In the sultan's service

However, in an important recent intervention on social networks and governance in the Ottoman Empire, Christine Philliou argues that there is another imperial dimension to which mainstream scholarship has been blind, and it is the same kind of blindness adumbrated at the beginning of this chapter.³⁶ She argues there is an Ottoman context to consider that was no less significant given that the empire was still a going concern throughout the nineteenth century, one that continued to hold some meaning for Ottoman Greeks.³⁷ This was particularly so because the second half of the century and the first decade of the twentieth century saw a new phase of Ottoman Greek prosperity that was a function of imperial economic modernisation and a vastly expanded export sector.

Much of this sounds paradoxical, but one could argue that the problem is historio­graphical rather than historical. Among the problems common to historians of the land­based empires has been that their own anticipations of imperial collapse in 1918 were shared by societies within these empires at the time, as if subject peoples, seething with discontent, were simply waiting for a chance to overthrow these imperial systems. The evidence, however, does not warrant such claims.³⁹ More recent scholarship suggests that these were certainly ‘crisis-ridden’ polities suffering the effects of diminishing international standing vis-à-vis Britain, France and Germany, but the conventional view that the tradi­tional empires were already defunct is absurd.

Philliou’s study of the Phanariots shows that Greeks who benefited from the Ottoman system could also identify with it. The Phanariots’ vast network of Ottoman Greek elites was associated with four important offices of governance, one of which served as chief liaison between European envoys and the Sultanate, while another related to the admin­istration of the navy and the Aegean region. The other two positions involved the general governance of two autonomous Christian provinces in present-day Rumania, Wallachia and Moldovia. In each case, these large areas of governance afforded opportunities for social mobility, and featured the formation of vast networks of salaried Orthodox Chris­tians, although a prerequisite of recruitment was Hellenic acculturation. Aside from learning Greek, recruits changed their names by Hellenising their existing names (e.g., from the Armenian Balyan to Balianos) or adopting an altogether new Greek name (e.g., Stephanos Vogorides from Stoiko Stoikov).⁴¹

Formally, offices within the Ottoman state and military were restricted to Muslims, but in practice Ottoman governance was flexible enough to be reshaped to deal more effectively with pressing exigencies. As the empire’s relationship with Europe became more important from the late seventeenth century, the Greeks were useful in that, even more so than other minorities (Jews, Armenians), they had networks that extended deep into Europe, and because they were very proficient in European languages.

It was a system of governance to which the fortunes of Phanariot families were tied, and to which members demonstrated a genuine commitment:

These networks of Ottoman Christians were embedded in, indeed products of, the larger world of Ottoman governance. They were tied to lowly officials and servants in Ottoman military and courtly retinues, and they were connected at the highest reaches of power as they attended ambassadorial visits and enjoyed special access to the Ottoman Palace. In their diverse local origins and activities they maintained ties of family, patronage, and business to virtually every region of the empire.

Some noteworthy Phanariots did conspire in the Greek revolt of 1821 that led to inde­pendence, and still others joined the revolutionaries once the revolt was in train, but as a class they could only see the actions of the rebels as harmful to their interests. Indeed long after the Greek War of Independence and the creation of the Hellenic Kingdom, and despite horrific reprisals visited upon Greeks throughout the empire in 1821, Phanariots were to continue to give their services to the sultan. Philliou’s work seeks to explain such unlikely loyalties, which appear ‘unlikely’ for the very reason that Ottoman history is nearly always read from the ‘national present’.⁴³

During the second half of the nineteenth century, however, the Ottoman imperial system was changing in ways that made it harder for groups like the Phanariots to pene­trate and colonise it.

To be sure, the trend towards constitutional governance was halted by the Russo- Turkish War of 1877—1878, which led to the loss of much of the Balkans, along with the effective loss of Egypt and Cyprus to Britain. The reformists lost credibility, and the young sultan Abdulhamid II (reign 1876—1909) instituted what seemed a new reactionary phase of governance that rejected constitutionalism and which refocussed on the empire’s Islamic traditions. Even so, the Hamidian regime continued the broader effort to rationalise and professionalise imperial administration: his aim was to be a ‘modern Muslim ruler’.⁴⁵ The regime’s failure to halt the empire’s diminishing international standing and what seemed its impending collapse prompted its overthrow in 1908 by the so-called Young Turk movement, which ushered in another, albeit short-lived, period of constitutional reform, which in turn was interrupted by the First Balkan War (1912).

