The reforms and changes in the regulations seemed to have little effect in the provinces. Where the problems therefore existed, they continued to exist. Much of the inefficiency and corruption in the provincial administrations was due to the manner in which governors were appointed and shifted about. Many people became unsalaried hangers-on of pashas, hoping that a position would come their way. The crowd of relatives and parasites in the anterooms of every high official was one of the great curses of Ottoman administration, leading to favouritism, inefficiency, and bribery (Davison, 34.).
The vilayet (turkish for ' province' ) law of 1864 aimed at rectifying the situation in the provinces by combining central control with local authority and accelerating the conduct of public business in the provincial capitals. The intention of the law was to eliminate both local discontent and foreign complaints on the behalf of minorities by introducing a public selection of the lowest officials. There was a hierarchy of officialdom which represented a mixture of centralisation and decentralisation. Governors holding the highest posts had wide-ranging powers over the police, political and financial affairs, judicial matters and the execution of imperial laws. Viewed from Istanbul this represented a decentralisation of authority wherever the governor could act on his own initiative. From the provinces' point of view, on the other hand, this meant a considerable centralisation in the vilayet.
In order to test the new system the vilayet Tuna, or the Danube province, was set up. It extended from the Danube river to the Balkan Mountains and was selected to be the ' pilot area' for the whole Empire, in which a system designed to hold the empire together could be tried out. Midhat Pasha was chosen to carry out the experiments. ' What impressed travellers and residents in Bulgaria first was the program of public works vigorously pushed and much of it completed, an achievement unheard of in other parts of the empire. Paved roads, bridges (fourteen hundred by Midhat' s count!), street lights, public buildings, schools, steamer service on the Danube, model farms with agricultural machinery imported from Europe, all served to bring both the appearance and the fact of prosperity to the province.' (Davison, 152.)
Probably because Barkley was not acquainted with any other part of the Ottoman Empire, he was anything but fascinated by these "achievements". Devoting a whole chapter to Midhat' s roads and post he describes the ' chausée' from Varna to Rustchuck thus:
The first five miles out of Rustchuck there was a fairly good broad road. From Varna, also, there was something like a road finished for four miles, but the intermediate piece (some 160 miles) was in a far worse state when the road was announced to be opened than before anything had been done to it. […] Rough stones [...] were thinly scattered about, and these sinking into the mud formed a foundation that prohibited the possibility of driving on it for even a few miles. (Barkley, 94-95.)
The inefficiency of the Turkish authorities was also visible in the administration of the Tuna vilayet. There was a lack of higher Bulgarian officials in the province, the population of which was predominantly Bulgarian. Local nationalism was undoubtedly a reason for that, though the low level of literacy may have also been a contributing factor.
From the educational point of view, the Danube province became the most advanced region of the Empire after Istanbul and its vicinity. A list of schools in the Danube province was compiled and the results were published. According to Tuna (the newspaper of the Danube Province, first issued on 3rd March 1865, the number of the Bulgarian schools increased rapidly during the Reformation Era between 1855 and 1876) in 1855, the Bulgarians had 588 schools in all of the Balkans and the number had risen to 1,504 by 1877. The Turks had at about 2,700 primary schools in 1875 (Simsir, 15.).
These changes also seem to be reflected in Barkley' s texts. He insists that there were schools in most of the Bulgarian villages but that as they were of recent foundation, the education they provided was necessarily limited and ' it [was] therefore […] the custom of the richer Bulgarians to send their sons to be educated, either in the Robert College at Constantinople, or to some foreign country. As is only natural, the greater part of the boys or young men find their way to Russia or Roumania' (Barkley, xvii.)
Historians nowadays tend to think that the Ottoman reforms were a failure. After all they were fruitless with regard to their main purpose of saving the Empire. On the other hand, the Tanzimat changed the whole idea of the state. The subjects were declared to enjoy certain rights and were not only seen as tax-payers. Welfare, commercial enterprise, and other social activities were no longer left to individuals. Railways were slowly being constructed, telegraph lines and a postal system were created. The government became involved in many areas of human life. Industrial development, however, depended on trained manpower, modern machines, a commercial network, good transport, and an adequate credit system. The Ottomans were forced to do everything at once -- a fact that lead to slow results and the financial dependence on foreign investment.
Barkley, Henry C., Bulgaria before the War during Seven Years' Experience of European Turkey and Its Inhabitants (London: Murray, 1877).
Davison, Roderick H., Reform in the Ottoman Empire 1856-76 (New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1963).
Simsir, Bilàl N., The Turks of Bulgaria (1878-1985) (London: K. Rustem and Brother, 1988).
Last modified 2001