BEGINNINGS OF MODERNIZATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

The Nineteenth Century
Edited by WILLIAM R. POLK and RICHARD L. CHAMBERS
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Ottoman Reform and the Politics of Notables

ALBERT HOURANI

I

It is a commonplace that we cut up history into periods at our peril: the artificial frontiers made for convenience may seem to be real, and a new generation of historians will have to spend time removing them. Nevertheless, to think we must distinguish, and the best we can do is to try to make divisions which reveal something important about the process we are studying. The old division of history in terms of states and dynasties was not without its value; the imposition for example of Ottoman rule on the western part of the Muslim world was an event of great importance however we look at it. But it is too simple and therefore misleading to go beyond that and make a further distinction simply in terms of the strength or weakness of Ottoman rule; the traditional division of a period of Ottoman greatness followed by one of Ottoman decline does not help us much to find out what really happened. Perhaps it would be more satisfactory to begin by making a distinction in terms of the kind of sources which we as historians must use; this might have a significance beyond itself, both because the sources we use help to determine the emphasis we place within the complex whole of the historical process, and because the appearance of a new and important type of source, or the disappearance of an old one, may reveal a change in the social order or intellectual life.

From this point of view we may make a very rough division of Ottoman history into four phases. In the first, we must rely mainly on Islamic literary sources (using the term "literary" in its widest sense) and archaeological I acknowledge with thanks a number of useful criticisms and suggestions made by Professors J. Berque, P. M. Holt and Stanford J. Shaw and Dr. E. R. J. Owen.

evidence. In the second, we must add to these the Ottoman archives; they form a unique source for the study of how a great Islamic government worked, but one which must be used in combination with the literary sources if we wish to study also how Ottoman society changed. In the third - stretching roughly, we may say, from 1760 to 1860 - the relative value of types ofsource changes once more. The control of the central government over Ottoman society weakens or is exercised in a more indirect way; the archives in Istanbul keep their value as showing what the Ottoman government thought or intended, but that may have been very different from what actually happened. In some provincial centers important archives exist-Cairo and Tunis are obvious examples; but in others those kinds of document which Professor Shaw has used to good effect 1 do not seem to have survived. In most great cities it is probable that we can find documents kept in the qadi's court, but once the reforms began the qadi lost his central position in the provincial administration, and the documents we most want to see may not have been registered in his court. Once new courts were established to administer new legal codes, however, their records were systematically kept and can be used to throw light on the effects of the reforms upon Ottoman society.

In this third period the European sources come to have the importance which an earlier generation of historians thought they had for the second. We refer not so much to the travellers; their books are usually to be treated with suspicion unless like Russell they spent a long period in the place they are describing, and in the nineteenth century they are perhaps even less reliable than for earlier times, because the coming of the steamship made it possible to travel rapidly and superficially, the power and wealth of Europe cut the traveller off from the people among whom he moved semi-regally, and romanticism cast the shadow of the observer's own temperament across what he was supposed to be observing. We refer rather to the reports of European diplomats and consuls, and also of Europeans in the Ottoman or Egyptian service. In this period they contain evidence of more direct importance than before for both political and economic history (although rarely for the history of thought). Even a serious and well-informed ambassador, in the seventeenth century, found it difficult to know what was really going on in the saray. But by the early nineteenth the ambassadors and consuls of the major powers were not just repeating information picked up haphazard and from a distance. The growing weight of European interests in the Near East made it necessary for the governments of Europe

to be fully and precisely informed; while the desire of the Ottoman government (and the dependent governments in Egypt and Tunisia) to maintain their independence and reform their methods obliged them and their local governors to take the representatives of the European states at least partly into their confidence.

The process of change which took place in this period was one which, by and large, the population of the empire and its dependent states-even the educated part of it-did not understand. It was change imposed from above, not yet accepted by most elements in the population, affecting the system of law and administration but not so far' the organization of society. For this reason the indigenous "literary" sources change in nature and value. The Muslim tradition of chronicles, biographies and descriptions continues for a time: apart from al-Jabarti, we may point in a later generation to Ibn Abi Diyaf in Tunis, al-Sitar in Damascus, Sulayman Fa'iq in Baghdad, 'Ali Mubarak in Cairo, and the official historiographers in Istanbul. But as this tradition dies out, there comes a moment in modern history when the Muslim population seems almost voiceless in the face of modern change. The faith in the continued existence of a strong, autonomous and God-preserved Islamic umma has been shaken, and the impulse to record the names and virtues of those who have preserved and transmitted the heritage of Islam through history grows weaker; the men of the old culture, looking on their rulers as alien in ways of thought, no longer find it possible or desirable to record their acts. On the other hand, a new school of Christian writers arises in Syria and Lebanon, the product of a new education which has taught them both better Arabic and the languages and ways of thought of Europe. But they too are far from the sources of power, and (except in regard to the princely government in Lebanon itself) possess neither the knowledge nor the self-identification with power which is necessary for the political historian.

It is only in the fourth period, which begins roughly in 1860, that this last factor changes and the historian can use a new combination of sources. The importance of the diplomatic and consular records continues; that of the Ottoman and Egyptian documents increases, as the governments impose a more direct and pervasive control over society, and thus require and are able to obtain fuller and more accurate information. But what distinguishes this fourth from the third period is that the changes which had been imposed from above are now increasingly understood and accepted. There is a new self-awareness and, linked with it, a new and more active interest in the political process, a new concern to take part in the movement of change and determine its direction. We are entering the modern age of the continuously and consciously self-changing society, and once more the

indigenous literary sources become important : not so much works of history (although modern history-writing begins with Muhammad Bayram and Cevdet Pa§a) as the play, the novel and most of all the press-article aiming to inform, advise, criticize or arouse feeling, written not by the 'aim responsible to an existing order regarded as of eternal value, but by the politician concerned with power or the intellectual acknowledging no sovereign except his own vision of what should or what must be.

II

We are here concerned with "the beginnings of modernization"; that is to say, with the third of our four periods. What kinds of source are important for this period we have already said, and in regard to each of them we can ask a further question : what can we expect it to tell us? Each of them can of course be used for one purpose at least, to throw light on the opinions or assumptions of those who wrote it; but can it be used beyond that, and for what?

There is no need to answer this question in detail here. Some of the main lines of an answer, are clear. The archives of governments, in a region and age where outside the large cities custom was still king, tell us what rulers or officials wanted to happen but not always what really happened. To take an obvious example, that of land-tenure: as Professor Lambton has shown,2 the relationship which existed between landlord and peasant was never in exact conformity with the theory of ownership laid down by law, whether Shari'a or modern statute. Again, diplomatic and consular reports must be treated with caution because those who wrote them were themselves actors in the political process, and wrote their reports not simply as a historical record of events but, often, to justify themselves to their govern-mentor persuade it to adopt a certain line of action; moreover, ambassadors and consuls tended to be drawn into the struggles of parties in central or local government, and so reflect (sometimes more than they knew) the views of the party which looked to them for help and to which therefore they had access.

