The Ottoman Fiscal-Military State in Comparative Perspective

The story of the Ottoman's devolution and increased outsourcing of imper­ial violence in the eighteenth century is important because it demonstrates how the central government was forced to turn from its late medieval policy of relying largely upon commissioned armies at a time when its European rivals are understood to have increased their monopoly of legitimate violence and articulated a clearer distinction between military and civil society.

Ottoman imperialism contrasted significantly with western European, colonial imperialisms. Ottoman expansion had long been predicated upon the absorption and assimilation of subject peoples, who were permitted to maintain local customs and religious beliefs, so long as they did not challenge Ottoman suzerainty. While conquest was initially violent, the conquered were not treated as racial inferiors and subject to the sorts of extreme violence that the process of European colonisation and racial slavery pro­duced in the New World. The Ottoman Empire offered peace and security for its multi-confessional and heterogeneous population. Its dynamic military machine offered social mobility for its entire subject population until the end of the seventeenth century. Historians have accordingly attributed the empire's very longevity to Istanbul's flexibility and ability to conceive of a policy that enabled the dynasty to negotiate with and co-opt indigenous populations across religious and social divides in the lucrative business of imperial expansion and trade.^[327]

In the traditional grand narrative of Ottoman history, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, awkwardly positioned between the better-studied ‘golden age' of sixteenth-century conquests and the nineteenth- and twentieth­centuries' modernising reforms and national revolutions, have been neglected and dismissed as a period of decline and military disaster. However, over the last decade historians have striven to replace the image of stasis and decay with a more balanced picture of developments.

Nevertheless, when it comes to the outsourcing and privatisation of coercive force that characterised the eighteenth century, the profound inter- confessional-cum-inter-ethnic strife that accompanied this devolution of violence has largely been ignored. Ottoman irregular forces are typically reduced to mere pawns and commodities in the struggles among Ottoman imperial and provincial elites, and Ottoman non-Muslims' participation in Ottoman culture and the Ottoman military is largely ignored until the first ‘national' uprising in Serbia between 1804 and 1817. This latter omission is all the more glaring given that what was so ‘revolutionary' about the period was the new political imagination of Ottoman Christian groups like the Serbs and, soon afterwards, the Greeks, that prompted them to take enormous risks to establish more autonomy and independence from Ottoman rule by the early 1800s. Moreover, the fact that bands of discontented irregular warrior popu­lations forged large networks of violence and terror that attracted and involved common subjects, janissaries, provincial notables and governors alike testifies to how very well organised paramilitary forces were, how they appealed to and were representative of a large swathe of Ottoman society.