In his books Barkley often holds Oriental institutions, i.e., the governmental and law systems and Islamic religion, responsible for what is wrong in the Ottoman Empire. In the texts the state of affairs in Turkey is often depicted as a result of the actions of oppressive rulers and legislature who rob the labourer of his individual independence. Islam is seen to leave its stamp on everything in the public and private domain and thus religion is brought forward as one explanation of the decay of the Ottoman Empire. According to the Englishman, the lack of joy in exercising labour derived from the fact that bad laws made work futile for the ordinary person. Oriental institutions, Barkley insists, were barriers to individual and national industriousness, for they did not encourage the working people to display initiative.
An oppressive state machine created circumstances under which a survival mechanism emerged based on bribery and corruption. Fraud and deceit were so common in Turkey that it was not an insult to tell somebody he was lying, but rather the reverse: cheating was considered, the civil engineer assures us, an accomplishment:
They [the Orientals] look upon what we should call straightforwardness as blundering, if not something akin to bad manners. (Barkley, Bulgaria, xiv.)
In Barkley' s opinion well-off people in Bulgaria were to be avoided as much as possible for ' such folly as teaching honesty is unthought of' (Barkley, Danube, 175.).
When a man is spoken of as being a genius, it means that he is a bigger and more plausible liar than his neighbour and a more thorough and successful cheat. (Barkley, Danube, 175.)
This immorality and degradation permeated the administrative hierarchy up to the top. There were two main reasons for that. Firstly, much of the inefficiency and corruption in provincial administration was due to the manner in which governors were appointed and shifted about. Secondly, the officials were too often unsalaried.
Transferring people to other positions was often a means of removing a politically influential man to a post of honourable exile far from the Porte. The governor was sent to a province about which he often knew nothing, where he would set about not only to recover his financial outlay but to support a mass of personal servants and hangers-on who were given official positions. Appointment was frequently the result of bribery and personal influence rather than of merit. More often than not the power distribution in the Ottoman Empire was a result of intrigues:
Ask any Turk about any other Turk who is not his direct superior, and he will give him the worst of characters. (Barkley, Bulgaria, viii.)
Barkley was aware that all this had its roots in ' the great personal influence of individuals, commencing with the Sultan and permeating through all classes down to the village ' Muchtar' ' (Barkley, Bulgaria, viii.). He himself was constantly visited by slanderers who thought they could make an easy profit:
The Governor and the officials all wanted more pay, and hoped we might be able at some time to say a good word for them in Stamboul. All the others wanted to be made Governor. If only half they said of the existing one was true, he must be a hoary-headed old sinner; and if a quarter of what each said for himself was also true, here was a nest of men all fit to be Grand Vizeirs! (Barkley, Danube, 26.)
What caused much more harm to the Empire and contributed greatly to the wide-spread corruption among the provincial governments was that the unsalaried officials depended on fees, fines and bakshish. The civil engineer once describes those whose business it is to enforce the law, as ' venal and idle' because the freshly arrived European, for example, who expects the law to protect and help him as long as he remains honest, ' finds it is only used to extract money from his pocket, and as a capital exercise for his bad temper' (Barkley, Bulgaria, 153.). Indeed laws in the Ottoman Empire were made in such way that they tricked the less cunning. It was possible for those who knew how to set about it either to buy or avoid them. It was one of the mechanisms which financed the body of officials.
At some point Barkley comes to the idea that all orders given ' like all other laws there [in Turkey], seemed expressly made to hinder trade, annoy the inhabitants, and enrich the officials' (Barkley, Bulgaria, 123.). Such was the case when Varna, although not really endangered, was put under quarantine and nobody was allowed to go into or out of the city:
I know a number of people who passed through simply by paying bakshish to one of the soldiers on guard to let them do so, and the captain in command made quite a pretty little purse out of travellers by this way of collecting tolls. (Barkley, Bulgaria, 123.)
As the civil engineer understands it, this self-financing body of officials, supported by an unfair legislation, took away all profits from the individual and thereby suppressed the will of the population to work. In their enjoyment of power, Barkley writes, the officials assumed such ' airs of importance and a general air of insolence' (Barkley, Bulgaria, xiv.) that they took receiving financial and other tributes from their subordinates for granted. Important men had the privilege of dropping in at a stranger' s house, expecting to be received honourably:
All -- from the governor-general to the hangman -- think it right and just, when on a journey, to quarter themselves on the peasants without ever thinking of paying; and at the same time they demand the services of their host and his family, and the best of everything there is to be had. (Barkley, Bulgaria, ix.)
Such advantages made labour unnecessary for the masters. The population was plundered also by the troops and the police, who lived on them freely. The largest and most prosperous villages, reports Barkley, were built far from the main roads and the fortified towns, where the carts and beasts of the peasants could not be seized so often for transport purposes. When this happened the owners were forced to accompany the troops as drivers and were obliged to find food for themselves and fodder for the cattle without receiving any recompense. The reputation of the Zaptiehs was so bad that the settlers of the flourishing village Gebedji, partly Turkish, partly Bulgarian, cut down the new bridge Barkley built over the marshes, so that no officials could have easy access.
Even the ' good' deeds of the rulers such as building new roads, bridges and other public projects were carried out with the help of the unpaid labour of the native inhabitants. Barkley attacks the famous Mithat Pasha, who, reportedly, caused more damage than profit with his reformatory projects:
If, on one hand, one takes into consideration the great numbers of men forced from home and their usual occupations, the misery they suffered, and the heart-burnings this forced labour engenders, and, on the other hand, the results, any fair-minded man would, I think, agree with me, that the Pasha [Mithat] deserved a reputation -- but a very different one from what he got! (Barkley, Bulgaria, 95.)
