The Sultan's Entrepreneurs: The Avrupa tuccaris and the Hayriye tuccaris in Syria

Bruce Masters

International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 24, No. 4. (Nov., 1992), pp. 579-597.

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Int. J . Middle East Stud. 24 (1992). 579-597. Printed in the United States of America

Bruce Masters

T H E S U L T A N ' S ENTREPRENEURS: T H E
AVRUPA TUCCARIS A N D T H E HAYRIYE
TUCCARIS IN SYRIA

By the first quarter of the 19th century, foreigners and Ottomans alike were keenly
aware that the sovereignty of the house of Osman was rapidly eroding. Austrian
and Russian armies threatened the empire from without; ethnic revolts and seces-
sion beset it from within. Its occasional allies Britain and France ate away at its
autonomy through growing economic and political influence. The military threats
were apparent, but the Porte was less alert to the dangers its relationships with the
Western European powers held for Ottoman hegemony over the peoples of the
Balkans and the Arab Middle East.'
Nonetheless, even if the Porte was short sighted, blinded by its vanished glo-
ries, the Ottomans could not ignore the growing multitudes of their non-Muslim
subjects who had become beratlls or prottgts, and thereby gained European con-
sular p r ~ t e c t i o nBy
. ~ the end of the 18th century, their defection posed a challenge
to the empire that was both symbolic and real. Not only were peoples who had
once been subject claiming an extraterritorial political status that nullified the sul-
tan's authority, but they were also no longer paying taxes. The number of Ottoman
zimmis (non-Muslims) who claimed protection from European powers is not really
known, but because most of them were wealthy merchants and moneylenders, pro-
t t g t status had an impact greater than their numbers would suggest.'
In the first decade of the 19th century, the Porte's response to the problem was
classically Ottoman and Islamic. When Sultan Selim I11 (1789-1809) failed to win
satisfactory assurances from the European powers that they would voluntarily
limit the number of patents of protection granted to Ottoman subjects, he offered,
as an inducement to return these subjects to the fold, imperial patents (berats) that
would allow selected non-Muslim merchants to engage in international trade and
enjoy the same advantageous import and export tariffs that the European powers
had won for their subjects under the capitulatory treaties. As a further stimulus,
provincial governors and judges were ordered to treat all claims of extraterritorial-
ity by apparent Ottoman subjects with ~ u s p i c i o n .A~ cadre of non-Muslim Otto-
man merchants, the Avrupa tiiccar~s,was organized, closely followed by the
formation of a similar organization for Muslim merchants, known as the hayriye
t i i c c a r ~ sThis
. ~ time the sultans used an Ottoman solution to the problem posed by

Bruce Masters teaches history at Wesleyan University, Middletown, Conn. 06459, U.S.A.

O 1992 Cambridge University Press 0020-7438/92 $5.00 + .OO

580 Bruce Masters

the new imperialists; a few decades later, they would borrow one from the West
instead. As such, the experiment was one of the last responses to arise from tradi-
tional Ottoman statecraft in an era of rapid change.
Did these two organizations of imperially sponsored merchants mean that the
Ottoman Empire had finally awakened to the economic dangers posed by the
West? At first glance the program is apparently protectionist, but the degree to
which it represented broad economic aims, rather than the limited recoupment of
taxes or purely political goals in the reassertion of suzerainty, is unclear. Did the
Ottoman sultans envisage a healthy class of entrepreneurs who would wrest the
trade of the empire out of the hands of the Europeans, or did they simply seek to
reaffirm their sovereignty over errant subjects?
What these goals were should be ascertained before the effectiveness of the pro-
gram can be assessed, but most historians have simply judged the experiment a
failure out of hand,h citing the increasing numbers of Ottoman subjects who ob-
tained foreign passports in the course of the 19th century7 and the absence of a
strong Muslim commercial class at the century's end. Yet the evidence from at
least one of the empire's mercantile centers, Aleppo, seems to indicate some initial
success in ending the most obvious abuses of the prot6gC system by enrolling into
the ranks of the Avrupa tiiccar~smany of the city's prominent merchant families
who had formerly enjoyed foreign protection. The same program was only mar-
ginally effective in Damascus, however, where the number of those seeking pro-
tCg6 status exploded as the city was opened up to direct foreign trade. Neither of
these cases represents how the experiment fared in the empire as a whole, how-
ever; the fate of the non-Muslim (Avrupa tiiccarz) and Muslim (hayriye tiiccarl)
merchant organizations in Aleppo and Damascus simply indicates that the sultans'
policy had mixed results. It also says less about the loyalty of the merchants in
each city to the House of Osman than it does about the degree to which various
parts of the empire had already been incorporated into a new trading relationship
with Europe, rendering the Porte's policies largely irrelevant. In the end, however,
the net result everywhere was the same, as the state's economy and finances be-
came subsumed under those of Western Europe and the imperial merchants were
superseded, and changes in the legal and commercial structure of the empire made
them redundant. Nonetheless, the story of the sultans' entrepreneurs illustrates that
the Porte could still in the early 19th century, however inadvertently, formulate
economic policies that led to a temporary reversal in the trend toward Western
economic control, but that permanent solutions to the empire's woes needed more
daring than the sultans could either imagine or implement.

T H E A V R U P A T U C C A R I S A N D T H E H A Y R ~ Y ET U C C A R I S

Eyragues, the French ambassador at the Porte, wrote to Louis-Mathieu, Comte de

Mole, foreign minister, in 1837: "I realized with pleasure that for our merchants
the main question was not so much the amount of the new duties as their equality
and stability. For what our merchants are requesting is, as far as possible, the
abolition of the monopolies and prohibitions that have diverted almost the whole
export trade into the hands of a small number of favored Baratarie~."~ This sug-
 The Sultan's Entrepreneurs 58 1

gests that the Avrupa tiiccarzs had achieved some initial success in breaking the
European monopoly over the Ottoman export trade in the decade preceding the
Anglo-Ottoman trade agreement of 1838. Although Charles Issawi translates
barataries as "European protCgts," it is clear both from the context of the report
and from other contemporary English and French documents that it was, in fact,
beratlz Ottoman Christian and Jewish merchants who were undercutting the profits
of Westerners and not their own pr~tCgCs.~ Complementing the scattered Western
anecdotal evidence suggesting the program's success is the clear growth in the
numbers of Ottoman merchants seeking the berat of an Avrupa tiiccarz throughout
the empire.
Exactly when the practice of granting such status began is unknown. In August
1802, Sultan Selim I11 issued an order setting down the conditions whereby cho-
sen non-Muslim merchants would be favored by an imperial patent that would al-
low them to import and export goods at an assessed customs rate of 3 percent, but
there are no extant copies of patents that were issued before 1806.1° In the begin-
ning, all those rewarded with an imperial berat lived either in the capital or in
Galata, across the Golden Horn. In 1815, orders were issued to the qadis of impor-
tant centers such as Izmir, Salonika, and Aleppo announcing the expansion of the
program to their cities." In a register dating from that year, 151 merchants were
listed as holding imperial patents. Of these, 70 percent (107) resided in the capital,
17 percent (25) in Izmir, and another 6 percent (10) in Aleppo.12 By 1835, the
number of merchants so registered had reached 521, of whom only 23 percent
(121) lived in the capital.13 Between 1839 and 1861, another 453 merchants were
added to the roster;I4 clearly, holding a patent as one of the sultan's "Europe mer-
chants" remained both profitable and desirable.
The advantages offered the merchants in their patents closely parallelled those
given the subjects of Western European powers.15 The Avrupa tiiccarzs paid the
same rate of customs duties as the Europeans. Any litigation involving sums over
4,000 akge was to be heard in Istanbul in the presence of the nazir (superinten-
dent) of the merchants. That office parallelled that of the foreign embassies and
gave the merchants an ombudsman at the Porte. In addition to the nazir, the mer-
chants elected two vekils (deputies) in each city where the program was installed
to represent their interests in the local courts. The merchants, the deputies, and the
superintendent were, in turn, placed under the authority of the office of the bey-
likgi, who was also the official responsible for the Europeans resident in the em-
pire.I6 Taking the European consular organization as a model, the Ottoman sultans
had created an association for their non-Muslim merchants, providing them with
similar channels for redress that were afforded the Europeans and their protCgCs.
Under the terms of their capitulatory treaties, the European merchants had been
granted the right to employ locals as dragomans and they too had been granted ex-
traterritoriality by the Ottoman state. After flagrant abuse of the system, the Porte
was wary of granting similar privileges to its newly created imperial merchants.
Each merchant was given the right to employ two agents," one of whom was per-
mitted to take up residence in another city. These agents were, in turn, granted
firmans establishing their status. Registers were maintained listing the merchants
and their agents. When a merchant died, the agents were required to surrender
582 Bruce Masrzrs

