PART III
Introduction to Part III
Europe and the Islamic world have a long, shared past. The very concepts “Europe” and “Islamic world” assumed meaning only in their opposition to each other. The conquests during the first Muslim centuries put an end to the Mediterranean unity inherited from the Roman Empire, creating a new geographical reality, and the first occurrence of the term “Europe” to name that reality appeared in reference to the Battle of Poitiers in 732. Of course, Europe had other borders, such as those with paganism, then with Orthodoxy, where the front lines of conversion, running from the Balkans to the Baltic, converged. In the same way, the “House of Islam” rapidly reached the conflictual borders of the Chinese and Indian worlds and their cultures, not to mention its first slow advance into sub- Saharan Africa. But because of its proximity to the vital cultural, religious, and political centers of the two worlds, the Mediterranean border has always been the most important.
From the seventh century to the eighteenth century, multiple military conflicts and exchanges were the rule. For centuries, vast territorial advances by one camp corresponded to the retreat of the other, back and forth in a zero- sum game. Geopolitics imposed its rules with its hybrid alliances, France with the Ottoman Empire, the House of Austria with the Persian Empire of the Safavids. The material culture represented by commerce in raw materials and manufactured goods constantly crossed borders. Large portions of the culture of antiquity, having been reworked by that of classical Islam, returned to Europe. Technological exchanges were a permanent part of the Mediterranean space, as attested by the many traces left in the linguistic vocabulary of the two worlds.
And yet the great rift took place in the second half of the eighteenth century.
CHAPTER 11
The Revolutions of the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century
The notion of “Europe” clearly existed in the eighteenth century. The term designated a cultural space and a political system, a balance of powers. Following on the terrible cycle of religious wars that ended with the Thirty Years’ War, the European crisis of conscience restored the idea of a cultural unity transcending the cleavages among states, each with a single and official religion. The publishing industry, supplanting handwritten letters, created a space for books and newspapers: this was the European space proper, though it expanded to North and South America and to Europe’s African and Asian trading posts. The printed word was closely associated with all things European, while the rest of the world was still the realm of the handwritten. The growth of literacy was a tangible reality, though it still affected only fractions of variable size of the populations concerned. Only Japan, having retreated to a voluntary isolation, had literacy rates comparable to those of Europe. Russia, despite questions about its true nature, was already part of Europe, because it had entered the world of the printed word. Its literacy rate was lower than in other places, however, and it was the first to come up with the innovation of remedial instruction.
The printed word had been the driving force of European exceptionalism since the late fifteenth century. Behind the appearance of a motionless history, a vast store of knowledge and technologies came to be constituted, giving rise to new modes of organization. The first beneficiary was the European state, whose chief activity was to wage war, which required not only new weapons, new disciplines, and new expertise but also new modes of financing and taxation, that is, new modes of social organization over the medium term.
Even in the early eighteenth century, the three great Muslim empires, the Ottoman, the Persian, and the Mogul of India, still seemed to be acting as a counterweight to the European powers and to be keeping them within their borders, as in the previous two centuries. The European discourse on Asian despotism was merely a translation of the deterrence effect of the great Muslim powers, and it exaggerated the organizational capacities and wealth of those powers. These gunpowder empires did not allow themselves to be outpaced during the great armaments revolution of the sixteenth century, and, though the Indian Ocean became a new space for exchanges and conflict, the Europeans were able to establish themselves there only on islands or in continental trading posts. From the Gulf of Bengal to the Mediterranean, the firearms were of the same nature as those in Europe (muskets and cannons) and were manufactured under the same system of small- scale production.
And yet, even before the true beginning of the industrial revolution, a power shift occurred, in seamanship in the first place, the sector where European technology and science were most advanced. That sector benefited from investments both by the state and by the commercial middle class. For the first time, the outlines of a true research and development strategy existed, with basic and theoretical science becoming a source for practical applications. The impetus came from ever more active transatlantic commerce and long- distance journeys to the Indian Ocean and already to the Pacific. The same was true for overland military arts: the eighteenth century witnessed the emergence of “smart weapons” and the first engineers, even as physical training found its fullest expression in Prussian discipline.
By the mid- eighteenth century, the military and maritime branches of European societies, without undergoing any major technological changes— which did not have an impact until after 1840— but thanks to a continuous series of modifications and improvements and the establishment of new disciplinary practices, far outshone the armed forces in other societies. The most glaring example was the Indian subcontinent, where, following the collapse from within of the sultanate of Delhi, the successor states appealed to European mercenaries to serve as officers in their armies, while the rival French and English companies in the Indies raised native armies. It all played out during the Seven Years’ War: on June 23, 1756, an army of three thousand men, two- thirds of them sepoys (indigenous soldiers), defeated an army of several tens of thousands belonging to the Nawab of Bengal. That episode in the Franco- English struggle, meant to guarantee security and freedom of action for the British trading post of Calcutta, was the beginning of territorial conquest. By 1764, the East India Company controlled Bengal as a whole, perhaps 40 million inhabitants, that is, four times the total population of Great Britain. Within a few years, it would seize the entire subcontinent.
