Negotiating Coercion at the Court
Barrelmakers and the Ottoman State in the Early Nineteenth Century
Introduction
Judicial authorities and the courts lay at the heart of the tributary labour mechanisms in the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman judge, kadı, played a central role in drafting workers and organising the production and transportation of materials for the military worksites. Nevertheless, the state's use of such judicial mechanisms for coerced labour did not hinder their appropriation by Ottoman subjects to negotiate the terms of the labour draft or to resist the specific ways the draft was practised. The Ottoman court records, thus, are crucial to explore and reveal the involvement of multiple actors and their complicated relationships in tributary labour mechanisms.
As opposed to what the term "judge" may imply, the Ottoman kadı's authority was not limited to the courtroom, and, until the mid-nineteenth century reforms, the kadı was a man with the most expansive public authority in a judicial district, overseeing not only judicial matters, but also political, economic, urban, and military affairs in a district. On the one hand, he was the official delegate of the Sultan in executing his orders, including those for provisioning the army and navy, and his responsibilities ranged from repairing roads and supervising urban affairs to investigating crimes, drafting labourers and soldiers for the state, inspecting guilds and shops, and fixing prices.1 On the other hand, he was also a judicial mediator among the people and between the state and the subjects. As such, some historians have seen him as the legitimate representative of a locality vis-à-vis the central state, who could make demands on their behalf.2 This Janus-faced characteristic of the Islamic court and the kadı produced records that could be particularly useful for studying coercive relations between the Ottoman state and working-class subjects. However, aside from these relations, recent studies have also demonstrated how these records could help analyse inter-relations among Ottoman people from various classes, particularly in the early modern era when these institutions had expansive powers over local affairs.3
The kadı's role in the tributary provision of labour for the state makes the judicial records, the sicills, a significant source for historians to understand how these mechanisms were enforced, resisted, twisted, and negotiated by Ottoman subjects. These records can illuminate the changing dynamics of the coercive relations between the state and the subjects, particularly over providing labour for state industries. Several examples of this could be found in the court records regarding the provision of labour by guildsmen to the Imperial Arsenal in the early nineteenth century. As part of efforts to create a stable labour force in the Imperial Arsenal starting with the 1790s, the guildsmen in Istanbul were obliged to send an assigned number of their members to work in the Arsenal regularly. The guilds had to share the financial cost of remunerating these workers, as the state paid them a fixed and low wage. Since it was unpopular among the guildsmen, the labour obligation was replaced by cash payment on the eve of the bureaucratic reform process, called the Tanzimat (reorganisation) in the late 1830s. Throughout the early nineteenth century, when the rule was implemented, the courts became a space for different branches of certain guilds to negotiate how to distribute the economic burden across each branch.
The court records in this period also show how guilds attempted to capitalise on this obligation to protect and advance their interests, despite their reluctance to work in the arsenal. The document below gives an example of how they did so, through the practice of "gedik," which refers originally to an occupational licence that allowed the craftsmen to protect their shops and tools against the market competition, but which, through the late eighteenth/early nineteenth centuries became a financial asset as well. The case demonstrates how craftsmen negotiated to secure the state`s protection against market dynamics in return for their obligation to work. In this regard, a main request concerned their problems with property owners.
In this period, rent disputes between artisans/shopkeepers and their proprietors "flooded" court hearings.4 In harmony with established legal tradition since the late sixteenth century, artisans/shopkeepers had the right to perpetual lease as long as they paid their due rents regularly, if their investments or installations (which they should have done with the consent of the proprietor) "contributed" to the maintenance of the property's value, and at times, if "public benefit" existed to continue their trades in these properties. In disputes, the artisans should have produced evidence with the court for their right to fixed tenure (hakk-ı karar), which was "in principle" acknowledged by the kadıs as long as the evidence was produced for their investments in the property. Increasingly through the late eighteenth century, however, the artisans who could not produce evidence for such investments opted to put forward the "public benefit" argument to claim this right against their proprietors, who increasingly pressured them to increase rents or else evacuate their properties.5
The Case of Barrelmakers
This document is a record of a decree by the Sultan issued to the Court of Istanbul, dated 14 Zilkade 1241 (20 June 1826). The text is particularly useful as it narrates the bureaucratic-judicial processes that ended with the Sultan's order, as issued to the court. As such, it is also lengthy due to multiple repetitions in summarising each procedure. These procedures started with a communication from the Steward of the Arsenal (Tersane Emini) to the Chief Treasurer's Office (Başmuhasebe), continued with the rule of a court that requested the Sultan's approval, and ended up with the issuing of the Sultan's edict.6 A comprehensive summary of the case is as follows:
According to a takrir (written communication) of the Steward of the Arsenal, Mehmed Said, the barrelmakers, consisting of sixty-seven craftsmen located in the Asitane (Istanbul) and the surrounding districts of Eyüp, Galata, and Üsküdar, had long been supplying the Arsenal with barrels and casks by a customary price, and in the meantime, sending the Arsenal a required number of barrel workers by a meagre wage. They were recently slower than usual in providing the barrels and casks for olives and water and sending the workers, so much so that they caused delays in the equipment of the ships. When the guild's headmasters were interrogated, they replied that the olive casks, water barrels, and the workers they gave for manufacturing mancanas (large barrels used for drinking water) were remunerated by an official price (fiyat-ı miri), the rest of the cost being met by the guild and thus they had to bear great expenses. Still, they said "they were honoured to serve the Sublime State." But, they complained, the staves and hoops brought from the provinces for the guild (for crafting barrels) were first bought by the profiteers, who then sold them to the barrelmakers at much higher prices.
