Professional Documents
Culture Documents
attila aytekin
Tax Revolts During the Tanzimat Period
(1839–1876) and Before the Young Turk
Revolution (1904–1908): Popular Protest and
State Formation in the Late Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman Empire underwent a slow but decisive transformation from the
early eighteenth century onward. The societal change observed during the
eighteenth century was accompanied by change in state structures during
the reign of Selim III (1789–1807) and Mahmud II (1808–39). The most com-
prehensive transformation of the Ottoman polity, however, took place during
the so-called Tanzimat period (1839–76). While the subsequent long reign of
Abdulhamid II (1876–1909) put a halt to some of the trends for reform, the
society and the state continued to evolve. The Hamidian period came to an
end with the Revolution of 1908, which made the empire a constitutional
monarchy.
The question of taxation was one of the issues the policymakers had to
deal with throughout the entire process of transformation. Tax-related
problems became especially pressing during two particular periods, first after
the declaration of the Tanzimat edict in 1839, and then during the last years of
Abdulhamid’s reign. State policies regarding taxation and the popular
reaction to them became one of the most important aspects of state formation
during the Tanzimat and pre-1908 periods.
This is not surprising given the significance of taxation for modern states.
First, the balance of state finances, therefore many of its capacities, depends
on the state’s ability to tax the population. A large tax base, a sound taxation
the journal of policy history, Vol. 25, No. 3, 2013.
© Donald Critchlow and Cambridge University Press 2013
doi:10.1017/S0898030613000134
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e . attila aytekin | 309
system, and of course a quiescent population are therefore critical for any
modern state to function properly. Second, the ability to tax also reflects a
state’s legitimacy in the eyes of the people. Coercion might not be sufficient in
itself for taxation if the state does not enjoy a certain amount of legitimacy at
the societal level. Third, taxation is a class issue. Who is taxed how much and
who enjoys the benefits of the tax collected are questions that speak not only
to state structure, but also to the relations between upper classes and lower
classes. The latter often have a sharp sense of what is fair and what is not, and
that does influence their attitudes toward state attempts at taxation.
This article is roughly divided into two sections. In the first section,
I focus on the tax revolts that took place during the Tanzimat period; the
second section is about the tax revolts that preceded the Revolution of 1908.
In both sections, I describe the general characteristics of the period and the
most significant revolts and discuss the rebels and their demands. I also
analyze the Ottoman state’s responses to the two waves of revolt. The first
section also includes a theoretical discussion about the state-formation
approach. The Tanzimat period and pre-1908 revolts are comparatively
discussed in the Conclusion.
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310 | Tax Revolts During the Tanzimat Period
with real powers were constituted at the center as well as in the provinces. The
principle of equality before law was recognized, along with a new notion of
citizenship. There was a massive codification campaign in which either original
laws were enacted or foreign laws were adapted in the fields of civil law, penal
law, commercial law, procedural law, and citizenship law. A gradual but
decisive process of secularization began, seen most clearly in the religious
courts’ loss of jurisdiction to secular ones. As we shall see, not all of these
steps taken as part of the Tanzimat reform program were successful; yet the
Tanzimat as a whole irreversibly changed the nature of Ottoman polity. It was
in fact the most comprehensive attempt at modern state formation in the
Ottoman Empire to date. Scholarship, therefore, has shown a high interest in
the period. In contrast, despite such interest, the Tanzimat reform program in
particular and the late Ottoman reforms in general have not been adequately
analyzed.
This is partly related to the influence of modernization theory, which
has, until recently, dominated the field of Ottoman studies. The proponents
of this theory have seen in the emergence of modern Turkey a success story.
