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Donald Quataert, Social Disintegration and Popular Resistance in the Ottoman Empire, 1881-1908: Reactions to European Economic Penetration, New York: New York University Press, 1983, xxii + 205 pages.
"Half a century has now passed since the movement for a "history from below" first opened up new paths for research in social history... In fact, recent scholarship on late Ottoman social history has substantially broadened the scope of research, to a large extent due to the path-breaking work of the late Donald Quataert" (Gara et al., 2001, pp.1-4)
While Donald Quataert's Social Disintegration and Popular Resistance in the Ottoman Empire, 1881-1908 is primarily concerned with the resistance of some people in the Ottoman Empire to the Europeanization and capitalization process, the accommodation of other groups and how they benefited from the process is also emphasized. In Quataert's words, it discusses "the twin themes of resistance and disintegration that characterize the encounter of the Ottoman Empire with the European economy" (Quaatert, 1983, p. 155). In other words, the basis of the study is the effect on Ottoman society of the penetration of Western economics in what Marx called a feudal empire. For him, the intrusion of the Europeans was a disruptive force that fractured the Ottoman polity both horizontally and vertically.
Five case studies that are used to illustrate the interactions between state, society and Western economic forces are the Régie, the cultivator-miners of Zonguldak and the Ereğli Coal Company, Anatolian Railway, the Port Worker Guilds and the Istanbul Quay Company, and The Ottoman boycott against Austria-Hungary. For Quataert, these particular case studies can open windows which to look both inwards upon local society and outwards upon the world.
In the "Introduction" of the book, Quataert elucidates the European economy that battled and ultimately transformed existing political, social and economic institutions. Here, he also places the Ottoman Empire and its incorporation into the European economy into the general world history. The first chapter of the book, "The Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Economy', delves into the process of the incorporation of the Ottoman Empire into the European economy, in general, and the European trade and investment activity in the Ottoman Empire, in particular, and specifically mentions improvements in transportation, and The Ottoman Public Debt Administration, which is the symbol and...