At the other end of the continental Islamic world, the Ottoman Empire, the traditional rear ally of France, launched a catastrophic war against Russia in 1768, to prevent the first partitioning of Poland. The defense line was breached, and a Russian fleet from the Baltic entered the Mediterranean and destroyed the Ottoman Mediterranean fleet near Chios on July 6, 1770. Finally, Russian troops occupied the Ottomans’ Muslim vassal state, the Tatar khanate of Crimea. The Russians’ financial difficulties and Pugachev’s rebellion saved the Ottomans. With the Treaty of Kuchuk Kaynarja of 1774, the Ottoman Empire was obliged to recognize the independence of Crimea, where Russia maintained its army. The sultan retained his religious authority, priding himself on his title as caliph. In addition, the Russians obtained the right to build and protect an Orthodox church in Istanbul, which would later allow them to demand protection for all the Orthodox Christians in the empire. And finally, the Ottomans had to pay a heavy war indemnity. In 1779, Catherine II put an end to the fiction of Crimean independence by annexing Crimea to her other possessions. The Ottomans were obliged to recognize the annexation in 1784, even while maintaining the caliph’s prerogatives in Crimea.
The Enlightenment and Islam
The dizzying pace— made possible by the printed word— at which knowledge accumulated allows us to understand the essence of the Enlightenment as an effort at totalizing and deciphering that knowledge. Two distinct historical sources, moreover, provided the Enlightenment with its specific orientation. First, the European crisis of conscience in the wake of the Wars of Religion opened the way for a critique of religion, tending more in the direction of deism than of atheism. And second, the progress of the modern state tended to undermine the foundations of the old law- and- order societies.
All the large agrarian societies promoted a view of a stable social order founded on a qualitative and honorific hierarchy of groups divided by function, in which everyone had his place. Rank and distinction were defined permanently in terms of social roles, with notions of purity and impurity sometimes used as discriminating elements. The essence of that classification lay in the social function one performed and, in Europe, in one’s bloodline. Absolute monarchy tended to subvert that order by concentrating the greater part of the powers around itself and by paring back privileges for fiscal reasons. The ideal for the monarchical bureaucracy was to have a population of subjects who were equal in their obligations, even though the king and his court remained the locus of the most firmly rooted distinctions. The aristocratic critique of absolutism unintentionally contributed to the ruin of the traditional social order by translating into historical terms what had at first been a functional division. It is likely that the weight assumed by inherited honors was the driving force behind that transition to history.
In monarchical France, therefore, the aristocracy, guarantor of freedom for all by virtue of its constitutive bodies, was said to be the descendant of the Germanic conquerors, and the Third Estate of workers, the result of the subjection of the Gallo- Romans. The freedom of the Roman commonwealth of antiquity thus gave way to the plural freedoms of feudalism. Absolute monarchy was a subversion of the traditional authorities, an Oriental and unnatural despotism that was taking root in Europe. Complementing that aristocratic critique was the egalitarianist demand for participation in power by “subjects,” which tended rather to use ancient citizenship as its frame of reference. The two critiques merged in the political struggles of the short eighteenth century (that is, between the death of Louis XIV in 1715 and the onset of the French Revolution). The champions of Germanic liberties therefore took pride in citizenship. The ambiguity would be neutralized in the violence of the year 1789.
The first goal of the Enlightenment was to bestow a rational order on knowledge. But after 1750, the project to rationalize knowledge was paired with a plan to introduce rationality into the social order. The idea of progress took hold in the middle of the century, along with the advent of slow but continuous economic growth. If progress is movement, then points of reference are needed to measure it. The first frame of reference was the history of Europe, where many differences in wealth and knowledge had been clearly perceptible since the sixteenth century, a period that put an end to the barbarism of “Gothic” times. The second framework was non- European, that is, Eastern societies.
In the preface to Bajazet, Racine claimed that, in his tragedy, geographical distance compensated for the absence of temporal distance. Conversely, for thinkers of the Enlightenment, geographical distance made it possible to bridge temporal distance. The East implicitly but abruptly became a past within the present, the place where Europe’s past could be recovered. As a result, the major controversies of the century played out in the various fields of Orientalism.
In the seventeenth century, when the first Orientalist disciplines took shape, their project was essentially humanistic: to universalize literature by adding Eastern literatures to the legacy of antiquity and to modern European literatures. These were initially the literatures of the Islamic world, which were the most accessible, followed by those of the more remote East: India, China, and Japan. In the following century, an ambition took hold to compose a universal history founded on the universalization of human behaviors. Hence a shift occurred: the Germanic invasions had previously been viewed as a singular occurrence, whereas invasions were now considered the driving force of Eurasian history. From the most ancient Scythians to the modern Manchus, great waves of conquerors from the steppes had put an end to great empires and constituted new states. Of all these waves of invaders, only one came from the south, all the other invasions having been carried out by peoples from the north.
The Arabs were the ones who came from the south, and a century of Orientalist research made it possible to write their history. Having originated on the Arabian Peninsula, they ruled the world between the Indus and the Atlantic and developed a brilliant culture. They were the past counterparts of contemporary Europeans, thanks to their acknowledged love for the sciences. As the Encyclopédie shows, the genealogy of all the exact sciences depended on the Arabs’ improvements on ancient scholarship or on the invention of new sciences such as algebra. As a result, Enlightenment thinkers posited a relationship between Islam and Arab development. On one hand, the Prophet formed the Arabs into a people and provided them with the dynamic of conquest; on the other, the increasing weight of religious fanaticism and Turkish domination gradually neutralized them. Like all Easterners, the Muslims rejected the art of printing, though it had recently been introduced into a few Christian convents of the Lebanon Mountains.
