1. For a familiar account of fiscal “developmentalism” see Carolyn Webber and Aaron Wildavsky, A History of Taxation and Expenditure in the Western World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), 174 ff; compare with James B. Collins, The Fiscal Limits of Absolutism: Direct Taxation in Early Seventeenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 9.

2. For a critique of these policy-blind approaches to the state, see Margaret Levi, Of Rule and Revenue (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 190. For other settings, see Muzaffar Alam, The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India: Awadh and the Punjab, 1707-1748 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986); Susan Mann, Local Merchants and the Chinese Bureaucracy, 1750-1950 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987); and Daniel Dessert, Argent, pouvoir et société au Grand Siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1984).

3. For South Asia see Frank Perlin, “State Formation Reconsidered: Part Two,”Modern Asian Studies, 19, no. 3 (1985): 415-80. For European states see Michèle le Mène and Jean-Philippe Genet, eds., Génèse de l'État moderne: prélevement et redistribution (Paris: Éditions du Centre National de la Récherche Scientifique, 1987); Alain Guéry, “Le roi depensie: le don, la contrainte, et l'origine du système financier de la monarchie française d'Ancien Régime,” in Emmanuel le Roy Ladurie, ed., Les Monarchies (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1986), 259-86; and Hilton L. Root, “The Redistributive Role of Government: Economic Regulation in Old Regime France and England,”Comparative Studies in Society and History 33, no. 2 (1991): 338-69; and for the Ottoman Empire, Ilkay Sunar, “State and Economy in the Ottoman Empire,” in Huri İslamoˇglu-İnan, ed., The Ottoman Empire and the World Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 63-87.

4. Charles Tilly, “Reflections on the History of European State-Making,” in Charles Tilly, ed., The Formation of the National States in Western Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 3-83, esp. 48.

5. Ottoman historiography of the period 1650-1850, understandably devoted to regional monographs, has only begun to understand the functionings of this enormous and complex polity. Efforts to synthesize these experiences have been polarized between two camps: the philologist's stress on institutions and ideology largely divorced from socio-economic context (see e.g., H.A.R. Gibb and Harold Bowen, Islamic Society and the West: A Study of the Impact of Western Civilization on Moslem Culture in the Near East, 1 vol. in 2 pts. [London: Oxford University Press, 1950, 1957]) and schools of political economics which attempt to derive Ottoman socioeconomic and political response from shifts in the world economy (see Immanuel Wallerstein, Hale Decdeli, and Reşat Kasaba, “The Incorporation of the Ottoman Empire in the World-Economy,” in Huri İslamoˇglu-İnan, ed., The Ottoman Empire, 63-87). In “Centralization and Decentralization in Ottoman Administration” in Thomas Naffa and Roger Owen, eds., Studies in Eighteenth Century Islamic History (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IN: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977), 27-53, Halil İnalcik tries to bridge institutional and social history. For a critique of the orientalist's reification of eighteenth-century institutions, see Roger Owen, “The Middle East in the Eighteenth Century: A Critique of Gibb and Bowen's Islamic Society and the West,”Review of Middle East Studies 1 (1975): 101-12; and for a critique of the assumptions of world-systems analysis in light of recent research, see Ariel Salzmann, Book review, Çaˇglar Keyder and Faruk Tabak, eds., Landholding and Commercial Agriculture in the Middle East (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), The Turkish Studies Association Bulletin 16, no. 2 (September 1992): 264-70.

6. See Rifa' at Ali Abou-el-Haj, Formation of the Modern State: The Ottoman Empire Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991). Over the last five years, scholars have made important collective efforts to reassess directions in Ottoman history. Mention should be made of conferences held at Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany, December 1-3, 1988 (“Legalism and Political Legitimation in the Ottoman Empire and the Early Turkish Republic”); at Washington University in St. Louis, April 12-15, 1990 (Rockefeller Foundation Seminar on Ottoman History); and at the Nahost-Institut of the University of Munich, May 2-5, 1990 (“The State, Decentralisation and Tax Farming, 1500-1850: The Ottoman Empire, Iran and India”). Additionally, a 1990 Salzburg (Austria) Seminar devoted to issues of periodization in early modern Middle Eastern history organized by Richard Bulliet and an ongoing series of meetings on West and South Asian history convened by Tosun Aracanli, David Ludden, and Ashraf Ghani, from which a volume of essays, Political Economies of the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Empires, vol. 1, is in preparation, have offered important forums for comparative discussions.

7. Although the imperial capital remained the physical reference point for much of the state's ideological and regulative authority as well as holding a plurality of military force, in a large, preindustrial territorial state like the Ottoman Empire, actual rule relied upon controlling and manipulating interests, corporate groups, and institutions that often straddled state and society. Such realities cannot be characterized by Mann's (see “The Autonomous Power of the State,” in Archives Éuropéennes de Sociologie 25 [1984]: 185-213, esp. 188-90) formulations of a state as a concentration of coercive or despotic means and infrastructural powers in a single place.

