Suchergebnisse

Social conditions and the social security policy in Turkey

This article lays groundwork for a more systematic history of the Ottoman gendarmerie (jandarma), here with special emphasis on the men in the corps and their working conditions. The gendarmerie, which before 1879 reform the Ottomans calledasakir-i zabtiye, was a provincial paramilitary police organization established by bureaucrats of the Tanzimat state during the 1840s on an ad hoc basis. This force later acquired a more uniform and centralized character, becoming the empire's principal internal security organization. Through this paramilitary police institution, 19th-century Ottoman bureaucrats aimed to extend their authority into the provinces, which at that time could be described as only marginally under Ottoman sovereignty according to contemporary definitions of the term. From the late 18th century on, extending state sovereignty to recognized territorial boundaries emerged as a vital need for most European states as well as the Ottoman Empire. Along with other modern military and civil institutions and modern administrative practices, introducing various types of paramilitary provincial police forces enabled governments in Europe to enhance and extend their authority over territories in which it had been limited. The gendarmerie thus emerged in both Europe and in the Ottoman Empire as integral to modern state formation and its technologies of government. Although acknowledging the Pan-European context of the gendarmerie's emergence and its theoretical ramifications, the present article is concerned more with the Ottoman context within which this police corps was established, evolved, and took on a uniquely Ottoman form.

This article aims to explore state–society relations during the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II (1876–1909) through the filter of a unique conjunction of state and society—that is, various social groups' voluntary activities, especially fund-raising campaigns with philanthropic and patriotic purposes, often initiated by the palace itself. These campaigns offer fruitful case studies for the study of state–society relations and the dispositions of the public sphere in the late Ottoman era. In light of these activities and their importance for understanding late Ottoman society, the public sphere in this context may be best defined as a dynamic political realm where social and political groups pursued their particular interests; at the same time, it was "the public domain where authority is constituted as legitimate and exposed to popular review, both inside and outside the accepted terms of the given discourse." Within the parameters of this definition, which is descriptive of the multiple agencies and fragmented nature of the public sphere in this period, this article focuses on how the Hamidian regime sought to unify this fragmented social and political space by promoting public participation in voluntary activities in the broader political arena.

This article examines the Ottoman state's increasing involvement in caring for the poor and the needy and the emergence of modern relief institutions and hospitals throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The particular focus will be on the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II (1876-1909) and the second constitutional period (1908-14) up until World War I.Rather than presenting the emergence of poor-relief institutions in the Ottoman Empire as a function of increasing poverty and need, or as a function of the state's desire to control and regulate the urban population for various concerns, I concentrate on the dynamics of the political sphere. I will focus particularly on the political conflict between the sultan and the new political elite, whose identity was defined in relation to newly structured state functions and services.