Mediterranean Historical Review Vol. 24, No.

2, December 2009, 7994

Imperial rivalry and port-cities: a view from above

Faruk Tabak
The reasons for the passing of the cosmopolitan order in the Ottoman port cities of the poque were neither cultural nor societal, but world-systemic. To a great extent, the belle e lives and times of these dynamic port-cities can be accounted for by reference to an opportune conjuncture that marked the world-system from the 1870s to the 1920s, rather than to the internal properties or constitution of the maritime cities along the Ottoman shoreline. This serendipitous conjuncture came about during the era of intense hegemonic rivalry starting in 1878. Its end, too, had more to do with the temporary resolution of great-power bickering than with the social or economic properties of the port-cities. Keywords: cosmopolitanism; imperialism; world economy; Great Britain; Ottoman Empire; China

Editors note This article was left incomplete at the time of Faruk Tabaks untimely death. The editors took the liberty of slightly reorganizing the rst paragraphs, an intervention which contributes, in their view, to the coherence of the narrative. 1 In the literature on late Ottoman port-cities, what is generally emphasized is the ethnic and religious diversity of peoples who inhabited these cosmopolitan, thalassic cities, and the economic eforescence that undergirded this social contiguity roughly from the last quarter of the nineteenth to the rst quarter of the twentieth century. What, in retrospect, makes the epoch of cosmopolitan port-cities shine so lustrously is the ghastliness of what came in its wake: a polar night of icy darkness, in Webers words, followed the Great War, not only in the eastern Mediterranean but worldwide. The economic vibrancy of the poque stood in stark contrast to the depressingly gloomy tendencies Edwardian belle e unleashed by the dawn of the conservative twenties.1 For one thing, the ethnic and religious mosaic of the era was largely shattered following the dismantling of dynastic empires; and the successor states, as bets the logic of nation-statehood, shaped their nations by exchange of populations and forced migrations. When examined in light of the social lacerations of the interwar period, the Ottoman port-cities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were a model of conviviality. Admittedly, the social diversity that set the port-cities apart turned out to be ephemeral, which, again in retrospect, renders this era all the more precocious.2 For within decades the social mosaic of the cities that dotted the eastern Mediterranean became less kaleidoscopic and hence more monochromatic: Alexandria turned Egyptian, Salonika Greek, Izmir Turkish, and Habsburg Trieste Italian after its annexation in 1920.3 By taking an insular vantage point, it is possible to attribute the passing of the cosmopolitan order of the era either to the inability of newly rising groups in these ports of call to consolidate their gains and translate their economic power into lasting political capital, or to the imperial bureaucracys unwillingness to accommodate centrifugal forces.
ISSN 0951-8967 print/ISSN 1743-940X online q 2009 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/09518960903487933 http://www.informaworld.com

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Yet the social conviviality and economic buoyancy that coloured the port-cities at the turn of the twentieth century were due neither to their cosmopolitan constitution nor to their generosity of spirit, which sanctioned tolerance and Bildung. Far from it. The reasons were neither cultural nor societal, but world-systemic. To a great extent, the lives and times of these dynamic port-cities can be accounted for by reference to the aforementioned opportune conjuncture, which marked the world-system from the 1870s to the 1920s, rather than to the internal properties or constitution of the maritime cities along the Ottoman shoreline. This serendipitous conjuncture came about during the era of intense hegemonic rivalry launched, symbolically, by the signing of the Treaty of Berlin. Its end, too, had more to do with the temporary resolution of great-power bickering than with the social or economic properties of the port-cities. The prominent Ottoman port-cities of the nineteenth century may have come of age during the mid-Victorian economic boom, but they matured during the Edwardian belle poque. Crucially, these vibrant cities could not survive the passing of the epoch that e nurtured them, and they met their ultimate demise sooner rather than later. For the belle poque was not simply contemporaneous with the age of port-cities; the destinies of the e two were inextricably intertwined. Yet the onset of the age of port-cities was but part of a wider set of global transformations that set the Edwardian era apart from its Victorian predecessor. This was, above all, a time of hegemonic rivalry, and therefore of the scramble for colonies. After all, it was the advent of rivalry that hastened the pace of colonization worldwide. In those parts of the world where colonial rule was difcult to establish, as in the case of vast dynastic empires, the situation was fundamentally different. Competition among hegemonic rivals vying for allegiance from these dynastic empires mitigated a perverse outcome. Precisely when the colonial world was coming within the ever-tightening embrace of rival powers, with no breathing room at its disposal, the dynastic empires managed to retain, if not grant, substantial room for manoeuvre due in large part to the escalation of competition among the great powers. This was, then, a latitudinarian conjuncture for dynastic polities that escaped colonization.4 Given that periods of rivalry were followed by periods of balance of power, during which the intensity of competition decreased to some extent (as happened during the interwar period), this was also a conjuncture with a short historical lifespan.5 The sibling rivalry was eventually brought to an end by the triumph of the new hegemon, the United States. However short-lived this conjuncture may have been, the historical trajectories and destinies of dynastic empires, from the Treaty of Berlin to the 1920s, need to be charted with reference to it. So should, by extension, the high age of the Ottoman port-cities. The ethnic and religious diversity of peoples who inhabited the thalassic cities of the empire, and the economic dynamism that undergirded and buttressed this social conviviality, were thus products of a conjuncture which, by denition, was temporally bound: half a century or so. In the pages that follow, we place the era in which the port-cities blossomed in its historical context, and highlight, from a world-historical perspective, how anomalous the developments that reshaped dynastic empires were. 2 The conjuncture framed by hegemonic rivalry was not only temporally bound. It was the advent of competition among rivals for hegemony, concomitant with the drawn-out waning of Pax Britannica, which set in from the 1870s, that provided the Ottoman Empire with a precious Lebensraum, a breathing-space, which was largely lacking in other regions of the world. Only a few polities that escaped colonial subjugation had access to the

