In the eyes of the Englishman, the Oriental world in which he worked and lived seemed to have an upside-down concept of morality. The inconsistencies in the behaviour of the Ottoman subjects were incomprehensible to the Victorian gentleman, whose conduct was ruled by truthfulness and honesty.
[Everyone] apes and exaggerates the manners of the dominant race whom he in private discourse affects to despise, and, in short, is insufferably arrogant and vulgar. And yet such conduct seems to be accepted by all classes as quite natural and proper under the circumstances, such as should inspire respect rather than disgust or aversion. (Barkley, Bulgaria, xiv.)
The slyness, cunning and dishonesty that shocked Barkley was the ruling Turkish philosophy. The Englishman expresses his surprise that contrary to the beliefs one had in England, it was not only the Turks who were untruthful. The Christians held straightforwardness in similar contempt. The rules of deceitfulness were followed by all the nationalities and religious communities of the European part of the Ottoman Empire.
Even if most of the double-dealing and treachery could be attributed to the faulty ruling methods of the Empire, there were some striking paradoxes which could be explained, if at all, only with the nature of the Ottoman character. Bulgaria was a far-away country, distant in space and obviously in historical time. It had a different evolution and substantially different regulating mechanisms. Barkley was perplexed when realising how complicated the native people were in their hearts. The civil engineer tells us with amazement the story of one of his guards, Sali, who had committed a murder and robbed the house of the dead family but as a cavass was as ' much to be trusted … as Policeman X. is at this moment as he stands guard over the jeweller' s shop in Regent Street.' (Barkley, Bulgaria, 66.)
It is next to impossible for a European to understand these extraordinary people, or to realise the fact that one of them will prove himself within a few months to be capable of the foulest crime for the sake of a few liras, and yet be able to be trusted to carry hundreds of pounds for long journeys on lonely roads where he could easily make a bolt of it, or hide it up and say he had been robbed by overwhelming numbers. (Barkley, Bulgaria, 65.)
It was not the only confusion Barkley had to encounter. In many respects Bulgaria, in comparison with England' s economic evolution, had an inverse logic. Notwithstanding the undreamed-of wealth that the conquest of the steam engine created, it failed to eliminate poverty and human drudgery. In the first half of the nineteenth century, conditions in the industrial areas were often appalling. Knowing much of the lustrous as well as of the black side of ' rich industrious England' , Barkley was astonished by what he saw in Bulgaria:
The great majority [of the population of Varna] just loaf about all the day, every day, and all their lives; yet there is no such thing as poverty, as we understand it in rich industrious England. […] few of the town people ever asked for a job, and yet the shops, khans, and coffee-houses are full of apparently poor people, and their homes generally swarm with unkempt, unwashed youngsters, the picture of health and looking well fed and contented.' (Barkley, Bulgaria, 54.)
Barkley' s bafflement was obviously shared not only by his contemporaries. The totally different laws governing Oriental society were at all times an object of bewilderment. At the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, there was a theoretical model in England for explaining the Oriental character which maintained that Europeans and Asians differed because of the physical, i.e., the climatic, conditions. Throughout the nineteenth century this speculation gradually became less important as political, economic and religious explanations gained the upper hand, but at the time when Barkley was in Bulgaria, the assumption was still influential. Climate, so the argument ran, had a determining effect on manners and institutions. Cold climates strengthened the body and moral of the inhabitants; so they were virtuous, frank and courageous. Hot climates, by contrast, made the psychological frame of men weak and wanting -- these were given to vices, and indolence of mind and body (Schiffer, Panorama, 234-39.).
In analysing Oriental society, some travellers tried to establish their claims by assigning the Turkish moral character its position in the spectrum of general human achievement. The strategy of these "philosophical" travellers placed the Turks outside the pale of civilisation, and Turkey was best explained as an anachronism. (Schiffer, Turkey, 15.).
Barkley belongs to the authors who use a descriptive strategy of writing. He places himself and his experiences into the foreground and gives an account of his personal observations and conclusions mostly with the help of anecdotes. Without discussing the body of texts created before him and without trying to throw off the weight of its authority, he puts forward his own explanation of the behaviour and labour habits of the inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire. As already mentioned in Ch. 4.3.1, Barkley defends the thesis that the negative attitude to work was a result of several conditions which made the labour of the Padishah' s subjects fruitless: monarchical despotism, bad government, lack of individual independence and the role of the women in the Ottoman society. The first three circumstances, as already discussed, moulded the character traits of the different nations; the last one, as will be discussed later, shaped the individuals.
The diverse cultural groups filtered and absorbed the influence to which they were subjected according to their specific ethnic features and their subordinated or marginal relationship with the dominant authority. The different grades of resisting authoritative control explain the distinctive differences of the attitudes displayed towards labour.
As already mentioned, Barkley had to do with a great number of nations, and in his books, there are numerous passages describing them. The civil engineer does not necessarily divide the inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire into ethnic groups. Just as often he classifies the men he worked with according to their profession or social status. He speaks of the Varna merchants, the Albanian masons, the peasants, etc. The next few chapters will deal only with the (ethnic) groups where the amount of information allows a more complete analysis -- the Turks, the Bulgarians, the Varna merchants, the peasants.
Barkley, Henry C., Bulgaria before the War during Seven Years' Experience of European
Turkey and Its Inhabitants (London: Murray, 1877).
Schiffer, Reinhold, Oriental Panorama (in print: Rodopi, 1999?).
Schiffer, Reinhold, Turkey Romanticised. Images of the Turks in Early Nineteenth Century English Travel Literature (Bochum: Brockmeyer, 1982).
Last modified 2001