All the changes that took place in different spheres of life in the period,
from the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries, have been reduced to
“modernization,” according to which a couple of reformist sultans and a
handful of Western-minded bureaucrats tried to save the empire from collapse
by emulating the successful European model and restructuring its state along
those lines. In this story, the history of the Ottoman Empire from the late
eighteenth century onward becomes one of struggle between modernizers
and forces of reaction.1 Dependency theory has been developed as an alterna-
tive to the modernization approach. An offshoot of dependency theory,
the world-system perspective, produced by Immanuel Wallerstein and his
colleagues at SUNY Binghamton from 1970s, has had a short-lived, yet
important, impact on Ottoman studies.2 With their stress on economic relations,
world-system scholars have shown that the late Ottoman Empire cannot be
understood solely in terms of political modernization. Their works that focus
on the incorporation of the Ottoman lands into world capitalism have pointed
out those aspects of the transformation of Ottoman polity that had hitherto
been in the dark. In contrast, using world-system theory to analyze late
Ottoman history has its problems, some of which are related to its basic
concepts. The concepts of “incorporation” of the Ottoman Empire into the
world capitalist system, or, even more so, the “penetration” of capitalism into
the Ottoman territories, suggest that the process was essentially external to the
Ottoman social formation. Thus, the contribution of the studies influenced
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e . attila aytekin | 311
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312 | Tax Revolts During the Tanzimat Period
Their approach contravenes both the liberal notion of state, which views
it structurally separate from the (civil) society, and the Marxian views that see
the state either as an instrument in the hands of the ruling class or super-
structural. The state-formation approach stipulates that the state, instead, is
necessarily and internally related to capitalist economy. Although state forms
appear separate from the economy and above the society, the former appear-
ance is a result of the fetishized nature of social relations under capitalism,
and the latter is related to the organizing role of the state under the capitalist
mode of production: “The State within capitalist production, regulates and
orchestrates—in short, organizes—in such a way that the defining material
characteristics of capitalist production relations (individualization, formal
equality, and a host of social forms) are made to appear the only way those
social activities could be conducted and arranged.”8 In fact, the state could
organize only by appearing outside economy and above sectional interests in
society.
In their major historical study, The Great Arch, Corrigan and Sayer apply
this perspective, which sees the state not as a thing but as a reified, organized,
imposed, and regulated form of social relations of production to English state
formation.9 They underline that English state formation did not consist only
of repression. Legal regulation, that is, the law, and moral regulation also
played a significant part in the long process of English state formation from
medieval to modern times. Legal and moral regulation reduces all people
to individuals and delegitimizes and even criminalizes alternative forms of
existence. They create a sense of sameness and commonness while keeping
deep social divisions intact. During state formation, the nation as a politically
defined entity is also created. On the one hand, nationalism disintegrates
other identities and subjectivities.10 On the other hand, those who are deemed
worthy to be included in the political nation are included and those who are
considered unworthy or dangerous are excluded or disciplined through
jurisdiction.11 In the English case, this double process of inclusion-exclusion
was imposed most importantly on the working class and women.
Corrigan and Sayer show that state forms are extremely flexible and, as
such, they are constructed through struggle and contention between actors.
One aspect of this contentious process is “the constant ‘rewriting’ of history
to naturalize what has been, in fact, an extremely changeable set of State rela-
tions, to claim that there is, and has always been, one ‘optimal institutional
structure’ which is what ‘any’ civilization needs.”12 To turn to the Ottoman
case, the preamble of the Tanzimat rescript is quite revealing in this respect.
The authors of the text are at pains to argue that they are offering nothing new
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e . attila aytekin | 313
and it is the same old imperial state that had some problems recently and
needs only some “maintenance” to return to its old glorious days:
All the world knows that in the first days of the Ottoman monarchy,
the glorious precepts of the Kuran and the laws of the empire were
always honored.
The empire in consequence increased in strength and greatness,
and all its subjects, without exception, had risen in the highest
degree to ease and prosperity. In the last one hundred and fifty years
a succession of accidents and divers causes have arisen which have
brought about a disregard for the sacred code of laws and the regu-
lations flowing therefrom, and the former strength and prosperity
have changed into weakness and poverty; an empire in fact loses all
its stability so soon as it ceases to observe its laws.