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manoeuvring space offered by this eeting conjuncture. Dynastic polities were given relief, albeit briey, from the exigencies of the world economy at a time when much of the world was coming under the watchful eyes of colonial powers. For the onset of the decline of Pax Britannica, and the concomitant rise in the number of contenders to the throne who challenged Londons global command, triggered a new wave of colonization that began in the 1880s. As a result, vast swathes of the globe parts of Asia and Africa, in particular were subsequently brought within the compass of the capitalist world-system, under the strict tutelage of colonial powers. The growing rule of capital at the end of the century thus went hand in hand with territorial acquisition, since the colonial order entailed a double movement benecial to the world-system: growing commercialization on the one hand, and the building of modern state apparatuses on the other. In parts of the world where the rise of the British Empire had largely dismantled or weakened the hold of pre-existing empires (as in the case of the Spanish Empire), the consolidation of new territorial states and the boom in the export of tropical crops, largely nanced by capital ows from Britain, served to consolidate the network of global economic ows precisely when the City of Londons dominance started to be challenged elsewhere. Complementing the tropical boom was a steep rise in grain production in the temperate (white settler) world, rendered possible by an inux of British capital.6 In fact, one of the responses that London crafted to address the challenge posed by rival powers was to channel a growing portion of the Citys capital resources to the British dominions, where settlers opened up vast territories to cultivation. In the process, regions of recent settlement received the lions share in British capital movements, and hosted 37% of them in 1914, up from 7% in 1870. Along with the Americas, North and South, these regions, mostly located in the temperate zones of the world, received close to 80% of British investments in 1914.7 The growing retrenchment of British capital was, of course, a response to, and created a window of opportunity for, its rivals, especially in those parts of the world where Londons grasp, unlike in its empire and dominions, remained feeble. In any event, the dynastic empires of the time were neither sizeable nor the favourite recipients of British capital ows: this held true for the Ottoman Empire as well as Qing China. And the same can be said of French capital ows. In line with the expansive nature of the French Empire and its engagements in different parts of the world, capital movements that originated in Paris and were destined for the Ottoman Empire also declined: the share of the Ottoman Empire in these ows dropped from 20% to 11% of the total from 1881 to 1914.8 Owing to the crucial role played by capital movements in this period in weaving networks of production and trade worldwide, it is signicant that the growing retrenchment of British capital in its empire and dominions opened a window of opportunity for Germany in the case of the Ottoman Empire, and for Japan in the case of China. Alongside London, the main actors in these sites of rivalry were, rst, ascending powers vying for global dominance and, second, dynastic polities that had escaped colonial rule. So the period of hegemonic rivalry was not only temporally bound, it was also spatially delimited. Temporally, the period of rivalry (and the age of port-cities) spanned half a century or so. Spatially, the primary sites of contention in this internecine warfare were the dominions of two dynastic empires the Sublime Porte and the Heavenly Kingdom where powers contending Londons supremacy had a large stake in their bid to dislodge the British Empire and establish their imperium in its stead. World-historically, the room to manoeuvre associated with hegemonic rivalry was thus scarcely available, and then only to a select few, in this instance, to the Ottoman and