8. See R. H. Coase, The Firm, the Market and the Law (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

9. I thank Edgar Kiser for providing me with a copy of his paper “Markets and Hierarchies in Early Modern Fiscal Systems: A Principal-Agent Analysis,” (Paper delivered at the American Sociological Association, Cincinnati, OH, August 23-27, 1991 and at the American Political Science Association, August 29-September 1, 1992). For other applications, see Levi, Of Rule and Revenue, 26-27.

10. R. H. Coase in “The Nature of the Firm,”The Firm, the Market and the Law, 33-56, suggests guidelines for understanding the scale of firms. The phrase “relative efficiency” is borrowed from Kiser, “Markets and Hierarchies in Early Modern Fiscal Systems,” who uses it to qualify the fiscal options facing the ancien régime.

11. For an introduction to early Ottoman state institutions and political history see Halil İnalcik's The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age, 1300-1600 (New York: Praeger, 1973).

12. See Ömer Lûfti Barkan, “Caractère religieux et caractère séculier des institutions ottomanes,” in Jean-Louis Bacqué-Grammont and Paul Dumont, eds., Contributions a l'histoire économique et sociale de l'Empire ottoman (Leuven, Belgium: Éditions Peeters, 1983), 11-58.

13. For the origins of certain key European concepts and ideological stances toward the Ottoman Empire, see Lucette Valensi, Venise et la Sublime Porte: la naissance du despote (Paris: Hachette, 1987).

14. İnalcik, The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age, 104-21; Vera P. Moutachieva, Agrarian Relations in the Ottoman Empire in the 15th and 16th centuries (Boulder, CO and New York: Eastern European Monographs, Columbia University Press, 1988), 74-75. Given Islamic law's strong support for personal rights to property (see Baber Johansen, The Islamic Law on Land Tax and Rent [London: Croom Helm, 1988]), the Ottomans faced challenges to their claims to land rents from religious lawyers and notables in Syria and Egypt.

15. Moutachieva, Agrarian Relations in the Ottoman Empire, 135-37; Bistra Cvetkova, Les Institutions Ottomanes en Europe (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1978), 3.

16. Mark Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1973), 19-20; Mehmet Genç, “Osmanli Imparatorluˇgunda Devlet ve Ekonomi,” in Hakki Dursun Yildiz, İnci Enginün and Emine Görsoy Naskali, eds., V. Milletlerarasi Türkiye Sosyal ve İktistat Tarihi Kongresi (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1990), 13-25.

17. See Leila Erder and Suraiya Faroqhi, “The Development of the Anatolian Urban Network during the Sixteenth Century,”Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 23 (1980): 322-45; and Suraiya Faroqhi, “Sixteenth-Century Periodic Markets in Various Anatolian Sancaks, İçel, Hamid, Karahisar-i Sahib, Kütahya, Aydin and Menteşe,”Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 27 (1984): 32-80.

18. See Frederic C. Lane, “The Economic Meaning of War and Protection,”Venice and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1966): 399-411; and Huricihan İslamoˇglu-İnan, “Peasants, Commercialization and Legitimation of State Power in Sixteenth-Century Anatolia,” in Çaˇglar Keyder and Faruk Tabak, eds., Landholding and Commercial Agriculture in the Middle East (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 57-76.

19. Jean Bodin (Les Six Livre de la Republique [Paris: Fayard, 1986] vol. 2, 75; vol. 3, 207) regarded the Ottoman state as merely another variant of absolutism and considered the Ottoman imperial law superior to Western European feudal codes.

20. Gianfranco Poggi, The Development of the Modern State (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1978), 36-59.

21. See Huri İslamoˇglu-İnan, “Introduction: Oriental Despotism in World System Perspective,” in The Ottoman Empire and the World Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 1-26.

22. In other regions (see Antoine Abdel Nour, Introduction à l'Histoire Urbaine de la Syrie Ottomane (XVI-XVIIIe siècle [Beyrouth: Publications de L'Université Libanaise, 1982]), market relations between town and country were quite dynamic. By the middle of the seventeenth century, as Rifa' at Abou-el-Haj points out in The 1703 Rebellion and the Structure of Ottoman Politics (Leiden: Nederlands Historisch Archeologisch Institut te Instanbul, 1984), despite the official policy of expropriation of officials upon death, bureaucratic and military elites could circumvent restriction by using disguised investments, partnerships, and endowments (waqf). Moreover, the state was reluctant to leave families destitute or to deprive women of their dowries.

23. On the impact of the command system on the Balkans, see Bistra Cvetkova, “Les çelep et leur rôle dans la vie économique des Balkans a l' époque ottomane (XVe-XVIIIe s.),” in M. A. Cook, ed., Studies in the Economic History of the Middle East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 172-93. Yet as Daniel Goffman demonstrates in Izmir and the Levantine World, 1550-1650 (Seattle: University of Washington, 1990), the origins of the Aegean emporium of Izmir owed to growing consumer demand for agricultural products from Istanbul and other Mediterranean cities. On the use of Islamic endowments as instruments of popular credit, a phenomena that coincided with the expansion of cash taxation during the seventeenth century, see Jon E. Mandaville, “Usurious Piety: The Cash Waqf Controversy in the Ottoman Empire,”International Journal of Middle East Studies, 10 (1979): 289-308.

