Miners and the State in the Ottoman Empire: The Zonguldak Coalfield, 1822–1920 by Donald Quataert (review)

198 JOTSA 2:1 (2015) Quataert, Donald. Miners and the State in the Ottoman Empire: The Zonguldak Coalfield, 1822–1920. New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006. xii, 257 p., [16] p. of plates, ill., maps. Paperback $27.95: ISBN 1845451341. Donald Quataert’s engaging book on the Ottoman miners in the last century of the existence of the empire shows that, linguistic and other turns notwithstanding, social history still has a lot to offer. The author manages to combine his interest in the everyday life of Ottoman subjects, in this case people working in the mines of the Zonguldak region, with contributing to historiographic debates on the formation of the modern Ottoman state, the expansion of capitalism and “the role of working classes in these large processes.” Furthermore, the author’s approach is enriched by his sensibility towards gender aspects, although he often has to limit himself to outlining questions and hypotheses that can be only answered by future research based on primary sources different from those he used for this book. The way the state is introduced into the story is one of the major achievements of the book. Scholarship on Ottoman history has been criticized for being too statecentered , for depending mainly on state-produced primary sources, and for implicitly endorsing the raison d’état. Quataert’s book acknowledges the prominent role of the state in Ottoman mining in its very title. However, the author decidedly opts for presenting “a history from below,” not only in the sense of focusing on a truly underground activity like mining (paraphrasing the author), but putting the life of manual workers in the mines into the center of the narrative. This does not prevent him from making several important contributions to the debate on the formation of the Ottoman state. Namely, he questions the notion of an omnipotent bureaucratic apparatus, showing how difficult it proved for the government officials to ensure a reliable labor force for such a strategic sector like mining. Furthermore, when they tried to do so, they opted for arrangements that do not follow historians’ expectations associated with the age of high capitalism: instead of a “landless, uprooted class of workers,” the mining in the coalfield became dependent on local villager-miners with “enduring ties to land” that were forced to work in the mines via a rotational corvée-like system introduced by the Ottoman state in 1867. The state relied heavily on local notables regarding the management of this villager workforce, which confirms that Karen Barkey’s “negotiated empire” did not disappear with the Tanzimat reforms. Quite on the contrary, the power of local notables over the villagers might have even been strengthened due to similar state initiatives. Furthermore, the central state apparatus did not act as a coherent block: when part of the administration strove to keep the mines running smoothly during the wars, the War Ministry drafted the miners into the army. Thus, in what Quataert understands to be an un-modern pattern of behavior, betraying the residues of the Ottoman state’s archaic character, military authorities imposed their narrow interests even if these were blatantly contrary to the demands of modern warfare and to the general raison d’état. Book Reviews 199 In the introduction, the author outlines the debates in Ottoman and global history to which he aims to contribute by this, in a way, very local study. He includes a historiographic essay on how the history of mining in Zonguldak has been told, exploring how these narratives were inscribed in and shaped by the political discourse of the time. While he places his own work into this tradition, at the same time he stresses the ways in which his approach is different than the one of his predecessors. The first chapter offers a vivid description of the region’s physical and human geography, followed by a glimpse into the way the coalfield was managed. Quataert shows how the state initially organized and oversaw the coalfield to gradually—and partially—surrender control to private enterprise, particularly in the extraction, keeping mainly a supervising role. As in other cases (i.e., School of Civil Engineering), the Young Turk Period is the time when a...