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Qing dynasties. Correspondingly, port-cities that speckled the shorelines of these two dynastic empires became privileged sites of hegemonic rivalry, from the Chinese treaty ports to the Ottoman maritime cities. 3 That these two dynastic polities were able to benet from the salutary conjuncture offered by hegemonic rivalry was not due solely to their exemption from colonial subjugation. Also germane were their agrarian and commercial structures. Separated by vast expanses of land though these two polities were, they nonetheless shared certain structural features. Immense and expansive in size, they were both home to large numbers of smallholding peasantries. And they both had relatively strong central bureaucracies which, by arresting centrifugal forces, guaranteed that the peasantry remained independent. There were times, to be sure, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when feudalization gained considerable force and registered success in establishing its rule independent of the central seat of power as in the case of notables and tax farmers in the Ottoman Empire or, at the end of the Ming rule in China, during the rebellion of the Three Feudatories. Yet local functionaries and potentates failed to consolidate their rule in the medium or the long run. The incapacity of aspiring potentates did not stem from the strength of imperial dynasties alone. The continual involution that aquatic riziculture set in motion in the case of Qing lands, the high land labour ratio in Ottoman cereal agriculture and the mobility of peasantry were all elemental factors that undermined attempts to enclose land, at the expense of the imperial throne.9 Under these conditions, large-scale commercial agriculture proved difcult to establish, despite all the efforts shown by the British (and French) authorities to transform patterns of commercialization and landholding in these vast empires during the mid-Victorian boom (with the exception of Ottoman north Africa, which, of course, was under colonial administration). Given the parcelled and segmented nature of agrarian cultivation in both empires, it was the difculty of mobilizing rural surplus for the market regardless of the whims of millions of petty producers that was of paramount importance for merchants of all nations, including indigenous traders.10 Surely, the British had already made inroads into these vast imperial spaces, from the 1830s in the case of the Ottoman Empire after the signing with the Sublime Porte of the commercial treaty of 1838, and from the 1840s in the case of the Chinese Empire following the dispensing of capitulations by the Qing dynasty in the form of treaty ports following the Opium Wars.11 In effect, the boost given to world trade by the mid-Victorian boom, enhanced by the supply bottlenecks formed during the Crimean War in the 1850s and the American Civil War in the 1860s and the leap in demand for wheat and cotton in particular, fuelled an impressive growth in Ottoman trade at a time when British rule in India, Hong Kong and Singapore facilitated rice (and other branches of) trade in the Indian Ocean and China.12 Despite the passing of new land codes, vicissitudes associated with mobilizing rural surplus distributed among millions of petty-holding peasant households turned commercialization into an exacting task, and propelled the local intermediaries and merchants into a competitive, collaborative and almost equal relationship with Western merchants. The economic upswing of the 1850s 1870s the mid-Victorian boom was difcult to sustain, however. Just as the fast-paced mid-century growth of commercialization was subsiding, the spectre of an Anglo French condominium and imposition of strict market rules loomed on the horizon. This had the consequence in the Ottoman Empire of tilting

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the existing balance in the 1870s in favour of Western merchants.13 Yet, just as the Ottoman Empire was about to be placed under tutelage and Western merchants were gaining the upper hand in their dealings with local intermediaries, the multiplication in the provenance of capital ows in the 1880s, originating in rival nancial centres, introduced a new factor into the political equilibrium. 4 The great depression of the nineteenth century (1873 1896), which altered the agrarian landscape to the benet of commercial agriculture and landowners in most parts of the globe, therefore failed to do so in the Ottoman (and Chinese) lands. In the colonial world, the presence of a single power meant that the imposition of the logic of the world market was direct, through increasing taxation (in cash and cash crops) and the formation of large estates. Colonial powers had the capacity to build port-cities almost from ),14 and to create new social hierarchies by transferring scratch (e.g., Port Sudan and Sale imperial subjects within and across their dominions, as in the case of Indian populations transplanted in Africa and the Caribbean. In fact, the continual expansion of colonial rule over vast tracts of land privileged hill stations and highlands that overlooked low landscapes.15 In the case of tropical America and the temperate world, the ability of British capital and companies to operate without impediment, especially in the recently settled regions and precisely during the 1870s 1920s period, transformed formal imperial rule into an informal variety. In any event, the commercial nature of cereal culture in temperate regions necessitated growing volumes of capital inow, mostly from London. Also, the tropical boom, which lasted from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1920s, was largely underwritten, and orchestrated, by London-based bankers and merchants. Given the concentrated nature of land ownership in the hands of a few, in the form of plantations and at the expense of Amerindian lands, commercial agriculture was vigorous enough to pull most producers into the world-marketplace. After all, the British world order placed the onus of primary production onto the shoulders of the peripheral regions of the world-economy as the sway of capital came to encompass most agrarian producers in these regions. This was not necessarily so in dynastic empires, where agrarian surplus was distributed among smallholding rural households, unlike in other regions of the world where large landholders or colonial states channelled agrarian surplus to the world-markets. In addition, imperial rivalry and the accompanying inux of capital strengthened the agrarian structures of dynastic empires, as discussed below. The unabated inow of capital in the form of public debt, despite the empires alleged economic ill-health, proved damaging to the joint British and French presence in the region, owing largely to Germanys Drang nach Osten. By 1914 Germanys share in the Ottoman public debt and private investment had outstripped that of Britain: it had come to comprise 20% of the former and 30% of the latter, as opposed to Londons shares of 14% and 13% respectively. The picture could not have been more different from that in 1881. Then, Londons share in the Ottoman public debt was 30%, while Germanys was insignicant, and Britains share in direct investment by 1895 had fallen to 24% of the total while the German share stood at 19%.16 Suddenly, the informal rule established by the British Empire at its height, from the 1850s to the 1870s, was no longer of value to her once the scramble for colonies started. Therefore, the introduction into the picture of Germany in the case of the Ottoman Empire, which disturbed the long-standing Franco British cohabitation in the Levant, and of Japan in the case of the Chinese empire, altered the contours of economic and political change.

