Was the Ottoman Empire a colonizer?
Monday, February 25, 2008
Ali GÜNEŞ

 International University of Sarajevo, jointly with Ankara Centre for Thought and Research (ADAM), through the sponsorship of Turkish International Cooperation and Development Agency (TIKA), hosted an international conference on “East-West Relations: Past, Present, Future” on February 14-15, 2008, in Sarajevo, the capital city of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Highly well-known scholars and academics from different countries joined. All the papers were of vital importance to comprehend how both East and West have perceived each other, but I paid special attention to the papers that examined closely the legacy of the Ottoman in the Balkan region.I had two reasons to do so. First, I am on the verge of writing an article on Ivo Andric's Nobel Prize winning novel, The Bridge on the Drina, which deals artistically with the relationship between Orthodox Christian Serbs and Muslims in the eastern town of Visegrad (now eastern Republika Srpska) in Bosnia and Herzegovina from the beginning of the construction of the bridge over the Drina River in 1566 to the start of World War I in 1914. Secondly, I secretly sought the answer to a question which has haunted me for a long time: was the Ottoman Empire a colonizer? I certainly know that my effort is ridiculous and non-academic, since it is the historians who will give the right answer, yet I would like to share with you what was argued at the conference and what I learned from my reading of colonialism and what my Bulgarian and Serbian friends told me about the Ottomans.

 Enter colonialism:

 Colonialism, as defined by various scholars such as Leroy Beaulieu, Edward Said, Madan Sarup, Homi Hbabha and Gayatri Spivak, is a kind of “subjugation” and “exploitation” of a weaker nation by a powerful one through the deployment of “force”, often military actions. As these key words indicate, colonialism aims to include, along with the extension of the colonizer's way of life, culture, manners and language beyond its national borders, economic exploitation of the colony's natural sources, creation of new markets for the colonizers.There are countries particularly in Europe that obviously practiced such activities almost from the sixteenth century to the twentieth in many places around the world such as North and South America, Australia, Africa, and Asia. In addition, these colonizers also sent their settlers to populate the land or compelled local governments to carry out their mission. In history, the first organized process of colonization started with the Renaissance and geographical discoveries from the 15th century onward. The first colonies were established in the Western Hemisphere by the Spanish and Portuguese in the 15th and 16th centuries. The Netherlands colonized Indonesia in the 16th century, and Britain colonized North America and India throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. Later on, Britain also colonized Australia and New Zealand. Colonization of Africa, in fact, began during the 1880s, yet almost the entire continent was colonized by Europeans by the 20th century. The period of colonialism ended gradually after World War II, leaving its place to another form of colonialism known as post-colonialism or neo-colonialism.

 What about the Ottomans?:

 What about the position of the Ottomans within this definition of colonialism? It is known that the Ottoman Empire, like other European Colonizers, also crossed its national borders of Anatolia and extended its territory in Africa, Asia and Balkans. According to Ivo Andric in The Bridge on the Drina, the Ottoman Empire was a colonizer. Among many other things, he writes that the Ottoman Turks “took away…Christian children, [like Mehmed Pasha Sokolovic] from their mothers by force [to Istanbul]”: “when they were taking them away, their mothers refused to be parted from them and, weeping and wailing, were insensitive to blows and to curses. Stumbled after them as far as Visegrad itself”. Moreover, Andric also writes that the Ottomans took their “property and money” but gave back “merely crumbs”. However, Andric is also confused in his views about the Ottomans after the Austria-Hungarians invaded his country. In view of the “annexation crisis” and tension as well as the difficulties created in life by Austria-Hungarians, the older people sought the “sweet tranquility” of Turkish times, which used to be “the main aim of existence and the most perfect expression of public and private life”. During two recent conferences in Bulgaria and Serbia, I asked my Bulgarian and Serbian friends whether they viewed the Ottoman state as colonizer. The answers they gave were interesting. One of them said, “The Ottoman Empire, with regard to the definition of colonialism, was apparently a colonizer, yet it is not a Western type of colonizer when we look at its practices in our countries. It did not take anything from but gave us a lot. It also did not rule our countries in the same manner as other colonizers; we were governed by the people among us. We were secure. We are controlled now more than the Ottoman times, since our rulers, the media and economy are all controlled in one way or another. Life is not secure now.”

 Ottoman laissez faire?:

 At the conference Dr. Mehmet Bulut also noted what the Ottomans brought to the region. He argued that “the Ottoman state took very low tax and provided economic balance and welfare in the Balkan region, since it supplied traders with cheap food to prevent the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a small group of people who formed the economic structure of the whole society at a time when individual entrepreneurship (laissez faire) was important in the West. In this respect, there is a great difference between the mindset of the Ottomans and that of Westerners in that the Ottomans distributed wealth not a small group of people but to a larger segment of society and also controlled the price balance in the market, by which it aimed to shun monopoly. Bulut also pointed out that the Ottomans, unlike the Western colonizers that divided and ruled, “amalgamated and tolerated difference of language, religion, culture and identity, which it considered fundamental aspects of nations when there were many ideological conflicts, fights and categorizations linked to religion, culture and identity in the Western world during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries”.  

 Ottoman multiculturalism:

 Simply, the Ottomans created what we discuss today a multicultural atmosphere, in which everybody became able to present their identities, voices and view without any restrictions. Finally, Prof. Mehmet Can from International University of Sarajevo suggested that “the Ottoman model of tolerance toward every ethnic, religious, racial and cultural group might be a solution to the ethnic, sectarian and ideological problems the world faces nowadays”.My final conclusion is that I may not find a suitable place for the Ottoman in my readings, listening and talks.

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 Ali Güneş teaches English literature and culture at International University of Sarajevo, Sarajevo- Bosnia and Herzegovina. He can be conducted at aligunes@ius.edu.ba.