Another problem was that the barrelmakers could not work in a narrow space, thus requiring large shops with depots. Although their current shops fit their needs, some property owners attempted to evacuate them from their shops and depots. They were telling them, "you are not registered craftsmen, and thus go and rent a shop somewhere else", so that they could lease their shops to other craftsmen and thus increase their rents. As the craftsmen were ruined and suffering as a result, they declared they could not manage to pay their service to the Arsenal and requested their protection against such transgression (ta'addiyat).
Upon this request, the Steward communicated to the Başmuhasebe (the Chief Treasurer's Office), with the recommendation that these barrelmakers were to be registered according to the following scheme: The guild would continue to provide the Arsenal with barrels by the customary price, and the Arsenal would continue to employ the requested number of workers sent by them at their usual wages, and they should also continue giving one or two barrel workers for each ship upon request; in return, they were not to be evacuated from their shops or squeezed for higher rents by their property owners as long as they paid their due rents on time, and that the number of shops would not be higher than the registered number, and the staves and hoops brought from the provinces would be directly purchased by the guild, rather than the profiteers, and the guild should not oppress the sellers of these materials by charging them lower prices on the basis of their monopoly to purchase them.
Since the guild did not have a gedik, the Chief Treasurer's Office transferred the case to the Kadı of Istanbul for the recognition of their gediks, with the approval of the guild members. The court ruled that although a previous imperial edict forbade that no new gediks would be registered hereafter, it acknowledged that these craftsmen were unlike other classes. They deserved to be put under protection since they were employed in the very critical affairs of the state, and the necessity that the matters of the Imperial Arsenal should be facilitated was obvious. Thus, they could be registered through an imperial order on the condition that this should not set an example for the recognition of other guilds in future cases.
As the case thus went to the palace, the Sultan approved it, despite his previous order against the registration of any new gediks, declaring that he agreed with the court rule regarding the significance of barrelmakers for the Imperial Arsenal, which should earn them such privilege, on the condition that it should not set an example for the others. In the end, the Sultan issued this edict that commanded the kadı to implement this new scheme for the barrelmakers.
Tributary Labour as a Tool against the Market
The barrelmakers' hitherto existing tributary relationship with the state entailed the coercive use of their labour at two levels: On the one hand, they were obliged to sell their products at fixed prices determined by the state, being lower than the market rates, or providing them in place of taxes.7 On the other hand, they also had to provide labourers to the Arsenal upon request, although, since the 1790s, this became a regular practice, as mentioned above. The case demonstrates how the barrelmakers forced the state to negotiate the terms of this obligation in a way that shows the changing relations between the Ottoman subjects and the state throughout the gradual erosion of the tributary provisioning system in the age of market capitalism. Squeezed by the increasing pressure from property owners and profiteers at the expense of their customary hold on the market, their income dramatically decreased. Adding to this was the growing demand by the navy to provide goods and labour in parallel to the transformation of shipbuilding: The ever-increasing numbers of larger and more sophisticated sailing vessels (notably, the galleons) with larger capacities to carry men and goods required more barrels, and more barrelmakers for producing and maintaining them regularly.
These challenges forced the barrelmakers to resist this coercive relationship by attempting to exit it, though not in an open conflict, but in more mundane forms, like slowing down work or not complying with their obligations. This attempt to exit forced the state elites to negotiate the terms of this relationship. Their ultimate goal was to keep the labour cost at a minimum, a concern that became critical at a time when the Ottoman navy was under growing pressure to maintain its competitive strength through an increasingly expensive process of modernisation. Through such negotiation, the barrelmakers were able to secure the state's protection against the market at the cost of refurbishing and consolidating their coercive relationship with the state. Such consent did not mean they stopped their attempts to evade or resist this obligation, along with other guilds in Istanbul, which eventually led to the abolition of the labour obligation a decade later.
Such cases demonstrate the significance of understanding coercion as a complicated and dynamic relationship that remained far from static but was subject to change throughout history. The guilds' tributary relationship with the Imperial Arsenal, which had hitherto involved occasional employment of labour, became a tool to subject the labour force of the Arsenal under discipline, against irregular and migrant labourers, as part of state reforms of the New Order in the 1790s. In another context, the same obligation was used, this time as a tool by craftsmen to survive against the incoming competitors and against the competition for the properties and materials they used for performing their crafts.