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As colonial rule was putting in place market-friendly states and massive capital ows were creating business-friendly environments in distant corners of the globe, the Ottoman Empire and its port-cities were marching to the tunes of much more lenient forces which, in sharp contradistinction to other world regions, remained structurally incapable of imposing the kind of order the world-economy had on offer, thanks to inter-state rivalry. That is to say, the crushing presence and resilience of smallholding peasantry, which was spared land engrossment, left its impress on modalities of commercialization. How agrarian surplus was drained determined the dramatis personae who manned commercial networks and their points of embarkation and disembarkation, namely, port-cities. 5 Spread over vast swathes of land, the world of petty producers housed in Ottoman and Qing dominions was quite unlike that of the colonial and temperate regions of the world-economy, as well as of the new nation-states in the Americas. On account of the plethora of Lilliputian producers, commercial agriculture could not be easily implanted in the case of these colossal empires. The relatively free availability of funds to the Sublime Porte and the Empires ability to continue importing manufactured goods without major transformations in the countryside lifted the pressure on the agricultural sector exactly when the great depression of the nineteenth century was instigating radical change elsewhere: it was then that agricultural prices fell and state bankruptcies multiplied. In these dire times, capital-holders found it easier to impose their terms on states and direct producers. To wit, it was during this downturn that the temperate regions came under the full sway of British capital due to heavy capital borrowing and acquisition of machinery, which turned agriculture in these recently settled regions into a full-edged commercial enterprise. Immersed in the world-economys capital and commodity markets, commercialized family holdings had by the end of the century carved out a precious niche for themselves in world cereal trade. The change in landholding patterns in South America established a system whereby the landlords were deeply embedded in capital, credit and commodity networks. Moreover, large landownership, mostly of plantations and lands expropriated from the Amerindians, provided a steady supply network by eliminating the whims of small producers, who were turned into agricultural labourers. In the colonial world, the ability of the newly-installed states to extract cash crops and to channel rural surplus to world-markets accelerated the tempo of commercialization. The colonial world, too, was incorporated into world-markets during this period: witness the growth of plantation agriculture in Asia and the attendant labour migration. As the great depression of the nineteenth century was setting in, agrarian producers were being transformed into simple labourers or becoming integral parts of the world-market through cash-crop production, and the volume of tropical crops and cereals thrown into commercial circulation soared. The era of rivalry, which exempted the dynastic empires from the transformations the worlds agrarian landscape underwent, was thus anything but commonplace. This was, after all, a period in which the grip of capital on labour and economic resources tightened. The transition from the London-centred world-economy of the mid-nineteenth century to the multi-polar world at the turn of the twentieth century generated such a tightly interconnected world, thanks to overlapping webs of economic ows, that the expansionary conjuncture generated by this era of imperial rivalry is today seen by some as the rst wave of globalization.17 To some, the interconnectedness

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among different parts of the globe at this time was much more sophisticated than its present-day reincarnation. During this period, capital, labour, and commodities criss-crossed frontiers with enviable ease, and in growing magnitudes. The Ottoman port-cities ourished in this propitious conjuncture. What provided the Sublime Porte with a precious (and precarious) breathing space, which was not available in other parts of the world-system, was the onset of competition between powers vying for hegemony as Pax Britannica was gradually eroded from the 1870s. The social and economic space that this great power bickering engendered was not conducive to the perpetuation of Britains uncontested dominion over the Ottoman realm. Instead, divergent and at times conicting interests of, and claims advanced by, rival powers over dynastic empires became the order of the day. Correlatively, the Porte was absolved from the obligation to observe the rules of the marketplace, despite its need to borrow money in world capital markets. This newly won latitude was provided by the multiplicity of vying powers, as demonstrated by the differing provenance of capital inows. Even the bankruptcy of the Porte in 1875 failed to deter the injection of fresh capital.18 Draining small agrarian surpluses via the commercial outlets of the Empire required an expansive commercial network overseen by merchants of all sizes. In concert with the proliferation in the number of contending powers and the emerging multi-polar world during the 1870s 1920s period, the social space that hegemonic rivalry created favoured multiple indigenous groups, however dened, in the non-colonial world in general and in the late Ottoman port-cities in particular, and furnished them with the ability to carve out a niche for themselves in the expanding global emporia. After all, the competitors had to vie for constituencies among indigenous groups: one way of doing this was to endow chosen groups with extraterritorial privileges and immunity from local taxes. British businesses, which operated easily within the connes of the British Empire and deployed corporate strategies (through free-standing companies, for example)19 in their commercial undertakings in different corners of the world, did not have similar weapons at their disposal and, more in the dynastic empires than elsewhere, had to rely on indigenous communities. The dispersion of rural surplus thus mobilized the labours of merchants of all sizes, from local, regional traders to trading houses based in London. Unlike in most regions of the world, where extraction of rural surplus revolved around institutional arrangements and privileges granted on a corporate basis, commercial arrangements in the dynastic empires, very much like the capitulations of the previous centuries, remained based on personal and communal arrangements: extraterritorial privileges and immunity from local taxation. This generated a world populated by those exempt from local taxes and enjoying extraterritorial rights, others who were in possession of foreign passports, and yet others who served as intermediaries. It was a universe in continual ux, open to intrigue and machinations, and subject to perpetual negotiations, since accounts between hegemonic rivals were yet to be settled. 6 The great depression of the nineteenth century ended somewhere around 1896. By then the economic map of the world had already been largely altered in favour of commercial agriculture. In the period that followed, from the 1890s to the 1920s, the trends that had been unleashed during the great depression gathered further momentum. The involvement of powers aspiring to assume the position of world hegemon in the affairs of the two dynastic empires gathered force, and the globe-encompassing nature of the