their firmans to the authorities, and if a merchant wanted to change his agent, a
formal application had to be presented to the authorities and the firman of the
former agent returned, before a new one would be issued.18
Despite the similarities in some of the benefits granted the Avrupa tiiccarzs with
those of the Western merchants, their patents were granted to confirm the suzer-
ainty of the sultans over the merchants. This was accomplished by a clause stipu-
lating that the merchants and their agents were responsible for payment of the cizye
(the poll tax levied on adult male non-Muslim subjects), to be collected yearly. To-
gether with the fee of 1,500 a k ~ charged
e for issuing the patent, the cizye obviously
benefitted the empire's coffers. But as the amount stipulated for the cizye was ex-
tremely low (first 12 a k ~ ethen , 20, and finally 2419), the fact of the payment was
apparently more important to the state than the cash it generated.20
The payment of the cizye was mitigated by the government's willingness to ex-
empt the Avrupa riiccurzs from most of the internal taxes levied on trade, as well
as from the various extraordinary taxes (tekcilif) that had become ordinary and
were levied on the population of the empire. The internal customs duties were as-
sessed by outmoded methods and were a source of irritation to the European mer-
chants who considered them arbitrary or corruptly administered-and in many
cases, both. Of course, customs rates guaranteed in writing did not necessarily
keep overly ambitious customs officials in the provinces from augmenting their in-
take by o ~ e r c h a r g i n g .Nonetheless,
~~ where fairly applied, this tax advantage, to-
gether with the monopolies created by the state over certain primary commodities
and the ban on foreign merchants' traveling freely within the empire, provided the
imperially sponsored merchants with an advantage over their European competi-
tors at a time of expanding export trade.
In the years 1820-22, the Ottoman Empire exported goods worth E650,OOO to
the United Kingdom. By 1836-38, that figure had reached E1,729,000.22The share
of that trade handled by Ottoman merchants rankled the Europeans, and their com-
plaints triggered intervention from the European ambassadors at the Porte. The re-
sult was the Anglo-Ottoman trade agreement of 1838 and an identical Franco-
Ottoman treaty the next year, which standardized customs duties for all merchants
in the empire and permitted free access to internal markets for foreign merchants.
In a revised regulation concerning the issuance of patents establishing Avrupa tiic-
carzs, dated June 1840, it was stated that new customs dues had gone into effect
for England and France. These included a tax of 5 percent on imports and 9 per-
cent on goods arriving in port from the Ottoman hinterlands to which another 3
percent would be added at the time of export. The document added that henceforth
the same rates of taxation were to apply to the Avrupa riiccarzs as well.23The new
treaties also abolished the export monopolies, at least in theory; in practice, they
lingered on for a decade more. These reforms eliminated the advantages enjoyed
by the sultan's merchants over foreigners, but the number of merchants who con-
tinued to seek patents to become Avrupa tiiccarzs between 1839 and 1861 would
indicate that many found the legal and tax advantages offered by the program
sufficient to justify enrollment.
Two registers of the Avrupa tiiccarzs, one from 1815 and the other covering the
years 1839-61, give some idea of the kind of merchant who opted to join, though
 The Sultan's Entrepreneurs 583

TABLE 1 Ethnicity of Avrupa tiiccaris

1815 1839-50 1850-61

number (%) number (%) number (%)

Greeks
Armenians
Jews
Slavs
Arabs
Other
Unknown

Total

the paucity of supporting evidence leaves us with little more than their names and
the cities in which they lived. (A complete prosopographic study is further hin-
dered by the fact that no register covering the period from 1815 to 1838 has sur-
vived.) Merchants who enrolled were at least moderately wealthy, as the
enrollment fee excluded mere peddlers from the ranks. Many of those who en-
rolled were sarrafs (money-changers and -lenders). They were invariably non-
Muslims who made themselves indispensable to the Ottoman military bureaucracy
by supplying the ready cash necessary to purchase government posts. That kind of
relationship is illustrated in a series of cases registered in Aleppo in 1828, in
which two Armenian Avrupa tiiccarzs engaged in protracted litigation. Both liti-
gants brought pressure to bear on the judge, relying upon the support of the pashas
who had been their respective clients and patrons.24
The ethnicity of the Avrupa tiiccarzs is less clear even when we have their
names. Those merchants whose given names and patronymics are known are pre-
sented in Table 1. The system for determining their community is admittedly im-
perfect. Armenians and Jews bore distinctive names, but Greek Orthodox
Christians could be Greeks, Slavs, Arabs, or Albanians, although they almost al-
ways had their names recorded by Turkish-speaking Muslim secretaries in their
Greek form. Possible confusion is sometimes mitigated by the use of Slavic nick-
names, or in the case of Christian Arabs by Arabic surnames. But with the excep-
tion of the Arabs, few merchants used surnames until the middle of the 19th
century. As a result, the totals in Table 1 are skewed in favor of ethnic Greeks;
Slavs, at least in the earlier years, are undoubtedly underrepresented, and Alba-
nians invisible.
Even with this caveat, it is clear that ethnic Greeks supplied the majority of the
early imperially sponsored merchants, most of whom came from places that had
long traditions of trade with the West. Thirty-eight merchants (25%) in the 1815
list bore the toponym Sakizli (from the island of Chios), and it must be assumed
that most of those without an identifying place name were from the Greek commu-
nities of Istanbul and Galata. This is not surprising as Greeks had emerged in the
18th century as the dominant ethnic group in the export trade of both the Balkans
and the Black Sea. During the 19th century, their paramount position was affected,
584 Bruce Masters

TABLE 2 Geographic Distribution of the Avrupa tuccaris

1835 1839-50 1850-61

number (%) number (%) (number (%)

Istanbul
Turkish Thrace
Balkans
Western Anatolia
Central Anatolia
Eastern Anatolia
Cyprus
Arab provinces