One limitation is common to most of our sources, and it is this which concerns us here. The voice of an important part of the population is scarcely heard in them, or heard only in a muted, indirect and even distorted form : that of the Muslim town-dwellers and their traditional and "natural" leaders, the urban notables. For example, from all our vast documentation about the events of 1860 in Syria and Lebanon, we can discover with some precision and from within the attitudes and reaction of

Maronites, Druzes, Turks, and European governments, but we have scarcely an authentic record of the attitude of the Muslim population and its leaders, except for a short work by al-Hasibi and some passages in al-Bitar's collection of biographies. Again, from our still vaster material about Muhammad 'Ali, we can trace in detail the development of each aspect of his policy, and the growth of a new ruling caste, but we cannot easily discover how the Muslim urban population and its leaders reacted to it. Some reaction there must.have been, and we come on traces of it in the later pages of al-Jabarti or when `Urnar Makram is sent into exile. But it is not easy to build anything from these hints, and our usual picture of Egypt in the nineteenth century is an old one: at one end, a gradual increase in the political activity of the urban population, going on throughout the eighteenth century and reaching its height in the period between the first revolt against French rule and the movement which carried Muhammad 'Ali to power; much later, in the 1870's, a sudden upsurge; and in between virtually nothing, a political vacuum.

This is an important gap in our knowledge, for the urban politics of the Ottoman provinces (at least of the Muslim provinces) cannot be understood unless we see them in terms of a "politics of notables" or, to use Max Weber's phrase, a "patriciate". There are many examples in history of "patrician" politics. They differ from one place and time to another, but perhaps have certain things in common. This type of politics seems to arise when certain conditions exist: first, when society is ordered according to relations of personal dependence-the artisan in the city producing mainly for patrician patrons, and the peasant in the countryside, whether nominally free or not, also producing mainly for a landowner, either because he cannot otherwise finance himself or because the landowner holds the key to the urban market; secondly, when society is dominated by urban notables, by great families which (like those of medieval Italy but unlike medieval England and France) reside mainly in the city, draw their main strength from there, and because of their position in the city are able to dominate also a rural hinterland; and thirdly, when these notables have some freedom of political action. This freedom may be of either of two kinds. The city may be self-governing, and the notables its rulers, a "patriciate" in Max Weber's full sense; or else the city may be subject to a monarchical power, but one on which the urban population wishes and is able to impose limits or exercise influence.

It is this second kind of situation which we find in Muslim history. Very rare exceptions apart, what exists is not the republic ruled by patricians, but monarchy, rooted in one or more cities and ruling their hinterland in cooperation with, and in the interests of, their dominant classes. In such

circumstances we find certain typical modes of political action. The political influence of the notables rests on two factors : on the one hand, they must possess "access" to authority, and so be able to advise, to warn, and in general to speak for society or some part of it at the ruler's court; on the other, they must have some social power of their own, whatever its form and origin, which is not dependent on the ruler and gives them a position of accepted and "natural" leadership. Around the central core of this independent power they can, if they are skilful, create a coalition of forces both urban and rural. But this process does not necessarily end in one notable or one party of notables drawing all the forces of society into its coalition. In such political systems there is a tendency towards the formation of two or more coalitions roughly balancing one another, and for this several reasons may be given: leadership of this kind is not an institution, and there will always be those who challenge it; since the leader has to combine so many interests, and to balance them against the interests of the ruler, he is bound to disappoint some groups, who therefore tend to leave his coalition for another; and it is the interest of the ruler to create and maintain rivalries among his powerful subjects, as otherwise he may find the whole of society drawn up against him.

The two aspects of the notable's power are of course closely connected with each other. It is because he has access to authority that he can act as leader, and it is because he has a separate power of his own in society that authority needs him and must give him access. But for this reason, his modes of action must in normal circumstances be cautious and even ambiguous. At moments of crisis direct action may be possible and even be needed. The notables lead a revolution against the ruler, or themselves become rulers during an interregnum; when one dynasty is displaced by another, it is the notables who act as caretakers and surrender the city to its new master. But at other times they must act with care so as not to lose touch with either pole of their power. They must not appear to the city to be simply the instruments of authority; but also they must not appear to be the enemies of authority, and so risk being deprived of their access, or, through the full exercise of the ruler's power, of the very basis of their position in society. Thus in general their actions must be circumspect: the use of influence in private; the cautious expression of discontent, by absenting themselves from the ruler's presence; the discreet encouragement of opposition-but not up to the point where it may call down the fatal blow of the ruler's anger.

III

Ottoman Istanbul was above all a center of government, comparable, as a Muslim city, not so much to those great organic growths which held the

deposit of many ages of Islamic history, but rather to the imperial foundations by which new dynasties marked their greatness. The greatest strength of the government was naturally concentrated in its capital, and there was almost no local countervailing power independent of it. Istanbul had not existed as a Muslim city before the conquest and the conquerors found there no ancient Islamic society with its inner structure already full grown and having its "natural" leaders in ancient families with an inherited social prestige. Trade was largely in the hands of foreigners or members of religious minorities, who as such were not able to exercise leadership or obtain power (except for such derived influence as the Phanariot Greeks had for a time) ; and the obvious need to keep the capital supplied with food made it necessary for the government to prevent that growth of urban domination over the rural hinterland which in other places made it possible for city notables to control the economic exchanges between countryside and town.

Moreover, the class which, in other cities, provided the spokesmen for popular grievances and demands--the 'ulama-was here very much of an official class, owing its influence to the holding of high religious office in the government, and therefore nearer to the ruler than to the subject; in course of time too it tended to be dominated by privileged families passing on wealth and the tradition of state service from one generation to another. It is true that, at least in the later Ottoman period, the janissary organization gave the members of the regiments a means of expressing their discontent. But while they could disturb the government they could not themselves control it, and they were themselves indeed the instruments of political forces inside the government. The politics of Istanbul were not the "politics of notables" as we have defined them but something different, court or bureaucratic politics. The political "leaders", those who formed and led combinations and struggled for power, were themselves servants of the ruler and derived the core of their power from that, not from their independent position in society. But, as Professor Itzkowitz has shown,3 the path to power and leadership within the government changed from one Ottoman age to another: in the sixteenth century, it had led through the schools and service of the palace, but by the eighteenth it was more common for civil servants to rise to the top.

In the provincial centers however Ottoman power took a different form. Here the distinction of 'askar and ra'aya could have many undertones, ethnic, religious and other. Ottoman governors and officials came from far off; spoke often a different language, did not usually stay long enough to

strike roots; the standing forces they could rely on were normally not sufficient to allow them to impose their authority unaided. To rule at all they had to rely on local intermediaries, and these they found already existing. At least in Asia and Africa, the lands the Ottomans conquered were lands ofancient Islamic culture, with a long tradition of urban life and separate political existence; both by necessity and because of a certain view of government, the Ottomans when they came tried not to crush and absorb but to preserve or even revive good local customs. In such conditions, when authority can only maintain itself with local help, a "politics of notables" can grow up.

But who were the "notables"? The concept of a "notable", as we shall use it, is a political and not a sociological one. We mean by it those who can play a certain political role as intermediaries between government and people, and-within certain limits-as leaders of the urban population. But in different circumstances it is different groups which can play this role, groups with different kinds of social power. In the Arab provinces there were three such groups. First there were the traditional spokesmen of the Islamic city, the eulama, whose power was derived from their religious position. They were necessary to the Ottoman government because they alone could confer legitimacy on its acts. But while in Istanbul they were an official group, in the provinces they were local groups: apart from the qadi the others-muftis, naqibs, na'ibs -were drawn from local families. Their positions alone would have given them influence, but they derived it also from other sources: from the inherited reputation of certain religious families, going back many centuries perhaps to some saint whose tomb lay at the heart of the city; from the fact that, in spite of this, the corps of 'ulama lay open to all Muslims; from the connection of the local ulama with the whole religious order and thus with the palace and the imperial divan; and from their wealth, built up through the custody of tvaqfs or the traditional connection with the commercial bourgeoisie, and relatively safe from the danger of confiscation because of their religious position.