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London-centred world-economy became more pronounced. The two were closely related: as the territorial sway of the system expanded, the economic signicance of the dynastic empires abated for Britain, but not for its rivals. In the nal analysis, however, its rivals too found themselves in a similarly taxing position: in charge of opening vast territories to market-mediated transactions but without much success. So, if political command in the colonial world and the deepening of economic incorporation of the temperate and tropical worlds into Pax Britannica contributed to the poque, the phenomenal expansion and vibrancy of the world-system during the belle e same cannot be said of the two dynastic empires. For within this colonially cloistered and nation-state-ordered world, dynastic empires, boxing in vast markets for manufactured goods and in possession of raw materials that could be mobilized for world markets, remained only nominally subjugated to the dictates of the world-market.20 Despite the phenomenal increase in world trade, which soared from an index of 23.8 in 1870, taking the base year 1913 as 100, to 100 in 1913, and despite the advent of railroads and the growth in the volume of shipping, the Ottoman Empires share in world trade did not register an increase between 1870 and 1914. On this account the Chinese Empire did not fare any better either.21 This was testament to the fact that plans previously entertained by British authorities to turn vast lands under the control of the dynastic empires into new centres of agrarian growth in western Anatolia, for instance or to lease land along the South China coast, quickly lost their allure, given the ability of British capital to tap into the resources of the fast-expanding world-market and to take refuge in safe locations spread around Britains informal empire at the expense of other locations, thereby facilitating the incursions of contestants for hegemony, as we shall see below. As German capital and diplomacy were building their initial inroads into in the region, the Ottoman Empire was on the verge of bankruptcy. Yet the Empires economic ill-health did not necessarily translate into a stiing Franco British control, despite the establishment of the Public Debt Organization. Establishment of the stranglehold of these powers could have at least syncopated the developments in other parts of the world. The British Empire, which had been able to extract allegiance from both dynasties since the 1830s by force and by diplomacy, was no longer entitled to enjoy similar privileges alone, given the willingness and ability of her rivals to proffer competing nancial and commercial deals with the expectation that they too would be able to tap into the vast imperial spaces of the Sublime Porte and the Heavenly Kingdom. Witness the erce competition among the Japanese, British and British American tobacco companies in China, and the railroad wars in the Ottoman Empire between British, French and German companies.22 The competition offered imperial bureaucracies and dynasties some room for manoeuvre. The Sublime Porte, despite signs of periodic malaise exhibited by the Ottoman economy, gained access to funds that would otherwise have been denied to it. In other words, its political leverage, however limited, yielded economic returns, however paltry. What is more, the injection of fresh funds, principally by Germany, not only strengthened the Sublime Porte, whose passing would have facilitated the partitioning of the Empire by the British and the French, who already had their spheres of inuence delineated beforehand, but also allowed merchants of the lending states to nd customers for their goods.23 The ever-shifting kaleidoscope of commercial opportunities and the wide range of actors involved in carrying out economic transactions in this environment created a milieu which was in constant ux and did not offer any of the great powers a long-lasting advantage. No doubt competition between hegemonic rivals did not prevent them from cooperating in building a common institutional infrastructure, such as ensuring the

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continued existence of commercial or consular courts, which operated under the laws of great powers and not under those of the host empires. This did not mean, however, that either the political certainty that permitted colonial powers to institute their rule of law in their imperial holdings, or the economic certitude brought on by the stranglehold Britain in particular had established on the temperate and tropical zones of the world-economy through capital and population ows, was available in their dealings with the dynastic empires. Here it must be mentioned that, even though the Ottoman and Chinese empires belonged to the same category, in treaty ports which, unlike Ottoman port-cities, clearly segregated local populations from Western merchants, save for a tiny group who were employed as commission agents or independent brokers the dynamic was quite different.24 In the Ottoman Empire, even when the Western merchants found themselves in an advantageous position, they were constrained by realities on the ground. If Paris assumed the role of patron saint for the Catholic citizens of Mount Lebanon, the British felt compelled to counter it by extending their protective shield to the Druze populations. The port-cities of the Empire, as privileged points of interaction among diverse groups, may have housed merchants and businessmen equipped with extraterritorial rights, but this did not mean that they were capable of levelling the landscape in accordance with their own needs, given the multiplicity of interests at stake and the reluctance of the lesser powers, given their predicament, to easily give up on their claims and gains, territorial, commercial, diplomatic or geopolitical. Equally signicant, their mandate over large numbers of producers remained tenuous at best at a time when the opposite was the case in other corners of the world. 7 Granted, the diverse provenance of capital ows and the intensication of rivalry over the Ottoman lands created a propitious environment for the Sublime Porte. Nonetheless, it should not be assumed that this was a conjuncture with a gift of time. Not only was it eeting, since the state of rivalry was eventually resolved in one way or another; but also, in light of the territorial enlargement of the world-economy and the subsequent revisions in the global division of labour, the status quo of the mid-Victorian boom was undone. In fact, despite all signs of global prosperity, the temperate settlements beneted the poque.25 Certainly, the tropical world participated in the impressive most from the belle e growth of world trade, yet the terms of trade worked in its disfavour, as Arthur Lewiss analyses attest. Despite all the measures introduced to facilitate the ow of Ottoman agricultural goods into the world-markets, the Empires role as a major agrarian producer was further undermined by the phenomenal rise of the temperate settlements as the granaries of the world-economy. The rise of the temperate settlements in a relatively short time span radically altered the economic climate of the world-economy. The rise of capital-intensive family farming in these regions revamped world grain markets to the detriment of producers in the Old World, including the Ottoman dominions. Ottoman wheat exports fell consequently from 7% of the total in 1878 1882 to less than 1% in 1911 1913. The turnaround came after 1890, when wheat from the British dominions entered world markets.26 Also, with the increase in the number of cotton producers worldwide, the share of raw cotton in Egypts exports declined from 90% in 1910 1914 to 70% in the 1930s as the volume of the countrys trade declined from an index of 150 in 1913, with the base year 1938 as 100, to 61 in 1933.27 Growing labour migrations, which allowed the spread of plantations in the Far East, had a similar impact. The proliferation of tea plantations in the Indian Ocean and the Pacic Ocean arising from the availability

