ABSTRACT
During the nineteenth century, the Ottoman state encountered an accumulated stock of restructuring dynamics arising out of the economic imbalances, military decadence, social dissolution, political skirmishes and a retreating vision of the Empire in the international division of power. On the one hand, to enforce these restructurings was quite a challenging task, as the Ottoman social system, as discussed above, relied upon delicate balances that started to become unfastened during the second half of the sixteenth century. In this sense, the processes of conjunctural recoveries and then deteriorations stretching forward to the nineteenth century resulted in the accumulation of substantial discontinuities. On the other hand, such a restructuring was an out-and-out requirement for the perpetuation of the Empire’s traditional balances, the mainstay of the Ottoman social system. Thus, in the nineteenth century, the panorama of the Ottoman political economy was that its leisurely continuities should be changed in a manner that would not disrupt the building blocks of its continuing path-dependencies. This arduous nexus ineluctably brought capitalism into the very core of the Empire’s civilisational equations with its inseparable attachment, secularism.
