ABSTRACT
While the nineteenth century in Europe was the bourgeois century, even a small and a subordinate bourgeoisie was not in existence anywhere in the Ottoman Empire until the second half of the century. Given the conceptualization of the Empire as a patrimonial order (or, as an Asiatic agrarian empire), the development of a bourgeoisie would only have been possible on the condition of weakening imperial control. The two basic models which have been employed to understand the structural reasons for the decline of the Ottoman Empire make the relationship between the development of a bourgeoisie and decline of imperial authority obvious. The first is the patrimonial crisis model which assumes that a classical empire is basically agrarian and that it is governed by a strong centre utilizing non-hereditary tax-collecting administrators as its extensions in peripheral areas. Accordingly, any new social class which may evolve to threaten the reproduction of the ancient regime would have agrarian origins. The crisis tendencies which might be inferred from this feudalization model have to do with the centrifugal potential inherent in the administration of (not only geographical sense) peripheral lands. The second model locates bourgeois development potential in the cities and in trade and manufacturing sectors. Here, a new class of traders may develop in exchange with, but on the outskirts of, the principal agrarian activity; but only when the political authority is not able to contain and constrain their accumulation potential.