The Ottoman state’s reaction to agrarian unrest is of particular impor-
tance for the present article. As Corrigan and Sayer write about the English
state: “The state is involved in regulating into silence, eccentricity, marginality
or crime all doctrines and practices within the realm of cultural life that
provide glimpses of an alternative set of social relations.”13 The Ottoman
state’s attitude to post-Tanzimat rural unrest was quite similar. The state tried
to marginalize all forms of protest, violent or otherwise, and to discursively
reduce social unrest to ordinary crimes through the use of terms such as
“fesad” (mischief) and “müfsid” (troublemaker). By contrast, it is noticeable
that the actions of protest and resistance themselves and the “ringleaders”
were criminalized, not the large masses who got involved in or supported the
actions in one way or another. In the revolts of non-Muslims, religious differ-
ence allowed the Ottoman state to blame foreign-agent provocateurs who
supposedly exploited the naïveté of peasants and incited them to revolt. This
gesture of the state served a double purpose; it made ignoring the root causes
of unrest possible and prevented the identification of large segments of
the population, or a definite ethnic/religious group, with the “crime.” This
material and discursive separation of the “crime” from those who committed
it also enabled the state to hold a small group of “instigators” responsible for
cultivator protest and severely punish them, while at the same time showing
imperial “mercy” and “benevolence” to masses.
As I have noted above, state formation is not limited to violence or
repression in general. Modern states provide services and improvements for
the general public, such as mass education, health system, and better urban
sanitation. The Tanzimat period witnessed attempts to improve the living
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e . attila aytekin | 315
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e . attila aytekin | 317
new tax regime, he was supposed to get his stipend from the central treasury.
He, however, claimed the villages as his property and pressured the villagers
to pay rent in addition to tithe.30 In 1855, the peasants once more refused to
pay the amount Zekeriya claimed.31 Two years later, in late March 1857, the
confrontation was renewed. The cultivators in two villages refused to pay the
“rent” and the so-called kesim tax.32 An imperial order concerning the land
question in Niş and Leskofça was promulgated on November 7, 1858.33 Despite
this, the tax revolts in the area continued sporadically. In a separate incident,
by early 1859, a large group of peasants were noted for not paying taxes for a
year and a half. They had also reportedly formed an association to defend
their cause.34
The Vidin Revolts of 1849 and especially 1850 were perhaps the most
violent revolts during the Tanzimat period.35 In the nineteenth century, the
town of Vidin was an important economic center and a port city on the river
Danube in the northern-central section of the Ottoman Balkans. In rural
Vidin, an “archaic” land regime called gospodarlık, which was based on a
complex set of relations of exploitation, including corvée, and the exclusion
of Christian cultivators from controlling arable land was in effect.
Following the unrest of April 1849, a bigger and more violent uprising
broke out in 1850. Up to ten thousand people joined the insurgency.36 In
response, the governor sent out a group of negotiators composed of Muslim
and Christian notables and Christian clergy to listen to the rebels’ demands
and to try to persuade them to give up. The rebels, however, refused to talk to
people from Vidin. Although the central state ordered the governor to act
moderately and not to use excessive force, the landlords took total control of
the local council and dealt with the revolt heavy-handedly, using irregular
troops.37 Large-scale massacres of Christian peasants and even townspeople
followed.38
Another tax-related conflict took place in Canik, a central Anatolian
region on the Black Sea coast, from the 1840s to the 1860s. The majority of
the population was Muslim, with a significant presence of Greek Orthodox
and Armenian populations. Due to the fertility of land, the main economic
activity in the region was agriculture, though the importance of the Samsun
port and customs increased in the second half of the century.39
In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Hazinedar magnate family
controlled a number of bureaucratic posts, including the crucial one of
governorship of Trabzon, the jurisdiction of which covered Canik.40 The
family and their entourage had tax farming rights over wide tracks of arable
land. The already-existing tension in the region was intensified when the
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e . attila aytekin | 319
problem. For example, Nadir Özbek argues that the Tanzimat-era state tried
to move the burden of taxation from the agrarian to the urban economy.47
But the actions and policies of the Ottoman state regarding peasants do not
suggest that there was such an attempt. Indeed, the state tried to solve prob-
lems created by its own policies, usually to the detriment of peasants. This
was especially true for non-Muslim peasants, who in general were more
vulnerable in their dealings with the state and the magnates. The real reasons
for the inability of the Tanzimat state to reform taxation, then, should be
sought less in its “weakness” or failure to modernize but in the class compo-
sition of the political support for reforms. The alliance that supported the
Tanzimat reforms as well as the preceding ones consisted of the central state
bureaucracy, the petty gentry, and the wealthier merchants.48 It was fragile and
there were groups within the alliance that could be adversely affected by some
of the reforms. The central state could not afford to alienate any element of the
alliance and as a result, its policy toward the upper classes was determined
by permissiveness49 and salutary neglect50 rather than weakness. As a result,
attempts to modernize taxation were hardly backed with an unambiguous
political will to restrain former tax farmers or local gentry, leading to violent
reactions on the part of the cultivators.