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of indentured labour deprived China of one of its main sources of revenue. Tea and silk, the most signicant Chinese exports, were now commercially grown in new locations. The economic position of the dynastic empires was weakened as a result.28 The economic landscape shaped by the mid-Victorian boom therefore suffered from the erosive effects of the changes in the global division of labour. Unlike economies structured around plantation agriculture and mono-crop cultivation, commodity exports from the Ottoman Empire were more diversied than those of its counterparts in the peripheral zones of the world-economy. In effect, the share of the leading eight crops shrank to 44% of Ottoman exports in 1913, down from 51% in 1878 1880, and the share of any commodity in the total value of the exports of the empire rarely exceeded 12%. The crop diversity and the absence of plantation-like units demonstrate how idiosyncratic the economic trajectories of both empires were. As the territorial and commercial sway of the system was growing at a vertiginous pace, and world trade soaring, the advancement of commercialization sought by the Western merchants and businessmen proved difcult to achieve on account of the failure of attempts to establish large, commercial agrarian estates, which would, ideally, devote larger portions of arable land to cash crops in demand in world markets. In the absence of a colonial force that would allow settlers to acquire large tracts of land, as they did in Algeria, or of a strong landlord class, as was the case in South America, who would channel large portions of the rural surplus to world markets, the creation of a commercial base capable of withstanding the competition fuelled by the entrance of new players into the world marketplace was an almost impossible task. In any event, the overwhelming presence of small peasantry, with their Lilliputian holdings, turned the commercialization of agriculture into a Herculean task.29 Yet it was exactly in this period, when the growth in Ottoman exports failed to catch up with that in world trade, especially after the heights it reached in the 1860s, that funds extended by the rival powers to the Sublime Porte gained importance and became a vital component of its economic health. That the British and French merchants had plenty of time to build their commercial arsenal, extending their catchment area deep into the productive regions of the Empire, left the latecomers with little choice but to do the same. The ascending powers had to operate within the terms set by an agrarian landscape inhabited by petty producers, and not by the rules of capital. 8 The dynamic changed after the Great War. Even before the onset of the Balkan Wars of 1912 1913 and the Great War in 1914, economic growth in the two empires subject to imperial rivalry the Ottoman and Chinese had started to decelerate. By contrast, those regions of the world-economy that specialized in the cultivation and export of tropical crops, and regions of recent European settlement which specialized in cereal culture, went on to thrive until the late 1920s. These two trajectories were of course intimately related. Economic enfeeblement was not the only process unleashed by the extension in the territorial sway of the world-economy. The impact of continual lending was manifest in the structure of Ottoman trade. For most of the second half of the nineteenth century, but more so after the 1870s, the Empire had a consistently adverse balance of trade as its imports outpaced its exports. Ironically, the steady erosion of the mid-nineteenth century export boom created a greater need for capital inows. As long as this conjuncture, which stemmed from inter-state rivalry, lasted, the Empires merchandise decit remained unchanged. But imperial rivalry, as we indicated above, was a passing phenomenon. The end of the political bid by the emerging powers, successful or otherwise, thus brought

