The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It - Course Information

~ THE STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES OF OTTOMAN WARFARE ~ 109
there was no possibility of generating a war-induced boom in the armaments sector.
This failure could become the source of numerous difficulties. As is well
known, wars result in a decline of demand for manufactured goods used by civilians.
Men are taken away from home to serve in the armies and navies, often
leaving their families in straitened circumstances. At the same time, the civilian
population frequently will suffer food scarcities, due to the priority accorded to
the needs of the armed forces, and due to the destruction of harvests in the course
of fighting. High prices for food will, of course, further decrease the demand for
civilian manufactured goods, and thus hasten the decline of this sector. In consequence,
the war-related boom in armaments and army supplies, as it generates
employment for artisans, comes to form an important ‘anti-cyclical factor’.
When peace is concluded, obviously reconversion to a civilian-dominated market
will be necessary, a process often accompanied by a serious economic
disruption.
It has been suggested that, in the Ottoman setting, this model did not operate,
or at least operated only in part. War-related losses to the civilian population did
occur, and these must have resulted in a declining demand for manufactured
goods. But there was no sectorial boom to counterbalance this war-induced
slump, because craftsmen working for the military were paid too little to generate
extra investment capital or even increase their consumption of food. To the
contrary, a lengthy war tended to result in overall economic exhaustion, exacerbated
by the inclination of the Ottoman bureaucracy to collect the largest amounts
of dues from the most efficient producers. 60 This meant that, at the war’s end, virtually
all artisans were starved of working capital, and thus unable to procure the
raw materials that they would have needed to make the transition to production
for a civilian market. Moreover, presumably there was little demand for their
products, at least if we disregard a few high-quality items purchased by the Ottoman
court and high-level officials. It is likely that under these conditions the
better-off townsmen, normally the purchasers of craft products, lost so much in
wartime that, even after peace had finally been brought about, they no longer
generated much demand (compare Chapter 2).
This line of argument has been developed to explain the situation observed in
the late eighteenth century, when the Ottoman armies in fact were being so badly
supplied that they were no longer in a position to win victories. However, there is
an important difficulty involved: for Ottoman methods of war financing did not
change substantially from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, even though it
is possible that the load placed on the backs of Ottoman subjects was less heavy
in the earlier period. Unfortunately, at our present level of information, we are
not able to provide quantitative data. Further, as has been stressed in a recent
study, in the sixteenth and partly even in the seventeenth century, artisans were
not overtaxed to the extent that universal exhaustion was the result. 61 These considerations
may at first glance cast some doubt on the explanatory value of the
‘war financing model’ in explaining Ottoman economic crisis and military
failure.