Secondly, there were the leaders of the local garrisons. They too were necessary to the government because they had immediate control of armed force, but they also had a certain independence of action. They could rely to some extent on the esprit de corps which an armed and disciplined body of men develops; and the leaders of the Janissaries in particular controlled the local citadels under direct orders from Istanbul and were not responsible to the local governor. In some places also the Janissaries in course of time took roots in the city: they enlisted local auxiliary troops; membership of a regiment became hereditary; particular regiments indeed became closely identified with particular quarters of the city. Thus they served not only as

military bodies but as organizations for defense or political action.

Thirdly, there were those whom we might call "secular notables" (a'yan, aghas, amirs): that is to say, individuals or families whose power might be rooted in some political or military tradition, the memory of some ancestor or predecessor; or in the 'asabiyya of a family or of some other group which could serve as its equivalent; or in the control of agricultural production through possession of malikanes or supervision of waqfs. (This last factor was of particular importance, not so much because it gave them wealth as because it enabled them to control the grain-supply of the city, and thus indirectly to affect public order and put pressure on the government.)

From whichever of these three groups the local leadership arises, we find it acting politically in much the same way. On the one hand, its leaders or their representatives are members of the governor's divan, and thus have formal access to him. On the other, around the core of their own independent power they build up a coalition, combining other notable families, 'ulama, leaders of armed forces, and also the organizations which embody the active force of the population at large: some of the guilds (in particular that of the butchers), the Janissaries in places where they have become a popular group, shaykhs of the more turbulent quarters, and those unofficial mobilizers of opinion and organizers of popular action who, under one name or another, go back into the distant past of the Islamic city. The combination may even spread beyond the city and its immediate hinterland and include Beduin chieftains or lords of the mountains, But it is a precarious combination forces attracted into the orbit of one notable can be drawn away into that of another, or can themselves become independent agents, or can be won back to direct dependence on the government.

This much was true of all the provincial centers, but there were great differences between the provinces in regard to which group of the three took the lead and how far it could go visa vis the Ottoman government along a spectrum stretching as far as complete and permanent seizure of power. At one extreme, in the North African provinces, distance from Istanbul and the loss by the Ottoman navy of control of the central Mediterranean made it possible for certain local forces to take over the government, to rule in the name of the sultan and with his investiture, and to hand on their rule to their chosen successors.

In Cairo however the balance was more even. True, the local Ottoman power was comparatively weak once the first phase was over, and was unable to maintain a large enough standing army to impose its authority. Nevertheless, Egypt was too important from many points of view for the Ottomans to let it go. Ottoman sea power still counted for something in the eastern Mediterranean, and so did the prestige of the sultan as defender of

Sunni Islam and protector of the Holy Places; it was still possible for the Ottoman government to assert its authority, either by a direct act of force or by balancing local groups against each other. But the Ottoman administration in Egypt never rested, as it did in Anatolia and the Balkans, on a social basis of Turkish military landholders. It was thus possible for local leaders to arise, and hope to strengthen and make permanent their position by seizing hold of the land and the land tax. The nature and development of this local leadership has been made clearer by the recent writings of Professors Ayalon, Holt, and Shaw.4 It did not come either from the religious class or from the leaders of the military corps. It is true, the religious leaders (not so much the teachers of the Azhar as the heads of families which possessed a hereditary leadership of important turuq) had certain weapons in their hands: a connection with the Muslim merchants who engaged in the Nile and Red Sea trade, control of waqfs, a close link with the population of the small towns and the countryside, and of course the prestige of religious ancestry and learning. But the long experience of military rule, and the whole tradition of the Sunni 'ulama, had taught them to play a discreet and secondary role, and taught the people to look elsewhere for political leadership. The leaders of the "seven regiments" also had certain obvious advantages; but it may be that, once the military corps began to be drawn into Egyptian society and military discipline to relax, the solidarity of the regiments was not enough to provide that asabiyya which was necessary for one who wished to seize and hold power. In the absence of local families with a tradition of leadership, the only groups which could provide the needed asabiyya were the "Mamluke" households: these were not military corps but elites created by men possessing political or military power and inheriting their prestige, composed of freedmen trained in the service of the current heads of the household, and held together by a solidarity which would last a lifetime. The training and tradition of the household produced individuals who knew how to make of it a core around which could be combined the religious leaders, the commanders of the regiments, popular guilds, and behind them the great loose combinations of Egypt, Nisf Haram and Nisf Sa'd; and then, with this combination, to secure real power-to obtain for themselves and their followers from the governor the rank of bey and therefore access to the great offices to which begs were appointed, and to seize control of the tax farms. But the combination was fragile: one household might be destroyed by others, as the Qasimiyya were destroyed by an

alliance of the Faqariyya and Qazdughliyya; but in its turn the new dominant party might split, as did the Faqariyya and Qazdughliyya, or might have to face new rivals; and the Ottoman governors as well perhaps as other local forces could use their rivalries to weaken them all.

In the Arab provinces to the east of Egypt also there existed "notables", but in different forms. In two provincial centers, Sayda (later Acre) and Baghdad, we find the same phenomenon of the Mamluke household as in Egypt. In both of them however we find a single Mamluke household not without a tendency to split but still keeping its solidarity. In each of them, the household has been formed by a strong governor, and after his death secures the governorship for itself and keeps it until the 1830's. Why was it that the Ottoman government accepted this formal monopoly of power by a household? Various reasons may be suggested. First, both Baghdad and Acre were "frontier" posts: Baghdad lying on the disturbed frontier with Persia, and with a potentially disloyal Shi'i population all around. Acre lay near the frontier of almost independent Egypt and open to the Mediterranean, and also at the foot of the hill country of northern Palestine and southern Lebanon, whose inhabitants had in the past shown more than velleities_of independence and a willingness to ally themselves with outside forces; in the 1770's a combination of semi-autonomous mountain rulers, Egyptian forces coming up the coastal road through Palestine, and Greco-Russian sea forces in the eastern Mediterranean had gravely threatened the Ottoman hold over southern Syria. In both places (as in some other provinces of the empire) it was therefore in the interest of the Porte to acquiesce in the rule of a group which could maintain efficient armed forces, collect taxes, and keep their provinces loyal to the sultan in the last resort.