Still, according to the principle of a universal history to be constituted, the Turks were a people of invaders from the north. Their invasions complicated the task of discerning a pattern in European history. Unlike the Germanic invasions, the Turkish invasions produced despotism, not liberties. The defenders of monarchy took that opportunity to demolish the thesis of the Germanic origin of liberties. Charlemagne’s empire was an absolutist state, and feudalism rose from the ruins of that empire by dismembering the state’s authority. The defenders of Germanic liberties responded with the new thesis of military despotism: the Turkish invaders did not enter into a dynamic of freedoms because they did not proceed to a distribution of wealth among equals, as the Franks had done with the division of their spoils. They remained within the framework of the preexisting state, becoming the recipients of the resources that the state collected from its subjects. That type of tax levy could adapt just as surely to an absolute monarchical system, such as that of the Ottoman great sultan, the “sophi” of Persia, and the great mogul of India, as it could to “military republics,” such as the “regencies” of Barbary (the Maghreb). The immutable tendency of military despotism was to overtax society, leading to a decrease in its investment capacity and hence continuous impoverishment, which would also explain why the East increasing lagged behind Europe.
The old image of Oriental despotism was of a surplus of power resulting from the capacity to mobilize all the resources of society by means of terror, and that capacity for mobilization was attributable to the terrifying efficiency of the administration. The new image of despotism was the exact opposite of that view. Despotism was an oppressive system that obeyed the law of diminishing returns. Since it bankrupted the society it governed, its force inexorably declined, but it remained sufficiently strong to prevent the subjected peoples from emancipating themselves, even as they were led to their collective ruin.
The Enlightenment methodology was to grant meaning to the constituted bodies of knowledge. So it was with universal history. In the 1780s, thinkers constructed the trajectory of Mediterranean history, a construct that would have a lasting influence on school curricula. The Europeans clearly situated themselves at the end of history. Their immediate predecessors could not be the people of Gothic times. Knowledge came from the Arabs, who in turn had taken it from the Romans and Greeks. Since the Greeks named the ancient Egyptians as their predecessors, the native land of the sciences and arts turned out to be the mysterious ancient Egypt, a society certainly governed by sages who had fathomed the mysteries of death.
The Egyptomania of the last generation of the Enlightenment was an instrument in the struggle against Christianity, or more exactly, a substitute for it. The desire for de- Christianization on the part of the most radical fringe of the Enlightenment was at odds with the powerful consolation provided by Christian death rites. It was indispensable to constitute a new funerary symbolism, and since there was a vague perception that most of the traces left by the ancient Egyptians were associated with funerary practices, Egyptian- style art came to compete with Christian funerary art, while Freemason esotericism increasingly embraced Egyptian sources.
Political Translation
In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the deep- seated tendency of the Enlightenment was to transform knowledge into political action, resulting in a merciless renovation of human institutions. As would be said during the French Revolution, history ceased to be law, having been replaced by a rational reorganization of society. The criteria that were applied took into account individuality and the collectivity simultaneously: it was necessary to preserve or set in place what was both advantageous to the individual and beneficial to society. Happiness, a new idea in Europe, was the dual product of that individual and collective regeneration.
“Regeneration” was the watchword of the French Revolution. It led to the assertion of a new collectivity— the nation— made up of individuals equal before the law and participating equally in the exercise of sovereignty. Of course, the revolutionaries could not move beyond certain limits characteristic of their time, such as the exclusion of women and servants from the political body, but they set down principles whose application would serve as programs for the generations to come. In the interest of intellectual coherence, therefore, the members of the Constituent Assembly emancipated the non- Christians of French society, that is, the various Jewish collectivities in the kingdom. Since they were to participate in the body politic, everything was to be granted to them as individuals and everything refused them as a collectivity (“nation” in the old sense of the term).
During the 1790s, with its horrifying succession of events, the terminology became more precise. The regeneration of Europe was nothing less than a new stage in the historical process of civilization, and that process was not limited to Europe. Its destiny was to be universalized by spreading to humanity as a whole.
The Islamic world was the closest to Europe and the best known. It was Europe’s immediate neighbor and stretched to the other end of the Old World, where the Europeans were building new empires. Intoxicated by their new power, which they already defined as the mastery of nature, the Europeans nevertheless knew that the European moment in the history of the New World was coming to an end. For France, the Seven Years’ War entailed the loss of Canada. Although it held onto its Sugar Islands in the West Indies, it was rightly concerned about perpetuating its presence in that region. The Europeans correctly interpreted the American Revolution as the beginning of an inexorable process of emancipation of the European colonies in the Americas. Europe had been split in two, and in the 1790s philosophers such as Condorcet marked that geographical threshold by systematically using the expression “the West” in its current sense.
The conquest of the New World had occurred in the name of Christianity. The Iberian conquerors had experienced it as the continuation of the reconquista against Islam. New England’s original plan was to constitute a Protestant and English Christian society far from the depravities of European absolutism. The French colonization of Canada was accompanied by a permanent desire for the Catholic evangelization of the native peoples. The Enlightenment critique of the European colonial adventure thus became a vehement denunciation of the violence done in the name of Christianity. It marked the end of the European moment, which became one of the charges brought against Christianity.
The 1757 British victory in Bengal defined the Indian routes as the new geopolitical axes, which would dominate the next two centuries of history in the Old World. The sea route via Capetown was the object of a naval rivalry between France and Great Britain. Despite temporary difficulties during the American Revolution, the British were sure of their domination, thanks to their control of the seas. The overland route took longer to emerge. From the 1770s on, the Suez passage preoccupied the French and the British. They had to thwart the Ottomans’ desire to keep the Red Sea closed to Europeans, an aim they achieved by the end of the century. Now the Isthmus of Suez had to become a canal. The troubled circumstances of the 1790s did not allow it, but the project was well within European prospects over the medium term.
