ABSTRACT
Let it be noted once again that the Ottoman ‘circle of justice’ assumed a process of extensive accumulation contingent upon the territorial expansion of the state. Once limits to territorial conquest became too obvious to ignore, as they did by the time of the aborted siege of Vienna (1683), this virtuous circle could no longer operate. Hence, as of the classical period, wars became too costly for the state, and the prospective gains too small, if not entirely unlikely. In this context, the Ottoman Empire found itself in an impasse where fighting wars contributed more to the expenditure than to the revenue of the state, thereby giving rise to a mounting fiscal crisis. In order to come to terms with this crisis, the state was forced to create new sources of revenue and to toy with monetary policy (Genç, 1984). Up until the late eighteenth century, the Ottomans sought to restore the traditional equilibrium of the circle of justice as a response to the deepening crisis in which they found themselves. During the late-eighteenth century reforms of Sultan Selim III, caught between the old and the new (Shaw, 1971), Süleyman Penah Effendi envisaged to restore the order by accommodating the idea of development within the framework of the classical model whereas Tatarcük Abdullah Molla and Mehmed S¸erif Effendi deliberated on the fiscal crisis and budgetary processes of the state in their writings (Cezar, 1986: 142-8).3
