Urban Tanzîmât, Morality, and Property in Nineteenth-Century Istanbul
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URBAN TANZÎMÂT, MORALITY, AND PROPERTY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY ISTANBUL Eda Güçlü A DISSERTATION in History Presented to the Faculties of the Central European University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Budapest, Hungary 2018 Supervisor of Dissertation: Tolga U. Esmer CEU eTD Collection Copyright Notice and Statement of Responsibility Copyright in the text of this dissertation rests with the Author. Copies by any process, either in full or part, may be made only in accordance with the instructions given by the Author and lodged in the Central European Library. Details may be obtained by the librarian. This page must form a part of any such copies made. Further copies made in accordance with such instructions may not be made without the written permission of the Author. I hereby declare that this dissertation contains no materials accepted for any other degree in any other institutions and no materials previously written and/or published by another person unless otherwise noted. CEU eTD Collection iii Abstract The nineteenth century for Istanbul was a process in which streets increasingly gained a dominant role in the urban character of the city. It was a period of transition from passageways to streets. This dissertation examines the new immediacy of the street in the built environment of the city within the context of the spatio-temporal restructuring that the Ottoman capital went through in this period. The attempts of the government to construct wide and straight streets on a grid system were not only a matter of new urban aesthetics but also a process of value creation in the built environment. Giving a new order to the city was also an attempt to change the relational values of urban property. To moderate such a process and mediate spatial value relations was not easy; therefore, the government had to fashion a fiction of urban rent in which city dwellers could position their interests as property owners. It is this fiction of urban rent within which this study presents property as a social relation in which politics of location and value were played out around concepts like şeref that had both moral and economic meanings. This dissertation explores moments of contestation, persuasion, ambiguity, opposition, corruption as well as compliance in the space of the ‘modern’ – the street – where property owners fashioned competing notions of justice and morality in the collective and social production of urban tanzîmât. It argues that streets as commodities and şeref as an expression of value were social forms that constituted capitalist modernity with all the contradictions between experience and expectation; private and general interest; sacrifices and benefits; and CEU eTD Collection between depreciation and appreciation. iv Acknowledgements It is a good feeling that I have now the formal opportunity to thank my colleagues and friends who helped me in various ways over years. I am grateful to my supervisors, Tolga U. Esmer and Christoph K. Neumann. It was a privilege to have the chance to learn from them. Their support has always been more than academic. I also thank Susan Zimmermann who has inspired me more than she knows. I regret that I have not made enough effort to work more with her. I am greatly indebted to Sinan Çetin whose help has been beyond measure. I am also deeply indebted to Aslı Odman in many ways. Her critical stance has always been a reminder in and outside of academia. I am very grateful to Ayhan Han who helped me find my way in the Ottoman archives. I thank Tijana Krstić, Brett Wilson, Jean-François Pérouse, Yücel Terzibaşoğlu, and Alp Yücel Kaya for their support. I would also like to express my gratitude to Görkem Akgöz and Adrian Grama who have read parts of my dissertation. Their comments and criticism have been most helpful. I am also grateful to all my friends and family. I also thank Koç University Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations in Istanbul, and New Europe College in Bucharest for the fellowships that they granted to me. CEU eTD Collection v Table of Contents A Note on Transliteration ........................................................................................................................ 1 List of Figures ........................................................................................................................................... 2 Introduction ............................................................................................................................................ 3 Property as a fictitious form of capital ................................................................................................ 8 Spatial and temporal regularity ......................................................................................................... 12 Time, labor and property in Ottoman political economy.................................................................. 16 Institutional and legal context ........................................................................................................... 32 Capitalist modernity .......................................................................................................................... 39 Petitions as the empirical realm of experiences ............................................................................... 40 Orientation ........................................................................................................................................ 44 Chapter I: Urban Tanzîmât and the Hocapaşa Fire of 1865................................................................. 51 A fiction of urban rent and streets as commodities .......................................................................... 55 The relief program as a form of persuasion ...................................................................................... 90 “The few must suffer, more or less, that the many may gain” ......................................................... 96 Chapter II: Love, honor, happiness, labor, and property .................................................................. 106 Ottoman political economy ............................................................................................................. 114 The separation of economy from politics and morality .................................................................. 122 The ideal of private property and the practices of waqf and mîrî property ................................... 131 Credit and property ......................................................................................................................... 142 Chapter III: Municipal organizations .................................................................................................. 146 CEU eTD Collection The question of local autonomy ...................................................................................................... 152 Real estate tax and the ideology of services ................................................................................... 167 The principle of the separation of powers ...................................................................................... 177 Chapter IV: Corrupting property ........................................................................................................ 190 Corruption ....................................................................................................................................... 196 vi The problem of Gülizar Hanım with the Building Council ............................................................... 202 The “age of justice and equity” and Habibe Hanım vs. Mahmud Nedim Paşa ............................... 209 Intrigued by expropriation: property owners vs. the intangible state ............................................ 222 Epilogue ............................................................................................................................................... 230 Bibliography ......................................................................................................................................... 236 CEU eTD Collection 1 A Note on Transliteration When Ottoman Turkish is latinized in this dissertation, only long vowels, ‘ayn, and hemze are indicated as in the examples of tanzîmât, ma‘mûriyet, and me’mûr. However, no changes are made in the quotations in Ottoman Turkish from published sources, such as Osman Nuri Ergin’s Mecelle-i Umûr-ı Belediyye. Place names and names of people are transliterated as they are used in modern Turkish. CEU eTD Collection 2 List of Figures Introduction Figure 1: Map of Istanbul, 1910s (1331) Figure 2: Map of the Istanbul Peninsula, 1910s (1331) Figure 3: Panoramic view of the city from the Istanbul peninsula, 1900 Figure 4: View of the Bosphorus from the Istanbul peninsula Figure 5: View of the Istanbul peninsula Figure 6: Fatih after the Çırçır fire of 1908 Figure 7: Petition-writers Chapter I Figure 8: An example of a narrow and crooked street with wooden houses Figure 9: A narrow street in the Istanbul peninsula Figure 10: Another street with wooden houses Figure 11: Galata Bridge (New Bridge), 1912 Figure 12: Galata Bridge Figure 13: Eminönü Figure 14: Eminönü Figure 15: Sirkeci Figure 16: Divanyolu Figure 17: Divanyolu Figure 18: Divanyolu Figure 19: The vicinity of Çemberlitaş Figure 20: Ayasofya Figure 21: Ayasofya Figure 22: View of the Istanbul peninsula Figure 23: Proposed parceling of Demirkapı, May