Total 52 1 112 34 1

however, by the political upheavals in the empire, and it went into decline begin-
ning with the Greek war for independence (1821-29). The island of Chios was
sacked by the Ottoman army in 1822 with terrible loss of life, and elsewhere ethnic
Greek Avrupa tiiccarls were recorded as having had their wealth and patents con-
fiscated under the suspicion that they were aiding the Greek insurgents.25
Despite the establishment of the kingdom of the Hellenes, Ottoman Greeks con-
tinued to be the most dominant trading community in the empire, largely due to
their favorable position as traders and their presence in regions-Thrace and the
maritime districts of western Anatolia-that were newly opened up to commercial
agriculture and the Western export trade. But as commercial agriculture expanded
beyond the areas of traditional Greek habitation, other groups-especially Arme-
nians and Slavs-also benefited. The expansion in the enrollments of Avrupa tiic-
curls serves as a trace element with which to follow this development of the
Ottoman economic system in the first half of the 19th century. As regions such as
eastern Bulgaria, Macedonia, and central Anatolia became incorporated into the
expanding system of an international export trade, the network of merchants
moved in to exploit the growth (Table 2).
A model linking the presence of the Avrupa tiiccarzs to a particular region's in-
cipient commercial agriculture is, however, not completely reliable. Between 1839
and 1861 (the years covered by the Bagbakanlik Argivi register Maliyeden
Mudevver [MM] 21 192), trade between Europe and the port cities of Beirut and
Trabzon grew rapidly.26 Yet although sixteen residents of the Black Sea ports
were admitted to the ranks of the Avrupa tiiccarzs, only one signed up in Beirut.
Salonika also was inexplicably underrepresented. In the 1835 register there were
only seventeen Salonika merchants with patents, compared to thirty-four in the
much smaller town of Plovdiv, and only two more signed up later. Merchants in
each city were obviously prompted by very different considerations in accepting
or rejecting the program.
These registers also give hints about how the merchants developed their trading
networks through their choice of agents. In roughly a quarter of the cases re-
corded, at least one of the agents was an identifiable family member, usually a
 The Sultan's Entrepreneurs 585

brother but sometimes a son. Furthermore, as new merchants were added to the
rosters, they most often were former agents and they, in turn, added still other
family members as their agents, creating commercial dynasties, such as that of the
Giilbenkoglu, first of Kayseri and then of I ~ t a n b u l . ~In' most of the other cases
agents were of the same ethnic group as the merchants they served. Thus, while
interethnic cooperation was not unknown, occurring in 10 to 15 percent of the
cases, the old Levantine tradition of keeping business matters within the family-
or, barring that, within members of the same ethnic group-seems to have been
normative.
Possible competition between ethnic groups is evidenced by the merchants'
choice of supervisor (nazir). A condition of enlistment was that they choose two
nazirs in each city for a term of one year. In most of the election records that have
been preserved, the men represented different ethnic communities, giving balance
to the ethnic makeup of the merchants resident in any given city. Most commonly
it was a Greek and an Armenian, but in regions where other groups were active
they were represented: Jews in Edirne, Aleppo, and Damascus; Christian Arabs on
Cyprus, in Istanbul and Syria; Slavs in the cities of Bulgaria and Macedonia.
By 1840, the institution of the Avrupa tiiccarz was well established throughout
the empire. We have at least two indications that it was relatively effective: first, it
continued to grow and attract new applicants; second, the Western European pow-
ers persistently pressed and cajoled the Porte until they had won the same tax rates
for their merchants as the sultans' own entrepreneurs had been granted. This was
accomplished when the customs duties for both European and domestic beratlzs
were set at the same rate. It is not so clear, however, if the hayriye tiiccar~shad
enjoyed equal success.
The establishment of the parallel Muslim merchant organization of the hayriye
tiiccarzs came as an apparent afterthought, and it remained a poor steprelation
throughout its existence. The patents issued to the Muslim merchants stated that
the institution was formed at their behest so that they might enjoy the advantages
of their non-Muslim countrymen who had received berats. That the institution was
initiated from the bottom makes it appear unlikely that the state introduced either
program for economic, rather than political, reasons. The non-Muslim organiza-
tion had been established to reclaim the loyalty of Ottoman subjects, and the Mus-
lim one in response to Muslim outcries for privileges similar to those granted their
non-Muslim competitors. As in the case of the Avrupa tiiccarzs, the exact date of
the founding of the Muslim merchants' institution is a problem. The earliest pat-
ents extant date from 18 10, but one of these mentions that the institution itself was
formed in 1806.28
The patents of the Avrupa tiiccar~swere modeled after those issued to the Euro-
pean merchants; the berats of the Muslim merchants after those of the non-
Muslim merchants. Like the non-Muslims, the Muslim merchants were required to
purchase their documents, although at the lower rate of 1,200 akge. It was further
stipulated that they be men of high moral and religious character (ehl-i arz ve din-
dar), something apparently not required of their non-Muslim colleagues. The local
qadi and reputable merchants of the city in which they lived were to attest to their
good character and to send a letter of recommendation along with the merchants'
586 Bruce Masters

applications to the Porte. This paternalism of the state towards its Muslim mer-
chants in looking out for their economic and spiritual welfare underlies the lan-
guage employed in all documents relating to the hayriye tuccarts, and is equally
absent in the documents relating to the non-Muslims.
The Muslims had an organization comparable to that of the non-Muslims, al-
though different titles were used. Theirs was headed by a gehbender in the capital
with two assistants (muhtar) under the supervision of the beylik~i.As in the case
of the non-Muslims, all litigation involving goods or cash valued at over 4,000
ak~w e as to be conducted in the capital in the presence of that official. The title of
gehbender was an old one that earlier had referred to the head of a rather informal
merchants' association in some of the Ottoman cities. The institution of the
hayriye tuccar~revived the office, first as the elected representative of the Muslim
merchants in the capital. As the organization expanded, merchant representatives
also known as gehbender were elected at the provincial level (corresponding to the
vekil of the Avrupa tuccarts). Finally, gehbenders functioned as the representa-
tives of Ottoman merchant interests in cities outside the empire, laying the foun-
dation for an Ottoman consular corps.29
There were, however, some differences in the responsibilities and privileges
afforded the two merchant groups. There was no upper limit to the number of mer-
chants who could be appointed Avrupa tuccarts, but the hayriye tuccarts were
limited initially to forty in the capital and ten in other designated provincial cen-
t e r ~ In. ~practice,
~ this cap seems to have been ignored. A document registered in
Aleppo in 1831, repeats the provision, but follows it with a list of twenty individ-
uals who had obtained be rat^.^' By 1839, the regulation had been officially phased
Another obvious difference between the two groups was that a Muslim mer-
chant had the right to bequeath his patent to his oldest son and, of course, did not
have to pay the cizye. This was a limited boon to the merchant, but it makes trac-
ing the expansion of the hayriye tuccarts throughout the empire a difficult task, as
the officials showed less concern about registering them than their non-Muslim
counterparts.

