is implicitly true of the system of population registration, which made demands on the consuls as well as on many officials of the Ministry of the Interior . More importantly for present purposes and for the general effort at restoration of political balance, there was a new emphasis on controls, taking such forms as inspections and reports , over the way officials behaved and over the conduct of Six. Restoring Political Balance administrative business. Like some of the new institutions in the field of personnel policy, the consulates could be used in ways that had little justification except in terms of an exaggerated concern for maintenance of the sultan's dominance. But this kind of diversion could not occur without inviting attack from those who responded to the spirit of the new measures. Similar implications also emerge from the reforms of this period in the field of official communications. Whatever the extent of bureaucratic featherbedding and underemployment, the volume of paperwork continued to grow and to be perceived as unmanageable. Extreme centralization did nothing to diminish this problem; no more did the lack of any idea that certain types of documentation were of temporary utility and ought not to be retained permanently in the files. The number and scale of the archival collections remaining from these ye\ars acquaint every researcher with these facts. Contemporary officials responded to such problems in part through various attempts at improvement in records management . The organizational evolution of the various records offices and archives is one sign of this effort. There was also a variety of procedural changes, including extension of the use of standardized forms for certain types of transactions, adoption of systems for the numbering of documents,186 and substitution of filing in dossiers for the old practices of registering documents in chronological order or storing them in sacks.187 One set of regulations prescribed procedures, resembling some of those in the consular regulations, by which embassies should register and secure their correspondence.188 Another set demanded monthly examination of the registers of the Records Office of the Porte, the sending out of inquiries about documents that had not been returned from other offices on time, and the reporting to the grand vezir of officials or offices that did not respond to these inquiries within a set interval.I89 Other measures indicate the connection between concern for the control of official paperwork and the growing centralization of administration. An order of 1882, for example, said that since many of the documents issued by the Office of the Imperial Divan were prepared in response to imperial decrees, they need no longer be submitted for the seal of the grand vezir. Since the types of documents named had mostly to do with appointrnents, this order is clearly a sign of the loss of patronage by the grand Regulation and Systematization vezir and its reconcentration in the hands of the sultan.19o Yet centralization did not necessarily imply that the sultan did not want ideas and recommendations from lower echelons. On more than one occasion, orders went out to all offices and ministries to the effect that they were not to refer problems to higher echelons without including supporting documentation and recommendations for solutions.191 Under Abd iiI-Hamid, as in the traditional system, officials had reason not to be forward in expression of their opinions; but he, like some of his ancestors, demanded that they be so, anyway. As the procedures for document control became more rigorous , special attention also had to be given to the registration and promulgation of laws, regulations, treaties, and other such acts. The principal change of the period in this regard occurred with a decree of July 1872, which we have already mentioned as defining the roles of the Council of State and the Council of Ministers in the legislative process. The same decree provided, in addition, that each new law would become executory at a date specified in the law or, in want of specification, fifteen days following publication of the law in the official newspapers of the capital (Takvim-i Vekayi) and of the provinces. In provinces that had no such newspapers, the fifteen days would be counted from the public proclamation of the law.192 In fact, one of the saddest victories of despotism under Abd iiI-Hamid was that the official newspaper of the capital fell victim to the censor, supposedly for nothing more than a typesetter's error, while publication of the volumes of legal acts, the Diistur, also lapsed for most of the reign. Care was still taken to maintain the traditional system for registration of laws and diplomatic agreements in the Office of the Imperial Divan.193 Similarly, legal acts continued to appear in special printings or in the newspapers that did remain in circulation. But regular publication of the official newspaper of the central government or of the legal volumes would only resume under the Young Turks.194 Where the connection between reform in the field of official communications and the increasing emphasis on control and monitoring of bureaucratic performance ultimately became clearest was in the so-called "statistical system." This appears to have been founded in 1879 on the recommendation of Kiic;iik Said Pa§a, then prime minister (bas vekil), as a means by which to provide the central administration with sound information on 286 Six. Restoring Political Balance which to base policy.195 An ambitious set of regulations ordered the formation in various local and central agencies of special bodies to gather the statistical information. The regulations went on to define the procedures by which the information should be aggregated as it