The problems in rural Vidin stemmed from the systematic exclusion of
Christians from land ownership. Perpetuating this ethno-religious exclusion,
however, became increasingly contradictory in the face of the Tanzimat prin-
ciples that promised equality before law. Despite this contradiction, except
for a brief period after the rebellion, the government was determined to pre-
vent land acquisitions by Christian cultivators, which was one of the prime
reasons why the conflict remained unresolved for a long while. The culti-
vators of Vidin reacted to this apparent contradiction by withholding tax
payments. Indeed, the first goal of the peasants who rose up in revolt was to
defend their livelihood. However, the revolt was not a desperate attempt for
survival. The Tanzimat was indeed an essential component of the back-
ground that paved the way for the peasant rebellions in Vidin and elsewhere.
Moreover, it figured predominantly in the way the rebels perceived the
conflicts and configured their demands. The Vidin peasants “read” the
reforms differently and argued that the sultan had given them the land.
Moreover, they did not accept the double taxation situation where they
would be paying the new Tanzimat taxes as well as the old dues. As a result,
they refused to pay and were able to avoid paying the claims of the land-
owners for as much as seven years. They thereby did not agree to extractions
they considered illegitimate.
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320 | Tax Revolts During the Tanzimat Period
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e . attila aytekin | 321
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322 | Tax Revolts During the Tanzimat Period
which time the constitution was suspended and military and civilian bureau-
crats suspected of liberal ideas were eliminated, a full-blown absolutist regime
was established. The regime maintained an unmistakable hostility to all forms
of liberalism. There were heavy limitations on the use of personal rights and
freedoms, which were enforced by relentless censorship of the press and an
overdeveloped spy network accountable directly to the Sultan. Abdulhamid
established tight control over ministers, and central as well as provincial
bureaucrats, and tried to suppress all autonomist tendencies in the provinces.
The Hamidian Regiments, quasi-regular units recruited from certain Sunni
Kurdish tribes incorporated into the army, engaged in widespread massacres
against Armenians in Eastern Anatolia. An estimated one hundred thousand
Armenians died in the 1895–96 massacres, at best initiated by civilians and
ignored by state forces, but often provoked, facilitated, and even carried out
by them. In short, the reign of Abdulhamid put a long halt to the processes of
democratization of decision-making and enlargement of civil and political
liberties in the Ottoman Empire that had been initiated with the Tanzimat.
However, it is problematic to see the Hamidian period as a “stray
from the track” as a whole. There were serious attempts at economic and
technological progress, in particular in agriculture and transportation.
There was a significant increase in investment in education. Programs of
social welfare were initiated.55 The regime paid great attention to both
internal legitimation and international symbolic competition through
the emphasis on the Sultan’s title of caliphate, public displays of grandeur,
and elaborate ceremonies.56
Despite such attempts, however, the regime in its final years had
increasing difficulty containing discontent. The last period of the Hamidian
regime indeed witnessed much social unrest and growing political opposition.
