The gist of what I want to say by way of introduction was suggested to me during my recent visit to Hong Kong and China. Reading about the events which led up to the establishment of the British presence on the South China coast in the 1830s and 1840s, I was struck, once again, by two things. The first is the way in which the 1838 Anglo-Turkish Convention was so obviously part of a world-wide movement of European self-assertion, spearheaded by a coalition of merchants, military men and politicians. The second concerns the essentially dramatic nature of the confrontation between European might and the declining power of the states and empires whose commercial practices it sought to control—the kind of drama which doesn't always get properly represented in history textbooks, let alone works of political economy.

We commemorated in 1988 the sesquicentennial of the Convention of Balta Limani, the ground-breaking Ottoman-British commercial agreement that set a pattern for Ottoman agreements with other powers in the years immediately following. The Convention sprang from British interests and from Ottoman needs during the 1830s in the Near East. My function is to sketch the general international background for the Convention, to look at the situation of the Ottoman Empire, at British foreign policy in the early nineteenth century, and in particular at the development of British policy in the Near East in the years from 1827 to 1841. A subtitle indicating the desirable breadth of view might read “From Navarino (1827) to Nezib (1839), and from Hercules’ Pillars to Hormuz and Herat.”

For the economies of the Middle East, the nineteenth century was a period of rapid integration into the world economy. Some of the forces behind this process came from Europe. In the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, Great Britain and later the Continental economies began to turn towards areas beyond Europe in order to establish markets for their manufactures and also secure inexpensive sources of foodstuffs and raw materials. As a result, European commercial penetration into the Middle East gained new momentum in the 1820s after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Later, starting around mid-century, commercial penetration began to be accompanied by European investments in the Middle East in the forms of lending to governments and direct investment in railways, ports, banks, trading companies, and even agricultural land. A large part of this investment served to increase the export orientation of the Middle Eastern economies.

The aim of the present study is to reconsider and reconstruct the economic history of the “decaying” Ottoman Empire during the Tanzimat period. Scores of scholars have already interpreted the decay in terms of imperial expansion. The decay paradigm is part of empire histories. Therefore, it is strongly imprinted with political discourse.

Below, I will argue that the Ottoman case would be better understood if viewed within the context of a more dynamic process of change versus inertia rather than decay, and that such an approach to Ottoman economic and social history would be less tainted with political concerns.

The ultra-nationalist approach to Ottoman economic history, has always blamed the 1838 Anglo-Ottoman Commercial Treaty for the “under-development” or “dependency” of the late Ottoman Empire. This scenario with a xenophobic hint and backed by Marxist as well as nationalist historiographies, finds the main scapegoat of modern Ottoman-Turkish economic history in the 1838 Treaty.

The Balta Limam Treaty of 1838, the Nanjing Treaty of 1842, and the events that led to them have epochal significance in the history of Britain's involvement in the Ottoman Empire and China. In addition to stipulating the principles according to which commercial relations were to take place between England and the Ottoman Empire and China, these treaties became the first in a series of international and domestic measures that marked a turn toward free trade and informal empire as distinct from the widespread use of formal methods of control that had characterized British policies in previous periods. As such, the treaties are also regarded as having a global significance. Furthermore, unlike previous unilateral grants by the Ottoman and Chinese governments that restricted the commerce and the residence of foreigners, the Balta Limam and Nanjing documents were drawn up as bilateral agreements that greatly expanded the foreigners’ ability to trade and reside in the Ottoman Empire and China.

In the last decades of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Izmir experienced tremendous economic growth, mainly as a result of growth in the world economy. In addition, the French Revolution and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars resulted in the collapse of French economic domination in the area. As a result, Ottoman minority merchants experienced an equally tremendous economic growth (Frangakis-Syrett, 1987, pp. 73-86). Britain replaced France as the principal trading partner of Izmir, while the economic growth of the port-city as well as that of the minority merchants continued strong. It was in this period of increasing commercial activity that the Anglo-Turkish Convention was signed between Great Britain and the Ottoman Empire on 16 August 1838 to come into effect in western Anatolia on March 1839. The Treaty, which subsequently was signed by all the European States as well as the United States and the Ottoman Empire, aimed at removing obstacles to free trade in the Empire for the merchants of these states. It was to achieve that by removing an array of local or additional duties paid for the export of Ottoman goods or the import and circulation of all other goods, manufactured or otherwise, and by setting a fixed rate of five percent duty on imports and twelve percent on exports—nine percent on purchasing at the place of growth and three percent on exportation.

The Commercial Convention of 1838 has often been used as a landmark delimiting the end of Ottoman economic insulation and the beginning of massive influence by foreign powers. Quite recently, Ottoman historians and economists have documented the enormous importance of the Free Trade Treaties, showing that “whereas British manufacturers began to expand their markets in the Ottoman Empire before 1838, the opening of Ottoman primary products to trade with Britain accelerated only after the signing of the Free Trade Treaties” (Pamuk, 1987, p. 29). For the empire as a whole, it seems probable that the Treaties influenced the patterns of international trade.

This paper is an examination of the relationship between the Anglo-Turkish Convention of 1838 and the transformation in Ottoman women's dress which took place during the nineteenth century. Until now, there has been a tendency to assume a direct cause-and-effect relationship between the Anglo-Turkish Convention and other economic treaties of the period, and fashion. The argument has been that the substantial increase in the volume of imported textiles and other goods led to a change in clothing styles, and indeed to changes in Ottoman taste generally, but my study of Ottoman women's dress indicates that the situation was much more complex. It is clear that the transformation in dress was well under way by the time of the Anglo-Turkish Convention, proceeding at its own rate, tied to events other than the treaty. In this context, fashion represents one of a whole complex of components of culture which, although affected by economic developments, are primarily social phenomena. Examining an area such as fashion (or painting or theater, for instance) will lead to a richer understanding of the period of the Anglo-Turkish Convention.