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Ottoman Civil Officialdom
A Social History
By Carter Vaughn Findley PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1989 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05545-9
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Any study of civil officials must come to terms with the variety of meanings and feelings associated with the idea of bureaucracy. Definitions of the term have varied so widely that some have little in common with one another. Some analysts have understood bureaucracy as a system of rule, analogous to monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy. Others have given the word a more limited scope, to refer to a way of organizing government administration. Early on, the term "bureaucracy" acquired a twofold application, both to a pattern of administrative organization, and to the people who worked in such organizations. The term "bureaucracy" has also acquired a twofold application in a different sense, in that some discussions dwell on the negative dimensions of the phenomenon and some on the positive. Honoré de Balzac, who helped popularize the term, spoke in Les employés (1836) of "Bureaucracy, the giant power wielded by pygmies." In such contexts, "bureaucracy" comes to mean neither a way of organizing administration nor a group of people, but rather the red tape and paper shuffling, the muddling and frustration, that officials introduce into people's lives. To this day, almost the only discussions of bureaucracy that arouse any popular response are the attacks — especially the humorously conceived ones — on bureaucracy in this sense. Yet by Balzac's time, the centralized continental European governments were largely staffed by professional officials, who were supposed to apply official administrative doctrines and regulations, which had become the subject matter of an academic subdiscipline recognized as a branch of legal studies: administrative law. As a result, while an oppositional literature also emerged in these societies, much of the writing on bureaucracy set out to define a normative picture of what it should be like. Max Weber's "ideal type" of bureaucracy, the most influential such view ever produced, has to be seen against this backdrop.
Weber defined what he saw as ideal attributes, not only of bureaucracy, but also of the legal authority system that he regarded as its necessary context. He also contrasted both these ideal types with other alternatives. He contrasted bureaucracy with patrimonial officialdom, and legal authority with traditional and charismatic authority. Later social scientists have found his views easy to criticize. This is especially true of scholars who lack Weber's historical perspective, or who assume that he meant to equate the formal rationality that he associated with modern bureaucracies — and the authority systems in which they operate — with efficiency. Among the critics, Peter Blau emphasized that the requirements of rational administration change over time, and that efficiency depends on adapting to changing circumstances, rather than adhering to fixed rules. Henry Jacoby spotlighted the "forceful transformation of rational administration into the irrational exercise of power."
As the debate has progressed, no new synthesis has emerged. This appears to be partly because what bureaucracy is, or thinking about what it is, has changed. For example, the rise of modern governmental bureaucracies in western Europe and North America is largely the result of an increase in middle-level positions requiring a relatively high level of qualifications. In Great Britain, to cite one influential instance, the NorthcoteTrevelyan report of 1853, a milestone in the evolution of the British civil service, proposed a division between "intellectual" and "routine" work, with separate recruitment systems based on that division. The nineteenth-century rise in expectations about what a civil service could or should be had important implications not only for the most developed governments of Europe and North America, but even for the Ottomans, as this study will show. In nineteenth-century Europe, this transformation of civil administration into more of a "white-collar" pursuit made it increasingly attractive as a career to the burgeoning middle class. The growth in the power and importance of civil officials, and in scholarly interest in them, was partly a consequence of this embourgeoisement of administration.
More recently, with the growing organizational complexity of modern societies, the scope of discussions of bureaucracy has broadened to take account of the bureaucratic attributes of large organizations outside government. While many historians still have trouble following other social scientists in applying the term "bureaucracy" to branches of government service other than civil officialdom, sociologists have long been accustomed to talk of industrial bureaucracy and the like. For sociologists, the study of bureaucracy has thus broadened into a sizable subtopic within the field of organizational theory. One consequence of this broadening has been to highlight the difficulty of denning the attributes that distinguish bureaucracy from other types of organization. The broadening of scope has progressed to the point where some writers have discussed the "bureaucratization of the world." No wonder that one recent writer has said of bureaucracy: "few concepts in social science have undergone such a continual process of fragmentation and transformation."
A scholar studying the history of a group of civil government officials — bureaucracy in a "classic" sense — is mercifully exempt from some of the definitional and other problems raised by the broadening in scope of the recent literature on bureaucracy. Yet the need for conceptual clarity remains; so does the need to recognize differences in the roles or the importance of officials in different societies, and to identify major forces impinging on administrators in a given environment. The remainder of this chapter addresses these needs. The first section will define essential terms by posing the obvious first question: "Why study Ottoman officials?" The second will consider ways and means of carrying out such a study. And the last will discuss five major issues that interacted in especially important ways to direct the evolution of Ottoman civil officialdom and so to define the context of the present inquiry.