The main opposition group was called the Young Turks, an umbrella organiza-
tion that brought together diverse groups against the regime. Despite impor-
tant internal tensions, the opposition made important headway in organizing
at home and unifying their forces. The 1907 alliance between the Committee
of Union and Progress (CUP) and the Armenian Revolutionary Federation
was especially important in this respect. The liberal revolutions of 1905 in
Russia and of 1906 in Iran did not help the Hamidian regime either. They
caused a good deal of concern in the regime and inspired hope in the opposi-
tion. They were particularly influential in Eastern Anatolia.57 There were
several serious instances of mutiny in the armed forces, especially in the navy,
between 1906 and 1908.58 In addition to tax revolts, there were other forms of
social unrest. In Eastern Anatolia, there were uprisings against the notorious
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e . attila aytekin | 323
Hamidiye Regiments.59 Food riots took place in Erzurum, Aleppo, and Beirut
in 1907 and in Sivas in 1908.60
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e . attila aytekin | 327
c onclusion
Several popular rebellions took place in the Ottoman Empire around the mid-
nineteenth century. Many of these rebellions included a collective refusal to pay
taxes to the state and/or local magnates. In the literature, the revolts have mostly
been considered either as nationalist or proto-nationalist uprisings or conser-
vative reactions to the Tanzimat reform program. Another crucial moment was
the wave of tax revolts that took place on the eve of the Young Turk Revolution
of 1908. From 1906, there were important tax revolts in several Anatolian towns
as well as Macedonia and Mosul, largely in response to attempts to introduce
two new taxes. Historians have not paid enough attention to those revolts. In
fact, the tax-related popular protest and state response in both periods were
crucial instances in the slow and painful birth of the Ottoman modern state.
Although taxation was the root cause in both waves of reforms, there
were four significant differences between the post-Tanzimat rescript and the
pre-1908 Revolution tax strikes and revolts:
1. The Tanzimat period tax revolts occurred in all of the three historical-
geographic regions of the empire, namely, the Balkans, Anatolia, and
the Arab-speaking provinces. The revolts were concentrated more in
the Balkans than the two other regions and the biggest ones seem to
have taken place there. The pre-1908 revolts, however, were largely
confined to Anatolia. In any case, the major ones occurred there.
2. Although there were instances of noteworthy Muslim participation
in the Tanzimat revolts, most rebels were non-Muslim. In contrast,
the rebels in the revolts that occurred before the 1908 Revolution
were by and large Muslim.
3. The post-Tanzimat uprisings were peasant revolts with limited
townspeople participation. The early twentieth-century tax strikes,
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328 | Tax Revolts During the Tanzimat Period
however, were manned and led by the urban middle classes. Rural
participation in those instances of unrest was quite negligible.
4. Contrary to the assumption that the insurgent peasants reacted
against the Tanzimat, the rebels in some of the major revolts rather
endorsed the prose of reform, often referring to the promises of
equality and protection of the well-being of subjects. They often
rebelled not to halt the reforms but to preempt a particular way
of understanding them. Peasants and other cultivators in several
provinces in fact comprehended the transformation the reforms
entailed, endorsed them, and the tax revolts were part of their
endeavors to reinterpret the Tanzimat. In response to the midcen-
tury revolts, the Ottoman state strived to delegitimize the revolts
as foreign instigation or agitation by a handful of ill-intentioned
people, criminalized what it saw as their ringleaders and often used
excessive force to subdue them. Because of the fragmented and
fragile structure of the ruling class, it could not oppose the local
gentry and, given the harsh reaction of some segments of the popu-
lation to double taxation, it was forced to abolish the new taxation
system after a short while. Thus, the midcentury peasant revolts
and the state’s response in the form of legal regulation, moral reg-
ulation, and concessions to the upper classes should be considered
as an integral part of Ottoman state formation during the Tanzimat
period. The 1904–8 revolts, in contrast, took place amid intense
agitation by political opposition toward the end of the autocratic
reign of Abdulhamid II. The revolts shook an increasingly oppres-
sive regime. The state responded to those revolts with a mixture of
violence and helplessness. It was soon forced to abolish the newly
introduced taxes, but it was not enough for the survival of the
already weak regime. The tax revolts thus paved the way for the
constitutional revolution of 1908.
The differences between the two waves of tax revolts attest to three dimen-
sions of the relationship between late Ottoman social change and state forma-
tion. First, it seems that in the mid-nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire the
biggest part of the social question was the agrarian question. In the early
twentieth century, however, the agrarian question was not as important as it
used to be. Instead, the urban bourgeoisie was ready to assume the leadership
role in the new wave of tax revolts. The latter fact indeed shows that the
socioeconomic development of the empire in general and capital accumulation
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e . attila aytekin | 329
by the urban middle and upper classes in particular had advanced beyond a
certain degree by the first decade of the twentieth century.