In this sense, the case highlights how coercive labour relations could become a part of Ottoman subjects' "moral economy". Barrelmakers' claims with the court rested on a customary expectation that their provision of labour and materials to the military worksites would ensure their protection by the state against the market. Although the claim for such reciprocity might point to the legitimacy of this draft by producing consent, the context in which this case took place demonstrates the tactical characteristic of the barrelmakers' argumentation. Being conscious of the critical value of their labour for naval production, it should be no coincidence that their collective act to delay the provision of labour and materials came at a critical time, in the midst of the Greek War of Independence (1821-1832), which put a particular pressure upon the Ottoman navy to speed up production and provision in the naval shipyards. As such, the barrelmakers used the court as a space to seek protection and advance their interests against market forces by asserting the significance of their labour power for naval production, through a case that allowed such assertion to operate within a formal judicial framework.8
Conclusion
Due to their role as both representatives of central authority and mediators between the state and the subjects, the Ottoman courts played a significant role in workers’ attempts to negotiate the terms of the labour draft through legal mechanisms. We see the kadı's double position very clearly in this case: Despite a previous rule by the Sultan that officially prohibited the introduction of barrelmakers into the gedik scheme, the kadı sided with the barrelmakers and the Arsenal officials in bending this legal barrier, with the justification that doing so served better to the interest of the state. The role of the kadı in such negotiations points to the invaluable potential of Ottoman court records in revealing the complicated characteristics of the coercive dynamics in state-society relations and the judiciary's role in them.
Still, this case also reflects the potential limitations of historians studying judicial records. Such documents contain either the imperial orders sent to the court or the court's judicial decision, giving a summary of each case, an overview of arguments by each side, and the judge's justification for his decision. They barely allow us direct access to the voices of the subjects who appeared in the court and whose claims were reproduced in the text only in a reporting format woven with and filtered through official discourse. The court process, how the subjects used the courtroom, the full extent of their discursive strategies within the courtroom, and the role the judicial authorities and their local networks/relations played in the negotiation processes between the actors remain largely in the dark. In this sense, even in cases when the judges acted as mediators among the individuals or voiced the demands of local people vis-à-vis the central authority, such records demand deconstructing official discourses to surface the voices and experiences of the subjects, and in this way, to also reveal the coercive dynamics of their relationship with the state.
One of the goals of the analysis above is to demonstrate that while deconstructing the text to extract the voices or agency of the subjects, it is significant to draw connections between the production relations in state worksites and the judicial cases that involved the individual or collective targets of labour draft for these worksites. Such connections could particularly be valuable to understand how Ottoman subjects could manipulate their role in the production process as a tool to further their own interests, especially if they were drafted for military worksites in wartime, when their draft became critical and urgent. As such, they also allow us to further explore the complicated and diverse forms of agencies in the (un)making of coercive labour relations.
Footnotes
Tyan, E. and Káldy-Nagy, Gy., "Ḳāḍī", in: Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, Edited by: P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C.E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, W.P. Heinrichs. Consulted online on 24 September 2023 http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_COM_0410↩︎
İlber Ortaylı, “Kadı”, TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, consulted online on 24 September 2023 https://islamansiklopedisi.org.tr/kadi#2-osmanli-devletinde-kadi.↩︎
See Boğaç A. Ergene, Local Court, Provincial Society and Justice in the Ottoman Empire: Legal Practice and Dispute Resolution in Çankırı and Kastamonu (1652-1744). Brill, 2003.↩︎
Engin Deniz Akarlı, “Gedik: A Bundle of Rights and Obligations for Istanbul Artisans and Traders, 1750–1840,” in Law, Anthropology, and the Constitution of the Social: Making Persons and Things, ed. Alain Pottage and Martha Mundy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p.188.↩︎
Akarlı, 185-189.↩︎
The register that contained the record was transliterated from Ottoman Turkish and published in a series that involved 60 selected registers of the Ottoman courts in Istanbul, as part of a project entitled "İstanbul Kadı Sicilleri Projesi", funded by İstanbul Metropolitan Municipality's Kültür A.Ş. and İstanbul Medipol University's School of Law, and coordinated by M. Akif Aydın; see https://kadisicilleri.istanbul/ (accessed online on 24 September 2023). For the full transliteration of this particular record, see İstanbul Kadı Sicilleri 88 İstanbul Mahkemesi 154 Numaralı Sicil (H. 1237-1246 / M. 1822- 1831), ed. Coşkun Yılmaz, İstanbul: Kültür AŞ, 2019, pp. 267-269.↩︎
İdris Bostan, Osmanlı Bahriye Teşkilatı: XVII. Yüzyılda Tersane-i Amire (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1992), 77.↩︎
In another context, Aytekin places a similar emphasis on peasants' "valorization of their own labour" (throughout the rural uprisings in the mid-nineteenth century Ottoman Empire) as a significant dimension of their moral economy. See E. Attila Aytekin, "Peasant Protest in the Late Ottoman Empire: Moral Economy, Revolt, and the Tanzimat Reforms", International Review of Social History, 57, no.2, (2012): 191-227. On moral economy, see E.P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past & Present, 50 (1971): 76-136.↩︎