WHY STUDY OTTOMAN OFFICIALS?
This study takes as its subject the transformation, during the Ottoman Empire's reform era (1789–1922), of the branch of the "ruling class" known historically as the scribal service (kalemiye) into a new form known after the 1830s as civil officialdom (miilkiye). Within this branch, we shall at times select smaller units for closer scrutiny; most often, our choice will fall on the staff of the Foreign Ministry, the best-documented civil administrative agency. The organizational dimensions of the transformation from kalemiye to mülkiye having been examined in an earlier work, this study examines the social history of Ottoman scribes and civil officials.
The significance of the terms "civil officialdom" and "Foreign Ministry" may seem self-evident, even if "scribal service" is more remote from present-day awareness. But it could be misleading to assume that the significance of any of these terms is self-evident in the Ottoman context. An examination of the reasons for this statement helps to bring out the importance of Ottoman civil officialdom as an object of study.
The term "scribal service," precisely because it is remote from present-day realities, requires comparatively little comment in order to disentangle it from assumptions derived from other places and times. In the Ottoman Empire and earlier Islamic states, these were the men who produced the government's correspondence, kept its financial accounts, and compiled its records on land tenure. By the eighteenth century, the scribes formed one branch of a "ruling class" that also included the military, the Islamic religious establishment, and the palace service. By then, the scribes had begun to gain promotion into a larger variety of roles, as we shall note in chapter 2, a diversification that would help to shape the civil officialdom of the nineteenth century.
To understand Ottoman scribal officialdom, however, it is necessary to understand the character of the governmental system in which the scribes operated. This can be classified on one level as an Islamic sultanate, and on a more inclusive level as a patrimonial monarchy, that is, a state conceived on the model of a vasdy extended household. Prior to the reform era, this was a culturally conservative governmental system, in which authority and tradition were closely associated, whether in the centuries-old encrustation of ideas and values that served to legitimate the imperial system, in the ostensible legal primacy of the sharia (Islamic religious law) as compared to the decrees of the sultan, in the role of custom as a third source of law, or in the prevalence of habit and happenstance, over rational plan, in the definition of government functions. The conditions of scribal service differed from those characteristic of modern administrative systems in virtually all the ways that Weber defines as distinctive of patrimonial officialdom. Scribes and other members of the ruling class were seen as servants of the ruler, not free men who had accepted a contractually limited obligation to serve the state. Systems for recruitment and training tended to be rudimentary and ad hoc, more so for scribes than for some of the other elites, although nepotism and favor itism had come to prevail for all branches of service. The scribes' responsibilities tended to be miscellaneous, shaped more by custom than by plan, and poorly demarcated from one another. The sultan's favor and his power arbitrarily to punish his officials were key determinants of their fortunes. And scribal compensation took the form of revenue-collection rights (prebends) rather than salaries. Over the centuries, Ottoman history displays a kind of gradation between these attributes of the scribal service (traits that chapter 2 will illustrate with concrete examples) and the corresponding attributes of civil officialdom, to be listed below. In some ways, however, the state's ability to create the conditions associated with modern administration — such as highly institutionalized systems of recruitment and training, or salaries — had been greater in the sixteenth century, before the traditional imperial system went into decline, than it was in the eighteenth.
Concerning the term "civil officialdom," there is no need for qualification as to the roles these men filled. By the end of the nineteenth century, they were local administrators, diplomats, treasurers, inspectors, statisticians, magistrates, and so on, much like their counterparts in western countries. Yet a number of issues about the emergence of civil officialdom were controversial and do require clarification. For example, while no single act or statement had made as clear-cut a distinction among the Ottomans as the Northcote-Trevelyan report of 1853 demanded in Britain between "intellectual" and "routine" functions, one fact, as administrative reform progressed, was that the traditional secretarial skills of the scribe (kâtib) — or at least the intellectual horizons that usually went with them — ceased to be all a person needed to fill the most important roles. Cultural change within civil officialdom and a new idea of professionalism thus became important issues. On a broader scale, the extent to which Ottoman "civil officialdom" was a "civil service" in the modern sense was also a question. For "civil service" in this sense hardly existed before the later nineteenth century anywhere.
