EXPANSION IN TO THE MIDDLE EAST
Prior to the nineteenth century the Middle East had been partially incorporated into the global market economy. The capitulatory system, the influx of New World bullion with its inflationary effect, the activities of the various Levant companies and the pressures of the adjacent European powers all combined to subordinate certain Middle Eastern regions to the economy of the expanding capitalist West.
This process both broadened and deepened during the course of the nineteenth century, so that the Middle East, like Africa, changed from a peripheral to a fully integrated area vis-a-vis the world capitalist order. The Western powers annexed outright the whole of North Africa, including for all practical purposes the rich province of Egypt, despite the nominal suzerainty of Constantinople. The Ottoman Empire was left only with its Asia Minor heartland and the Arab provinces to the south, these escaping partition only because the European powers could not agree on the division of such strategically located territories. More important than the military expansionism of the West was its economic dynamism. All the Middle Eastern lands, whether colonies or nominally independent, felt the impact of Europe's Industrial Revolution. Everywhere the flood of cheap machine-made imports increased, facilitated by the new steamships and railways and distance-saving Suez Canal. Western capital also permeated the Middle East, whether in the form of private investments or governmental loans. By the turn of the century, Middle Eastern countries were dominated as much by Western banks as by Western factories. Those parts of the Ottoman Empire that had not been politically annexed as colonies were now economically annexed as semi colonics. The end result for all was the intensified control and exploitation by the West that marked the transition from peripheral to full-fledged status in the Third World.
Turkish Manchester and Leeds:
The changing relationship between the Ottoman Empire and the West was apparent in cultural matters as well as in political and economic matters. In earlier centuries the Moslem Middle Easterners, like the Confucian Chinese, had looked down on Christian Westerners as barbarians beyond the pale. "Do I not know you," broke out the grand vizir to the French ambassador in 1666, "that you are a Giaour [nonbeliever], that you are a hogge, a dogge, a turde eater?" * As late as 1756, when the French ambassador announced the alliance between France and Austria that marked a turning point in the diplomatic history of Europe, he was curtly informed that the Ottoman government did not concern itself "about the union of one hog with another." 2 During the nineteenth century this contempt and arrogance gave way to respect and fear, if not in the villages where most of the population lived, then at least among responsible policymakers who had to cope with the power and aggressiveness of the West. The change in attitude was prompted by the unbroken series of military defeats and territorial losses, as well as by the spread of Western-style educational institutions.
Turkey Enters the Third World:
The decisive event in the nineteenth-century Ottoman history was not the spectacular attempt at overnight industrialization, but rather the 1838 Anglo-Turkish Commercial Convention, which effectively ensured the failure of any industrialization program, regardless of any other inhibiting factors.
This agreement completed the Western domination over Turkey's economy that had gotten under way centuries earlier. By removing the various obstacles in the way of foreign trade, its total value (exports plus imports) increased dramatically, from £320 million in 1800 to £560 million in 1840, £1.45 billion in 1860, £2.89 billion in 1872 and £8.36 billion in 1913. This spurt in foreign trade reflected economic growth rather than economic development within the Ottoman Empire. The value of Turkish exports to Britain remained about half the value of British exports to Turkey, a serious and persistent drain that contributed to the need for heavy borrowing and eventual imperial bankruptcy. The principal Turkish exports to Britain were raw materials (dyestuffs, grains, cotton, wool, raw silk and raisins), while British exports were manufactured goods (cotton and woolen goods, iron and steel products, and processed colonial products such as spices, coffee and sugar). Western consuls in various Ottoman cities all reported the decimation of local crafts by the unhindered influx of cheap machine-made European manufactures. For example, in Izmir sixteen of eighteen cloth factories were closed by 1850; in Aleppo half of its original ten thousand looms were shut down by 1858; and in Bursa the four hundred looms of 1820 were reduced to thirty by 1860, and its original one thousand silk workshops to seventy five by 1868.
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