24. See İslamoˇglu-İnan, “Peasants, Commercialization and Legitimation of State Power.”

25. Suraiya Faroqhi (see “In Search of Ottoman History,”The Journal of Peasant Studies 18, nos. 3-4 [April-July 1991]: 211-41) is a notable exception and has long promoted comparative research.

26. For the classic statement of the problem, see Ömer Lûtfi Barkan, “The Price Revolution of the Sixteenth Century: A Turning Point in the Economic History of the Near East,”International Journal of Middle East Studies 4 (1975): 3-28. In “East and West in the Seventeenth Century: Political Crises in Stuart England, Ottoman Turkey and Ming China,”Comparative Study of Society and History, 30 (1988): 103-42, Jack A. Goldstone globalizes the inflationist thesis. For questions about the actual pace and impact of inflation in this region, see Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Precious Metal Flows and Prices in Western and Southern Asia, 1500-1750: Some Comparative and Conjunctural Aspects,”Studies in History, n.s., 7 (1991): 79-105.

27. See Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States, AD 990-1990 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990)

28. See Halil Sahillioˇglu, “Siviş Year Crises in the Ottoman Empire,” in M. A. Cook, ed., Studies in the Economic History of the Middle East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 230-54.

29. See William Griswold, Political Unrest and Rebellion in Anatolia 1000-1020/1591-1611 (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 1983); Suraiya Faroqhi, “Political Initiatives `From the Bottom Up' in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Empire: Some Evidence for Their Existence,” in Hans Georg Majer, ed., Osmanitische Studien zur Wirtschafts und Sozialgeschichte in Memoriam Vančo Boškov (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1986), 24-33; and Halil İnalcik, “The Socio-Political Effects of the Diffusion of Firearms in the Middle East,” in V. J. Perry and M. E Yapp, eds., War, Technology and Society in the Middle East (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 195-217.

30. See Suraiya Faroqhi, “Town Officials Timar-Holders, and Taxation: The Late Sixteenth Century Crisis as Seen from Çorum,”Turcica 18 (1986): 53-82; Douglas Howard, “The Ottoman Timar System and Its Transformation, 1563-1656,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Indiana, 1987; and Linda Darling, “The Ottoman Finance Department and the Assessment and Collection of the Cizye and Avariz Taxes, 1560-1660,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1990.

31. For an example of Ottoman war financing during the Safavid campaigns, see Rhoads Murphey, Regional Structure in the Ottoman Economy: A Sultanic Memorandum of 1636 A.D. Concerning the Sources and Uses of the Revenues of Anatolia and the Coastal and Northern Portions of Syria (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1987).

32. See Bruce McGowan, “The Study of Land and Agriculture in the Ottoman Provinces within the Content of an Expanding World Economy in the 17th and 18th centuries,”International Journal of Turkish Studies 2 (1981): 57-63; Katsumi Fukasawa, Toilerie et Commerce du Levant au XVIIIe Siècle d'Alep à Marseille (Marseille: Groupe de Recherche et d'Études sur le Proche Orient, 1985); and articles in “Ottoman Trade,” special issue of New Perspectives on Turkey no. 5-6 (Fall 1991).

33. For an innovative attempt to understand the resulting class structure, see Suraiya Faroqhi, Men of Modest Substance: House Owners and House Property in Seventeenth-Century Ankara and Kayseri (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

34. For one of the best discussions of the origins of these social groups, see Özer Ergenç, “Osmanli Klasik Dönemindeki `Eşref ve A `yan' üzerine Bazi Bilgiler,”Journal of Ottoman Studies 3 (1982): 105-18; and for an overview of the resulting center-periphery relationships, see Halil İnalcik, “Military and Fiscal Transformation in the Ottoman Empire, 1600-1700,”Archivum Ottomanicum 6 (1980): 283-337.

35. Ahmen Tabakoˇglu, Gerileme Dönemine Girerken Osmanli Maliyesi (Istanbul: Dergah Yayinlari, 1985), 108-9.

36. The janissaires had already gained rights to pursue secondary occupations as tradesmen, merchants, and tax farmers. For other state groups, see Joel Shinder, “Career Line Formation in the Ottoman Bureaucracy, 1648-1750: A New Perspective,”Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 16 (1973): 216-37; and Suraiya Faroqhi, “Civilian Society and Political Power in the Ottoman Empire: A Report on Research in Collective Bibliography, 1480-1830,”International Journal of Middle East Studies 17 (1985): 109-17.

37. Abou-el-Haj, The 1703 Rebellion, 9-13. For an example of the embourgeoisement of Ottoman elites, see İbrahim Metin Kunt, “Derviş Mehmet Paşa, Vezir and Entrepreneur: A Study in Ottoman Political-Economic Theory and Practice,”Turcica 9 (1977): 197-214.

38. Jack A. Goldstone terms this crisis (Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991], 4-12) as “state breakdown.”

39. Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States, 84-95.