Aleppo provides an important test for the efficacy of the sultans' policy towards
the empire's minority merchants. In the course of the 18th century, many of the
prominent Christian merchants of the city had opted for communion with Rome
and thereby gained protection from France, which practiced a foreign policy in the
region linked to confessionalism. By the end of the century, a growing number of
people enjoyed the protection of Britain, which had only entered into the race for
protCgCs reluctantly and did not insist on any religious test.33The legal basis for
their dubious status lay in the Anglo-Ottoman commercial treaty of 1675, which
had extended extraterritoriality both to English factors operating in the Ottoman
domains and to their officially recognized dragoman^.'^ Similar rights were soon
after extended to most of the Western powers. A century later, however, few of
those Ottoman subjects that were protected actually provided any translation ser-
vice to the foreign consuls.
 The Sultan's Entrepreneurs 587

There were undoubtedly other cities in the empire where European consular
protection had been extended illegally to Ottoman subjects, but the situation in
Aleppo seems to have drawn the Porte's particular ire, perhaps because of the
large number involved. According to a 20th-century historian of Aleppo, Kamil
al-Ghazzi, the Porte inquired in 1794 as to the number of "translators" in the city
and found that there were about 1,50035-an undoubtedly grossly inflated number,
as surviving lists of those who claimed protection Nonetheless, reports of
the flagrant abuse of diplomatic privilege in the city caught the attention of the bu-
reaucracy in the capital, and thereafter there were periodic requests to list all those
who claimed foreign protection in the city, a boon to later historians.
The most probable reason why Aleppo was singled out, however, lay in the sim-
mering dispute between the merchants who had opted for the Uniate communion
with Rome and the clergy of the churches in which they had been baptized. The
leadership of the traditional Eastern rite churches in Aleppo viewed the defection
of their communicants to the church of the Franks with an alarm comparable to
that felt by the sultan at their renunciation of his suzerainty. In both cases the re-
sult was a reduction in revenue. For the clergy, it meant forcing an even greater
burden onto the shoulders of those who remained steadfast in their allegiance to
the Eastern churches to make up for the loss of those who had strayed into error
and chose not to contribute to the taxes that were levied on the community at
large. This affliction was made all the worse by the fact that it was the wealthy
merchants who opted for allegiance to the pope in Rome, while the poor held to
the old dispensations. In Aleppo, sectarian animosities had strong economic sub-
texts, and it was the equitable burden sharing of taxes rather than the doctrinal
question of pope or patriarch that informed the debate. As such, it was most often
representatives of the established churches who drew the Porte's attention to the
abuse of the protCgC system, and their steady stream of appeals caused Aleppo to
be singled out for special attenti~n.~'
The response of Istanbul to such petitions was to restate the limits that had been
imposed on the number of persons a consul could legally employ. Thus, a directive
to the authorities in Aleppo in July 1794 asserted that the French consul could only
employ four persons as dragomans and eight as servants and that the registration of
anyone else would constitute a violation of the treaty between France and the
P ~ r t e . 'Such
~ reaffirmations of policy were accompanied by orders prohibiting the
dragomans from engaging in commerce. Nevertheless, the practice of consular em-
ployees moonlighting as merchants continued, leading the Ottomans to insist on a
clause in the capitulatory treaty with Great Britain drawn up on 5 January 1809 that
would bar dragomans from trade.39London refused to ratify the treaty and the for-
eign powers resisted any further attempts by the Ottoman authorities to interfere
with their employees' off-duty hours. It was in the face of such entrenched opposi-
tion that the Ottomans created their alternative merchant organization.
Despite their past record, the non-Muslim merchants of Aleppo looked with fa-
vor on the opportunity to enroll as Avrupa tuccarzs. In the first place, having come
under the close scrutiny of the Porte, it was harder for them to gain the bogus pro-
tection of a foreign power and still engage in trade. Secondly, by the end of the
18th century, several of the prominent trading families who had enjoyed foreign
588 Bruce Masters

protection-the houses of 'A'ida, Ghadban, and Hawwa-had family members

living in Istanbul. There had been attempts to gain consular protection for at least
some of them, but the Ottoman state had held firm in refusing to recognize their
status as translators outside of A l e p p ~ . ~These
O individuals were, therefore, willing
to embrace an alternative status that would enable them to maintain the favorable
trading privileges to which they had become accustomed. Supporting this interpre-
tation, once the institution was established no less than six Christian Aleppines
residing in the capital signed on. Later, those same individuals expanded the net-
work back to their hometown through the designation of relatives as their agents
there.
The changing economic position of Aleppo in the Ottoman Empire provided an
incentive beyond that of foreign protection to the city's merchants to enroll.
Aleppo had earlier served as a major commercial entrep6t for trade between Eu-
rope and the Middle East, but by the start of the 19th century that trade had dwin-
dled to a trickle. The Europeans had departed the city, and locals who were their
agents now acted as independent merchants. Their trade was largely domestic, so
the lower internal taxes promised to the Avrupa tuccarls were an advantage. For
non-Muslim merchants in Aleppo, the gain was potentially greater than being a
protCgC had been, and that advantage was made all the more attractive by the new
vigilance with which Ottoman authorities met claims of foreign protection.
In March of 1815, the chief qadi of Aleppo received orders from Istanbul estab-
lishing a half-dozen merchants in the city as Avrupa tuccans. At the same time, he
also received orders outlining the obligations (cizye) and benefits that the status
entailed. By 1818, sixty individuals had enrolled, giving Aleppo one of the high-
est per capita concentrations of favored merchants. Thereafter, very few signed
on; apparently all those with the inclination and the capital had signed on with
alacrity.
The ethnic composition of those who chose to become Avrupa tuccarls reflected
the proportional composition of Aleppo's non-Muslim population: forty-five
Christian Arabs, twelve Jews, and three Armenians. In this group, some families
were clearly more prominent than others. The Jewish family of Sithun (or Sittun)
held five berats, as did the Christian Arab family of Yusuf al-Himsi; another
Christian family named Ghazzala held four. Three other Christian families-Balit,
Dallal, and Kubba-held three apiece. The Aleppo Avrupa tuccarls were less
likely to choose agents from outside their own ethnic groups than were members
of the empire-wide sample. One Christian Arab had a Jewish agent, and one Jew-
ish merchant had two Christian agents, but the rest employed members of their
own community. Among the Christian Arabs, however, it was common to choose
agents from outside their immediate family. These examples may have repre-
sented potential marriage alliances, as we know from the city court records that
many of the agents eventually married daughters of the men they served. It is also
clear from the sectarian identifications that followed the mention of the Avrupa
tiiccarls in the court records that virtually all of the Christian Arab merchants
were communicants in the Uniate Greek Catholic church.
Unlike some of their number on the island of C y p r ~ s , the~ ' sultan's merchants in
Aleppo did not later seek protCgC status from the Western powers, despite the fail-
 The Sultan's Entrepreneurs 589

ure of Ottoman authorities to deliver all they had promised. The 1820s were diffi-
cult times for the empire, and the Greek insurrection forced the Porte to levy more
and more of the extraordinary taxes (avariz, tekdlif).42In Aleppo, they were col-
lected in 1824, 1825, 1826, 1828, and 1829.43In the last collection, registration
was made not only of the lump sums that had to be supplied by the trade guilds
and various minority religious communities, but also of amounts expected from
individual contributors, both Muslim and non-Muslim. This departure from tradi-
tional practice allows us to identify those individuals in the city that the authori-
ties considered the wealthiest. It also shows that most of the money levied on the
Christian communities was paid by the Avrupa tiiccarrs in contravention of their
patents. This fact was confirmed by orders from Istanbul in 1831, which stated
that all merchants holding imperial patents were exempt from the extraordinary