The overland route was a virtual road that crossed through the entire continental Muslim world. Europeans were absent from the caravan routes in the Old World, but they dominated the seaways. The East India Company extended its network to the Persian Gulf, since the emirates in that region were the commercial partners of India. The British thus created settlements in Kuwait and Basra and studied the feasibility of delivering mail by caravan. The overland route was not a commercial thoroughfare, however, but a political prospect.
Great Britain would have lost interest in that route had it not been for the plans to partition the Ottoman Empire, tirelessly suggested by Catherine II of Russia and reiterated by Joseph II of Austria. The eastern Mediterranean, therefore, was to be divided in three, with a good part of the Balkans going to Austria, Constantinople and Anatolia to Russia, and the regions populated by Arabs (with the possible addition of Crete) to France. Great Britain was not invited to the table and still seemed far away. But when France bowed out because of its revolution, and when the Russians seemed once more ready to seize Constantinople (in the new war begun in 1787, when the Ottomans had to face the Austro- Russian alliance), London was obliged to intervene. In 1791, Great Britain issued an ultimatum to Russia, demanding that it not place itself on the overland Indian route, and made the requisite naval demonstration. A new partitioning of Poland and the formation of the First Coalition against revolutionary France provided a fortuitous diversion.
Although the Ottoman breach was temporarily closed, another threatened to open. For centuries, northern India had been menaced by Afghan invasions, the last of them in the eighteenth century. Now the Russians were outside Afghanistan. They could either spur another Afghan raid or take that path themselves and attack Great Britain, in what was considered at the time the base of its economic power, commerce with India. That trade still consisted of importing Indian cotton prints to Europe; it was not an export trade of manufactured European goods.
When the French Revolution prevailed in Europe, the overland Indian route seemed to mark the line of the major conflicts to come.
Europeans in the Islamic World
The critique of European social and economic institutions was only one phase in the revision of human conduct undertaken by the Enlightenment. That transformation was supposed to spread to humanity as a whole and therefore, in the first place, to the Islamic world. Japan was closed off and little known. China was still too far away, and its mandarinate seemed to be the exemplary product of a regime founded on meritocracy— hence the positive assessment given it. India was a colonial extension of Europe, but it was already largely in the Islamic world, since the successor states of the sultanate of Delhi were at war with one another there.
Because of the costs of long- distance commerce, European activity remained centralized within large companies or, in the case of the French Mediterranean, within the Marseilles chamber of commerce. But the geographical boundaries were becoming hazy: Did Suez belong to Mediterranean trade or to that of India? In Persia, three English companies were active concurrently: the Levant Company (the Mediterranean), the Russia (Moscow) Company, and the East India Company. Governments had to arbitrate these conflicting interests.
The Persia of the Safavids had foundered in a cycle of civil wars that captivated Europe. Great war leaders, adventurers coming from out of nowhere, reemerged. Shah Nadir was seen as a new great conqueror and the builder of an empire, albeit a short- lived one. The restoration of order by the Qajars, which came very late in the century, appeared largely unachieved. In a Europe that was becoming increasingly civilized, the East more than ever seemed the place where a man could do “great things.” The theme of Eastern violence free from European limits prefigured the romantic view of the East, a phantasmal protest against the bothersome impediments imposed by European civilization. The phenomenal enrichment of certain Europeans in India, by means of both commerce and war, made it possible to dream of something other than social ascent through work or savings. Since the European presence in India was male for the most part, these adventurers generally participated in an Eastern society for which they felt no disdain and whose mores, such as the constitution of harems, they easily adopted, at least in part. What was known about harems in Europe fueled secret fantasies, protests against the moral and disciplinary order being set in place, in like manner to reports of the sexual generosity of the Pacific Islanders. Every relationship between Europe and the East was built on that ambivalence between a supposedly wretched backwardness and the richness of an imagined authenticity, a nostalgia for a world that no longer existed in Europe, or that never had.
Nevertheless, these adventurers’ pillaging of the Indies could not last long. The scandals became too apparent, and England cleaned house. High- profile trials took place, exposing all the moral and financial turpitude. A relatively effective tax system was set in place in the conquered territories. In 1790, the tribunals of Bengal were reorganized: a Briton now presided over a supreme court, assisted by a Muslim and a Hindu. A new legal code, largely inspired by British practices, was instituted in 1793. Inexorably, the East India Company lost its commercial functions and became a state machine. The first Protestant missionaries arrived in 1793. The time of adventurers was over, replaced by that of bureaucrats. An increased presence by British women definitively put an end to the equality of and intermarriage with the native peoples. Distance and separation became the rule. Also in the 1790s, British textiles began to supplant Indian prints on the world market. The vast Indian artisan class was being destroyed. The rural economy turned to the production of raw materials. The time of dependence had begun.
The small “Frankish” nations (communities) of the Levantine ports and Barbary did not pass through this era of adventurers. Tradespeople lived under the strict supervision of the consuls, who were responsible for imposing respect for public morality and for preventing any clashes with the Muslim authorities. These Levantines in the strict sense of the term (Europeans permanently established in the Ottoman Empire) lived in symbiosis with a significant portion of local Christians. From the sixteenth century on, the Holy See worked to reopen communications with Eastern Christianity. The missionaries of the Sacred Congregation of Propaganda sought both to purge religious practices of ancient superstitions and to spread the new forms of spirituality of the Catholic Reformation. Indisputably, the graft took, though the Eastern Catholics recombined the new practices with their own religious heritage, and the first conflicts arose around the Latinization of the rites. The Christian elites were the first to move toward modern European education, to participate in the new mechanisms of exchange, and to serve as intermediaries between Europe and the Islamic world.