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about an end to the precarious balance it created. At any rate, when the dust of rivalry settled the victorious party strengthened its grip, leaving behind the breathing space it initially provided. By the 1920s the new order was rmly in place. And the die was cast for the port-cities. The agrarian order that came into being during the 1873 1920 period around the centrality of the temperate settlements was eventually codied in the 1930s: the Ottawa Commonwealth Agreement regulated the world grain trade. It was also in the same decade that a series of agreements imposing quantitative controls on the production of a wide range of crops, mostly tropical but also inclusive of tea, were signed.30 Already by then the Middle Kingdom was trying to fend off forces trying to dismember it territorially, and the Ottoman Empire had already expired. Thus, as soon as the contenders to the hegemonic throne Germany (and to a lesser extent Italy) in the West and Japan in the East were either contained, albeit momentarily, as in the case of the Reich, or given free rein, as in the case of the Nipponian state, the imperial rivalry which marked the poque fast became a thing of the past. belle e So the global economic climate started to change in the 1920s, ushering in developments detrimental to the survival of dynastic empires. The difculty of imposing market discipline the logic of which was thwarted by imperial rivalry may have animated port-cities in the eastern Mediterranean, but the economic vibrancy this stimulated was bound to be a passing phenomenon in accordance with the eeting nature of imperial rivalry. Thus, the once-vibrant port-cities saw their fortunes dwindle, regardless of local developments. Four factors can be singled out that establish that this was a drastic change which undermined the very livelihood of the port-cities. The waning of imperial rivalry after the Great War eased the intense competition, even though the nal resolution of the matter had to wait until the end of World War II. But even as of 1914 the prevalence of one power, even when that power was originally the challenger, as in the case of Japan, obliterated the favourable conditions of the 1870 1914 period, again, as exemplied by Japans growing embrace of China.31 In the case of the Ottoman Empire, Germanys defeat in the Great War paved the way for the end of the House of Osman. And the revision of the global division of labour since the 1870s weakened the position of established producers by fuelling erce competition worldwide. The Ottoman and Chinese Empires saw their economic fortunes dwindle in the face of a proliferation in the number of new locations producing for world markets. The ability of the new producers to pull down the prices of most of the agricultural commodities and raw materials that were in high demand in the core regions of the world-economy exacerbated this competitive downward spiral.32 On the eve of the Great War, the share of both empires in global economic transactions had shrunk, and this economic enfeeblement, when seen from the viewpoint of the world-economy, was later complemented, in the wake of the war, by their political emasculation.33 9 To be sure, this was not the rst time that rivalry for hegemony had reshaped the worldeconomic landscape. After all, the consolidation of the British Empire deprived Spain of its empire in the Americas, and the rise of Amsterdam cost Portugal its empire in the Far East. Indeed, inter-state rivalry, pace Dehio, has been part and parcel of the workings of the world-system from its inception.34 The fact that such rivalry became a salient feature of Ottoman history in the late nineteenth century, and not earlier, needs explanation, however. For the Dutch, English, French and Venetian merchants in the seventeenth and

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eighteenth centuries competed to capture a growing portion of the economic ows into, and out of, the Empire. At times, one power among many gained primacy over its competitors. Between the seventeenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries, the grip of maritime powers over dynastic empires remained weak, perhaps because the worldeconomy had the luxury of expanding into, or incorporating, new territories at a fast pace, from the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans to the Pacic. Yet the rivalry at the end of the nineteenth century proved to be different in nature from earlier episodes of it. There were two reasons for this. Again, perhaps one reason was that, owing to the expanding frontiers of colonialism, the territorial expansion of the world-system had largely reached its limits: vying powers had less room to manoeuvre. Equally signicant, the Sublime Porte and the gate of Heavenly Peace starting to borrow in world capital markets in the latter half of the nineteenth century changed the picture signicantly. Growing reliance on world-capital markets substantially altered the nature of imperial rivalry so as to make it an integral component of the Ottoman Empires history. The Japanese indemnity of 1895 generated a similar effect in the case of the Chinese Empire by restricting its sovereignty.35 Rivalry led to a momentary and unsuccessful partitioning of both dynastic empires. The partitioning was much briefer in the case of the Ottoman Empire than in the Middle Kingdom, where the Long March restored the integrity and unity of the realm after the conclusion of World War II. At any rate, even a temporary resolution to the inter-state rivalry resulted in an abatement in its intensity. The triumphant rise of the Franco British condominium in the Levant, and the partitioning of the Empire under their watchful eyes, rendered ineffectual the German bid for supremacy. The German presence in the region was not completely erased, but it was no longer menacing. In the case of China, the emergence of Japan as the uncontested regional power, which seized German possessions in the northern Pacic, perversely generated a similar outcome. This time it was the imperial rival rather than the established powers, certainly in close cooperation with the British (and American) interests in the region, that triumphed, left its mark, and for all practical purposes helped the waning of rivalry. The withering away of inter-state competition undermined the age of illustrious Ottoman port-cities as well as that of the treaty ports in China. Changes in the global political climate of the post-World War I era hence undermined the trends of the previous epoch, which had handsomely served sites of extraterritoriality. The easing of inter-state rivalry in both instances was not without its consequences. Japans hold over Chinese territories deepened, especially after the collapse of 1929, which ruptured global nancial and commercial links forged over the previous 50 years. And the treaty ports in China, sites of extraterritorial rights, may have been formally abolished in 1946, but they had ceased to serve as points of entry into the vast interior, now consumed by warfare and war-lordism. In the case of the Ottoman Empire, the segmentation of its expansive imperial economic space and the abrogation of extraterritorial privileges by the successor states, independent as well as mandate, took their toll on the buoyancy of port-cities.36 Yet to say that the dynamic behind the fall of port-cities was that of imperial rivalry does not necessarily mean that the process was simply political in nature, for it needs to be emphasized that the contraction in world ce. The signicance of port-cities, treaty ports markets after 1929 was only a coup de gra and arrangements that privileged extraterritoriality may have lasted longer in the case of Alexandria, but in most parts of the Empire their fate was sealed starting with the end of the Great War. Long before the waning of dynastic empires political gravitas as a result of the resolution, albeit temporary, of inter-state rivalry, the steady economic enfeeblement of both empires had already started to take its toll on the livelihood of the port-cities.