The willingness of the Avrupa tiiccarls to remain the sultan's men was tested
during the Egyptian occupation of Syria, between 1831 and 1840, when in the ab-
sence of Ottoman authority many Aleppines were able to attach themselves to the
various European powers as protCgCs. With the return of Ottoman control, the au-
thorities sought to reverse their defection. In 1845, a census was ordered of all
those claiming foreign protection but whom the state considered in arrears of their
cizye payments. The total came to 271. While a number of these were identified as
being merchants, only one, Yusuf Fath-Allah Kubba, was an Avrupa t i i c ~ a r z In.~~
Aleppo, at least, the leading minority merchants had been enrolled in the program
and chose to stick with it even when they had occasions to stray. State policy had
scored a moderate success.
The leading Muslim merchants of the city embraced the opportunity to become
the sultan's merchants as eagerly as did their non-Muslim compatriots. The order
establishing the hayriye tiiccarrs reached Aleppo in February 1830," and within
two years twenty-six individuals had enrolled. There was a hiatus in the program
during the Egyptian occupation; but with the return of Ottoman control over the
city, Muslim merchants again sought the patents that would establish them as im-
perial merchants, until at least 1852 when the last surviving patent was registered.
From the family names of those whose berats have survived (forty-four in all), the
hayriye tiiccarzs in Aleppo were from respectable, often sharif, families, but very
few came from the politically dominant acydn clans. Wealth in Aleppo's Muslim
families was more typically concentrated in property, tax-farming, and govern-
ment office than in trade. Support for this assertion is found in the registry of the
tek6lifpayments of 1829. There, nine Muslims were assessed at rates over 2,000
ghuriish. Of these, none ever became hayriye tiiccar~s,but of those who were as-
sessed at rates between 1,500 and 2,000 ghuriish, seven of the twelve later went
on to enroll in the program. The Muslim merchants were both prominent and
wealthy, but they did not enjoy the same political and economic clout in the Mus-
lim sectors of the city as the Avrupa tiiccarrs did in the non-Muslim communities.
How wealthy both the Avrupa tiiccarrs and the hayriye tiiccarls of Aleppo were
and what role they played in the overall commercial life of the city are difficult to
ascertain. A few extant customs registers from the period and some remaining es-
tates registry for Muslim merchants in the qadi court records of the city are the
590 Bruce Masters

only evidence we have. The estates registry of Avrupa tiiccarts were kept sepa-
rately by their vekils and have not survived.47With such crucial gaps in the archi-
val materials, much of what can be said has to be extracted from sparse anecdotal
evidence.
One such source is the report on the commercial statistics of Syria presented to
Parliament in 1840 by John Bowring. In this often cited work, Bowring stated that
there were thirty Christian merchant houses in Aleppo that traded with Europe, of
which seven had capital exceeding a million piasters (ghuriish), and that the
wealthiest merchant in the city was Fathalla Cubbe (Fath-Allah Kubba) who re-
putedly possessed 3 to 4 million piasters (£30,000-£40,000 sterling). Of ten Jew-
ish merchant houses, the wealthiest possessed capital of one million piasters. Of
the nearly seventy Muslim trading houses that did business with Europe, he iden-
tified Agi Wosa Muaket (al-Sayyid al-Hajj Muhammad Wafa' Muwaqqatzadah) as
the wealthiest, with capital assets of 1,300,000 to 1,400,000 piasters.48
These remarks are supported by local evidence. Al-Sayyid al-Hajj Muhammad
Wafa' was undoubtedly one of the most prominent Muslim merchants in the city.
In 1841, he was appointed representative of the hayriye tiiccar~sin Aleppo and
served in that post, later renamed ~ e h b e n d e r until
, his death in 1848.49 However,
in a case involving the settlement of his estate, it was determined that at the time
of his death he only left 93,045 ghuriish, far below what Bowring had estimated
his net worth to be. But as the surviving document is not an estate inventory, this
sum of money constituted cash on hand and not real estate or outstanding loans
owed the estate. Undoubtedly his total worth was much higher. An indication that
during this period Muslim merchants were, in fact, actively trading with Europe,
as Bowring suggested, is found in an estate inventory of a certain al-Shaykh 'Ali
ibn al-Hajj 'Abd al-Qadir Celebi Birizadah registered in 1836. This document
mentions that the deceased and several partners-all Muslims except for Yusuf
Kabbaba, an Avrupa tiiccar~-had invested 364,375 ghuriish in a joint venture to
Europe that returned a total profit of 128,306 g h ~ r i i s h . ~ ~
The commercial activity of the various sectors of the Aleppo merchant commu-
nity is found in a detailed customs register that encompasses six months of 1841,
when a total of 1,163,628 ghuriish were assessed on the merchants by the customs
authorities. Of the total, 267,942 ghuriish were assessed on fifteen individuals,
whose taxes ranged from 34,641 to 8,629 ghuriish. These fifteen men clearly dom-
inated the import-export trade of Aleppo at this time. The top eight were all
foreign-passport holders, including one former Avrupa tuccarz, Michel Himsi,
who had legally obtained a French passport. The ninth in the list was Fath-Allah
Kubba (15,561 ghuriish) and four other Avrupa tuccarrs followed him. In terms of
the value assessed on their merchandise, only two Muslims-Muhammad Baz-
arbashizadah and Muhammad Wafa' Muwaqqatzadah, both hayriye tiiccar~s-
were among the top fifteen merchants, and they were at the bottom of the list.*'
Less detailed fragments from 185 1 and 1852 provide similar results; the sultan's
entrepreneurs, both Muslim and non-Muslim, were active participants in Aleppo's
trade but their participation was dwarfed by Europeans-Englishmen, Frenchmen,
and Italians-and by Sephardic Jews whose families were longtime residents of
Aleppo but carried European passports.
 The Sultan's Entrepreneurs 59 1

In Aleppo, the sultans' policy designed to prevent local minority merchants

from seeking foreign protection had worked. The organizations created by the
Porte also gave voice to the political and economic demands of the mer-
c h a n t ~ . ~Frequent
' examples of political cooperation between the Muslim and non-
Muslim merchants, as well as the numerous cases of commercial partnership
across sectarian lines, seems to undercut the assertion that commercial competi-
tion between Muslims and Christians led to sectarian violence in 19th-century
Syria.53 In Aleppo, this was clearly not the case. Individual Muslims and non-
Muslims prospered from the advantages the system provided. At the end of the
century, the Kabbabas and the Hawwas, two families who had origins in Aleppo
and members enrolled as Avrupa tuccarts, had even managed to establish firms in
Britain.54 But while the opportunities afforded by the imperial patents may have
served to consolidate the commercial bourgeoisie in Aleppo, the policy did little
to counter the overwhelming Western advantage in Aleppo's international trade, if
that had ever been one of the sultan's goals.
Both programs had initial success in Aleppo, but failed in Damascus and Beirut,
Syria's other major trading cities. Damascus had been removed from any direct
trading relationship with Europe throughout most of the Ottoman period. As a re-
sult of its trading orientation being to the east and south, rather than to the west,
the city's Christians remained for the most part outside of its interregional trade.
In their absence, it was dominated by Muslims and Jews-many from Baghdad,
with which Damascus had extensive trading relations. Without foreign consuls,
the problem of protCgCs had not existed. When in 1825 the Porte extended to the
merchants of Damascus the opportunity to become Avrupa tuccar~s,very few re-
sponded. In 1830, those who had enrolled were reminded that they had to choose
two vekils whose names should be forwarded to the Porte immediately, and only
then did they comply.s5 By the time of the Egyptian occupation only eleven indi-
viduals had enrolled. A similar reaction greeted the institution of the hayriye tuc-
c a n , to which only thirteen Muslim merchants subscribed, two of whom had first
enrolled in Aleppo and then moved their operations to Damascus.
The composition of the two groups was also very different from what it was in
Aleppo. Among the Avrupa tuccarts, all but one, Hanna 'Anhuri, were Jews and at
least four were not originally Damascene. The hayriye tuccarzs in Damascus were
not from prominent families; their surnames indicate that either they or their fa-
thers had been tradesmen. Bowring said that the Jews were the wealthiest mer-
chants in Damascus in 1840, followed by Muslims, with the Christians holding a
weak third place. With the exception of 'Anhuri, whom Bowring claimed was the
leading Christian merchant in the city, neither the prominent Jewish nor Muslim
merchants he mentions by name had apparently considered it advantageous to ob-
tain one of the sultan's patents.56 Instead, it was the middle level of the merchant
community, both Muslim and non-Muslim, who opted for enrollment.
A plausible explanation for the reluctance of rich merchants to join up lies in
the nature of Ottoman authority in Damascus and in its changing trading relation-
ships with Europe. For the first four decades of the 19th century, Ottoman control
over the city was tenuous. Attempts at modernization and centralization in the
center had little effect on the periphery. The boom in trade between Europe and
592 Bruce Masters