Second, that Tanzimat was adopted by peasants who did not refuse the
reforms but indeed tried to radicalize it show that the Tanzimat-era state
enjoyed a large degree of legitimacy among the rural lower classes, Muslim
and non-Muslim alike. The revolts preceding the Young Turk Revolution,
however, show that the ancient regime had lost legitimacy even among
Muslims, whom it had considered as its main social support base.
Third, around the mid-nineteenth century, the discontent of non-Muslims
could still be voiced in non-nationalistic terms. Yet, as a result of certain
important political developments, this situation had changed by the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century. The significant loss of territories in
1878, the development of the Macedonian Question as a burning problem
facing the empire and its citizens, and the emergence of the Armenian question
as a national question and the subsequent massacres of Armenians in the 1890s
all made the emergence of non-nationalized social movements very difficult.
As it happened in important central and Eastern Anatolian towns, only
among Turkish-speaking Muslims did the tax strikes not acquire a national
or at least an ethnic character.
n ot e s
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332 | Tax Revolts During the Tanzimat Period
53. Donald Quataert, Ottoman Manufacturing in the Age of the Industrial Revolution
(Cambridge, 1993).
54. Seyfettin Gürsel, “Osmanlı Dış Borçları, ” in Tanzimat’tan Cumhuriyet’e Türkiye
Ansiklopedisi (Istanbul, 1985): 672–87.
55. Nadir Özbek, “The Politics of Welfare: Philantrophy, Voluntarism, and
Legitimacy in the Ottoman Empire, 1876–1914” (Ph.D. diss., State University of New York
at Binghamton, 2001).
56. Selim Deringil, “Legitimacy Structures in the Ottoman State: The Reign of
Abdulhamid II (1876–1909), ” International Journal of Middle East Studies 23 (1991): 345–59;
and Deringil, Well-Protected Domains.
57. H. Zafer Kars, 1908 Devrimi’nin Halk Dinamiği (İstanbul, 1984), 21.
58. Ibid., 112–16; Yuriy Aşatoviç Petrosyan, Sovyet Gözüyle Jöntürkler(Ankara, 1974),
223.
59. Ibid., 22.
60. Aykut Kansu, 1908 Devrimi (İstanbul, 1995), 90–91; Kars, Halk Dinamiği, 22, 38.
61. Kars, Halk Dinamiği, 73.
62. Ibid., 73; Kansu, 1908 Devrimi, 38.
63. Ibid.; Özbek, “Gelir Vergisi,” 64.
64. Kansu, 1908 Devrimi, 38; Özbek, “Gelir Vergisi,” 65.
65. Kansu, 1908 Devrimi, 43–44, 52, 53, 54, 71, 90.
66. Özbek, “Gelir Vergisi,” 63, 65, 67.
67. Kars, Halk Dinamiği, 64.
68. Ibid., 24ff.
69. Ibid., 143.
70. Kansu, 1908 Devrimi.
71. Kars, Halk Dinamiği.
72. Ibid., 64ff., 146.
73. Sven Steinmo, “The Evolution of Policy Ideas: Tax Policy in the 20th Century, ”
British Journal of Politics and International Relations 5, no. (2003): 206–36 (209–10).
74. Özbek, “Gelir Vergisi,” 61.
75. Ibid., 66–67.
76. Ibid., 71–72.
77. Steinmo, “The Evolution of Policy Ideas,” 210.
78. Petrosyan, Sovyet Gözüyle, 234.
79. Kars, Halk Dinamiği, 12–13.
80. Agrarian workers and porters joined shopkeepers in Bingazi protests against the
personal tax in 1905. Özbek, “Gelir Vergisi,” 64.
81. Kars, Halk Dinamiği, 166.
82. Ibid., 147.
83. He criticizes Kansu for generalizing the rebels under the name “people” and
for simply seeing the revolts, especially the one in Erzurum, as a revolutionary uprising
against the established order. Özbek, “Gelir Vergisi,” 76.
84. Kars, Halk Dinamiği, 36.
85. Ibid., 64.
86. Ibid.
87. Özbek, “Gelir Vergisi,” 136.
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