In both of them, again, the rural hinterland has been gradually eaten away: in Acre-Sayda by the lords of the Palestinian and Lebanese hills, in Baghdad by such tribal leaders as the shaykhs of the Muntafik, who controlled the greater part of the land and therefore the collection of the land tax, as well as many customs posts. There did not therefore exist the same spur to the ambitions and rivalries of urban forces as was provided by the inizams of Egypt. Moreover, those urban forces were weaker than in Cairo, and therefore there was less scope for the creation of powerful combinations. Sayda and Acre were small towns, without great religious families; their hinterland was largely in the possession of Christians, Druzes and Shi'is, and did not contain large waqfs. In Baghdad there were great families of Sunni 'ulama, but their social power must have been limited by the hold of Shi'is and Beduin over the countryside. In both of them, commerce was controlled largely by foreigners or members of minorities, Jews and

Armenians in Baghdad, Orthodox or Uniate Christians in Sayda and Acre. Mosul again showed a different picture. It was like Acre and Baghdad in that a local group was able to impose itself on the Ottoman government and insist on a governor drawn from the city itself, but unlike them in that the governor came not from a Mamluke household but from a family,, that of Jalili, and one which as so often in Islamic history came from outside (it was in fact of Christian origin) and so was able to serve as the focal point for many different groups. Perhaps here too we can find an explanation for these facts in certain characteristics of the city. Mosul had a small hinterland. The range of influence of the urban economy scarcely stretched beyond the plains and river valley immediately around it; beyond that lay Beduin territory and the principalities of the Kurdish mountains. Within this small enclave, almost a city-state, urban politics could work themselves out without much interference. The city itself was a great center of orthodox Muslim education, and around its mosques and schools had grown up some families with a religious tradition and prestige, like the `Umaris, the guardians of the religious orthodoxy of northern Iraq. It was also an important center of trade, lying on the main route from Istanbul and Asia Minor to Baghdad and the Gulf, and being a collecting and distributing center for parts of Anatolia and Persia; and its trade was largely in Muslim hands. Here once more we find the combination of a religious group with a commercial bourgeoisie. Moreover, it was not a military center of the same importance as Baghdad. The main armed forces were local ones raised by the Jalili governors, and the Janissaries had become mainly a political organization of the city quarters and under the control of local leaders. There was therefore no military body which could counterbalance the ascendancy of the local notables.

There remain to be considered the cities of Syria and the Hijaz: Damascus, Aleppo, the Holy Cities and their dependencies. Here we find the "politics of notables" in their purest form. On the one hand, Ottoman authority remained real; it had to be a reality, because its legitimacy, in the eyes of the Muslim world, was bound up with its control of the Holy Cities and the pilgrim routes, and also because it was control of the Fertile Crescent which determined that Istanbul, not Cairo or Isfahan, should dominate the heart of the Muslim world. Although this authority might appear to be ceded to a local group, as with the `Aims in Damascus throughout most of the eighteenth century, it could be taken back, either by the time-honored method of setting one governor against another, or by direct military methods: the imperial road to Syria and the Hijaz lay open. On the other hand, the power of the notables was particularly great in these cities; and here the "notables" were not a Mamluke group but an

ancient bourgeoisie with its leaders, the shanfs in the Hijaz, the great families in Damascus, Aleppo and the smaller Syrian towns, some of them with a religious and learned tradition (and in Aleppo and its province claiming the title and privileges of sharifs). This class was strong enough to absorb into itself families of military origin around whom rival loyalties and Mamluke households might have grown up, to restrain the power of the local governor or at least ensure that it was exercised in its own interest, and at times even to revolt successfully against the governor and itself rule the city for short periods (in Aleppo several times, in Damascus in 1830).

In both Aleppo and Damascus, this class was represented in the governor's divan and so had access to the governor. In Aleppo the members of the divan included the muhassil, a local notable who had the farm of the most important taxes; the serdar of the Janissaries who, as we shall see, was open to influence by the notables; the mufti, the naqib, and the principal 'ulama; and the a'yan in the restricted technical sense of those notables who were hereditary members of the divan. In Damascus the composition of the divan was similar. But the notables not only had access to the governor, they were in a position to make it impossible for him to rule without them. They controlled the sources of power in the city: not only the wealthy and established classes but the populace. This control was exercised through the religious institutions, the popular quarters, and above all the Janissaries. In both cities there was a formal distinction between kapekutjanissaries who garrisoned the citadel, and yerliye, local auxiliaries or their descendents. In Aleppo however this distinction had lost its meaning and both alike were local groups open therefore to local influences, while in Damascus the kapikul were imperial troops sent from Istanbul, but the fact that they were not under the control of the local governor, only under the distant control of their agha in Istanbul, meant that they too were exposed to local pressures. In both cities they had close connections with certain trades (once more here we come upon the ubiquitous butchers) and with certain popular quarters where immigrants from the countryside and men engaged in the caravan trade gathered: in Aleppo the Banqusa and Bab Nayrab quarters, in Damascus the Maydan, which a French consul called "le faubourg revolutionnaire" of the city. They and through them the notables could make and unmake public order; they could also control the urban tax system, since taxes.were collected through the shaykhs of quarters and guilds.

The notables derived their wealth from two sources: trade and the land. Historians have relied so much "on consular reports, that they have tended to exaggerate the importance of the trade with Europe, with which of course the consuls were mainly concerned. But the wealth of Damascus and Aleppo came very largely by other routes, the pilgrimage route and those across the

desert to Baghdad, Persia and the Gulf; and at this time the first of these was wholly and the second partly in Muslim hands. The wealthy Muslim trader appears less in the consular records than the Armenian or Uniate or Jew, but was perhaps more important in this period. As for the land, the orchards of Damascus and the rich plains around the cities were to a large extent virtually owned by the notables, either as malikanes or as waqfs; when they were not so owned, the notables could hope to obtain the tax farms. Whatever form their control of the villages took, it gave them control of the urban wheat supply, and in both cities we can see them using this in order to create artificial scarcities, and so not only to raise prices and gain wealth but to dominate the governor by causing disorders which only they could quell. In Syria as in Egypt indeed it may be that the struggles of factions were mainly about control of the food supply and the land tax, both for their own sake and as political instruments. It was for this that political combinations were formed, and because of this that they could be formed. But simply because the prize was so great the combinations were fragile. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, at least in Aleppo, the notables as such seem to have been losing their hold over the combinations they had formed, and power to be passing to their former instruments the Janissary chiefs. It was these who were now obtaining control of the villages and making alliances not only with the forces of the city but with the Beduin and Kurdish chieftains of the countryside. But their power too was more fragile perhaps than that of the Mamlukes in Egypt, because urban and settled life in Syria was so much more precarious : the independent power of Kurds and Beduin was eating up the countryside.

IV

It is clear that the reforms of the Tanzimat period in the Ottoman Empire and the similar reforms in Egypt (as also in Tunisia) would, if carried to their logical conclusion, have destroyed the independent power of the notables and the mode of political action it made possible. The aim of the reforms was to establish a uniform and centralized administration, linked directly with each citizen, and working in accordance with its own rational principles of justice, applied equally to all. But these aims, although they could be fulfilled to some extent, could not be carried out completely, and in Istanbul and Cairo alike the effect of the reforms was deflected and made more complicated by such factors as the existence of an absolute ruler who was only willing to apply the new ideas so far as they did not threaten but strengthened his own position; the gradual development of a public

consciousness among certain groups, who were no longer willing to be ruled for their own good from above but wished to take part in the process; and the very size and variety of the Ottoman system of government, which worked differently in different places.

In Cairo (and also it would seem in Tunis, although here we must speak with caution until M. Raymond's work now in progress is complete), the reforms worked primarily in favor of the ruler. In fact, the first and main aim of Muhammad 'Ali was to destroy all rivals to his power. The destruction of the Mamluke notables has been much written about, although perhaps too much attention has been paid to the famous lunch party, and too little to an event of more permanent importance, the abolition of the iltizams. The control of the Mamlukes over the iltizams had been weakened by the French occupation, and this made it easier for Muhammad 'Ali to end the system. This act destroyed both the means by which the military households had secured power and the goal of their ambitions. By collecting the taxes directly, Muhammad 'Ali ensured that no new class of multazims should arise; when, towards the end of his reign, a new class of landowners began to come into existence, they did not at first possess the same means as the Mamlukes of putting pressure on the government. It is true that they were soon able to achieve a position of much power in the rural economy, but landownership by itself did not create political power once more until Isma'il began to need their help and support in the 1870's.

