History Questions Not Worth Their Own Thread VII
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innonimatu
the resident Cassandra
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True. The people better positioned to make large investments in factories were merchants, they had more capital available than artisans. And the connections to large markets, both for raw materials and for the production. To make an inaccurate but helpful analogy, guild members were "small business owners", the new industries were "corporations". One artisan in a city, or a few, might even make it big: take an interest in new technology, break guild rules (which were designed to prevent any one member from putting the others out of business), grow his business into a factory. There wouldn't be room left for the others.
I wonder of governments in some countries did try to force guild members into partnerships in new industries. The fascist/corporatist regime in Portugal tried something like that in the 20th century, with small business owners being very much "encouraged" to close shop and pool resources into building larger factories. Didn't work out well.
The funny part of this analogy is that guilds were often referred to as "corporations" in the 18th century, especially in France, where that is a literal translation (corporation = guild).
innonimatu
the resident Cassandra
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Yeah, and that was where the corporatists allegedly got the idea for their "ideal society". Also funny, because on economic development they by necessity (modern industry, economies of scale, international competition and all that...) backed grand schemes. Or at least the italians did - the portuguese and for a while the spanish were deliberately backwards and prevented modernization!
It was one more example of history being abused for ideological reasons. The medieval corporations were not about economies of scale. But they were about "industrial conditioning" - limiting competition. That much the ideologues of corporatism imitated.
jackelgull
An aberration of nature
Alright then, another question: Why was the Ottoman war record against the Russians so terrible post 1768? I mean, in that war the Ottomans did terribly, in the next war the only reason the Ottomans staved off defeat was because Russia was distracted by Napolean. Was it just because of outdated technology? I mean that could've played a role, but history shows that technologically inferior forces are still capable of victory. So what gives?
That is a lot of different wars and a lot of different explanations for a lot of different battles. It's worth pointing out that none of these wars was an unending litany of Ottoman tactical defeats in and of themselves. But it's also true that the only wars that the Russians lost to the Ottomans in that time period were the Crimean War and (kind of) the First World War, both of which owed their outcomes to the Ottomans' allies.
One factor in Russia's consistent success was that by the late eighteenth century, Russia's population had grown enough that the Russians were consistently able to mobilize larger pools of manpower for war, and the Russians also possessed adequate logistical support south of Ukraine to allow those men to fight the Ottomans on at least an even footing. Larger armies do not win wars, but they help a great deal, and provide their commanders with a considerable margin for error. Russia's rulers were generally able to invest more in their army than the Ottoman ones were, and so apart from a few examples - the siege of Pleven, for instance, or the Yavuz Sultan Selim - technological superiority was a force multiplier in Russia's favor. Technological superiority is not a cure-all or a substitute for effective command, but it certainly helps.
Neither of these explanations is particularly satisfying, nor do they even explain things very well because of just how contingent military history and diplomatic history are. A lot of it is also down to luck, which is an extremely unsatisfying answer but one that probably does more to explain warfare on the sort of macro level you're asking about than does any other single factor.
jackelgull
An aberration of nature
Why were the Russians more able to invest in their army than the Ottomans? Were they more efficient in taxation than Ottomans? Did they spend less on non military than the Ottomans? And what factors kept the Ottoman Empire from adopting the arms of the Russian Empire?
Well, importantly, Russia was a much larger state, in terms of size, and population, and available resources to exploit. That doesn't always translate exactly into revenue, and nobody would call eighteenth-century Russia's government an extractor of national wealth of the same efficiency as Prussia, let alone Britain, but they were starting from a much-improved position relative to the Ottomans. Russia could spend more money because Russia had a lot more money.
Some macrohistorical explanations of declining state power in Muslim Southwest Asia over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have tried to highlight taxation as becoming less efficient in relative terms due to Christian conversions to Islam, which supposedly reduced direct tax revenues while increasing the pool of available military manpower, but the problem with that is that the jizya and its successor, the baddal-askari, don't track particularly well with any decline, relative or absolute, in Ottoman finances and military power. (Admittedly, many of these statistics are estimated, because sources are so poor. That cuts both ways, of course.) Similar things like an ostensible lack of customs tax revenues due to the existence of the capitulation agreements with Western powers are also hard to directly connect to revenue difficulties, especially balancing that with the massive amount of funds that Ottoman sultans of the nineteenth century were able to borrow from European powers. It's true that Ottoman tax revenues didn't increase at the same rate as Russia's did over the course of these centuries, but neither did the Empire's population, which was already smaller than Russia's by the late eighteenth century by a few millions and which by 1900 was 20% of Russia's.