With time, the Ottoman administration did begin, in a ragged way often clearer in concept than implementation, to take on the traits of a modern bureaucracy, as opposed to those of the earlier scribal corps. In the famous Weberian listing, this meant that the officials should be personally free, that the offices should be hierarchically organized, that each office should have distinct and specific functions, that the officials' obligations should be contractually limited (as opposed to the patrimonial officials' unconditional personal dependence on the sovereign), that officials should be recruited on the basis of their qualifications (preferably by examinations), that they should be compensated by salary, that the office must be their sole or at least primary occupation, that there should be a definite career pattern with promotion by seniority or merit, that officials would acquire no proprietary right in their posts or in the resources that went with them, and that the officials should be subject to a unified system of disciplinary control in the conduct of their duties. Counterparts to Weber's listing can be found in other sources, necessarily so, since it describes a pattern replicated in different countries and repeatedly defined in statute and regulation. Ottoman officials perhaps never acquired all these traits (their personal freedom and the contractual limitation of their obligations were certainly unclear through 1908), nor had the implied opposites of these traits all existed among the scribes of the prereform era (for example, Ottoman scribal officials never acquired proprietary rights in their offices). Yet the Weberian list of bureaucratic traits can be taken as an indication of the orientation of Ottoman administrative reform, manifested with special clarity in regulatory acts, which often followed foreign models, and in the thinking of leading reformers. A key concern of this study must be to assess how far mundane reality caught up with these regulatory acts.
If, as reform occurred, the Ottoman governmental system remained an Islamic sultanate and a patrimonial monarchy — indeed, Sultan Abd ül-Hamid II (1876–1909) and the Young Turk triumvirate (1913–1918) "modernized" and reasserted patrimonial authoritarianism — a transition away from traditionalism toward rational-legalism was under way nevertheless. To return to the point where many critics have attacked Weber, it would not do to make sweeping claims about the rationality or efficiency of Ottoman administration; the chapters that follow will amply substantiate this point. Yet in proportion as Ottoman reformers began deliberately changing inherited patterns defined by tradition, they had no choice but to use reason to develop their plans and then, if they were to project these plans effectively, to embody them in laws and regulations.
This shift from traditional to rational-legal authority remained incomplete, largely because the processes of rationalization and regulation often were subverted to serve the ends of patrimonial discretionalism in high places. Yet it is impossible to understand Ottoman administrative reform without recognizing that a shift in underlying authority concepts had at least begun and progressed far enough to become a subject of controversy. This shift also made political life more contentious. For innovative reform — the deliberate breaching of patterns sanctioned by tradition — opened an unprecedented range of policy controversy. With the emergence of the Young Ottoman ideologues of the 1860s and later the Young Turk revolutionaries, Ottoman political life began, for better or worse, to assume some of the most distinctive forms of the secular western polities of the day.
Our subject, then, is the transformation of a scribal corps, operating under conditions of traditional patrimonialism, into something more like a modern civil administration or even civil service, operating in an environment where the very idea of reform pointed toward a greater need for law and rationalization, inflaming political controversy as it did so. Yet why is this an important subject for study? This question has answers both external to the field of Ottoman studies and internal.
Externally, in terms of comparisons with other societies, the Ottomans' efforts to reform and preserve their state — one of only a handful in Asia and Africa to retain nominal independence throughout the great age of European imperialism — mark them as pioneers of the struggle for development that has become a universal Third World theme in this century. Chronologically, the Ottomans were the first nonwestern society — unless we count Russia as such — to embark on that path. This fact gives the Ottoman experience with reform a comparative interest little appreciated, as yet, among nonspecialists, particularly those who assume that "development" is solely a twentieth-century issue. As concerns government administration in particular, the fact that the Ottomans were the last great representatives of a millennial Islamic tradition of statecraft adds an extra dimension of comparative interest.
Within a purely Ottoman frame of reference, one conventional way to justify our choice of subject would be to argue that Ottoman scribes and civil officials formed an especially important social group. This was true; yet it would be misleading to present this as an "elite study" without further qualification. For example, a number of recent studies have focused on "elites" as defined in terms of high-level officials. By comparison with such studies, which tend to have the generic problem of studying the "elite" without comparing it to the non-elite, this is not an "elite study" at all, at least not a study of only top-level officials. Rather, as much as possible, our social history will present a top-to-bottom view of Ottoman civil officialdom. This is especially true of the sections based on the personnel records of the Foreign Ministry, which provide a "vertical slice" of civil officialdom, rather than a picture of its topmost layer alone.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Ottoman Civil Officialdom by Carter Vaughn Findley. Copyright © 1989 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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