Did Venetian and other Western traders' modus operandi from the 15th century onwards cause the decline and fall of the Ottoman Empire?

by jonquiz

Recently, I watched CaspianReport’s analysis “Decline of the Ottoman Empire” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-SUlb4rwls). In it, Mr. Shirvan Neftchi outlines a very straightforward and seemingly very logical main reason for the decline. I have summarised his main points below:

  1. 15th century: Venetian traders start buying all kinds of raw materials all over the Ottoman Empire and exporting them; 17th century: French, English, German, Dutch traders are also buying raw materials with the gold of the Americas - always able to outbid local Ottoman traders

  2. Result: Ottoman guilds, which are regulated by the state, lose their productivity

  3. Reaction: State bans Europeans from buying strategic raw materials

  4. Result: A black market emerges and corruption spreads among officials

  5. New rich class of bribe-taking entrepreneurs emerges, who buy imported luxury consumer goods

  6. Result: Ottomans are consuming much more than they are producing

  7. Resulting inflation affects actors with fixed-income the worst - who are precisely the officials

  8. Reaction: Countermeasure of state is to raise salaries of these officials - in order to do this, it needs to mint more money, by which it aggravates the inflation even more

  9. Parallel development: Janissaries gradually become aristocrats - promotion no longer depended on actual skills and merit

  10. End result: The resulting complex web of corrupt bureaucrats and black-market entrepreneurs has a major adverse influence on the Ottoman Empire, decisively contributing to its decline

After watching this analysis, I was struck by how self-explanatory it all seemed and had a tidy little “Aha” moment of enlightenment. I also wondered why nobody ever bothered to explain this to me at school, because if true, I consider it to be a quite a revelation - a chain of causes and results that would serve to expand one’s grasp of the dynamics of history.

In any case, I tried to find more detailed background information related to CaspianReport’s claims online - but couldn’t. What I swiftly found was this, for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_the_fall_of_the_Ottoman_Empire. I am almost completely ignorant on the topic, but gather that there are many conflicting theories and by all means no easy explanation.

Could you please help me understand this better by addressing the following questions:

  1. Is there enough truth in Mr. Neftchi’s reasoning outlined above that would render it at least partially valid and worth mentioning in historic sources? If yes, are there any such sources?

  2. Even if your answer to the first question is negative, and if at all possible, could you please consider this as a hypothetical situation and tell me: How should the Ottoman Empire have handled the issue in order to avoid the resulting far-reaching detrimental consequences? (Should you consider this to be more of a r/HistoryWhatIf part of the question, please just ignore it.)

Much obliged for your thoughts, fellow Redditors! :)

CptBuck

With the preface that I'm not an Ottomanist, and many of these points are comparative with European history, and as a result this is not a specialty of mine:

This video is a whole lot of bad history.

Historians have basically rejected the notion of an "Ottoman decline thesis" like the one proposed in this video for most of the past century. If we are to accept the timeline posited above, then we end up with the bizarre result that the Ottomans were already "declining" at the time of their greatest expansion, and that their fall 300 years later as a result of the First World War was somehow pre-ordained by trade dynamics already in place in by the 1500s. In other words, an empire that's "declining" for 500 years and that still controlled virtually the entire Middle East immediately before its dissolution at the hands of outside forces seems to actually have been doing pretty well and was otherwise in no imminent danger of this "decline" becoming a fall.

As to the specific points:

French, English, German, Dutch traders are also buying raw materials with the gold of the Americas - always able to outbid local Ottoman traders

I wrote the part that follows from reading your comment as opposed to listening to the video, and so I assumed that you meant that these European traders were bypassing/outbidding Ottoman traders along the silk route, which has merit. The video is dumber than that, and seems to be suggesting the European traders, who somehow had access at an individual level to the gold of the New World, were able to engage in and win a bidding war for Ottoman raw materials in a way that was somehow detrimental to the Ottomans overall? No explanation is given as to why such a thing would be detrimental, or why it was worse than Venetian traders, or the fact that, no, domestic Ottoman merchants did just fine. He also mentions "oil" as one such product, I assume he means olive oil? I really, really, hope he doesn't mean petroleum.

Anyways, for an explanation of how western Europeans actually came to dominate the Asian trade:

The new world gold and silver trade certainly was important for the development of trade between Western Europe and Asia where the luxury goods of the silk road were produced, but this is a very odd list of countries to put together for these purposes. Neither the Dutch nor any of the German states had particularly extensive colonies in the New World, nor were they major producers of gold or silver compared with the Spanish and Portuguese colonies. The explosion of Dutch wealth was predicated on their domination of the Baltic grain trade and facilitated a massive growth in domestic textile production. Remarkably, in 1670, the Dutch merchant fleet was larger than that of "France, Egnland, Scotland, the Holy Roman Empire, Spain and Portugal combined" (Blanning). This proved to be a flash in the pan based on a lack of foreign competition and the staggering levels of Dutch wealth in the 17th century soon declined, but were more than made up for in the growing wealth of French and especially British trade and industry, but which didn't especially pick up until the 18th century (we'll get into some of the timeline problems involved in the "decline thesis" later, but one of the issues is that failures in the 17th century are muddled with developments of the 18th in countries that had little to nothing to do with the Ottoman's immediate regional competitors, as though the industrial revolution in Britain somehow contributed to the powers of Russia.)