Part of the problem here is that the causation lines are difficult to draw, here. It'd be a nice story if one could draw a line between the Agricultural Revolution and Russia's increased population allowing the Russians to inundate the Ottomans with troops and cash. But it'd also be a story that is probably wrong, because the Agricultural Revolution's technologies didn't take off in Russia until later, in the nineteenth century; Russia's population and economic growth in that century was probably more due to the settling and clearing and planting of Ukraine than to technological improvements, although both were factors; the course of any individual war militates against claiming that Russian manpower superiority won them any individual conflict, but rather that it helped create a favorable matrix for doing so, insofar as it was correctly applied; and so on, and so forth. Russia's population did meaningfully grow over the course of the eighteenth century, but was there some sort of tipping point that made regular victories in wars more easily thinkable? No.
A similar problem occurs when one considers Ottoman military technology. The usual narrative is that the yeniçeri stranglehold on the Ottoman military, and yeniçeri obscurantism, prevented the Ottomans from adopting modernized European military arms and forms of organization. Which is true, to an extent - the yeniçeri lodges did often react against modern equipment in all its forms - but has been overstated. And it's not as if the destruction of the yeniçeri forces in the Auspicious Incident of 1826 automatically made the Ottoman military better. The infant new-model army was born in the middle of the war against the Greek rebels, which was in large part being subcontracted out to the Egyptian military, and within a few years had to deal with a Russian invasion that, after initial setbacks, resulted in a campaign of maneuver in which the Russian commander outmaneuvered his Turkish adversaries and was able to dictate a peace in Edirne. And, of course, the yeniçeri were never the entirety of the old Ottoman army, which included large numbers of irregular levies and provincial formations, and many of those forces persisted under the New Order (Nizam-ı Cedit), further limiting the extent to which we can place the burden of Ottoman military troubles on the yeniçeri.
I suppose the point I'm trying to make is that you're asking questions that, in large part, require Big Answers, but a lot of history as it is practiced today militates against giving a lot of these Big Answers because there are few narratives that do not go unchallenged by individuals who make close studies of more narrowly defined areas. A narrative isn't very useful if it doesn't describe the facts of specific situations as we understand them. So, again, luck and contingency were highly relevant and placing the burden of the explanation on things like "Russia was more populous and therefore wealthier" is not totally right, but also, admittedly, not totally wrong.
It's a wishy-washy answer, I know, but it's easy enough to demolish answers that are more specific and confident.
jackelgull
An aberration of nature
Would this be a specific enough question that you can answer without resorting to a Big answer model of history - Why did the Ottoman Empire lose the First Turko - Egyptian and Second Turko - Egyptian war?
Were the Ottomans unable to mobilize manpower as effectively as the Egyptians, was it simply antiquated tactics, or terrible leadership?
And why did the second war nearly cause the collapse of the Ottoman Empire?
Were the Ottomans unable to mobilize manpower as effectively as the Egyptians, was it simply antiquated tactics, or terrible leadership?
And why did the second war nearly cause the collapse of the Ottoman Empire?
Muhammad Ali's reforms are usually credited with providing the financial and military underpinnings of Egyptian success in those wars. He carried out a massive land confiscation and redistribution program that vastly enriched the state. He established monopoly control of industries and used that to create relationships with European agents that further enriched the state. His government began the large-scale cultivation of cotton, which resulted in considerable revenues in a short period of time. He and his son Ibrahim carefully constructed an army, first by bloodying it in mostly-successful Arabian and Saharan campaigns, then by reforming it to mimic European drill and command.
Muhammad Ali's reforms, naturally, encountered difficulties, in the form of both mutinies against his military program and peasant revolts against his confiscations, monopolies, and taxes. Unlike most of the Ottoman sultans, he possessed the political skill to deal with both adeptly, by moderating the pace of military reform to appease soldierly interests and by crushing the peasant revolt with his army.
