Impact Of Capitalism In The Ottoman Empire

1025 Words3 Pages

European Capitalism and the Late Ottoman Empire

Cyrus Taheri
History 594
Dr. McCarthy

Introduction
On the eve of World War One, the Ottoman Empire spanned a territory of 1.7 million square kilometers, comprising of present day Turkey, Syria, Palestine, Iraq and parts of the Arabian Peninsula. Its population was over 23 million, of which three fourths were found in Anatolia. Although the Empire had gone through a period of substantial economic transformation and growth in the 19th century, especially towards the latter end of the century, it was considerably poorer and less developed than industrial European countries, in terms of real gross domestic product (GDP), both per head and cumulative. The Ottoman GDP in 1913 (at current prices) was $370 million and the GDP per head was roughly $171. Compare these figures to $226.4 billion and $4,921 respectively for the United Kingdom, $257 billion and $676 for British India, $138.7 billion and $3,485 for France, $257.7 billion and $1,488 for Russia, $244.3 billion and $3,648 for Germany, $100.5 billion and $1,986 for Austria2. It has to be noted, however, that in terms of GDP, the Ottoman Empire was significantly richer than neighboring Egypt and Persia. In the context of competing with European Imperialism and Finance, though, this would not be enough. World War One would be the actualization of the desire to defeat and colonize the former Ottoman Empire, manifest in the partitioning of the defeated Turks in the Treaty of Sevres. In this paper, I hope to explore and analyze these economic relationships between the Ottoman State and Western powers to better understand why the Turks were destined to lose the First World War.
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...ly became evident in the rapid collapse of most of the enterprises.”6
Alongside the state sanctioned industry, the same service and trade related industries continued to grow and took on characteristics of capitalist accumulation. However, these forms of small scale production took on ethnic and religious characteristics. Keyder gives a Marxist analysis of the politicized nature of the nature of these entrepreneurs. He claims that class and Nationalistic antagonisms grew side by side through the domination of economic output by Greek and Armenian minorities, who, according to him, “could receive protected status from the European powers which effectively placed them beyond the reach of Ottoman law and tax authorities…the multi-ethnic social structure of the empire had prepared for an ethnic division of labor that eventually culminated in a class differentiation”.7

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