The Ottoman Salt Administration

Abstract

From Europe’s greatest aristocratic monarchy we pass to its long time enemy, Islam’s greatest meritocratic monarchy. In the period when the salt administration was of greatest significance to it, however, the Ottoman state was a friend of the Habsburg empire and from Islamic was becoming first dynastic and then Turkish nationalist. In this chapter we make three further transpositions. First, we leave Europe, though for much of its history the Ottoman empire was more a Balkan than an Anatolian state. Second, we enter modern times, for our focus will be the last period of Ottoman history, 1881–1923, where it was the first period of Habsburg. Third, we move into the world of imperialism, the European-centred world order, and its role in modernization. For the salt administration with which we shall be concerned functioned under the Ottoman public debt administration, a typical synarchic institution characteristic of that world order.¹ These transpositions will be maintained in the subsequent chapters on the Indian salt administration under the raj and the Chinese salt administration under the late empire and early republic. Salt administrations, we have argued, are characteristic of the beginning or end of states.