the coastal regions of Palestine and Mount Lebanon led to the growth in size and
importance of Beirut, a city with little, if any, Ottoman state traditions.j7 As a re-
sult, just as the Ottomans were trying to stop the abuse of the protCgC system in
Aleppo, the system was replicating itself in Beirut and, to lesser extent, in Damas-
cus, which had been drawn into Beirut's commercial orbit. Both the growth in
trade and the multiplication of the number of protCgCs occurred during the Egyp-
tian occupation, when the Ottomans were in no position to implement their poli-
cies. The protCgC system generally favored Christians over Jews and excluded
mu slim^.^^ This may account for the almost total lack of Christians seeking to be
Avrupa tiiccarls in Damascus, an explanation bolstered by frequent complaints to
the Porte by the French consul in Damascus on behalf of merchants with Christian
Arab names.59
The local merchants of Beirut were even less eager to seek the status of Avrupa
tiiccarl than were their counterparts in Damascus. Only one individual, Niqula
Mudawwar, even applied. He received his berat in 1851 and was promptly ap-
pointed vekil for Beirut. In 1856, he still held that post, despite the rule that a new
vekil had to be chosen every year and Istanbul's apparent distress that his longev-
ity in office might lead to c o r r u p t i ~ nThere
. ~ ~ was apparently no one else for the
job. The only other son of a prominent Beiruti commercial family to join was
Lutf-Allah Sarsuq, who enrolled as Avrupa tiiccart in 1848 in the town of
Mersin.'jl As Fawaz showed, both the Mudawwars and Sarsuqs were extremely
adept at taking any opportunity for advancement. Their willingness to register as
the sultan's merchants does not necessarily indicate any deep loyalty to the House
of Osman, as other members of the two families were quick to acquire European
protection when opportunities presented t h e m s e l v e ~ For
. ~ ~ most of Beirut's Chris-
tian merchants, foreign protection, not enfranchisement by the state, provided the
best option for financial success. This was noted by Bowring who added that the
almost universal protCgC status enjoyed by the local merchants in Beirut made it
difficult for the British merchants to pursue local legal channels for commercial
litigati~n.~~
Christian merchants of Beirut and Damascus, therefore, had opportunities that
lessened the attraction of becoming Avrupa tiiccarts; it is not so easy to explain
why Muslim merchants failed to become hayriye tiiccarls. Only three berats for
Muslim merchants in Beirut-those for Hajj Ahmad 'Iraysizadah, al-Sayyid Hajj
Khalil Barbirzadah, and Ibrahim 'Afarazadah-survive. Undoubtedly others may
have been issued but, as in the case of Damascus, it would seem that the institu-
tion in Beirut was simply an Ottoman bureaucratic measure and had little impact
either on the individuals who joined or the larger commercial and political life of
the city.
The merchants of Damascus and Beirut failed to avail themselves of the oppor-
tunity to become the sultan's merchants, because it came too late to be of much
value. Both institutions followed the old Ottoman practice of rewarding specific
classes of people with tax exemptions in return for benefits which they in turn
would provide to the state. In some cases, as apparently that of the Avrupa tiic-
c a n s , it was simply a way of buying loyalty. All this changed under the dispensa-
tion of the Tanzimat (1839-76). Faced with pressure from Britain, the sultans
 The Sultan's Entrepreneurs 593

relinquished practical control of the state to Westem-oriented bureaucrats. If the

empire was to survive, it needed British help, and that was conditional on the re-
forms London suggested. In 1838 came the Anglo-Ottoman trade agreement,
which made the Ottoman Empire the most extreme instance of a free-trade regime
in the world. This reduced any advantage that the sultan's merchants enjoyed over
their European competition.
For the merchants of Beirut and Damascus, the Egyptian occupation had been
decisive. By the time Ottoman rule was reestablished, becoming either an Avrupa
tiiccar~or a hayriye tiiccart was no longer a relevant option. A similar pattern
seems to have held in Baghdad and southern Iraq where direct Ottoman control
was minimal. Despite some interest in the program upon its extension to Baghdad
in 1815, the leading Jewish merchants opted for British protection almost to a
man.64 Those who did enroll from what would become Iraq (Mosul and Baghdad)
seem to have been engaged primarily in the internal trade of the empire and there-
fore benefited from the lower internal taxes offered by the program.
Changes in the Ottoman legal system during the Tanzimat rendered the privi-
leges of the Avrupa tiiccar~sand hayriye tiiccar~smeaningless. Pressure from Brit-
ain to "modernize" its institutions led the Ottoman state to establish a commercial
court in Istanbul in 1846, and it began functioning in 1848. In 1850, a new com-
mercial code was published, and this was reissued in 1862.65Starting in 1850, the
commercial courts were established in all the major cities of the empire, but at an
uneven rate. A court was established in Aleppo in 1850,66and further orders were
issued in 1852 outlining the code that the court should implement and specifying
that the members were to be paid a salary by the state.'j7 There seems to have been
some difficulty, however, in its start up; the British consul in the city reported as
late as 1860 that the court still was not functioning despite repeated orders that it
be instituted. He described the court as "a commercial court of Mussulmans, Chris-
tians, Jewish, and European merchants, to be guided by the laws and usage of
trade, without reference to Mussulman law."6s Shortly thereafter, however, the
court seems to have begun operation; there are references to it in the qadi court
records of the city, and commercial litigation largely vanished from the Islamic
court registers. Unfortunately none of its records seem to have survived. With the
standardization of the commercial legal system, all benefits to the sultan's mer-
chants in the form of special representation at the Porte disappeared and along with
them all distinction that status had offered them over nonregistered merchants.
According to a note at the end of the Bagbakanlik Argivi register MM 21 192,
dated June 1861, a new document was being drawn up in which merchants re-
cently enrolled were to be listed. If indeed it was ever started, this register proba-
bly did not have many more entries. There were no new enrollments for either
program after that date in Aleppo. By 1864, individuals who had patents under
either program were no longer being referred to as such in the court records, in
contrast to a few years earlier when that status was noted every time they ap-
peared at court. Both institutions, like so many before them in Ottoman history,
were never formally abolished, but simply allowed to disappear into obscurity.
The abuse of the protCgC system continued, largely because the Ottoman regime
was powerless to stop it. As new nations were granted diplomatic privileges in the
594 Bruce Masters

Ottoman Empire, the number of bogus foreign nationals increased exponentially.