Whereas the Muslims could not and would not cross the Mediterranean barrier, the Eastern Christians— Greeks, Armenians, and Arabs— traveled to Europe, where schools and monasteries were open to them. For the most part, they came to know an Italian and, to a lesser degree, a French Catholic society. The European education they received was clerical in its inspiration, but these travelers also transmitted knowledge about their own cultures. Eastern preachers were the language tutors and instructors of European Orientalists. When they returned home, they took part in a literary renaissance of their native languages. And, with the advent of the printed word, they set in place the first elements for the great renaissances of the nineteenth century.
Their immediate rivals were other non- Muslims, the Jews of the Islamic world. But though these Jews maintained contact with the Italian Jewish communities, they were in large part outpaced by the Eastern Christians, who possessed a much greater store of modernity and a much wider network of relations with Europe. Inexorably, the Christians dispossessed the Jews of their positions of strength in the fiscal and financial system of the Ottoman Empire. Nevertheless, since the Jews were not dealing with the European powers, they could command the trust of certain Muslim leaders troubled by that strengthening of ties between the Eastern Christians and the Europeans.
At stake in the near term was the restructuring of the flow of trade. The great Eastern empires constituted largely self- sufficient economic groups, where, in any case, domestic commerce predominated over foreign trade. European commerce with the Ottoman Empire had largely consisted of transiting products such as Yemeni coffee or Indian prints, in addition to a few food items and artisanal products. But during the eighteenth century, the Europeans planted coffee in the Americas and monopolized the trade in Indian prints.
The modifications of the terms of exchange led to lasting changes. The Europeans increasingly purchased agricultural products and supplies in exchange for their textile products, which came primarily from the rural and urban industries of southern Europe. The relative underpopulation of the Islamic Mediterranean allowed it to export cereal grains and rice, while the start of the industrial revolution in the textile sector amplified the need for cotton, and soon, for silk. In the exporting countries, the result was a renewed interest in investing in the rural world, favored by changes in the rural tax system (for example, an extension in the duration of the tax farm). In the decentralized framework of the Ottoman Empire, that evolution favored the emergence of strong provincial powers that financed their armies with tax farms and with the tax on trade. The prototype may have been Ahmad Pasha al- Jazzar, who ruled the Palestinian and Syrian regions in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. For French travelers, he stood as the model of the Oriental despot, not only for his cruelty but also for his harsh taxation of foreigners and his determination to maintain the various monopolies.
In the new discourse of the European political economics, the Eastern tax system, with its many monopolies and the state’s eminent domain over land, appeared to be a new monstrosity of Oriental despotism. For the French philosopher and Orientalist the comte de Volney, the hard- won freedom of the Lebanese mountain dwellers and their relative prosperity were a further demonstration of the merits of economic liberalism.
The Fate of the Ottoman Empire
After the Treaty of 1774, the Ottoman Empire seemed condemned to be divided among the European powers. Its fate was a subject of debate in the world of European publicists. The most commonly used image was of an imposing, worm- eaten tree. Some said it was practically dead, others that a skillful gardener could revive it with attentive care. All agreed that maintaining the present situation would prove lethal to it. Rousseau’s disciples pushed the paradox to the extreme, expressing regret for the possibility of the tree’s disappearance. That delay on the path to civilization became proof of a lesser moral corruption. Muslim decency served to point out European hypocrisy.
The French monarchy was still intent on holding onto the empire, no longer as a rear alliance against the House of Austria, an alliance that had been anachronistic since the reversal that occurred during the Seven Years’ War, but as an instrument for limiting Russian expansion. Charles Vergennes, former ambassador to Constantinople and now minister of foreign affairs, believed in the possibility of Ottoman reform. He sent military missions, whose aims were, first, to modernize the Ottoman Empire, and second, to create the educational institutions that would allow it to catch up with Europe. That policy was well received in Ottoman governmental circles, which were aware of the imbalance of powers. They established a government printing office in the imperial capital, parallel to the one that had begun to operate in the French embassy, and ordered the translation of military manuals and elementary science books. The European military specialists hired to serve the Porte were able to keep their religion and nationality, unlike renegades from earlier periods. A certain number of adventurers, however, converted to Islam to advance their careers. In the 1790s, the empire for the first time established permanent embassies in the chief European capitals. They were there to follow the unfolding political events of that tumultuous era, but they also took an interest in the economic transformations under way.
That policy of openness produced a great deal of opposition. The old military institutions such as the Janissaries were profoundly hostile to the creation of new units in competition with them. The autonomous provincial powers feared a policy of modernization that would inevitably entail recentralization at their expense. Finally, a large fraction of the Islamic religious institutions refused to borrow anything from Europe. The coalition of malcontents constituted a powerful check on the army’s and state’s modernization and prided itself on defending the true religion. In their discourse, the authorities were obliged to mark their attachment to Islam and to declare that the reforms under way were inspired at bottom by the empire’s original institutions. The precautions taken limited the debate of ideas, which for the moment was confined to the ruling circles of the empire.
In Europe, where revolution was brewing, the political analysis of the majority party assimilated these ruling Ottoman classes to Turkish domination, comparable to a certain degree to the Germanic nature of the French nobility. There was now an Ottoman Third Estate composed of peoples subservient to the Turkish military class and administration. European thought, having destroyed the character of Old Regime institutions in Europe— which rested on social functionalities— in favor of a historicist interpretation of the origin of these institutions, now interpreted Islamic institutions in the same way. Only Rousseau’s disciples, in power during the revolutionary Reign of Terror, considered the Ottoman Empire a “democracy,” a regime where no hereditary aristocracy existed, a meritocracy. It is true that the Ottoman Empire was the only European state to maintain diplomatic relations with the newly conceived republic. The Committee of Public Safety had ordered the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the constitution of Year I to be translated into the Eastern languages, and in the first place into the languages of Islam, a treacherous enterprise requiring the creation of neologisms. The Convention, then the Directorate, hoped to restore the rear alliance against Austria, whereas the Porte asked primarily for guarantees of its territorial integrity. The validity of that alliance rested especially on the absence of geographical proximity between the two states.