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10 Seen in this light, the demise of robust port-cities had little to do with the developments in the Ottoman (or Chinese) Empire(s) per se, but reected wider, if not global, developments. If the dynamics of imperial rivalry explains the vitality of the port-cities in the eastern Mediterranean at the turn of the twentieth century, then the passing of this conjuncture was bound to inict damage on the very constitution of those cities. It goes without saying that port-cities played a major role in extending the sway of the capitalist world-economy in the nineteenth century. This was amply demonstrated by the pivotal role assumed by, or invested in, a score of port-cities, from those strung along the shores of the Ottoman Empire to the famous treaty ports of Qing China. Despite its impressive spatial stretch, however, the pre-eminence of port-cities was hardly a universal phenomenon. The experience of the colonized world did not leave any room for such a role, for its inclusion in the world-system and the character of economic ows were politically determined by colonial powers this self-invested authority was codied, and facilitated, by the signing of the Treaty of Berlin. By contrast, in those parts of the world where colonial rule could not be, or was not, established, seething competition among imperial rivals, political intrigue and machinations associated with the multiplicity of rivals vying over, and chasing after, a few geopolitical sites, and the new prospects for economic mobility for some indigenous peoples crystallized mostly along ethnic, religious lines were staples of a world where the certitudes of colonial rule were absent. In the absence of colonization, port-cities became nodes of political incertitude and promise, and hence a world of possibilities, where striking alliances among and between seemingly unlikely partners imperial contenders and indigenous aspirants was always an eventuality. Prospects of enrichment were real; and expectations of bypassing the tutelage of obstinate central governments were high. In the colonial world, the absence of rivalry signicantly narrowed the world of possibilities for indigenous actors. Analyses of port-cities in the Ottoman Empire should thus not be conducted in a self-referential fashion, but with reference to experiences in other regions of the world-economy. As sketched above, the reasons why the vibrant era up to 1914 came to an end have more to do with the changing structural features of the world-economy than with the local players in these port-cities. If not examined from a world-historical perspective, it is possible to misread the developments of the epoch as signs in themselves, however precocious they are deemed to be, rather than as simple registers of systemic, larger trends.

Notes
1. Polanyi, The Great Transformation, ch. 2. 2. Cf. Ilbert and Yannakakis, Alexandrie, 1860 1960; Benveniste, Salonique, ville cosmopolite, 13 18. 3. Driessen, Mediterranean Port Cities, 139. 4. Keyder, State and Class in Turkey, 38-41. 5. Wallerstein, The Three Instances of Hegemony. 6. Friedmann, World Market, State, and Family Farm, 545 86; Topik and Wells, The Second Conquest of Latin America. 7. On the centrality of these lands in the modus operandi of British capital, see Frank, Multilateral Merchandise: Trade Imbalances and Uneven Economic Development; and Cecco, Money and Empire. 8. Kenwood and Lougheed, The Growth of the International Economy, 43. 9. Huang, The Peasant Family; Faroqhi, Crisis and Change. 10. Skinner, The Structure of Chinese History; Stoianovich, The Conquering Balkan Orthodox Merchant.

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11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

F. Tabak
Hao, A New Class, 44659. Latham, From Competition to Constraint; Pamuk, The Ottoman Empire in a Comparative Perspective, 127 49. The periodization is borrowed from Kasaba, Was There a Comprador Bourgeoisie?, 215 28. . Cf. Brown, People of Sale Kennedy, The Magic Mountains. Issawi, An Economic History of the Middle East and North Africa, 64 71. ORourke and Williamson, Globalization and History. Goetzmann, Ukhov, and Zhu, China and the World Financial Markets. Wilkins, The Free-Standing Company, 259 82; Palan, The Offshore World, 102. Kasaba, Treaties and Friendships, 215 41. Rostow, The World Economy, 70 73, 669. ne tration allemande au Moyen-Orient. Cochran, Encountering Chinese Networks; Fleury, La pe Keyder, State and Class in Turkey, 37 9. Wood, No Dogs and Not Many Chinese. Pamuk, The Ottoman Empire in Comparative Perspective. Hanson, Trade in Transition, 303 4; Owen, The Middle East in the World Economy. Issawi, An Economic History, 26 7, 31. Latham and Neal, The International Market in Rice and Wheat, 260 80. Keyder, Small Peasant Ownership in Turkey. Kenwood and Lougheed, The Growth of International Economy, 21920. Some countries surrendered the privileges they had acquired in China to Chiang Kai-sheks government in Nanjing; others did the same during WWII. The west abandoned this wretched prey to Japan (Gernet, A History of Chinese Civilization, 613). Rostow, The World Economy, 176 7. Tabak, The Middle East in the Long Twentieth Century. Dehio, The Precarious Balance. Arrighi, Hamashita, and Selden, The Rise of East Asia. Issawi, An Economic History, 14.

Notes on contributor
Born in 1953, Faruk Tabak received his PhD from the State University of New York at Binghamton and went on to work as a research associate at the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems and Civilizations at Binghamton. He began teaching at Georgetown Universitys McGhee Center for Mediterranean Studies in Alanya, Turkey, in 1995, and later became Assistant Professor of Modern Turkish Studies at Georgetown University near Washington DC, USA. He passed away in Ankara, Turkey, on 15 February 2008. His book The Waning of the Mediterranean, 1550-1870: A Geo-Historical Approach was published mere days before his death.

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