In an 1859 register of individuals holding foreign protection in Aleppo, Iran was
the leading provider of berats, with forty-nine subjects in the city. While many of
these are described as Acemi (Persian), others were not, and the presence of obvi-
ous Christian Arab names hints that the old pattern was being repeated.69 Simi-
larly, despite the injunction that Iranian consuls actually be Iranians, there were
many individuals bearing distinctly Christian Arab names in the shah's service, an
indication that the policy was not being enforced.70

CONCLUSION

We do not know for certain whether the framers of the Avrupa tiiccar~program in-
tended to restructure the economy of the empire, but economic results doubtlessly
occurred. The trend toward non-Muslim dominance in the empire's commercial
life had already been established with the shift in reliance on Western rather than
Eastern trade in the 18th century. Yet the advantage of being an Avrupa tiiccarl in
the crucial early decades of the 19th century accelerated the emergence of a non-
Muslim entrepreneurial class in places where there had been none before, as in the
hinterlands of the Balkans and central Anatolia. This class might have emerged
anyway, but the program clearly aided the process. All the evidence is still not in,
but it would seem that the formation of the institution of the hayriye tiiccar~had
little or no impact on the creation of a Muslim entrepreneurial class. Not until the
period of the Young Turks (1908-18) did the Ottoman state awaken to the prob-
lem of low Muslim participation in the empire's commercial sector. By then the
communal ruptures had already occurred, and most of the minority merchant com-
munities viewed the state as the enemy."
But to point to the proliferation of protCgCs and the weakness of the Muslim
commercial sector as indications of a total failure in Ottoman policy is perhaps
due to our tendency to expect too much of policy framers. Classically, Ottoman
public policy was formulated only in response to pressing problems and was
rarely either preemptive or based on long-term strategy. It can be suggested that
the institution of Avrupa tiiccar~shad a similarly limited object, namely to reverse
the defection of prominent non-Muslim merchants and moneylenders to the ranks
of the protCgCs. As the case of Aleppo shows, the government had some success.
But at the same time, while the bureaucrats focused their attention on cities where
abuses of the system were traditional, the process replicated itself in cities such as
Damascus and Beirut, which previously had not been involved to any large degree
with European trade. In traditional Ottoman terms, the program had succeeded,
but the band-aid approach to problems could no longer keep the empire together.

NOTES

Author's note: The research for this article was conducted with the support of an Islamic Civilization
research grant provided by the Fulbright Program. I would also like to thank the staff of the Bagba-
kanlik Araivi in Istanbul and that of the Syrian National Archives in Damascus for their help and
assistance.
 The Sultan's Entrepreneurs 595

' ~ r u c eMasters, The Origins of Western Economic Dominance in the Middle East: Mercantilism
and the Islamic Economy in Aleppo, 1600-1 750 (New York: New York University Press, 1988). 186-
213.
his is a subject that could use a modern study. For the basic research, see Nasim Sousa, The Ca-
pirularory Regime of Turkey: Its History, Origins and Nature (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity Press, 1933). See also Peter Sugar, "Economic and Political Modernization: B. Turkey," in
Political Modernization in Japan and Turkey, ed. Robert Ward and Dankwart Rustow (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1964). 154-55; Stanford Shaw, Between Old and New (Cambridge: Har-
vard University Press, 1971). 177-79.
o or a discussion of the problem see Ihsan Ali Bagq, Osmanlr Ticaretinde Gayri Miislimler (An-
kara: Turhan Kitabevi, 1983). 39-70.
4~stanbul,Bagbakanl~kArgivi (hereafter BBA), Cevdet Maliye 4332, Cemaziyevvel 1217lSeptem-
her 1803; Cevdet Maliye 18893, Muharrem 1222lMarch 1807.
5 ~ v r u p atiiccarr, literally "Europe's merchant," was an Ottoman abbreviated form of the official
title, Avrupa ve Hindistan ve Acem tiiccarr (Europe, India, and Iran's merchant) while the term hayriye
tiiccarr (merchant of goodness) was derived from the Ottoman phrase ehl-i hayr, people of goodness,
that is, Muslims. 1 use an English plural of both terms rather than the Ottoman plural tiiccarlarr.
6 ~ e r n a r dLewis, "Beratli," Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2d ed. (EI 2); Thomas Naff, "Ottoman Diplo-
matic Relations with Europe in the Eighteenth Century: Patterns and Trends," in Studies in Eighteenth
Century Islamic History, ed. Thomas Naff and Roger Owen (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University
Press, 1977). 103.
7 ~ h e sw e ere more often obtained from nations newly established in the Levant, rather than from the
historic regional powers, Britain and France; see Regat Kasaba, The Ottoman Empire and the World
Economy: The Nineteenth Century (Albany: State University of New York, 1988). 71. The United
States, for example, was said to have had 70,000 of its citizens resident in the empire by the time of the
First World War. Giilnihll Bozkurt, Gayrimiislim Osmanlr Vatanda~larrnrnHukuki Durumu (Ankara:
Turk Tarihi Kurumu Bas~mevi,1989), 152.
' ~ u o t e d in Charles Issawi, The Economic History of Turkey, 1800-1914 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1980), 9 1 .
bid., 104-6.
'O~ozkurt, Gayrimiislim Osmanlr Vatanda~larrn~n Hukuki Durumu, 142; Miibahat Kiitiikoglu,
~smanlr-ingilizikriscidi Miincisebetleri, 1. (1580-1838) (Ankara: Turk Kultiirunii A r a ~ t ~ r mEnstitiisu,
a
1974). 73.
" B a g l ~ ,Osmanll Ticaretinde Gayri Miislimler, 92. The orders establishing the institution in Aleppo
were dated 15 Safer 1230128 January 1815, Syrian National Archives, Damascus, series AleppolAwa-
mir al-Sultgniyya (henceforth Aleppo AS), 36:50-52.
"BBA, Kepici, Cizye Miihasebesi Defteri 3838. I was unable to see this particular register and am
relying on the abstract presented in Baglg, Osmanlr Ticaretinde Gayri Miislimler, 129-41.
"BBA, Cevdet Maliye 27501.
1 4 ~Maliyeden ~ ~ ,Mudevver (henceforth MM) 21 192, Miisvedde-i Riisum-u Berevat.
I 5 ~ example
n of the patents establishing an Avrupa tiiccarr was published in Documents turcs pour
l'histoire macedonienne, vol. 5 (Skopje: Institut de I'Histoire Nationale, 1958), 164-67. 1 thank Alek-
sander FotiC for the citation. The conditions of the patents are also discussed by Kutukoglu, Osmanli-
tngiliz iktiscidi Miinirsebetleri, 73; Musa Cadlrc~,"11. Mahmut Doneminde (1808-1839) Avrupa Ve
Hayriye Tiiccarlar~,"in Social and Economic History of Turkey (1071-1920). ed. Osman Okyar and
Halil Inalcik (Ankara: Meteksan Limited Sirketi, 1980), 237-41.
I6carter Findley, Bureaucratic Reform in the Ottoman Empire: The Sublime Porte, 1789-1922
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980). 24.
I 7 ~ h term
e used in these documents was hizmetkcir, which is usually translated as "servant," but it is
clear from the description of the duties involved with the position that "agent" is a more appropriate
translation.
"see for example, BBA, Ecnebi Defter 106, doc. 117:50-51 (dated Evail-i Zilkade 1254lJanuary
1839). in which an Avrupa tiiccarr named Yusuf Veled Nasri applied to replace the lost firman of his
agent Antepli Minas. The document was issued, but only after records for both the merchant and his
agent were consulted and noted, and affidavits supporting the merchant's story were collected.
596 Bruce Masters