The inclusion of "German traders" here makes even less sense, as the German states were comparative backwaters in the period in question.

As a general point, the initial reason why gold and silver were necessary for Europeans to trade with Asia is because they essentially had nothing else of value to sell, with the result that Spanish treasure fleets that initially went east to the coffers of the Spanish government would eventually sail west to purchase luxury goods in China, Japan and the east Indies.

The result was that trade between Europe and Asia until the 18th century was valuable but quite minuscule, and it was the development of "triangle trading", particularly of opium, tea, cotton and textiles between Europe, India and China that led to the explosion in direct trade between Asia and Western Europe.

On the development of the trade and the growth of wealth and industry in Western Europe I would read Tim Blanning's Pursuit of Glory. On trade patterns I would read John Darwin's After Tamerlane.

Result: Ottoman guilds, which are regulated by the state, lose their productivity

As best as I can tell, this is a non-sequitur. What do the prospects of Ottoman merchants, who as the video just mentioned were supposed to be making their money by exporting these goods around Europe, have to do with the success of Ottoman guilds, which were producing finished products?

In any event, in a pre-industrial society, the primary non-perishable manufacture was textiles. (In other words, as far as I'm aware, the video can't possibly be suggesting that these changes in trade could have affected the bakers guilds. So let's look at textiles as that's the primary historiographical debate)

As it happens, this is a really complicated topic, for which I'll be excerpting mostly from the chapter "Declines and Revivals in Textile Production" in The Cambridge History of Turkey volume 3, 1603-1839.

[In] the 1960s and 1970s, historians writing the history of a single textile tended to assume that the growth and decline of the relevant industry mirrored Ottoman craft activity as a whole.1 A comparison of the trajectories of different handicrafts in medieval and early modern Europe has, however, shown that such industries typically follow a parabola curve: an impressive expansion is usually followed by an equally rapid decline.2 Industrial collapse may be caused by the competition of rival production centres, but also by wars, excessive taxation and other non-economic factors, which may originate both within and without the state at issue.

Thus it cannot be assumed that an industry, once established, will last for centuries. From that point of view, the growth and eventual decline of Ottoman manufactures conforms to an accustomed pattern, and the fate of a single industry should not be taken to reflect the dynamic of the totality. Only when no new centres of urban or rural production develop to replace the defunct ones can we conclude that the state or region studied has really suffered a decline. However, since Ottoman documentation tends to highlight urban as opposed to rural craftsmen, determining whether a given region as a whole did in fact suffer deindustrialisation may not be a simple task. What artisans of the larger towns lost may well have been the gain of their rural competitors.

As noted, the picture is complicated, and one in which state regulation, as in Western Europe, could be both a help and a hindrance on manufactures, but the idea that it was simply new world gold-->raw materials shortages-->production declines is oversimplified and in many cases wrong.

One issue, for example, was the demand for silks in the non-Ottoman production regions increased in the 1600s. So:

Iranian silk, as yet the principal raw material in the manufacture of Bursa silk stuffs, had become more expensive, due to increasing English and Italian demand. However, because of political constraints – the palace was apt to dictate prices – producers were unable to pass on the price increase to their customers. That many potential buyers had sustained losses in income due to the financial crisis of the early 1600s did not help matters. This situation resulted in a ‘profit squeeze’, which forced many manufacturers to suspend operations.

But the other issue was that the increase in European manufactures meant that the price price of finished textiles was declining, so that even where the state intervened to protect guilds' access to raw materials, they struggled to compete with European exports:

While the Ottoman state frequently intervened to protect the raw material sources of its textile-manufacturing subjects, imports of foreign fabrics were generally regarded in a positive light. Imports appeared to supply the market with needed goods, thus lowering prices, and were not usually curtailed.17 From the late sixteenth century onwards, the Levant Company thus could import large quantities of English woollens into the Ottoman Empire to balance its purchases of Iranian raw silk in Aleppo or Izmir. These fabrics were sold at bargain prices, as the Levant Company’s principal profits came out of the resale of Iranian silk in Europe.18 It was mainly the Ottoman producers of medium-quality woollens who suffered, particularly the Salonika weavers.

But this was hardly universally the case:

For the ‘mass market’, such as it was, even moderately priced imports were too expensive. Thus local manufactures of the cheaper goods survived and even thrived: the decline of the Salonika industry was balanced to a certain extent by the seventeenth-century expansion of rough woollens (aba) in the area of Plovdiv (Ottoman Filibe).

Nor was the competition solely from Europe, as Indian textiles were just as sought in this period, if not more so, than the European goods.

Reaction: State bans Europeans from buying strategic raw materials

Not really. The Ottomans had long imposed export bans on cotton because of its strategic value in producing sail cloth. These restrictions were reduced over time.

What's really at issue is a failure of western market penetration. As described above, the impact of European demand on the availability of goods for local producers had the greatest impact on high value manufactures of raw materials sourced outside the empire, such as silk.

I'm running out of characters so I'll have to continue in a Part II