The ascendancy of the Mamluke households in the eighteenth century had prevented in Cairo the process which had taken place in Istanbul, the growth of the political power of the civil servants. They were therefore not an independent force for Muhammad 'Ali to reckon with, and they lost their importance as a new kind of administration grew up for which new types ofskill were needed. The new administrators were often Copts or other Christians, who as such had no power of their own, or else men of humble origin trained in the educational missions or the special schools and owing their advancement to the ruler's favor. The old religious families too, although clearly their social prestige remained in great part, lost their political power and freedom of action, which had been at their greatest in the years after the French occupation. The abolition of the iltizams (from which they had profited in the confusion caused by the French defeat of the Mamlukes), the weakening of the waqf system, the development of new legal codes and Muhammad `Ali's neglect of the old system of religious education, all these helped to weaken them. At the same time the old merchant class lost much of its power and prosperity, with the opening of the Red Sea to steam navigation in the middle of the nineteenth century, even before the Suez Canal was made, and the growth of the large-scale

trade in cotton with Europe, which was almost entirely in the hands of Europeans or local Christians or Jews.

The former possessors of power were replaced by Muhammad 'Ali. Like them he built up his own army and his own group of high officers and officials to control it. But he succeeded in doing what his predecessors had failed to do and created around himself a single unchallenged "Mamluke" household: soldiers of fortune or young boys, Turks, Kurds, Circassians and Albanians (with a few Europeans and Armenians for special purposes); strangers to Egypt, trained in his service, owing their advancement to him, with something of the 'asabiyya of a Mamluke household but with something else as well, a European education, a knowledge of modern military or administrative sciences, and of the French language through which it came. (Here too we may refer in passing to a similar development in Tunisia: Khayr al-Din can be taken as typical of these last groups of Europeanized Mamlukes.)

No doubt there was discontent with the predominance of the ruler and his household, and this was to find expression much later (first of all in the events of 1879-1882), and later still to become a recurrent theme of Egyptian nationalism. But in the time of Muhammad 'Ali it could not express itself because the instruments of political action had also been destroyed. The tax farms had gone; the guilds remained, as Professor Baer has shown,5 later than had been thought, and so did the turuq, but the stricter policing of the streets and bazaars made popular action more difficult. In the countryside, the sedentarization of the Beduin, and the growth in the power of the 'umda, the government's agent in the villages, destroyed other possible means of action.6 It seems too that Muhammad 'Ali set himself deliberately to dispose of those popular leaders who, in the period of confusion before he came to power, had served as mobilizers of popular support in favor of the contenders for power: in particular, 'Umar Makram. For, although modern Egyptian historians tend to look on `Umar Makram as a national leader, it would be better to think of him as an intermediary, someone who as naqib had access to the military chiefs but also had a popular following. He had indeed used his talents on behalf of Muhammad 'Ali himself: but in regard to him as to the Albanian soldiers, Muhammad 'Ali knew that the first act of a prudent despot is to destroy those with whose help he has seized power.

It is these two factors, the preponderant power of the government and the absence of instruments of political action, which explain why politics except for "court politics") virtually disappeared in Egypt from the 1820's to the 1870's. In the 1870's however the situation changed. The power of the ruler weakened as foreign pressure on Ismai'l grew, and new channels of opinion on and action sprang up, as an unofficial press was established, the urban population increased, rural security broke down, the Azhar revived under the khedive's patronage, and Egyptians of peasant origin became officers in the army. Once more then we find political activity, and once more it is the "politics of notables". The leaders who arise come, as might be expected, from the "Mamluke" household formed by Muhammad 'Ali.

It was beginning to split up, and its leading members had greater independence of action because by now they had become landowners, through land grants by the ruler and in other ways. Riaz, Nubar, Sharif, Barudi are the new politicians, and behind them one can see in the shadows different groups inside the ruling family. As politicians they still work in the traditional way, by building up their own "households" and systems of clients. 'Urabi and the army officers were not in the first instance leaders so much as instruments used by the politicians: we have perhaps paid too much attention to 'Urabi, too little to Mahmud Sami al-Barudi and others like him. It was the shock of the Anglo-French intervention which destroyed the politicians' delicate game of maneuver and the balancing of forces; the sword, struck from the hand which wielded it, for a moment seemed to have a power of its own as it flew through the air, before falling to the ground.

After the first shock of the British occupation however the "politics of notables" began once more. British rule was indirect, its official purpose was to make possible the end of the occupation, and for many years was unsure of itself; it needed intermediaries, even after Cromer had found a policy and secured the essential positions of power in the government. Moreover, there was a certain polarization of authority, between the agency and the palace. In such circumstances the notables could play a part, and as usual an ambiguous one, supporting the British occupation but also discreetly serving as the focal points of discontent. It was not until the middle 1890's that their role became less important, as Cromer began to rule more directly through British advisers and puppet ministers, while on the other hand the new khedive began to experiment with a new type of politics, that of the nationalist students and the urban mass.

In Cairo then the effect of the reforms of Muhammad 'Ali was to destroy the old political leadership and replace it by an absolute ruler supported by a new military household; but in Istanbul the process was not so simple, for many reasons but mainly perhaps because of the existence of old and deeply

rooted institutions. The reforms brought about the destruction of one such institution, the Janissary regiments. Another was weakened, but only up to a point. The palace was no longer the only source of fear and favor, its wealth was more limited, its men fewer, it could only rule through a skilled and specialized bureaucracy, although, on the other hand, the house of Osman was still the focal point of loyalty, and a whole complex of political habits still gave the sultan a final ascendancy over his officials and subjects. But a third institution increased in power: the higher bureaucracy. Their military rivals had been eliminated. Apart from that, they were needed more than ever because they were the only people who could work the new administrative system; and, as Mr. Mardin's classical book has made clear,7 that system largely embodied their ideas, or at least the ideas of those who had been trained as diplomats or translators, about how society should be ruled. They were a solid enough group to remain in control; they were held together by certain common values-belief in the empire, belief in modern European civilization, a certain interpretation of the strength of Europe in terms of justice, rationality, efficiency; to a great extent they were a hereditary group, belonging to families with a long tradition of public service, and when the ancient system by which the property of dead or disgraced officials was seized by the state came to an end, their wealth and therefore their stake in the existing order grew.

The division of power between palace and civil service, the differing interests and intervention of the European powers, and the very size and complexity of the civil service, all led to a certain political activity. But it was still court or bureaucratic politics rather than that of notables: the politics of men whose power was based ultimately on their position in the public service, struggling to ensure their dominance and that of their ideas. Here even more than in Egypt the conditions of a more open type of political activity had been destroyed. The Janissaries had gone, and, apart from a few isolated incidents, the mob of Istanbul played no great political part until towards the end of the century. The new army officers were not drawn into politics by contending groups, perhaps because the memory of the Janissaries was still there to teach the danger of it. The 'ulama lost much of their importance, as in Egypt, as their official functions in the systems oflaw and education dwindled. The upper 'ulama, as Professor Heyd has explained,8 were to a great extent supporters of reform, for many different reasons : they too in their way wished the empire to be strong again, some of them understood the conditions of its becoming strong, out of conviction

and interest they were on the side of established order, and the bureaucratic ideal of rule from above in the light of a principle of justice was not without its appeal to men brought up in the Sunni tradition of politics.

