The Political Economy of Ottoman Modernity: Ottoman Economic Thought During the Reign of Abdülhamid II (1876-1909)

Abstract

This dissertation is the first comprehensive and interdisciplinary study of Ottoman economic thought within the context of modernization during the reign of Abdülhamid II (1876-1909). Drawing on a broad array of primary sources ranging from textbooks and manuals of economics to memoirs and popular fiction, it offers a new account of late Ottoman history by discussing how economic knowledge shaped Ottoman modernization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The main focus of this dissertation is the Ottoman elite's use of "economic savoir" in formulating their strategy for saving the empire from downfall in the age of capitalist modernity. I first provide an overview of economic and intellectual conditions that shaped the late Ottoman economic mindset. Then, I investigate the patterns of transplantation of ideas from French and British political economy into the Muslim-Ottoman cultural-institutional setup. In the core chapters of the dissertation (Chapters 3, 4, and 5), I analyze Hamidian-era Ottoman economic thought on three grounds: the objective of building an "economic" society, the emergence of economic nationalism, and the popularization of modern economic principles through popular fiction.

Using an interdisciplinary approach to sources, I analyze various dimensions of the impact of "economic thinking" on the episteme of Ottoman modernism and on the Ottoman public sphere in the late nineteenth century. Moreover, I question some deeply rooted assumptions such as the "primitiveness" of late Ottoman economic thought and the mercantilistic nature of Hamidian-era protectionism by contextualizing and historicizing economic ideas in the late Ottoman Empire.