The Wars of the First Coalition temporarily brought to the fore the debate on the Ottoman Empire’s fate. Some French dreamed of liberating the Indies from the ruthless and selfish profiteering of British domination. London took the opportunity to accuse the last independent Indian states of Jacobinism, a convenient pretext for continuing the conquest of the subcontinent. For moralists, colonial conquest on the British model merely replaced one despotism with another. It was the Eastern counterpart of the partitioning of Poland, a manifestation of the cynicism of the great states. The British were beginning to invent the discourse of the enlightened despotism of colonial good government, but it was in fact only an outdated variation on the theme of reformist despotism.
The French revolutionaries proposed another route for legitimating colonial expansion, the liberation of the Eastern peoples. The Egyptian expedition would be its testing ground.
The Egyptian Expedition
The respite allowed the Ottoman Empire thanks to the Wars of the First Coalition ended with Napoleon Bonaparte’s Italian campaign. In 1797, the young general seized the republic of Venice and the Ionian Islands belonging to it. The French republic became a neighbor of the Ottoman Empire. Immediately, the great pashas of the Balkans sent letters of congratulation “to the commander in chief of the Great Nation’s army.” That Ottoman expression of courtesy, intended to make up for the absence of established protocol for addressing a republic, became the slogan of revolutionary France, which had entered a phase of territorial expansion. For a time, Bonaparte envisioned organizing an uprising of the Greeks in the Balkans, then began to consider a possible conquest of Egypt.
That undertaking was not the political maneuver of a regime in desperate straits wishing to rid itself of a troublesome general. Rather, it was the culmination of a century of reflection on the nature of Muslim society and on the ramifications of the geopolitical changes. The first justification was that this was an attack on England in the Indies, the supposed source of its commercial power. Once installed in Suez, the French army would be able to organize a naval expedition, whose arrival in the Indies would provoke a general uprising against British domination. If necessary, an expedition could be planned for the overland route, inciting to revolt a vast movement of people, who would surge over the Indus.
That frame of reference allows us to understand the use made of the call for liberation. Initially, the Egyptians were told that the expedition had occurred with the agreement of the Ottoman authorities, who wished to rid themselves of the rebel Mamluk regime. If the Ottomans went to war nonetheless, then the French would incite a general revolt of the Eastern peoples. That strategic view rested on general principles used in analyzing Eastern societies, but it was reinforced by cognizance of the rebel movements against the autonomous provincial powers, such as that of Ahmad Pasha al- Jazzar in Acre, and of the beginnings of Wahhabi expansion in central Arabia, which was poorly understood. (European travelers interpreted it as a form of armed deism characteristic of desert culture.)
The innovation specific to Bonaparte, apart from his personal synthesis of the ideas of the age, was to argue that Islam had within it a revolutionary content that could be turned against the conquerors or, on the contrary, channeled to their advantage. The French would present themselves as the enemies of the Christians, particularly the Catholics, assuaging at every turn the Islamic religious authorities. Bonaparte himself would style himself a messenger of God, in accordance with the logic of his already romantic view of the East.
Everything would be done in the name of civilization, which became the key word of expeditionary discourse. In the first place, “civilization” meant the development of the conquered domain in accordance with the rules of individual and collective happiness. Economic success would make it possible to replace the Sugar Islands, whose fate appeared increasingly precarious, and would lead to a permanent colony founded on a Franco- Arab synthesis, an expression that appeared for the first time in history in 1799. The scientific expedition accompanying the military enterprise would mark the return of the sciences and arts to their land of origin. In addition to the natural sciences, that expedition would focus on rediscovering the secrets of the ancient wisdom of Egypt and would take stock of the modern state, preliminary to any civilizing enterprise.
The British immediately took the danger to the Indian route seriously. From the Deccan to the Indus, the men of the East India Company hastened to bring the “Eastern Jacobins” in line. Diplomats urged the sultan of Constantinople to go to war, to proclaim jihad against the atheistic French. They asked him, in the name of his supposed powers as caliph, to address the Muslims of India and warn them against the false promises of the French. The sultan would thereby engage unawares in pan- Islamism. Austrians and Russians joined that second coalition, which had become the union of the revealed religions against revolutionary atheism. Against that discourse of religious propaganda, Bonaparte in turn called on the Arabs to revolt against the Ottoman yoke.
For the Eastern populations, that chaos was incomprehensible. To be sure, the ulemas of Cairo saw the French ideas as a resurgence of the ancient materialism of the zindīqs in the first centuries of Islam, but for the Egyptian masses it was primarily a foreign domination of Christian origin. In Constantinople, where Europe was better understood, the impious ideas of Voltaire and Rousseau were formally condemned, but the frame of reference for popular mobilization was the Balkan Wars against the Austrians, the Russians, and the local Christian uprisings. Nevertheless, the three- year collaboration with the British army and navy would be a powerful vehicle for introducing modern forms of armaments.