To make up for the loss of internal instruments of action there were, it is true, certain outside forces which could be brought in. Different groups of officials were linked with different European embassies. There were also links with powerful forces in the provinces or dependencies of the empire. The relations between Muhammad 'Ali and the reforming groups in Istanbul need to be studied further, but it is clear from the diplomatic sources that between 1838 and 1840 one aim of Muhammad `Ali's forward policy in Syria and Asia Minor was to bring to power in Istanbul his own friends among the Turkish court politicians. Again, the possibility that there were links between groups in Istanbul which were opposed to the reforms and such movements as that of Damascus in 1860 needs to be explored.

But such external forces could not make up for the lack of instruments of political action inside Istanbul. Here as in Cairo the period of the Tanzimat was one of political quiescence, but here too a change begins in the 1860's and 1870's, and for similar reasons: on the one hand the weakening of the power of the government and the growth of European pressure; on the other, the appearance of new instruments of action- the press, the intelligentsia (officials and officers of humble origin and rank, students and graduates of the higher schools), and the new ideas of the Young Ottomans, forming as they did a powerful critique of the principles underlying the reforms.

Thus once more there was scope for the politicians, but who were the politicians? Here as in Cairo they came from inside the system of government. For all his panoply of a traditional Muslim despot, Sultan Abdul-hamid II was in a sense the foremost politician of the empire: the first sultan who descended into the political fray, using various means to generate popular feeling and mobilize support vis a vis his own government as well as the European powers. But once the monarchy became political, it could no longer serve as a rallying point for all the forces of society. Other members of the Ottoman family, and of the related Egyptian khedivial family, began to come forward as points around which loyalty or discontent could crystallize. What was more important still, Abddul-hamid broke the connection between palace and higher bureaucracy which had continued in spite of strains throughout the period of the Tanzimat: some of the high officials, with an inherited position and wealth, supported by the official class and one or other European embassy, became rallying points for discreet opposition. For a time there grew up a politics of notables coexisting with the court politics of Yildiz. Both were swept away by the process which

began with the Young Turk Revolution and brought Turkey into the modern age of mass-politics. But it is significant that the leaders of the Young Turk Revolution and of the Kemalist Revolution which followed it were also drawn from the ranks of the Ottoman officials and officers. Modern Turkey like the later Ottoman Empire was built around the framework of strong and well-rooted institutions of government.

Both in Cairo and Istanbul therefore the reforms worked in favor of the power of the government as against that of the subject, although in each city a different element in the government drew the main profit from the change. In the provinces of Arab Asia however this development was not to come until towards the end of the century, and even then not completely. Before this, the reforms in so far as they were applied did not weaken the power of the urban notables and in some ways strengthened it.

There were many reasons for this. It would not be enough to explain it by the distance of Damascus, Aleppo, Baghdad and Jidda from Istanbul. Distance may it is true have counted for something in regard to Baghdad, but Syria and western Arabia felt the impact of modern means of communication even before the Suez Canal was opened and the first railways were built. Steamship lines were opened from the 1830's onwards (at the time of the events of 1860 in Syria, it was possible to reinforce the Ottoman army there rapidly by sea), and telegraph lines were laid in the 1860's. For the main reasons why the Arab provincial cities reacted in a different way to the Tanzimat we must look elsewhere, and first of all to the very fact that they were provincial cities. The hand of the government was less heavy there than in the capital, and there is plenty of evidence that, as the century went on, it came to be regarded as in some sense alien, as it had not been earlier when political thought and sentiment naturally took a religious form. Both the Egyptian government which ruled Syria and the Hijaz in the 1830's, and the Ottoman government which replaced it, were regarded by the Muslim city-dwellers as Westernizing governments going against religious tradition and against the ancient principle of Muslim supremacy; and it seems that this view of the new Turkish officials as innovators, almost infidels, sharpened the perception that they were Turks.

Moreover, the long tradition of leadership by the local a'yan and 'ulama was too strong to be broken. It is true, in each of the provinces Ottoman control was sharply imposed or reimposed: in Baghdad and Mosul by military expeditions in the 1830's, in Syria and the Hijaz after the Egyptian withdrawal in 1840. This experience certainly left its mark. It meant that old ruling groups or families lost the power they had had in the eighteenth century, but it did not necessarily mean that they were destroyed, and during the nineteenth century there was perhaps a tendency for families of

"Turkish" or Mamluke military origins to blend with those of "Arab" and religious origin to form a single class with social prestige. This class still had at its disposal the instruments of political action which had been weakened in Cairo and Istanbul. The 'dam remained more important than in the capitals, both because they were an ancient, wealthy, locally rooted aristocracy and not an elite of service, and because the religious schools, although in decline, still had a monopoly of religious education. There were no modern professional high schools in the provincial centers, and it was not until towards the end of the century that Muslim families of standing began to send their children to the French and American mission schools or the professional schools of Istanbul.

The "popular" organizations still remained. Ottoman policing of the cities was less effective than Egyptian, and the quarter remained very much of a unit with its local leadership. The guilds still existed, and there is some evidence that they had more autonomy in Syria at least than in Cairo or Istanbul: for what it is worth, Iliya Qudsi speaks of the shaykhs of the Damascene guilds as being elected by the members,9 and it seems that in Jerusalem the shaykhs were drawn from the poorer sharifs and under the control of the naqib, The Janissaries also, although formally dissolved in the 1820's, continued to be an important political force for at least another generation. They were largely responsible for the rising of 1854 in Mosul, and they were reported to be still meeting secretly in Aleppo in 1860. There was perhaps greater popular discontent to build on than before. The coming in of European textiles led to a rapid decline of local crafts: raw materials which had previously been manufactured for a wide market in Aleppo or Damascus were now exported to the factories of western Europe. The number of looms fell sharply: in Aleppo, from 10,000 to 4,000 at most during the 1850's. This meant a decline in the prosperity of the artisans and of the merchants whose work was bound up with theirs : a decline the more sharply felt because at the same time a new merchant class was rising to deal with the trade with Europe, and this class tended not to be drawn from the local Muslim population. In Damascus, it is true, the Muslim merchants held their own even in the European trade. But in Baghdad it was Jewish and Armenian merchants who prospered; in Aleppo, local Jews and Christians and Europeans; in Beirut, local Christians; in Jidda, Europeans as against the Hadrami merchants. Again, in spite of efforts the Ottoman control of the Syrian and Iraqi countryside was to remain limited and precarious until much later. It

gradually spread over the more accessible plains, but in the hills some degree of autonomy continued, and the power of the Beduin chiefs remained as it was. As late as the 1850's indeed, when in Egypt the process of sedentari- zation was well under way, the opposite process was still taking place in some parts of Syria, and peasants were abandoning their lands to the pastoral nomads. The traditional connection of the urban a'yan with the mountain or Beduin chiefs could still therefore play a role in the politics of the cities. In some ways indeed the influence of the notables was even strengthened in the first phase of the Tanzimal. The Ottoman governors needed them more than before. A governor was sent, usually for a short period, to a city he did not know, with a small number of officials to help him, no organized police force or gendarmerie and inadequate armed forces. He was sent not simply to carry on as before, but to apply a new reforming policy which was bound to arouse opposition. In these circumstances, he could only rule with the help of the local notables: without their local knowledge and their credit with the population he could scarcely hope for example to raise conscripts or new taxes. Some at least of the new governors moreover were men out of sympathy with the reforms and for that reason exiled by the central government to posts in different provinces. It was no doubt for these reasons that, with the acquiescence of the government, the local majlis in most provincial centers came to be controlled by the notables. The majlis included several Muslim notables either appointed by the governor or in some sense elected, as well as the gadi and the mufti and perhaps the naqib ex officio. All the consular reports agree that, at least until the 1860's, this local Muslim element dominated the majlis. The Jewish and Christian members, who had played an active part during the Egyptian occupation, were reduced to silence, and in one way or another the a'yan were able to do as they wanted with the Turkish officials.