passed to higher echelons, made available to the interested ministries in Istanbul, and published. The system was an elaborate one; yet the publication of official economic statistics, beginning in the 1880s, indicates that it produced tangible results.196 The uses of this statistical system for control of the civil bureaucracy became obvious with the creation in 1891 of the Statistical Council of the Sublime Porte, attached to the Council of State. Some details are not clear, but this seems to have amounted to a revised version of the earlier system. Its regulations specifically charged this Statistical Council with collecting information on everything that happened in the provincesbirths , deaths, the presence of foreigners, crime, the building of roads and schools, the numbers of documents sent and received -"down to the smallest detail." The governors general (vali) of the provinces, and also the governors (mutasarrif) of sancaks that did not come under the authority of a governor general, were to submit this information to Istanbul in annual reports. Whenever such an official was transferred, a special report of the same type was to be submitted. One copy of it would go to the palace, where it would presumably serve as a report on the official's performance. There were again articles in the regulations to specify how statistical information should be collected at the lower echelons of the local administration, how information of some of the same types should be collected through the Foreign Ministry from the embassies, and how the information gathered should be published.197 A set of reports submitted from the embassies in 1905 proyides a measure of the practical workings of this system. The reports typically took the form of a tabulation of the number of documents received and dispatched during a given period of time, sometimes with breakdowns as to the source or destination of the documents or the matters with which they dealt. Such statistics may be criticized as a crude measure, at best, of the volume of business handled or the efficiency of the agency in question . Yet the compilation of this kind of statistics appears to conform to the practice of the Western bureaucracies of the day,198 and the resulting data are not totally useless. In this case, the re- Conclusion ports varied widely, those of some of the less professional ambassadors being slovenly or incomplete enough to elicit criticism from the Statistical Commission. The better reports, in contrast, were quite informative. These included one from the embassy in Berlin, beginning with an account of the "constant" correspondence between that post and the palace, or the report of Galip Kemali Soylemezoglu, by then first secretary in Bucharest. He produced a handsome tabular summary of the correspondence of that legation, not just for one year but for all nine since the appointment of the then minister, Kazlm Bey.199 As documentation of such types confirms, developments of this period in the conceptualization of other types of organizational and procedural patterns paralleled and amplified those that had reshaped the ostensible personnel policy of the civil bureaucracy . Not only was there significant progress toward organic regulation of bureaucratic structures-despite frustrated aspirations and plans that never reached the point of enactment -but a desire for reactivation and reassertion of the bureaucracy, a desire already discernible by the end of the eighteenth century, had also begun to find fulfillment in the displacement of old concepts of official roles and procedures by new ones emphasizing service and control. As long as the Hamidian system survived, the new concepts of organization and procedure would remain subject to its deforming influence. The consequences of the financial situation of the government were equally grave and even harder to deal with. Yet the increasing prominence of new ideas about how the administrative system should operate indicated a movement toward closer approximation of the rational-legal ideal. Some measures, such as the consular instructions or the use of "statistical" data to monitor official performance, even began to anticipate the emphasis on efficiency that, in the thinking of some students of the most advanced of modern bureaucratic systems, begins to assume primacy over the Weberian emphasis on law.20o If the Hamidian palace system were to be eliminated, surely the scope for such developments would be vastly increased. CONCLUSION Between 1871 and 1908, then, the Sublime Porte achieved a new degree of organizational elaboration and articulation. The general outlines of a rational personnel policy were adopted for the 288 Six. Restoring Politil;al Balance entire civil bureaucracy and in some respects made operative. Increasingly modern conceptions of official roles and procedures also became current, along with a new concern to monitor the actual performance of the bureaucracy. Most importantly, this effort to build controls into the bureaucratic system was part of a larger concern for the restoration in some form of the political equilibrium that had been so profoundly disturbed during the Tanzimat. As concerns the long-term development of the politicobureaucratic tradition, it was chiefly in this last respect-finance aside-that this period was one of frustration and conflict. For the failure of the constitutional movement and the creation of the Hamidian machine, although a tour de force, was in too many ways a journey into the past. As long as this machine remained operative, its workings vitiated the practical improvements that might otherwise have been expected from the reforms of the period and compounded, rather than diminished, the problems of maintaining the imperial system. There was, however, to