40. With the exception of the families of the great ulema (see Madeline C. Zilfi, “Elite Circulation in the Ottoman Empire: Great Mollas of the Eighteenth Century,”Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 26, no. 3[1983]: 318-64), Ottoman political cadres came closer to a type of service aristocracy/military like the junkers. Compare with Çaˇglar Keyder's comments on the bureaucracy as a “class” in State and Class in Turkey: A Study in Capitalist Development, (London: Verso, 1987), 27.

41. Tilly, “Reflections on the History of European State-Making,” 64.

42. It is still too early to know whether such fragmented privatization in the Ottoman Empire was a recurrent strategy of rule based on redistribution of property or a reflection of the relative insufficiency of capital markets—indigenous capital formation and banking institutions. Unlike Western European states, which originally borrowed heavily from bankers outside their borders, the Ottomans do not appear to have had access to capital markets outside the empire before the nineteenth century. There was, nonetheless, a close financial relationship between sultans and the Iberian Jewish merchant house of Nasi in the late fifteenth-early sixteenth century. In 1689 (see Naimur Rahman Farooqi, Mughal-Ottoman Relations [Delhi: Idarah-i Adabiyat-i Delhi, 1989], 67) rumors circulated of an Ottoman attempt to secure a large loan from the Mughal Sultan Aurangzeb. For the role of credit and the scale of financial institutions in the Mughal Empire, see the J. F. Richards-Karen Leonard debate (“Mughal State Finances and the Pre-Modern World Economy,” and “Indigenous Banking Firms in Mughal India: A Reply,”Comparative Study of Society and History, 23 [1981]: 285-308, 309-14). Compare with Webber and Wildavsky, A History of Taxation.

43. Robert W. Olson (“The Esnaf and the Patrona Halil Rebellion of 1730: A Realignment in Ottoman Politics,”Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 17 [1974]: 329-44; and “Jews, Janissaries, Esnaf and the Revolt of 1740 in Istanbul: Social Upheaval and Political Realignment in the Ottoman Empire,”Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 20 [1978]: 186-207) attempts to sort out the parties and issues—taxes, credit, promotion to offices and the malikâne—involved in these events.

44. Tabakoˇglu, Gerileme Dönemine Gireken, 75-76. See also Sahillioˇglu, “Siviş Year Crises in the Ottoman Empire,” and Mehmet Genç, “Osmanli Maliyesinde Malikâne Sistemi,” in Osman Okyar and Ünal Nalbantoˇglu, eds., İktisat Tarihi Semineri (Ankara: Hacetepe Üniversitesi Yayinlari, 1975), 231-96, esp. 236.

45. Abou-el-Haj, The 1703 Rebellion, 9-13.

46. Tabakoˇglu, Gerileme Dönemine Girerken, 26, 269-72. See also Olson, “The Esnaf and the Patrona Halil Rebellion.”

47. See Bruce McGowan, Economic Life in Ottoman Europe: Taxation, Trade and the Struggle for Land (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); and Kenneth M. Cuno, “The Origins of Private Ownership of Land in Egypt: A Reappraisal,”International Journal of Middle East Studies 12 (1980): 245-75, esp. 246.

48. Abou-el-Haj (The 1703 Rebellion, 181) notes the strikingly proprietary claims of the Ottoman elites in this period. For the political constraints on Ottoman fiscal policy, see Ariel Salzmann, “Centripetal Decentralization: Life-Term Tax Farming in the 18th Century Ottoman Empire,” in Tosun Aracanli, Ashraf Ghani, and David Ludden, eds., Political Economies of the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Empires, (vol. 1 in preparation).

49. Murat Çizakça in “Taxfarming and Decentralization in the Ottoman Empire, 1520-1695,” (Istanbul: Research Papers of Boˇgaziçi University: 1990) shows that provincial janissaries had steadily displaced non-Muslims in important tax farms over the course of the seventeenth century; see also Haim Gerber “Jewish Tax Farmers in the Ottoman Empire,”Journal of Turkish Studies 10 (1986): 143-61.

50. See Mehmet Genç, “A Study on the Feasibility of Using Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Financial Records as an Indicator of Economic Activity,” in Huri İslamoˇglu-İnan, ed., The Ottoman Empire and the World Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 345-73. Genç (see “Osmanli Maliyesinde Malikâne Sistemi”) points to striking continuities in the logic of Ottoman fiscal practice while Avdo Suceska (“Malikâna”Prilozi za Orientalnu Filologiju, 36 [1986]: 197-230) views its application as a turning point in agrarian relations in the Balkans.

51. For the complete text of the decree, see Genç, “Osmanli Maliyesinde Malikâne,” 284-88.

52. Complaining that mere “carters and boatswains” were able to obtain malikâne and “treat it as if it was their own private property” the court historian Raşid Efendi (Raşid Tarihi, vol. IV, 177-78 [Istanbul, 1282/1865-66], cited in Mehmet Zeki Pakalin, Osmanli Tarih Deyimleri ve Terimleri Sözlüˇgü [Istanbul: Milli Eˇg tim Basimevi, 1983] vol. 2, 396) voiced the civil bureaucracy's frustrations over reaya (nonstate elites) taking control of state resources.