Egypt, therefore, possessed unusually high revenues, highly effective and centralized administration, an experienced army trained in the European style, and even an effective navy. Neither the army or the navy were up to European par, but they were better than the imperial army and navy. Unlike the imperials, Muhammad Ali did not have to deal with the multiplicity of rebellions in the Balkans in the 1820s, nor did he have to try to restructure his army on the fly as did the imperials in the Auspicious Incident, nor did his army suffer a catastrophic defeat at Russian hands. He lost his navy in the disastrous naval Battle of Navarino while assisting the sultan against the Greeks, but his army remained more or less intact.
Ottoman forces still possessed superior numbers in the first war, but the qualitative difference was so far in the Egyptians' favor that Ibrahim was able to win major tactical victories and brush aside the armies that the imperial government tried to post in Syria and Anatolia to stop him. Leadership was probably a part of it; the Ottoman army was not led by anybody special, but Ibrahim was a gifted tactician by all accounts. Minor tactics were probably not as relevant; Egyptian advantages in drill were real, but the sorts of tactical evolutions that the Egyptians practiced were generally unnecessary when confronted by an extremely obliging Ottoman enemy.
This had not significantly changed by the time of the second war, despite Sultan Mahmud II's crash program of European-style modernization. Moltke, who was the Prussian advisor to the Ottoman forces, claimed that the disastrous Battle of Nezib occurred when the Ottoman commander, Hafiz Osman Paşa, ignored his advice to wait for reinforcements and attacked the waiting Egyptians, suffering defeat in detail; it's undoubtedly a rather self-serving account (especially since it would absolve Moltke of blame for the outrageously poor performance of the army that he was supposed to be training) but it's plausible enough.
The Battle of Nezib alone was not enough to topple the Ottoman Empire. It was a fairly severe military defeat, but it was not by itself enough to make European powers believe that the Empire was doomed. Two other things also happened that made them think that the Ottoman Empire was about to collapse. First, the Ottoman navy defected virtually en masse to the Egyptians. This was by itself not a tremendously significant military asset, but it made many observers believe that the imperials had severe morale problems that could not be resolved without intervention. Second, Sultan Mahmud II died shortly after the battle - he didn't participate in it, but was in Constantinople and was actually dead before news of the disaster reached the capital - leaving the throne to his teenage son. A teenager on the throne and a disloyal fleet combined with the tactical military disaster to convince European observers that the Empire was about to fall unless they intervened. Which they did.
Were the British and French correct in their view that the Empire was doomed? Meh. Foreign observers were remarkably premature in calling the Ottoman Empire doomed for much of its history. They thought the Empire was about to fall after the Russian naval victory at Çeşme in 1770, but the Empire endured. They thought it was about to fall in 1829 with Russians on the capital's doorstep, but it endured again. In the Great War, British authorities were so convinced of the Empire's essential weakness that they believed that all that was necessary to defeat the Empire in war was to sail a few battleships up the Golden Horn and threaten to bombard the capital. That obviously didn't work out.
Total collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1839 was certainly a possibility, but whether it was a certainty, less European involvement, is unanswerable.
Seeing as the empire didn't collapse, I think the certainty is on it being a possibility that never materialized. In fact, the empire - unlike Austria-Hungary - never collapsed period. It was simply abolished in the aftermath of WW I. Interestingly, it was tsarist Russia that did collapse, even before Austria.
Incidentally, many of Muhammad Ali's reforms were subsequently reversed by the British, as they didn't need a developing country, but a raw materials producer.
Incidentally, many of Muhammad Ali's reforms were subsequently reversed by the British, as they didn't need a developing country, but a raw materials producer.
I think that it's reasonable to describe the events of 1918-21 as a "collapse" of the Ottoman Empire. It suffered massive military defeat, the government lost virtually all legitimacy in Turkey, and the army revolted against it. Only then was it "abolished" by Kemal's Assembly - at the point when it had already, effectively, ceased to exist as an actual government. If that isn't a collapse, I'm not sure what constitutes one.