Not only were the notables needed more by the government, their intervention was also more sought after by the population in its dealings with the government. Conscription, new legal codes, new methods of assessing and collecting taxes, the establishment of garrisons or government offices in smaller towns, the attempt to weaken or destroy the local autonomies, all meant that more than ever before the population was brought into connection with the government and the notables could play their traditional role of intermediaries. This strengthened their control over the city, and extended it over the countryside. Notables became "patrons" of villages, and this was one of the ways in which they came to establish their claims to ownership over them. They also created useful alliances with country notables. In Lebanon, for example, the abolition of the princedom meant

that the government in Beirut and Damascus could intervene more than before. Different families or factions in the mountain began to find powerful friends and supporters in the provincial capitals: it was in this period for example that the connection between Druze chiefs of the Shuf and Muslim notables of Beirut grew up. The destruction of the Kurdish principalities had similar effects. Disaffected Kurdish chiefs like Badr Khan formed alliances with discontented urban notables in Mosul; some of the Kurdish ruling families, like that of Baban, themselves settled in Baghdad, became urban notables, but from the city still had a certain influence over their former territories. In those territories, their place as local leaders was taken by the hereditary shaykhs of religious orders, like the Barzanji shaykhs of the Qadiri order and the Naqshabandi shaykhs of Barzan ; these too had connections through their orders with the religious aristocracy of the cities.

The notables used their possibilities of action fully in this period. On the whole they threw their influence against the reforms, not only from prejudice or conviction, but because the general direction of the reforms ran contrary to their interests : the political conception underlying the Tanzimat was that of a direct and identical relationship between the government and each of its citizens, and this was not compatible either with the privileges of Muslim notables or with their role as intermediaries. As was to be expected, they also used their power to increase their wealth. They no Iess than other classes were deeply affected by the change which was taking place in the trading system. The trade from which their wealth had come was in decline. Long before the Suez Canal was opened, steam communications between Istanbul and Egypt, as well as the disturbed state of Persia and of the desert routes had cut down the number of pilgrims going to the Holy Cities by the difficult overland route from Damascus: as early as 1843 it was reported that no pilgrims had come to Damascus from Persia, and only 200 from Asia Minor, compared with several thousand in previous years. The merchants of Damascus suffered most from this; those of other cities in Syria, Iraq and the Hijaz suffered also from the decline of the old textile crafts, the insecurity of the transdesert routes, and the opening of steamship communications between Iraq and India. On the other hand there were new possibilities of becoming wealthy from the land, and notables and merchants made the most of them. After the restoration of control by the central Ottoman government, many of the malikanes seem to have been abolished, but the land tax as well as other taxes was farmed annually. When the farms were auctioned, the large merchants and notables, in collusion with Ottoman officials, were in a good position to obtain them. The land tax was now paid in kind, while previously it had been paid in money. The tax-farmer would delay levying the tax, under some pretext or

another; but the cultivator could not send the rest of his produce to the city market until the tax had been paid. This caused an artificial scarcity in the city, prices went up, and the merchants could then release the stocks ofgrain they had stored up for this purpose and sell them at a high price. Such maneuvers, which we find described again and again in the consular sources, were the more profitable because the control of the government was being extended from the city over the more accessible countryside: regions like the Biqa', which had previously been under the control of the mountain lords, now came under that of Damascus, and their tax-farms went to Damascene families or Ottoman officials. Later, when the new Land Law was issued, it was used from the beginning by members of the mulls and their partners in the Ottoman administration to obtain the title to villages. In the Syrian and Iraqi provinces, the balance of power between notables and government did not swing decisively in favor of the latter until towards the end of the nineteenth century, when the control of Istanbul grew much more effective for various reasons. But even then this did not mean the end of the local predominance of the notables. Under Abdiilhamid they began to send their sons to Ottoman professional schools and from there into the civil or military service; they could preserve their position by becoming part of the Ottoman aristocracy of service. Later, under the Young Turks and then the Mandates, the idea of Arab nationalism provided them with a new instrument of resistance. Here indeed we find one of the ways in which the history of Syria and Iraq in modern times has differed from that of Turkey and Egypt. The nationalist movement was led by the urban aristocracy and moulded in their image; the change did not begin to come until after 1945.

V

Thus far we have talked in terms of two factors: the government, and the urban notables acting as a focus for local forces and able either to oppose the government or else oblige it to act through them. But there was a third factor involved: the European embassies and consulates, particularly those of England, France and Russia. Their influence was changing in scope and nature. Since the early seventeenth century the European states had had interests of their own to preserve, and had done so by allying themselves with one or other party in the palace, the imperial divan or the provincial divans. But in the nineteenth century a new situation came into existence. Their power and interests were now so great that they were no longer willing simply to act through whatever government existed, or in other words to allow the Ottoman central or local governments to provide the framework within which the activities of Europe should be conducted.

They were now in a position to put pressure on the government to become the kind ofgovernment they needed. In particular, they were not willing to deal with the various populations of the empire through the government. European trade with the empire (in particular the textile trade) was growing quickly, and this meant, not only that European merchants should be protected, but that those involved in the trade with Europe, whether foreigners or Ottomans, should he able to deal directly with the population: to travel freely, not to bear vexatious burdens and impositions, to widen the market for imports, to collect materials for export, to tell producers what to produce and lend them the money to do it. At the same time, for various reasons different groups in the population wanted the protection of the European powers, who were willing to give it them. Rich and prominent individuals could be protected by attaching them in some way to the consulates and embassies, and during the 1830's something new happened: for the first time Ottoman subjects Were themselves made consular agents. But beyond that, whole communities were taken under protection. A policy which had been pursued by the French since the seventeenth and the Russians since the late eighteenth century was pursued by them and others more consciously and deliberately in the 1840's and 1850's; it was then that the British government, which had no obvious proteges of its own, established a connection with the Jews in Palestine, some of the Druzes in Lebanon, and the new Protestant churches. Behind the protection of trade and religious minorities there lay something else, the major political and strategic interests of the powers, and these also might make necessary a direct connection with the peoples of the empire: British communications with India must be kept open, and for this purpose British consuls must have direct and friendly relations with the chiefs of Beduin tribes which lay across the routes.

In their own interests therefore the European powers needed a certain kind of Ottoman government and a certain position for themselves inside the empire; to obtain this they were prepared to put pressure on the government, and they were able to do so both because of their military strength and because of their connection with different groups in the empire. The Ottoman government for its part needed them: only the armies of one European power could protect it from the threats of another. In addition, political groups inside the government looked more than before to the support of European embassies and consulates in their struggles with other groups; this in its turn strengthened the position of the ambassadors and consuls even further.