53. For other investments of the state elite, particularly the religiously sanctioned endowments or trusts (waqf), see Bahaeddin Yediyildiz, Institution du Vaqf au XVIIIè Siecle en Turquie: Étude Socio-Historique (Ankara: Imprimerie de la Société d'Histoire Turque, 1985), 91-149.

54. For estimates of the number of persons involved in the central-state market and a general introduction to the growth and development of the malikâne system, see Genç, “Osmanli Maliyesinde Malikâne Sistemi,” 231-96 and Tabakoˇglu, Gerileme Dönemine Girerken, 131-34; for the provincial dimension, see Salzmann, “Centripetal Decentralization.” As for calculating the degree of financial control that these elites exerted, it is important to note that although the yearly income from malikâne sources represented some 3% to 5% of annual revenues, periodic auctions of malikâne were an important source of cash infusions into the fisc. Ultimately, a more accurate measure of the financial clout of these elites should be based on the actual income of these revenue sources. But as Genç points out (“A Study on the Feasibility”), this too is a difficult project, depending on the availability of other quantifiable sources.

55. Genç, “Osmanli Maliyesinde Malikâne,” 245, n. 34. In 1714 the state retracted malikâne contracts in most provinces only to restitute them in 1717 to their holders at the price of nearly 50% increases over and above the original bids (muajjele) and, in some cases, a considerable adjustment to the yearly remittance. From this point onward, however, there was no systemwide attempt to retract contracts until the 1790s.

56. The Prime Minister's Archives (Istanbul), Maliyeden Müdevver Defterleri 3423 (1695-98) is a copybook of the first three years of malikâne certificates. For the sociopolitical status of the earliest applicants, see Salzmann, “Centripetal Decentralization.”

57. In 1703 high-ranking state officials held 36% of the value of regional holdings in the Balkans, 17% of those in Aleppo, and 5% of those in Anatolia. For tables, see Salzmann, “Centripetal Decentralization.”

58. According to Rifa' at Abou-el-Haj (The 1703 Rebellion, 116) the head of the religious establishment, the Shaykh ul'Islam Feyzullah Efendi, designated an entire province in Georgia as a malikâne. For other examples of abuses and conversion of malikâne into forms of personal property, see Yavuz Cezar Osmanli Maliyesinde Bunalim ve Deˇgisim Dönemi (XVIII. Yüzyildan Tanzimat'a Mali Tarih) (Istanbul: Alan Yayincilik, 1986), 42, 51.

59. Sućeska, “Malikâna,” 209.

60. On portfolio theory as applied to early modern South Asian elites, see Sanjay Subrahmanyam and C. A. Bayly, “Portfolio Capitalists and the Political Economy of Early Modern India,” in Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ed., Merchants, Markets and the State in Early Modern India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), 242-65. For the portfolio of an Ottoman notable, see Suraiya Faroqhi, “Wealth and Power in the Land of Olives: Economic and Political Activities of Müridzade Haci Mehmed Agha, Notable of Edremit,” in Çaˇglar Keyder and Faruk Tabak, eds., Landholding and Commercial Agriculture in the Middle East (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 77-96.

61. On the kapi or retinue of these elites, see Rifa' at Abou-el-Haj, “The Ottoman Vezir and Pasha Households, 1683-1703: A Preliminary Report,”Journal of the American Oriental Society 94, no. 4 (1972): 438-47

62. A 1714 decree (Genç, “Osmanli Maliyesinde Malikâne,” 239, n. 16) prohibited the sale of most malikâne to non-Muslims. Yet as Çizakça's research (“Taxfarming and Decentralization”) would suggest, this order appears to have merely formalized a preexistent reality because non-Muslims had steadily lost ground in tax-farming markets to members of the local military units over the seventeenth century. With the advent of the new contracts, however, (see Salzmann, “Centripetal Decentralization”) nonstate Muslim elites were able to obtain significant numbers of malikâne contracts, especially rural holdings.

63. For studies on the role of these non-Muslim financiers, see Onik Jamgocyan, “Les finances de l'empire ottoman et les financiers de Constantinople, 1732-1853,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Paris I (Sorbonne), 1988; and Hagop Levon Barsoumian, “The Armenian Amira Class of Istanbul,” Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1980.

64. As Edhem Eldem's research demonstrates (“La circulation de la lettre de change entre la France et Constantinople au XVIIIe siécle,” in Hamit Batu and Jean Louis Bacqué-Grammont, eds., L'Empire Ottoman, la Republique de Turquie et la France [Istanbul-Paris: İSİS, 1986], 87-97) the competition and cooperation of non-Muslim Ottoman financiers with the banking houses of southern Europe is one of the important but overlooked aspects of early modern Mediterranean economic history.

65. Tabakoˇglu, Gerileme Dönemine Girerken, 133, n. 34.

66. Displaced multazim balked (Genç, “Osmanli Maliyesinde Malikâne,” 245, n. 32) at surrendering their position to central state tax farmers and their agents. For other examples, see Salzmann, “Centripetal Decentralization.”