For Egypt, those three years were a period of terrible destruction and misfortune. As during any occupation, some components of society found the means to accommodate themselves and even to collaborate with foreign domination. Some admired the new scientific methods and the art of printing, or took an interest in the administrative reorganization undertaken by the French, particularly in matters of taxation. But above all, the years 1798–1801 were the worst of a troubled time that had begun beforehand and would continue afterward.
The geopolitics of Islam emerged completely transformed by these Wars of the Second Coalition. The survival of the Ottoman Empire depended on its integration into a European balance of powers that now extended to India along the overland route. The policies of the European powers took into account every modification of local power relations. Local political leaders saw the need to adapt to this new state of affairs or to ask for European protections. Hence Bashir Shihab II, emir of the Lebanese Mountains, was allowed to keep his post as a reward for his refusal to join the French, enemies of the Christians— this despite the hostility of his traditional enemy, Ahmad Pasha al- Jazzar (who, however, had been the comrade in arms of the British in the decisive battle of the siege of Acre in 1799). The Muslims’ political survival therefore depended on integration at a general level into the European political system and on European political penetration at the local level. Local chroniclers took note of that new political reality by recording in their accounts the arrival of news about the major Napoleonic battles, even as they ignored the European conflicts of the eighteenth century.
The Islamic World under the Influence of the Napoleonic Wars
The fate of the Ottoman Empire was the great geopolitical question of the late eighteenth century. Not surprisingly, it remained an underlying issue in the Napoleonic Wars. The aftermath of the Egyptian expedition was the immediate pretext for breaking the peace treaty of Amiens: in 1803, the British refused to evacuate Malta as they had pledged to do. In Egypt, they supported the Mamluks against attempts to restore the Ottomans to power, but they respected their pledge to evacuate that country. European imbroglios hampered British policy. London had to be tactful with Russia to impel it to join the Third Coalition against France, even while ensuring that the overland Indian route was safe from the Russian threat, which materialized as multiple encroachments in the Ottoman Balkans. In 1805, London compelled the Ottomans not to recognize Napoleon’s imperial title, which meant breaking off diplomatic relations with France and furthering Russian influence in the empire. After Napoleon’s victory at the Battle of Austerlitz (December 2, 1805), Sultan Selim III reversed the alliances, recognizing Napoleon as emperor. The Russians supported the Serbian uprisings and in 1806 went to war against the Ottomans, invading the Romanian principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia. They had the support of the British, who attempted a naval operation against the Dardanelles and the Sea of Marmara. Repelled, the British then landed in Egypt in March 1807, but the sovereign of the region, the Albanian Muhammad Ali, forced them to reembark.
In Tilsit (July 7, 1807), Napoleon renounced the Ottoman alliance. The Russo- Ottoman War went on sporadically until 1812, whereas the British made peace in January 1809, forcing the closure of The Straits to European war navies in peacetime. As a result of the French threat, the Ottomans obtained a peace treaty advantageous to Bucharest in May 1812. The empire lost only Bessarabia and recovered the principalities, while pledging to recognize Serbian autonomy.
At the same time, the restoration of a relatively strong power in Persia, the dynasty of the Qajars, opened the new front of the Caucasus. The Persians attempted to reestablish their lost suzerainty over the kingdom of Georgia. Georgia appealed to the Russians, who annexed the kingdom in 1801. In 1803, Fath Ali Shah tried to make contact with the French. In 1806, the Russian advance resulted in the occupation of Baku and Dagestan. The ambiguous treaty of Gulistan in 1813 consecrated the loss of Georgia and northern Azerbaijan. It is therefore clear why the Ottomans and Persians sent embassies to central Europe to discuss an alliance against Russia in the wake of Austerlitz. Finkelstein’s treaty made France the guarantor of the integrity of the Persian Empire, if that empire were to fight against the British and the Russians. Tilsit put an end to such caprices. At that time, Great Britain appeared as the bastion against a Russia allied with Napoleon. The 1814 Treaty of Tehran made Persia the shield for British India in exchange for aid from London (in actuality from the East India Company).
Napoleon used these Eastern wars as a diversion for the Russian power, even as he sought to keep the Russians from seizing Constantinople. The French emperor even envisioned a new Eastern campaign, a French army marching on India with the agreement of the Ottomans and Persians. The Peninsular War put an end to these plans. Contrary to a tenacious and enduring legend, whose primary propagator was Alphonse de Lamartine, there was never any plan to support an Arab revolt of Wahhabi inspiration by sending agents for that purpose to the Near East. Reconnaissance missions in the Maghreb were organized, however, with the task of studying a potential military expedition. These never went beyond mere studies.
During that period, the Maghrebian regencies were attempting to position themselves in Mediterranean commerce, which had been completely disrupted by the Franco- British wars and by the disappearance of the merchant marines of Venice and Ragusa following the French occupation of these city- states. But the Europeans did not want to see Muslim commercial ships in their ports and would have done anything to avoid that risk, whereas they accepted the growth of a Greek navy under the Ottoman flag. Once the Napoleonic Wars were over, the Maghrebian merchant marine was banned from the European ports and the Maghrebian regencies attempted to return to traditional privateering. But those times were past. The British had banned the slave trade in 1807, as a result of the rise of the powerful Protestant evangelist current, which had made that ban its rallying cry. The 1815 Congress of Vienna generalized the prohibition, and for the first time Europe prescribed a universal norm. Yet slavery had been the principal economic driving force of Mediterranean privateering, both Christian and Muslim. The different treaties of protection and even of complicity with the regencies were now at an end.