The deeds of the ' great man' were realised in the old tradition of the exploitation of the Ottoman population. It was taken for granted that the subjects of the Empire should be, upon the order of any important person, the governmental disposal. The example Barkley gives is of a contractor system for exploiting the mines on the Black Sea coast which had nothing to do with its English equivalent:
The mines are principally worked for the government under contract by Christian Albanians, Bosnians, and Montenegrians, assisted by the Mahometan agricultural population of the neighbourhood, who are forced to work in the mines under the contractors; the nominal wages of these villagers, tenpence a day, are reserved by the government as a set-off against their elastic taxes. In times of pressure as at present, they are kept nearly constantly at work, either in the mines or in carrying the coal to the sea shore on the back of their mules and donkeys. (Barkley, Bulgaria, viii.)
The coal pits in nineteenth-century England did not have a good reputation either, because working conditions were appalling even when the century advanced. But the exploitation of the mines, contrary to forced labour in Turkey, was organised by the principle of free choice.
' The Bulgarians (and also the Turkish villagers) are loud and incessant in their complaints of the injustice and tyranny of the Turkish officials' (Barkley, Danube, ix.) -- reports Barkley, amazed at the patience with which the Orientals accepted their lot. At the same time the Englishman admits that they could not have done much about changing the everyday routine in the Ottoman Empire. Oppression by the authorities was too pervasive to be fought. Transformations had to come from above. But among the governing classes there were few well-educated Turks. Those who were well up in the politics of other countries had been brought up in some Western school and later attached to some embassy abroad, as far as possible from the Porte.
They see the decay of their country as plainly as we do, and feel the utter hopelessness of attempting to arrest it, and therefore turn their attention to accumulating riches, acquiring power, and surrounding themselves with pomp and luxury. The more plainly they see the deterioration of their own country, the more they hate their more fortunate neighbours, and there is really no fanatic like the Europeanised travelled Turk. (Barkley, Danube, 94.)
England' s secret of prosperity lay in the economic mechanism of self-regulation deriving from a different distribution of power. The role and the activity of the government were checked by the businessmen, who, having financial power, defended their interests by demanding the respective laws. The middle class was controlled by the groups of skilled artisans who banded together in trade unions and defended the positions of the workers.
The tension between workers and employers that sometimes arose was subdued with the help of the trade unions, whose policy was peaceful. The leaders of the highly respectable ' Junta' in London believed in thrift, temperance and ' steady habits' , talked incessantly of responsibility and disliked strikes, comparing them to wars which were only justified by absolute necessity. They admitted, however, that ' employers by their overbearing and tyrannical conduct, compel workmen to combine for their mutual protection' (Briggs, Improvement, 409.) and did not attempt to minimise the beneficial value of strikes on certain occasions.
The swindling methods of officials to get cheap or unpaid labourers gave strikes in the Ottoman Empire a preventative function. At least this was the case that Barkley experienced. In the conflict that arose with regard to the railway, he was in the role of the employer. The workers on the line were guaranteed two shillings a day and two loaves of bread. ' For that I will engage a thousand men.' (Barkley, Bulgaria, 30.) -- a native once told Barkley, thereby acknowledging that the interests of the employees were properly protected. However, on the fourteenth day of the construction, the labourers went on strike.
The fact was, they were so accustomed to being swindled, and were so astonished at the amount of work they had done, and we seemed so deep in their debt, that they were convinced they were trapped. (Barkley, Danube, 101.)
The workers' bitter experience with the provincial men of power caused insecurity among them, and they required their payment in advance. Giving in to their ultimatum could have spoiled the faultless organisation of the construction. The importance that the men would have assumed in this case would have made it almost impossible, Barkley says, to construct the railway at all.
The struggle for power on the works had a dramatic ending. At last pay day came.
A dozen of ferocious-looking Turks and Tartars made a rush at him [the Englishman carrying the money]. He stepped back, and then like lightening came the hunting-whip among their outstretched hands […] There was a pause, and then, finding the attacked was becoming the aggressor, the entire mass fled helter-skelter to the town, shouting out that they were all killed. […] It was hours before they came [to receive their money], and they would not then have done so had they not been driven by the Zaptiehs. (Barkley, Danube, 105.)
The reaction of the workers would seem totally exaggerated to a person not acquainted with Oriental habits and practices. The strike was provoked by fear of the men of power and their unlawful behaviour. For even at the top of the administrative hierarchy the word of an official was unreliable and a deal with him not reliable.
It was mostly the foreign investors who suffered, and this for two simple reasons: firstly, almost no native had at his disposal large sums to risk in a deal with the Turkish Government and secondly, nobody in the Ottoman Empire had business with a greater liar than he himself was. The foreign shareholders in the railway Varna-Rustchuk were induced to invest their money in the project by the promise of governmental guarantee, which should come into effect as soon as the line was ready for traffic.
[Over and over again] some well-instructed man came up to examine [the railroad], or to pretend to do so, and then left, finding some childish excuse for the Government' s not paying up -- such as the station doors wanting repainting, or the reeds on the marshes near the line requiring to be cut. […] It was only by stopping the traffic and shutting up the line that we at last got it acknowledged to be in proper working order. (Barkley, Bulgaria, 239.)
The odyssey of the shareholders went on forever because the Government announced it did not profit from the project. Although the amount of money obtained by the officials was enormous, Barkley assures us, the investors only occasionally obtained some trifling sums with no hope of getting what they should.
Barkley, Henry C., Between the Danube and the Black Sea or Five Years
in Bulgaria
(London: Murray, 1877).
Barkley, Henry C., Bulgaria before the War during Seven Years' Experience
of European
Turkey and Its Inhabitants (London: Murray, 1877).
Briggs, Asa, The Age of Improvement. 1783-1867 (London: Longmans, 1963).
Last modified 2001