67. Jamgocyan, “Les finances de l'empire ottoman,” Vol. 1, 226-33.

68. See Salzmann, “Centripetal Decentralization.” An assumption, uncritically carried over from Ottoman and early Republican Turkish histories into contemporary historiography of the Ottoman Empire (see e.g., H. A. R. Gibb and Harold Bowen, Islamic Society and the West, vol. 1, pt. 1, 118-19; İnalcik, “Centralization and Decentralization,” 33-34; and “Military and Fiscal Transformation,” 329), links tax farming and particularly the malikâne with the decline of the empire and the formation of an antistate class of gentry or ayan. Compare with Albert Hourani, “Ottoman Reform and the Politics of Notables,” in William Polk and Richard L. Chambers, eds., Beginnings of Modernization in the Middle East (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 41-68; and Karl Barbir, “From Pasha to Efendi: The Assimilation of Ottomans into Damascene Society, 1516-1783,”International Journal of Turkish Studies 1 (1979-80): 68-83.

69. According to Yücel Özkaya (Osmanli Imparatorluˇgunda Ayanlik [Ankara: Ankara Üniversitesi Dil ve Tarih-Gografya Fakultesi, 1977], 25), the order was one of the first documents to formally charge provincial notables with responsibilities on a par with central state elites.

70. See Salzmann, “Centripetal Decentralization.”

71. The conversion of landed resources in malikâne contracts in Aleppo is instructive. From 1717 to 1787 (see Salzmann, “Centripetal Decentralization”), the total pool of malikâne resources grew only 22% in nominal terms from 161,326 to 196,683 kurush. Jean-Pierre Thieck calculated (“Décentralization Ottomane et affirmation urbaine à Alep à la fin du XVIIIème siècle,” ed. Mona Zakaria, Dochchâr Chbarou, and Waddah Charâra, Mouvement communautaires et éspaces urbains au Machreq [Beirut: Centre d'Études et de Recherches sur le Moyen-Orient Contemporain, 1985], 116-78, esp. 129) that in 1777 malikâne contracts accounted for the largest single form of land holding in the district (47%); endowed lands (waqf/awqaf) had increased to 41%, while timar (benefice) holdings were reduced to only 12%.

72. İnalcik, “Centralization and Decentralization,” 28.

73. Moneylending served as a type of insurance policy for the tax farmer (see Margaret Meriwether, “Urban Notables and Rural Resources in Aleppo, 1770-1830,”International Journal of Turkish Studies 4 [1987]: 55-73, esp. 69-72; and Amnon Cohen, Palestine in the Eighteenth Century [Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1973], 221) because Islamic law recognized such obligations from one generation to the next, locking peasants into debt peonage after the titles of the tax farmer had lapsed.

74. See Salzmann, “Centripetal Decentralization.”

75. İnalcik (“Military and Fiscal Transformation in the Ottoman Empire” and “Centralization and Decentralization”) is correct in arguing that the line between malikâne and property rights was often fine or nonexistent in everyday relations between malikâne holders, peasants, and artisans. However, neither the provincial courts nor the central state regarded malikâne contracts as private property per se. Compare with Salzmann, “Centripetal Decentralization.”

76. “Quasi-venal” refers to offices like that of the voyvoda, whose salaries and dependent revenues were held collectively or individually in the form of short-term tax farms and malikâne. See Salzmann, “Privatization and Public Office: The Voyvodalik of Diyarbekir in the 18th Century,” (Paper delivered at the First Skilliter Conference on Ottoman History, “The Ottoman Empire in the Eighteenth Century,” Skilliter Library, Newnham College Cambridge, April 9-11, 1992). For the career of a central Anatolian voyvoda, see Necdet Sakaoˇglu, Anadolu Derebeyi Ocaklarindan Köse Paşa Hanedani (Ankara: Yurt Yayinlari, 1984), 59 ff.

77. Karl Barbir, Ottoman Rule in Damascus, 1708-1758 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 65-74. For the social composition of the malikâne holders in Syria, see Abdul-Karim Rafeq, “Economic Relations between Damascus and the Dependent Countryside, 1743-71,” in A. L. Udovitch, ed., The Islamic Middle East, 700-1900 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 653-85; Meriwether, “Urban Notables and Rural Resources in Aleppo”; and Salzmann, “Centripetal Decentralization.”

78. Genç, “Osmanli Maliyesinde Malikâne,” 282.

79. See Mehmet Genç, “XVIII. Yüzyilda Osmanli Ekonomisi ve Savaş, Yapit No. 49 no. 4 (April-May 1984): 52-61; 49, no. 5 (June-July 1984): 86-93; and Elena Frangakis-Syrett, The Commerce of Smyrna in the Eighteenth Century (1700-1820) (Athens: Center for Asia Minor Studies, 1992). For the percentage of the state's total fiscal resources sold in malikâne and other tax farms, see Yavuz Cezar, Osmanli Maliyesinde Bunalim, 93; Genç, “Osmanli Maliyesinde Malikâne,” 248-49; and Tabakoˇglu, Gerileme Dönemine Gireken, 121.

80. These rates of profit should also be judged against the very high rates of interest (Genç, “Osmanli Maliyesinde Malikâne,” 252) prevailing in the empire, often as high as 20%.

81. For the trajectories of various sectors of the eighteenth-century Ottoman economy, see Genç, “XVIII. Yüzyilda Osmanli Ekonomisi ve Savaş.”