I 9 B B ~Ecnebi
, Defter 106, doc. 14, evasit Rebiyelevvel 1251lJuly 1835.
'O~ohn Barker, the British consul in Aleppo, had a different view. He saw the creation of imperially
sponsored merchants as an attempt by the Porte to divert to the imperial coffers the large fees minority
merchants were paying the European consuls for their berats. Syria and Egypt Under the Last Five Sul-
tans of Turkey, ed. Edward Barker (London: Samuel Tinsley, 1876), 1:45-47.
here are many such cases recorded. See for example BBA, Cevdet Iktisidi 1152, dated 7 Ce-
maziyelah~r1232125 May 1817 on an overcharge on goods sent between Aleppo and Baghdad; Ecnebi
Defter 106, docs. 100 and 127, for overcharges in Volos and Diyarbeklr, respectively.
22$evket Pamuk, The Ottoman Empire and European Capitalism, 1820-1913 (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1987), 29.
2 3 ~MM ~ 21~ 192:10.
, A copy of a patent issued in September 1839 and recorded in the same reg-
ister had repeated the same formula that only a tax of 3 percent could be collected on imports or ex-
ports and all other imports by whatever name were strictly illegal.
2 4 ~ l e p p oAS , 45:13, dated Giirre Zilkada 1243115 May 1828.

2%ee, for example, BBA, Cevdet Maliye 3530, 28 Cemaziyelah~r1237122 March 1822.

2 6 ~ h a r l eIsssawi, "British Trade and the Rise of Beirut, 1830-1860," International Journal of Mid-

dle East Studies 8 (1977): 91-101; A. Uner Turgay, "Trade and Merchants in Nineteenth-Century Tra-
bzon: Elements of Ethnic Conflict," in Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire, ed. Benjamin
Braude and Bernard Lewis (New York; Holmes & Meier, 1982), 1:287-318.
2 7 ~MM~ 21192:150, ~ , 156.

2 8 ~ i i t i i k o g l~smanlr-tngiliz
~,
tktiscidi Miincisebetleri, 7 1.

2 9 ~Sehbender ~ ~ ,registers.
Findley, Bureaucratic Reform in the Ottoman Empire, 128-29.

3 0 ~ a d ~ r"Avrupac ~ ,
Ve Hayriye Tiiccarlar~,"239; Mehmet Zeki Pakal~n,Osmanlr Deyimleri ve Ter-
imleri (Istanbul: Milli E g ~ t ~Bas~mevi, m 1946), 1:782; this condition was listed in each individual's be-
rat, for example. that establishing Rakabizadah al-Sayyid Muhammad Celebi in 1830; Aleppo AS
45:236.
3 1 ~ l e p p oAS , 47:64.
3 2 ~ e efor, example, the berat establishing Hajj Ahmad walad CAbdullah; Aleppo AS 50:62-63.
3 3 ~ a s t e r sOrigins
, of Western Economic Dominance, 93-99.
3 4 ~ e c d eKurdakul,
t Osmanlr Devleti'inde Ticaret Antla~malarrve Kapitiilasyonlar (Istanbul: Doler
Negriyat, 1981), 107-21, for text of the agreement.
3 5 ~ ~ mal-Ghazzi,
il Nahr al-dhahab fi ta3rikh Halab (Aleppo: Matbacah al-Kathulikiyya, 1923-26),
3:311. Inalcik has traced the source of this to the histories written by Cevdet Paga and Mustafa Kesbi.
Halil Inalcik, "Imtiyazat," EI 2.
3 6 ~ e for
e example the list from 1793, reproduced by Baglg, Osmanlr Ticaretinde Gayri Miislimler,
11 1-15, which gives eighty-four names.
3 7 ~ m o nothersg Aleppo Court Records, 45:75, 85:131-32; 87:216-17; Aleppo AS 4253-54. Typi-
cal government responses are preserved in BBA, Cevdet Maliye, nos. 4332 and 18893.
3 8 ~ Cevdet ~ ~ Hariciye,
, 2514.

3 9 ~ a g ~Osmanlz
g,
Ticaretinde Gayri Miislimler, 84.

401bid., 85-86.

4 1 ~Cevdet ~ ~Hariciye,
2784.
4 2 ~ ann order issued in 1828, calling for more taxes to be levied in Aleppo, it was stated that the state
of lawlessness that prevailed in Rumeli and the attacks upon the empire by Russia, Britain, and France
required it. Aleppo AS 4 5 5 .
43~leppA o S 39:93 and 145; AS 43:21; AS 45:4, 134-37.
4 4 47:122.
~ ~

4 5 ~Maliye ~ ~Nezarati ,
Varidat (ML.VRD.) 1206.

46~leppA o S 45:2 10.

4 7 ~ learne
this in testimony given to the qadi by one of the vekils. Aleppo AS 47:9.
48~ohnBowring, Report on the Commercial Statistics of Syria (reprinted New York: Arno Press,
1973), 80.
4 9 ~ l e p p oAS 50:71; AS 54:38-39.
"Aleppo, Court Records 236, 103.
"BBA, ML.VRD. 399.
 The Sultan's Entrepreneurs 597

5 2 ~ l e p pAo S 42:28; AS 44:128; AS 46:91-92; AS 47:21.

" ~ a r u k Tabak, "Local Merchants in Peripheral Areas of the Empire: The Fertile Crescent during the
Long Nineteenth Century," Review 11 (1988): 178-214.
54~ssawi,"British Trade and the Rise of Beirut, 1830-1860," 98.
"Damascus AS 2: 120, 124.
"Bowring, Commercial Statistics of Syria, 91.
" ~ e i l a Fawaz tells this story in Merchants and Migrants in Nineteenth Century Beirut (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1983).
h he exclusion of Muslims was not universal. In the listing of illegal protCgCs drawn up in Aleppo
in 1845, one Muslim merchant was identified as having Sardinian protection and another enjoyed that
of the Netherlands.
5 y ~Ecnebi ~ ~Defter
, 32:49, 77, 84.

6 0 ~MM ~ 21~192:57;
,
Ecnebi Defter 106: 107, 110, 116.

6 1 ~MM~ 21~192:35. ,

6 2 ~ a w a zMerchants
, and Migrants, 91-94.
h 3 ~ o w r i n gCommercial
, Statistics of Syria, 56.
"Issawi, Fertile Crescent, 1800-1914, 269-70, 273.
6%ozkurt, Gayrimiislim Osmanlr Vatanda~larrnrnHukuki Durumu, 1 13.
h 6 ~ o n d o nFO, 861:82. Correspondence from Consul Werry to Ambassador Canning, 2 February
1850.
h 7 ~Irade ~ Meclis-i
~ , Vald 10164.
6 8 ~ o n s uSkene
l to Sir H. Bulwer, 4 August 1860, contained in Bill1 Simgir, British Documents on
Ottoman Armenians (Ankara: Tiirk Tarih Kummu Bas~mevi,1982). 1 :29-39.
6 Y ~Kamil ~ Kepeci
~ , Miihtelif 135, Genel S a y ~ 852.
s~

7 0 ~Ecnebi ~ ~Defter
,
43:451doc. 142, 481154, 511161, 591151, 761253.
7 1 ~ oar stimulating discussion of this disjuncture, see Feroz Ahmad, "Vanguard of a Nascent Bour-
geoisie: The Social and Economic Policy of the Young Turks 1908-1918," in Social and Economic
History of Turkey (1071-1920), ed. Osman Okyar and Halil Inalcik.