286 DESTINY DISRUPTED
from Ottoman officials (by haughty European bosses)." But that's certainly
what they meant by 1838, when the Ottomans signed the Treaty of Balta
Liman with a consortium of European powers (to secure their aid against
Mohammed Ali), a treaty establishing unequal terms between Ottomans and
Europeans on Ottoman soil. The treaty placed low tariffs, for example, on
European products coming into the empire but imposed high tariffs on Ot-
toman products flowing out. It forbade Ottoman subjects to establish mo-
nopolies but permitted and eased the way for Europeans to do exactly that.
These capitulations had but one purpose: to ensure that Ottomans would be
unable to compete with European businessmen on their own soil.
In the few decades after the Treaty of Balta Liman, the Ottoman govern-
ment shook its aging limbs and promulgated a series of new rules to revamp
Ottoman society so that it could match up to the Europeans-exactly the
sort of thing that was going on in Iran around this same time. In the Ot-
toman Empire, these modernizing moves were called Tanzimat or "reorgani-
:zation measures." They began with an 1839 proclamation grandiosely titled
"The Noble Edict of the Rose Chamber." In 1856 came another document,
"The Imperial Edict." Then in 1860 came a third set of reform measures.
Here are a few things the Tanzimat established:
- a new national government bureaucracy modeled along French
lines; - secular state courts superseding the traditional Shari' a courts;
- a new code of criminal justice based on France's "Napoleonic" code;
- new commercial rules favoring "free trade," which essentially gave
Europeans a free hand to set business rules in the Ottoman empire; - a conscripted army modeled on the Prussian system, to replace
the devshirme; - public schools with a secular curriculum similar to what was
taught in British schools, bypassing the traditional school system
run by Muslim clerics; - one single empire-wide state-run tax collection agency (rather like
the IRS in today's United States), replacing the traditional Ot-
toman "tax farmers" (who were, essentially, freelance tax collectors
working on commission);