82. See Salzmann, “Centripetal Decentralization.”

83. Cezar, Osmanli Maliyesinde Bunalim, 80.

84. Ibid., 184-85.

85. The Ottoman kurush (Genç, “Osmanli Maliyesinde Malikâne,” 283) lost 50% of its value between 1788-1812.

86. Jezzar Pasha of Sidon (Amnon Cohen, Palestine in the Eighteenth Century, 247) was able to combine his privatizing practices with considerable activity in the cotton trade. It is not surprising that European merchants, perhaps more than the Ottoman government, were frustrated by his malikâne-imposed “mercantilism.” See also Gilles Veinstein, “Ayan de la region d'Izmir et Commerce du Levant (deuxième moitié du XVIIIe siècle),”Études balkanique, 12 (1976): 71-83.

87. Owen, “The Middle East in the Eighteenth Century,” 109. For a comparative approach to the manner in which Asian states dealt with “the petty capitalism of the coastal lords,” see C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780-1830 (London: Longman, 1989), 62-63. In other cases they expanded their operations as local moneylenders, see Suraiya Faroqhi, “Wealth and Power in the Land of Olives.”

88. See Edhem Eldem, “The Trade in Precious Metals and Bills,” in Hakki Dursun Yildiz, İnci Enginün, Emine Görsoy Naskali, eds., V. Milletlerarasi Turkiye Sosyal ve Iktisat Tarihi Kongresi (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Publishing House, 1990), 572-91, esp. 589.

89. Between 1789 and 1810, Genç calculates (“Osmanli Maliyesinde Malikâne,” 282) that the relative share of the holdings of central state elites in the malikâne system dropped from 86% to 76.4%.

90. Cezar, P. Osmanli Maliyesinde Bunalim, 79, 91.

91. Ibid., 184-88.

92. Ibid., 169.

93. Ibid., 170.

94. Sultan Selim III's decree (published by Yücel Özkaya, “III. Selim İmparatorluk hakkinda Bazi Hatt-i Hümâyûnlari,”Osmanli Tarihi Araştirma ve Uygulama Merkezi Dergisi 1 [1990]: 333-54, esp. 341) refers to the “rural gentry and magnates (derebey)” as “usurpers who fleece the peasantry as tax farmers... [and the] voyvodas and police [i.e., provincial Janissaries]... [as those who] oppress the poor and have come to have the power of viziers and military commanders.”

95. See Salzmann, “Privatization and `Public' Office.” Stanford Shaw also observes (in Between Old and New: The Ottoman Empire under Sultan Selim III 1789-1807 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971], 129) that “the new treasury itself became the tax farmer of these holdings...administering them by subfarming them to its own tax farmers.”

96. Istanbul found a variety of allies in the provinces. In Belgrade (see Traian Stoianovich, “The Segmentary State and the La Grande Nation,” in E. Genovese and L. Hochberg, ed., Geographic Perspectives in History [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989], 256-80, esp. 261), the Serbian knezes supported Ottoman policy. In Aleppo, state strategy was one of the alternately exiling, expropriating, and rehabilitating local powers. One of the most prominent figures in the city, a former naqib al-ashraf, Muhammad Chalabi Tahazade, held nearly one-fifth of all malikâne lands in Aleppo as late as the 1777 census (see Thieck, “Décentralization Ottomane et affirmation urbaine”). Exiled in 1775, then back in Aleppo in the 1780s, his malikâne were only partially restored to his family upon his death in 1786. Yet his networks were resilient enough to permit other members of his entourage to succeeded to power in Aleppo after him.

97. See Halil İnalcik, “Sened-i İttifak ve Gülhane Hatt-1 Hümâyunu,”Türk Tarih Kurumu Belleten 28 (1964): 605-90.

98. While most malikâne contracts were revoked during this period, in more distant provinces like Mosul, as Dina Rizk Khoury informs me, the state allowed certain individuals to retain malikâne contracts until as late as the 1850s-1860s. Moreover, although the state intended to eliminate tax farming entirely after 1839, the treasury was forced to reinstate short-term tax farming and continued to use tax contractors throughout the nineteenth century.

99. Caesar Farah's observations in “Fiscal Politics as a Deterrent to Administrative Amelioration in Ottoman Mount Lebanon,” in Hakki Dursun Yildiz, İnci Enginün, Emine Görsoy Naskali, eds., V. Milletlerarasi Türkiye Sosyal ve İktisat Tarihi Kongresi (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Publishing House, 1990), 353-78, illustrate the legacy of eighteenth-century Ottoman rule.

100. S. N. Eisenstadt, The Political System of Empires (New York: Free Press, 1969), xx. See also Şerif Mardin, “Center-Periphery Relations: A Key to Turkish Politics”Deadulus 102 (1973): 169-90.

101. See Karen Leonard, “The `great firm' theory of the decline of the Mughal Empire,”Comparative Studies in Society and History 21 (1979): 151-67.

102. Along with central-state elites themselves, no group was more profoundly affected than the bankers. According to Barsoumian (“The Armenian Amira Class of Istanbul,” 17), this was one of the chief causes for the decline of the amira class of Armenia bankers in the early nineteenth century.