The other pretender to Mediterranean trade was the merchant marine of the United States, which profited from its status of neutrality (at least until 1812). But the Americans did not sign any treaty of protection with the regencies and were therefore vulnerable to Maghrebian privateering. Assimilating the corsairs to pirates, the United States launched expeditions against the regencies and established a permanent war fleet.1 That was the first contact between the Americans and the Islamic world. In the wake of the Treaty of Ghent of December 24, 1814, which put an end to the War of 1812, the Americans declared war on the regency of Algiers. In June 1815, the American war fleet destroyed a large part of the Algerian navy and imposed a treaty abolishing any form of tribute and allowing the exchange of prisoners. In July, the regencies of Tripoli and Tunis were obliged to follow suit.
In spring 1816, Lord Exmouth’s British fleet was given the mission of informing the regencies of the Congress of Vienna’s decisions. It ransomed a number of European captives for a rather high price and did not secure a pledge to end slavery and privateering. Since the result was considered inadequate, the British fleet, reinforced by a Dutch contingent, went on the attack in August 1816. On August 28, a terrible bombardment of cannons and rockets took several hundred lives in Algiers. The regency had to give in, liberate the captives, put an end to the slavery of Europeans, and pay war indemnities. But the conflict resumed the following year. The Congress of Aix- la- Chapelle in November 1818 established a “European” league responsible for ending privateering. Tripoli definitively yielded, but Algiers and Tunis maintained their claims. In actuality, however, privateering was finished. Maghrebian sailors spent the last part of their careers serving in the Egyptian and Ottoman fleets during the Greek revolt. The regencies sought to hold on by strengthening their tax system and attempting to become involved in African internal trade. They were terribly weakened, however, and vulnerable to European expansion.
Thus ended a history of the Mediterranean that had lasted several centuries. These conflicts in the first decade of the nineteenth century set in place the pressing issues related to the Eastern question at the time: Serbia, the Romanian principalities, freedom to pass through The Straits, the Russian advance in the Caucasus. The fate of the last two great Muslim states was directly linked to their military apparatus. Sultan Selim III tried to build a modern army, the Nizam Cedid, with European- style armaments and discipline, while attempting at the same time to preserve former military institutions such as the Janissaries, closely associated with the trade guilds and the ulemas. The disproportion between their forces and those of the European states obliged him to resort to
conscription, first imposed in a partial manner on the Anatolian Muslims in 1802. When the sultan attempted to impose it in the Balkans in 1806, the local notables successfully opposed it. That was the prelude to the conservatives’ deposing of Selim III the next year. A period of reaction against the reforms followed, then a civil war. In 1808, the reformers prevailed, placing Mahmud II on the throne. He had to act cautiously vis- à- vis the conservatives, who were quick to revolt. He took it upon himself to restore the units of the new army in order to create a real power base for himself, while multiplying the signs of respect for Muslim institutions. He built new mosques and established new pious foundations. He had to disassociate, in people’s minds, the conservatives from the defense of the Muslim religion.
In Persia, the Qajars did not possess such authority. Despite their desire to style themselves absolute sovereigns, the Qajar shahs had to compromise on a permanent basis with powerful tribal confederations with armed forces of considerable size. The provinces were governed by members of the dynasty, who had a tendency to behave autonomously. The central power was thus relatively weak, despite its pretensions. In face of the Russian threat, the shah attempted to build an embryonic modern army by appealing to deserters from the tsarist army, then to a short- lived French military mission in 1807 (the Gardanne mission). As of 1809, he turned to British officers, then, after 1815, to the half- pay officers in the Napoleonic army. The absence of systematic procedures and of parallel reforms in the state and in society made these actions rather futile.
The old contentiousness between Persia and the Ottoman Empire, and the differences between Sunnis and Shiites, prevented any concerted action between the two great Muslim states. In 1820, the Qajars launched the last of the Ottoman- Persian wars, between Anatolia and Iraq. After initial successes, their armies emerged weakened by cholera. In theory, the Treaty of Erzurum of July 28, 1823, reestablished the territorial status quo ante, but in actuality left border conflicts that would be reactivated in the twentieth century.
The India question remained a permanent aspect of geopolitics in the early nineteenth century. Until 1804, the East India Company, on the pretext of the French threat, had conducted a vigorous campaign of territorial expansion, followed by a ten- year consolidation period. India was already being used as a pool for levying soldiers. When the Netherlands were integrated into the Napoleonic Empire, it was Indian troops who occupied the Dutch possessions of Insulindia. They would also seize the islands of Réunion and Mauritius. After 1814, the expansion resumed and the border of the British possessions stretched to the Himalayas and central India.
Whereas Enlightenment thought had defined the Muslim states as instances of military despotism, the East India Company became in fact its most perfect incarnation. In 1813, it lost its monopoly— which had not been respected for a long time— on commercial transactions, becoming for the most part a tax collection machine based on a military apparatus, and one that increasingly excluded Indians from positions of responsibility. The company stood completely outside society, though at the local level it needed the cooperation of the notables. Lacking all legitimacy, it held onto the fiction of perpetuating the Mogul Empire in Delhi. Having honed the military function to its own advantage, it disarmed the Indian subcontinent after the wars among the successor states of the Mogul Empire. Its army of sepoys was recruited from a number of Hindu or Muslim castes and ethnic groups, but indigenous soldiers could no longer obtain a rank above noncommissioned officer.
The company aspired to be respectful of all faiths and was rather hostile toward Protestant proselytism. But as the nineteenth century advanced, the British in India were increasingly influenced by the Protestant revival in Great Britain. They had a tendency, especially in the officers’ corps, to display hostility to native religions, resulting in a growing tension with Hindu and Muslim collaborators and servants.