Historians of the Ottoman Greeks have certainly read this period as an ‘age of national- ism’,⁴⁶ but it is important to clarify what nationalism really meant at the time. It is certainly the case that the era did witness the growth of national consciousness among certain groups, especially the Ottoman Greeks, which manifested in a number of ways. Thus throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century, in Ottoman Thrace and Anatolia, Greek commu­nities in urban and rural centres were investing heavily in education. Villages near Trabzon, around Kayseri in the central plateau area, near the Aegean and Marmara coastlines, were pooling funds in order to build schools, hire teachers and buy books to school their children in the Greek language. The same communities were also busy developing voluntary orga­nisations to fulfil such cultural functions as musical performances and Greek theatre.⁴⁷ There was also much sympathy for the Greek Kingdom and its monarchy. In urban centres like Istanbul and Smyrna (Izmir), many educated Greeks were known for their love of Greek flags, the Greek monarchy and Greek national holidays.⁴⁸

It is far from clear, however, that secessionist ideas had much currency among Greeks or Armenians until after 1912. During the early Young Turk era (1908—1912) minority community leaders were often accused of lacking commitment to the empire by insisting on the retention of their communal privileges. By frustrating Young Turk efforts to insti­tute reforms, minority leaders gave the impression of seeking to wreck the process in order to hasten the empire’s demise. However, the view from Athens regarding their ‘fellow’ Greeks in Istanbul was quite different. Here the complaint was that there was little sympathy for Greece’s national plans to ‘reclaim’ the imperial city, which the Istanbul Greeks regarded as both hopeless and reckless—Greece on its own was too weak to chal­lenge Ottoman military power, and its foreign policy was characterised by a litany of debacles.

It is a mistake, however, to think that the Ottoman Greeks formed an ethnic bloc, or to assume that that all their concerns could be read as ethnic or national in character. The second half of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century witnessed an unprecedented expansion of the Ottoman Greek community. The population expanded through natural growth and immigration from Greece, while Greek commercial and financial interests appeared to capitalise most on the boom of external trade, urbani­sation and infrastructural development.⁵⁰ The growth of interest in Greek language among the burgeoning town and village communities of the empire was a reflection of growing communal confidence, although community expansion brought new problems of internal governance and class difference. The historian Fujinami Nobuyoshi has shown how growing social and ideological divisions within the Istanbul community were reflected in ecclesiastical politics during the Young Turk era, when constitutionalism was in the air, and when rival groups legitimated their rival claims by using the language of con­stitutionalism. As such the community’s internal crisis was a very Ottoman phenomenon. Nobuyoshi explains how Patriarch Joachim III, the leader of one faction, was touted by the Greek-owned Turkish paper, Sada-yi Millet, as someone whose efforts were more in keeping with the empire’s welfare than those of his rivals:

In stressing the vital importance of reconciling the common interest (menfaat-i umumiye) of the Ottomans with the particular interest (menfaat-i hususiye) of the Greeks, it praised Joachim as the only person who had been able to accomplish this difficult task. Contrarily, the synodal metropolitans were seen as only concerned with their own narrow interests; therefore, true Ottoman citizens had to back Joachim and support his patriotic policy. It seems that these editorials were directed toward Ottoman rather than Greek public opinion since Sada-yi Millet was published in Turkish and was read by the Ottoman public. Hence, it attempted to convince the Ottomans that the Joachimist camp was more patriotic than its opponents.⁵¹

Such preoccupations, however, ceased to resonate after 1912, for there followed a series of wars (the Balkans Wars, the First World War, the Greek-Turkish War of 1919-1922) of unprecedented destruction and violence, and these ruptures shifted the focus of political debate and popular sensibilities dramatically. Wars with Christian states, including Greece, and the flood of Muslim refugees from Christian countries, convinced the Young Turk regime and Turkish Muslim public opinion that Greeks and Armenians were a security liability. State-perpetrated ethnic cleansings and mass killings, and the sense of peril within the Ottoman political order, all served to inculcate the idea that the only future possible was one of ethnic exclusivity and nationhood. To save the empire Otto­man political elites believed it was necessary to get rid of large minorities such as the Greeks rather than embrace them. In hindsight, all earlier efforts to construct a more inclusive political order seemed naive and foolish, and the Balkan states and the Republic of Turkey, which emerged from the rubble of empire, would thereafter look upon that empire for its cautionary lessons.

As much anthropological work and some historical research has begun to show, however, Ottomans did not suddenly become nationalists. Despite the intensity and duration of the violence, governments throughout the brave new post-Ottoman world knew that the nationalisation of the masses had some way to go. Other kinds of loyalties (familial, local, regional, confessional) continued to mean something to people who were suddenly given flags to wave at parades, told to learn patriotic songs, and to speak nothing but the national language.⁵² The process of becoming national was not unproblematic or seamless, a fact which is not lost on many minorities in the Balkans and Middle East today, and which is again being recognised within public cultures.⁵³