The Ottoman Empire and the World Economy: The Nineteenth Century by Resat KasabaReview by: Robert OlsonThe American Historical Review, Vol. 95, No. 2 (Apr., 1990), p. 556Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2163899 .

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556 Reviews of Books

shared in significant ways throughout the book. His concluding remarks about the Geniza are applicable to him as well. "Every happening of the past is a non- recurrent single episode; yet it has relevance to the general experience of mankind.... It is the privilege of the historian to conceive the accidental past as ever present life" (p. 502). This work will be read and reread, a monument of profound scholarship.

M. S. STERN

University of Manitoba

RESAT KASABA. The Ottoman Empire and the World Econ- omy: The Nineteenth Century. (SUNY Series in Middle Eastern Studies.) Albany: State University of New York. 1988. Pp. xii, 191. Cloth $39.50, paper $12.95.

Resat Kasaba is a student of Immanuel Wallerstein's world-systems theory, which a recent critic (Leonard Binder) of development ideologies placed between structural Marxism (Louis Althusser, Nicos Poulantzas, and John Taylor) and the dependency and corporatist theorists (F. H. Cardoso, Enzo Falleto, and Guillermo O'Donnell) and the theories of revolution advocated by Barrington Moore, Theda Skocpol and Francois Furet. Wallerstein attempted to demonstrate that mar- kets and polities do not necessarily coincide geograph- ically, that international stratification is determinative of a country's or empire's economic development, and that countries or empires of the semiperiphery are important to the core and metropolitan (European) countries. Wallerstein posited further that states may move from the periphery and semiperiphery to the core and that core states may become peripheral. It is these possibilities that give optimism to scholars of the Third World for the economic development of their states.

Kasaba asks whether the Ottoman empire as a pe- ripheral empire ever had the opportunity of becoming a core or at least a less peripheral state and one with a 'civil society." He answers that the opportunity existed in the middle of the nineteenth century, but after the 1870s it faded because of the imposed bureaucratic centralism, especially during the reign of Abdulha- mid 11 (1878-1909). This bureaucratic centralism was "institutionalized under the auspices of the core capital and core states of the capitalist world economy" (p. 115). This development led to the exclusion of indigenous, largely non-Muslim, capitalist intermediar- ies and the last best hope, according to Kasaba, of a "genuine civil society." Kasaba continues, "The relative isolation of the non-Muslims during the late nineteenth century was also significant politically in that it created the ground for the successful implementation of poli- cies of natural enclosure [Young Turks] between 1908 and 1923" (p. 112). One has to assume that by logical extension Kasaba would also include the nationalist period of Kemal Ataturk. Such arguments are quite revisionist of the current historiography of this period. It seems unlikely that a civil society (Kasaba never

defines the term) or even an Islamic liberalism will materialize in the twentieth century in any country in the Middle East. Is it reasonable to postulate that such a civil society could possibly have emerged in the Ottoman empire in the middle of the nineteenth cen- tury and that non-Muslims would have been the ful- crum of that society? This is not to detract, however, from the prominence that Kasaba accords to the non- Muslims, especially in the Izmir area of western Tur- key, in the development of capitalist enterprises in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He, like Caglar Keyder, another scholar of Wallerstein's world- systems theory (State and Class in Turkey [1987]), rightly points to the significant role that non-Muslims played in the economy of the late empire.

It is perhaps somewhat ironic that the ability of the Ottoman empire to become more integrated into the European economy, even if it had no hope of becoming a core capitalist state, was prevented by the European Christian capitalist states that preferred the bureau- cratic and Muslim centralization of Abdulhamid II, which allowed for the continued extraction of profits and revenues from the empire, to the competition of Ottoman, largely Christian, capitalists. It seems to me that Kasaba makes another contribution here (al- though he does not elaborate), that is, that the reign of Abdulhamid II, at least for the first decade of his rule, was supported by the European Christian capitalist states. Kasaba, more than any other scholar, provides the argument as to why this was the case, which should give pause to those historians who still think that Europe viewed Abdulhamid II as a despotic, tyrannical leader. If there was some truth to such views, perhaps it was necessary as part of the symbiotically capitalist relationship of the Ottoman empire with Europe.

Kasaba has, then, made a case for a revision of the historiography of the late eighteenth- and nineteenth- century Ottoman empire as accepted currently by many American, European, and Turkish scholars. It was the Christians of Europe and the Muslims of the Ottoman empire and not the Christians and Jews of the Ottoman empire that contributed the most to making the empire peripheral in the world capitalist economy, especially after the 1870s.

Many of Kasaba's arguments would have been stron- ger if he had been more familiar with the historiogra- phy of the period. For example, his periodization of the eighteenth century would have been greatly im- proved if he had used my study (The Siege of Mosul and Ottoman-Persian Relations, 1718-1743 [1975]) and stud- ies by Abdul Karim Rafeq and Karl Barbir, all of which address the same questions that he does but from different perspectives and with the use of different sources. It seems that world-systems theorists and his- torians of the Ottoman empire should read one an- other's works more closely.

ROBERT OLSON

University of Kentucky

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