In general, their influence was used in favor of the reforms of the Tanemat. They wanted a better position for their Christian and Jewish

proteges; and they wanted an efficient and rational government with which to deal. (This is probably true of the Russian not less than other governments, although we shall not know definitely until the Russian sources are fully used. We should beware of what is written about Russian policy on the basis of British and French sources; there seems no reason to doubt that in this period of change Russia like other states wanted reform, so long as that did not mean the domination of some other power.)

But European help to the reformers was given on one condition : that the reforms did not harm the interests of the European states, and in particular their free and direct access to the peoples of the empire. The decisive struggle in this connection was that between the British government and Muhammad 'Ali in the 1830's. The aim of Muhammad `Ali's policy, so far as his relations with Europe were concerned, was to create a new framework within which European activities could be pursued, but to make sure that Europe would deal with his territories through him, not only as ruler but as merchant-in-chief, principal broker between the rural cultivator and the European market. This claim was not acceptable to the British government, and battle was joined over a number of matters: the rights and privileges of consular agents, the British expedition to open up the Euphrates to navigation, and above all the question of monopolies. After the defeat of Muhammad 'Ali, the claims of Europe were generally accepted. Ottoman and Egyptian reformers needed European help too much to risk a major quarrel, even had they had the strength to pursue it.

The consequence of this was not only that foreigners and proteges secured a better position, and that merchants, consuls and missionaries could travel and work more freely than before, but also that ambassadors and consuls came to have a larger role in the politics of the empire. Once more the role was different in Istanbul, Cairo and the cities of the Fertile Crescent. In Istanbul, no power could allow any of the others to establish a permanent ascendancy; the five embassies remained in a permanent tension, each on its guard against the others but all (until the last years before World War I) conscious of the overriding need to prevent the outbreak of war and to preserve the common interests of Europe in the Near East. Since Istanbul was the capital and its politics, as we have seen, were primarily those of a court and a bureaucracy, the embassies served as centers not so much for the independent forces ofsociety as for groups at court or in the government. In Cairo, at the other extreme, the British military occupation of 1882 meant that one of the foreign representatives became in effect ruler of Egypt, in uneasy collaboration with the palace; this conferred on the other representatives, in particular that of France, and on the Ottoman high commissioner a new importance as the only possible foci of

opposition but it also limited their efficacy, since the presence of a British army gave the British consul-general a power which they could not challenge.

In the cities of the Fertile Crescent the influence of the consuls was exercised within a different framework again. Because they were known to have power with the government, and because they had free access to the population, their intervention was sought, and they began to play the part of intermediaries which had belonged for so long to the notables. Innumerable examples of this could be given. To take a few at random: in 1822, after the great earthquake in Aleppo, the a'yan asked the French consul to intervene with the government so that the city could be exempted from taxation for five years; in 1830, the shaykhs of the Mawali and Anaza tribes asked him to make peace for them with the governor of Aleppo, who himself was willing to accept this intervention; in the 1850's the revolt of Jabal Druze against conscription was ended by the intervention of both the British and the French consuls. Such intervention tended to place the consuls in direct opposition to the interests of the notables. It gave the consuls, whether or not they wanted it, a role in local politics. Both in the town and countryside they could mobilize political forces for local political ends: in fact, they could scarcely avoid doing so. The famous intervention of `Abd al-Qadir in the Damascus massacres of 1860 is a good example of this. His action to save and protect Christians has usually been regarded as an act of Muslim noblesse, and so no doubt in a sense it was. But it is clear from the French records that it was the French acting consul who, in anticipation of what happened, distributed arms to the Algerians and agreed that they should act .as they did. Seen in this light, it is the French consulate which now plays the traditional part of the notable, and 'Abd al-Qadir and his Algerians that of his clients. The noblesse of 'Abd al-Qadir's action remains, but mixed with it is something else : the desire to win the favor of the government of Napoleon III, through whom his own political plans might be accomplished.

The rise of the consulates even threatened the economic power of the notables. While the old trading system declined, the growth of the European trade gave wealth and economic power to Christian or Jewish merchants who were for the most part either formal proteges of one or other consulate or morally attached to it. Even the hold of the notables over the land was challenged. As Mr. Chevallier has shown,10 in parts of Syria the merchant from the seaport was replacing the local landowner as provider of capital for the peasant and organizer of his production. Even more widely,

Christian and Jewish merchants were becoming moneylenders and thus acquiring some of the claims of landowners, and were looking to the foreign consulates to support their claims against the peasant: in the early 1860's a large proportion of the village debts in the province of Damascus were owed to Jewish proteges of the British consulate.

The opposition of the notables to reform was in this way colored with anti-European and anti-Christian feeling, and the growing influence of the European governments and their local proteges provided a common grievance through which the notables could hope to mobilize popular support. The great disturbances of the 1850's (Aleppo in 1850, Mosul in 1854, Nablus in 1856, Jidda in 1858, Damascus in 1860) follow a common pattern. In Mosul for example the events were organized by the relics of the Janissaries, in agreement with the 'ulama; aiming to restore their own former position, linked with the Kurdish aghas who were fighting for their own position in the mountains, strengthened by control of the tax-farms of the villages, which the governor had given back to them, and using anti-Christian feeling to win popular support. Again, in Jidda in 1858, those who set on foot the revolt were some of the large merchants and eulanza, with the help or acquiescence ofsorne Ottoman officials, and they used the grievances of the Hadrami traders against the foreign merchants who were replacing them.

After 1860 the fire dies down for a generation, but the rivalry of notable families and consulates as intermediaries, political organizers and potential claimants to rule continued. As one Arab province after another fell under European rule it came to the surface in a new form, the opposition of alien ruler and nationalist movement.

Notes

1 S. Shaw, Financial and Administrative Organization and Development of Ottoman Egypt 1517-1798 (Princeton, 1962).
2 A. K. S. Lambton, Landlord and Peasant in Persia (London, 1953).
3 19. Itzkowitz, "Eighteenth Century Ottoman Realities," in Stadia Islamita, 16 (1962).
4 D. Ayalon, "Studies in al-Jabarti I. Notes on the transformation of Mamluke society in Egypt under the Ottomans," in Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 3 (1960); P. M. Holt, Egypt and the Fertile Crescent 1516-1922 (London 1966), chs. 5, 6; Shaw, Financial and Administrative Organisation.
5 G. Baer, Egyptian Guilds in Modern Times (Jerusalem, 1964).
6 G. Baer, "Beduin Sedentarization in Nineteenth Century Egypt," in Die Welt des Islam (1957); "Dissolution of the Egyptian Village Community," in Die Welt des Islams (1959); "The Village Shaikh in Modern Egypt," in U. Heyd, ed., Studies in Islamic History and Civilization ( Jerusalem, 1961).
7 S. Mardin, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought (Princeton, 1962).
8 U. Heyd, "The Ottoman `ulerna and Westernization in the Time of Selim III and Mahmud II," in Heyd, ed., Studies in Islamic History and Civilization (Jerusalem, 1961).
9 Iliya Qudsi, "Notice sur les corporations de Damas," Ades du ilime Cong.,* des Orientalistes (Leiden, 1885).
10 D. Chevallier, "Aspects sociaux de la question d'Orient," in Annales, January, 1959.