103. Coarse, “The Nature of the Firm,” 39.

104. Mann's dichotomous view of state “power” (“The Autonomous Power of the State,” 188-190) should be compared with Prasenjit Duara's (Culture, Power and the State: Rural North China, 1900-1942 [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988], 242-43, 255-57) attempt to integrate social, cultural, and political matrixes of power.

105. For an historical exploration of the infrastructural argument, see Michael Mann, “State and Society: 1130-1815: An Analysis of English State Finances,” in Maurice Zeitin, ed., Political Power and Social Theory, Vol. 1 (Greenwich, CT: JAI, 1980), 165-208; and John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688-1783 (London: Unwin, 1989), 69, 120. However appropriate this model might be for England, aside from what Brewer characterizes as the sheer virtuosity of its bureaucrats, the particular form of English finances probably owes to two other important institutions (not to mention specific political and socioeconomic conditions): the parliament, which foreswore most revenue and tax farming altogether between 1660 and 1702, and the Bank of England, which compelled the state to honor its obligations. Compare with P. G. M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit, 1688-1756 (New York: St. Martin's, 1967); and R. J. Bonney, “The Failure of the French Revenue Farms, 1600-60,”Economic History Review, 2d ser., 32, no. 1 (February 1979): 11-32, esp. 26.

106. Again, although Coase (“The Lighthouse in Economics,” in The Firm, the Market, and the Law, 187-214) refers to contemporary state-business relationships, his methodological suggestions to pursue wide-ranging empirical studies are also relevant to this historical discussion.

107. Helen Nader, Liberty in Absolutist Spain: The Habsburg Sale of Towns, 1516-1700 (Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 209. I am grateful to Charles Tilly for suggesting this analogy.

108. While in the Ottoman Empire state assets were organized as individual “firms” widely distributed among members of the Istanbul resident state elite and among provincial gentry and janissaries across the empire, the French tax-farming system was centralized into the ferme générale between 1681 and 1726. See R. J. Bonney, “The Failure of the French Revenue Farms,” 23-24; and Vida Azimi, Un modèle administratif de l'ancien régime: les comis de la ferme générale et la régie générale des aides (Paris: Éditions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1987)

109. See Engin Deniz Akarli, “Provincial Power Magnates in Ottoman Bilad al-Sham and Egypt, 1740-1840,” in Abdeljelil Temimi, ed., La vie sociale dans les provinces arabes a l'époque ottomane, vol. 3 (Tunis: Publications du Centre d'Études et de Récherches Ottomanes, Morisques, de Documentation et d'Informations, 1988), 1-56.

110. I am grateful to Donald Quataert for sharing this insight with me: by focusing exclusively on its military and political impact, most accounts of the dissolution of the janissary corps in 1826 miss its significance for the Ottoman economy, in which they had exerted great influence, especially as traders, artisans, and tax farmers.

111. For an overview of later nineteenth-century commercial relations with Europe, see Şevket Pamuk, The Ottoman Empire and European Capitalism, 1820-1913 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 1-81 For the uneven impact of “incorporation” on nineteenth-century Ottoman economy and society, see Donald Quataert's work including “Ottoman Handicrafts and Industry, 1800-1914,” in Hans Georg Majer, ed., Osmanitische Studien zur Wirtschafts und Socialgeschichte: In Memorian Vančo Boško (Weisbaden: 1986), 128-33.

112. For division in the Ottoman government over the question of loans from Western European states, see F. S. Rodney, “Ottoman Concern about Western Economic Penetration in the Levant, 1849-1854,”Journal of Modern History 30, no. 4 (December 1958): 348-53. For an overview of financial pressures on the late Ottoman state, see Engin Deniz Akarli, “The Problem of External Pressures, Power Struggles, and Budgetary Deficits under Abdulhamid II, 1876-1909,” Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1976.

113. On the ideology of modernization in nineteenth-century Egypt, see Timothy Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). Selim Deringil kindly shared with me an 1871 bureaucratic memorandum, which disparages privatization and tax farmers, referring favorably to German and Austrian models of centralized state organization.

114. The impact of Ottoman state centralization in the nineteenth century is still the subject of much debate. In some regions and periods (see for example, Linda Schatkowski Schilcher, “Violence in Rural Syria in the 1880s and 1890s: State Centralization, Rural Integration, and the World Market,” in Farhad Kazemi and John Waterbury, eds., Peasants and Politics in the Modern Middle East [Miami: Florida International University Press, 1991], 30-84), fiscal and administrative reorganization and conscription contributed to and exacerbated economic dislocations. However, as Engin Akarli demonstrates in a pathbreaking study on post-1860s' Lebanon, The Long Peace (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), in other settings, Ottoman reforms—land reform, creation of local assemblies with administrative and legislative powers, and secularization of the state organizations and education—were quite successful. Indeed, one is left to speculate how different the history of this region might have been if the Tanzimat (1839-1876) project of forging a nonnational citizenship had been successful.

An Ancien Régime Revisited: “Privatization” and Political Economy in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Empire

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