436 conclusion
2 State
One cannot examine these notions without mentioning the emergence of the
modern concept of the state, i.e. of “an independent political apparatus ...
which the ruler may be said to have a duty to maintain”, which was recorded
in European political theory from the late fifteenth century.12 In the Ottoman
case, Rifaat Abou-El-Haj argued that from the late seventeenth century the
Ottoman Empire gradually became an early-modern state, with one of its main
features identified as the “progressive separation between the state and the rul-
ing class”, as well as the distinction between the ruler and the state apparatus.13
Indeed, if we were to trace the conceptual change in the meaning of the word
(devlet), we would trace a transition from an initial meaning of “luck, good for-
tune” (for instance in the works of Aşıkpaşazade and Ahmedi) through “power”
or “dynasty” (e.g. in Lütfi Pasha, Kınalızade, and Mustafa Ali) to the “desacral-
ization” of the term and its modern sense (so in Kitâb-i müstetâb, Hezarfen,
and Na’ima).14 The reader may remember how, in the early nineteenth century,
Behic Efendi used the strange term “heart of the state” (kalb-ı devlet) not for the
sultan or even the vizier but for the governmental committee he proposed. A
turning point in the history of the term would again be Kâtib Çelebi’s definition
of the word as both “kingship/kingdom” and “society” or “community”, which
functions as a bridge between the meanings “power” or “dynasty” and “state
apparatus” or “government”. A society has to be governed, and its well-being
is identified with the good functioning of its government: this line of thought
facilitated, it may be said, the semantic transition toward the development
of the notion of “state”. A similar process, it should be noted, can be discerned
in the development of the term miri, which would originally be translated
as “belonging to the ruler”, but which seems to have acquired the meaning
of “pertaining to the state” with a gradual distinction between sultanly and
state wealth from the mid- or late sixteenth century.15 On the other hand, the
privatization of state assets via tax-farming and other “outsourcing” methods,
which prevailed throughout the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,16
was never justified by political writers. They all (from Lütfi Pasha to Ali, Kâtib
Çelebi to Hemdemi, Defterdar to Dürri, and Penah Efendi to Sekbanbaşı) sug-
gest the collection of assets by sipahis or state officials (emanet); only Canikli
12 Skinner 1978, 2:349–358.
13 Abou-El-Haj 2005, 7.
14 Lewis 1988, 35–37; Sigalas 2007. I tried to trace this development in much more detail in
Sariyannis 2013, 87–95. Yılmaz 2015a, 232, fn. 3 places this semantic turn much earlier than
I do, “at least by the early sixteenth century if not well before then”.
15 Sariyannis 2013, 111–115.
16 See Salzmann 1993; Salzmann 2004.