The Eighteenth Century: the Traditionalists 331
to proceed with his ambitious Westernizing reforms of the army, the Nizam-i
Cedid, which will be examined in the next chapter.
It seems that the eventual failure or, at least, poor results of the reform efforts
was partly due to factionalism within the government, such as Halil Hamid’s
rivalry with Gazi Hasan Pasha. However, it must be noted that, throughout this
period, reforms and adjustments were not only the result of determined grand
viziers or military counselors. A series of experiments in tax-collection and
other similar issues were introduced by the financial bureaucracy: as was also
seen in chapters 6 and 7, such experimentation had been started in the final
decades of the seventeenth century with the introduction of the three-grade
poll tax (which, however, soon gave way to collective estimate of a lump sum)
and to lifelong tax-farming (malikâne) in 1691. By the third quarter of the eigh-
teenth century, the system was experimenting with various ways of allocating
and, more importantly, collecting taxes and other types of revenue within the
tax districts, as well as dividing the projected profit of a tax-farm into shares
(esham) that were then sold on by the state to a number of shareholders. These
developments may be seen as a deliberate policy to privatize state assets, being
part of a course toward modernism and the nineteenth-century centralized
state.15 It is again important to stress that these appear to have been the
result of autonomous policy-making from within government circles, as the
chief statesmen concentrated more on the possibility of military reform. As
has been seen, this development, i.e. the autonomy of the central bureaucracy,
was not a new phenomenon, as it had its origins in the mid-seventeenth cen-
tury at least. Throughout that century, this community had developed a com-
mon and self-conscious culture that praised its own role in the government of
the empire, taking inşa literature one step further and connecting it explicitly
to the bureaucrats’ rank and importance (some aspects of this process were
seen in chapter 6).16 It may be argued that, having fostered an alliance with
the loci of political power within the state, i.e. the sultan and the viziers, the
bureaucracy had identified itself with the state. It was precisely in these years
that the kalemiye or scribal career gradually became a stairway to the higher
administrative and political echelons. The most illustrative example is that of
Râmî Mehmed Efendi (d. 1708), the head Ottoman diplomat at Karlowitz and
the first scribe to become grand vizier (see also above, chapter 6).17
15 Cf. Salzmann 1993; Salzmann 2004; Darling 2006, 129–130; McGowan 1994, 713–716; Genç
2000; Ursinus 2012; Tuşalp Atiyas 2013, 24–26.
16 Aksan 1995, 2–23; Tuşalp Atiyas 2013, 132–191.
17 Itzkowitz 1962; Tuşalp Atiyas 2013, 9–29 for Rami’s biography and passim for the scrib-
al culture of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Another acquaintance
of Rami’s was the poet Nabi, whom was seen above as a supporter of the Karlowitz