be one more major effort to solve all these problems. Since this attempt forms another phase in the history of the opposition intelligentsia, the first phase of which we have already discussed in connection with the Young Ottomans and the constitutional movement, it is appropriate in concluding this chapter to say something about how the Hamidian system helped to call forth this effort. So successful was Abd iiI-Hamid at first in creating his political system and in neutralizing those who opposed him that the history of the opposition was very nearly discontinuous from soon after the termination of the parliamentary experiment until the end of the 1880s.2 0 1 It was not possible, however, to enroll larger and larger numbers in official cadres, demanding more and more from them in the way of education, and at the same time expect them to abjure the ideas of culture heroes such as Namlk Kemal or Ziya Pa~a, or to remain undisturbed by the absurdities of the domestic order or the contradictions between it and the world outside. When the diverse elements of what would become known as the Young r-rurk movement began to emerge, they did so in ways that took up the Young Ottoman legacy but also signified a broadening of both the social basis of the opposition and its intellectual horizons.202 Reflecting the growth of pressure for enlargement of the Conclusion scope of political participation, the leadership of the new opposition emerged from not one but several social settings. Spreading at first among the cadets of the military schools and then among the students of the School of Civil Administration, the movement gradually won recruits in various branches of official service and outside the bureaucracy, as well. The elements of the empire's populations represented among the early activists of the movement also presented a picture of much greater diversity , in terms of both ethnicity and social status, than had the blue-blooded founders of the Young Ottoman movement. Ultimately , however, it was to be the military officer corps, and within it men whose frustrations were at least partly linked to their relatively obscure origins, who would provide the actual leadership for the Revolution of 1908. Like their social origins, the ideas of the Young Turks displayed a new diversity. Some of the ideas recalled the Young Ottoman program. For example, the thought of the Young Turks focused on a demand for restoration of the constitution and was still strongly influenced by the liberal political philosophy. The Young Turks-the conventional name for whom is in this sense a misnomer-also resembled the Young Ottomans in continuing to emphasize the Ottomanist supranationalism and the preservation of the empire. But Young Turk political thought also included new elements incompatible with the Young Ottoman legacy. For example, Turkish nationalist tendencies, having emerged in other circles, gradually began to influence the Young Turks, especially after 1908. Other contradictions derived from the fact that the Young Turks' awareness of Western thought was broader and more up to date than that of their ideological predecessors had been for its day. Serif Mardin, the leading student of the Young Turks' ideas, has found them responding to such diverse intellectual trends as positivism and social Darwinism and to contemporary developments in fields ranging from philosophy to economics, sociology, psychology, and the physical sciences. With this increase in the breadth and currency of awareness of Western ideas-itself a major indicator of the impact of the educational reforms and literary innovations of this and the preceding period-went a growing secularization of world views and, in some quarters at least, a new emphasis on deliberate and thoroughgoing westernization. Simultaneously , the concern, typical of the Young Ottomans, to Six. Restoring Political Balance justify each intended reform in the light of Islamic religiouslegal tradition began to disappear. As of 1908, Young Turk political ideas were still evolving, and there were among those ideas several that implicitly contradicted the general constitutional emphasis of the movement or had otherwise explosive potentials~ Since the survival of the cosmopolitan empire was the paramount political concern of the Young Turks, this was most obviously true of Turkish nationalism , especially as it began to influence policy following the revolution.203 Scarcely less disquieting in its implications for the long-term development of the polity was a tendency to elitism and authoritarianism. This emerged among the Young Turks for several reasons, including military training and the character of some of the Western ideas-such as emphasis on bureaucratic expertise and efficiency-to which the new opposition responded . Coupled with their concern for the preservation of the empire, this tendency led the Young Turks in practice to display a sort of modernized version of the elitism and the "statistsecularist " orientation so long prominent in the tradition of the ruling class, and thus to couple their overt liberalism with yet another kind of neopatrimonial behavior. Even had it not been for the international situation, ideas and tendencies such as these might have led the Young Turks, once in power, into serious trouble. As matters developed in fact, the international problems assumed precedence in overwhelming the new leadership and precipitating the final collapse of the empire. Before that happened, however, the Young Turks not only overthrew the Hamidian machine, but also carried out reforms that gave unequivocal proof both of the continuing vitality of the ancient administrative tradition and of the momentum that had accumulated behind the newer drive for achievement of a rational-legal order. ...