INDUSTRY, CONSTITUTIONS, AND NATIONALISM 285
intellectuals who pictured themselves as Palestinian farmers, even though
they didn't know a shovel from a hoe. Most of them returned to Europe,
and the first aliyah petered out. That is where matters stood as World
War I approached.
When these three phenomena from Europe-constitutionalism, national-
ism, and industrialism-seeped into the Ottoman world they had a par-
ticularly corrosive effect, in part because the Ottoman "world" was
shrinking throughout the nineteenth century, which was engendering
much restless anxiety. Algeria was absorbed into France. Great Britain took
over Egypt in all but name. Technically, the Mediterranean coast north of
Egypt belonged to the Ottoman empire, as did the whole Arabian penin-
sula and most of what is now Iraq, but even here the Ottomans gradually
found themselves bowing to Europeans. Meanwhile, the Ottoman hold on
its European territories kept weakening. The whole of this ancient empire,
so recently the world's greatest, was like some colossal creature whose ex-
tremities had fallen away and whose body was rotting, but was somehow
still breathing, still alive.
It was alive, but Western business forces, backed by the power of their
governments, operated freely here. Through the first half of the nineteenth
century, their interaction with the Ottomans could be summed up in one
word: capitulations.
Capitulations: it sounds like another word for "humiliating conces-
sions." That, however, is not what the word meant at first.
The capitulations began when the empire was at its height, and the
term simply referred to permissions granted by mighty Ottoman sultans to
petty petitioners from Europe pleading to do business in the empire. The
capitulations merely listed what these folks were permitted to do in Ot-
toman territory. Anything not listed was forbidden. Why call them "capit-
ulations"? Because in Latin, the word simply means "categorize by
headings." So the capitulations were lists of permitted business activities
for Europeans, organized by category.
Since no single great war reversed the balance of power between the Ot-
tomans and the Europeans, there was no single moment when capitulations
stopped meaning "permissions doled out haughtily by mighty Ottoman
lords" and started meaning "humiliating concessions wrung out triumphantly