I'm not sure that 'the army revolted against it' is an accurate description either. Atatürk c.s. revolted against the proposed dismemberment of the empire, and successfully managed to prevent it. Only in the course of these events was the empire (effectively the sultanate) abolished.
You might argue the nationalist military revolted against the empire, but only because of its apparent powerlessness to deal with post-WW I events. And they revolted against it to take over effective control over it. If the original peace treaty would have been put into effect, there would be virtually no Turkey left. Originally, however, the nationalist had no intention of abolishing the sultanate. In this sense they stand in the reform tradition of the 19th century. But they succeeded, where all previous reforms ultimately failed.
You might argue the nationalist military revolted against the empire, but only because of its apparent powerlessness to deal with post-WW I events. And they revolted against it to take over effective control over it. If the original peace treaty would have been put into effect, there would be virtually no Turkey left. Originally, however, the nationalist had no intention of abolishing the sultanate. In this sense they stand in the reform tradition of the 19th century. But they succeeded, where all previous reforms ultimately failed.
r16
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more detailed and one is fully justified to suggest , more accurate answers than ı could possibly provide . Also consider the fact that the Ottomans were quite an European state were Europeans held sway . Mehmet Ali , as he would be called here , was a "European" , the fall of the Ottomans might provide equal opportunities for like minded people . It has been reported "Feudalism proper" started in the Ottoman lands very late where strong men got a powerbase to sustain their hold on the lands granted to them in the Tımar system and Mehmet Ali was just one of such Feudal lords but he happened to end up in control of Egypt , whose richness enpowered many empires . Which of course does not steal anything from his "work" . An anectode from some old Turkish history magazine : His concubine poisons him ; turns out he has been taking small quantities himself for decades , to build up some resistance . Things worked like that back then .
Again, this isn't really a claim that the empire didn't "collapse", but rather that its collapse was a highly contingent event. Which it was.
Describing the Kemalist coup as being in the reform tradition of the nineteenth century in response to foreign aggression and the perceived weakness of the state is certainly a useful mode of analysis, to a point. But that wasn't all that it was, and denying that it was a coup is just silly. Kemal and his allies in the military - which, as soon as Karabekir's troops joined the Ninth Army, comprised basically all of the army units in Anatolia - gained control of land not held by a foreign state and deposed the sitting Ottoman government. It is hard to come up with a more clear definition of a coup. The fact that Kemal couched the initial call to arms in terms of 'rescuing' the sultan from the Entente powers as a sop to Muslim opinion does not really change that, because his proclamation of 24 April 1920 made it quite clear that the Grand National Assembly - and himself as its president - possessed sovereignty in Turkey, not the Sultan or any body appointed by him.
Very true. Describing Muhammad Ali's regime as "Egyptian" is awkward because he was a Turkish governor who happened to rule Egypt; Egyptian autonomy/independence was a highly contingent outcome that relied chiefly on the failure of Muhammad Ali's various attempts to gain power and authority for himself and his family within the Ottoman imperial framework.
A good thing then that nobody put forward that claim then. The point is, there were still forces in 'the empire' to prevent total collapse. Which is a clear difference with Austria-Hungary or, say, the end of the USSR. But, of course, in order to do so, they had to revolt against the nominal power. The fact that they did so 'in the name of' that same power indeed doesn't make it not a coup. But the coup was not so much against the sultan - who, after defeat, was in no position to initiate any reform even if he had wished to - but against the foreign encroachment resulting from defeat. Once success on that front was achieved, there was also room for reform. And then, of course, why keep a sultan who has left no effective power anyway? So in the end Turkey achieved reform without a sultan. And indeed without an official religion. Which, surprisingly, has held to this day.
Lohrenswald
世界的 bottom ranked physicist
Was there any point in time where the majority of Russia's population was muslim?
They were a majority, though, in parts of the USSR - Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.
Lohrenswald
世界的 bottom ranked physicist
Yea I know. I thought I had heard somewhere that the Russian empire's expansion into central Asia made muslims a majority.
Although maybe it was like 1/3 instead.
Though I was also wondering about Ivan 4th's conquests.
But I won't dispute the answer "no".
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