Potatoes, Slaves, and Anglo-Ottoman Relations on the World Stage

Chris Gratien, Georgetown University

The 1840s were a decade of high imperial romance between the Ottomans and their British allies on the European stage. The British had played a major role in politically supporting the Ottoman Empire once it came under threat from Russia and also helped negotiate the end of Mehmed Ali's brief occupation of Syria. Close ties with the Ottoman government during the Tanzimat period would follow. These documents are part of that story. They are translations of letters (I don't have the English originals) thanking Sultan Abdülmecid I for two gracious acts, one regarding potatoes and the other regarding human beings.

Eviction of bankrupted Irish peasants by landlords

The Great Famine in Ireland, which lasted roughly from 1845 to 1852, is a dark chapter of nineteenth-century European history. Famine has often been considered a marker of pre-modern societies with inefficient modes of transport and low-yield methods of cultivation. But the factors that conspired to create the "potato famine" in Ireland were entirely modern. They were also devastating: between death and migration the island lost 20% of its population. The economic restructuring of Ireland under British domination from the latter half of the eighteenth century onward impoverished peasants, increasing landlessness and bankruptcy among the poorest segment of Irish society. During this period, the Irish diet also changed dramatically. A daily intake of traditional staples such as milk, butter, and bread gradually gave way to an almost entirely potato based diet among society's poorest segments. Potatoes were introduced to Europe during the second half of the seventeenth century following the Spanish conquest of the Incan Empire in modern-day Peru, which is the potato's ancestral home. These cheap and hardy tubers revolutionized the diets of European peasants. The calories per acre yield of potatoes was unrivaled among its carbohydrate cousins; only maize, also a New World crop, challenged its supremacy. Additionally, potatoes kept well and could serve as the base for a wide variety of dishes. An Irish farmer might consume dozens of potatoes in a single day. These carbohydrates helped to fuel the rapid population growth that occurred throughout Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yet, this spread would also be the undoing of the potato empire in Ireland. 

Though they offered high yields, potato crops were a bit of a gamble in Ireland. From their earliest introduction, widespread crop failures as a result of potato diseases and fungi occurred periodically throughout the island. What made the crops so uniquely susceptible to epidemic seems to have been genetic. While there were thousands of species of potatoes in the Americas, the potatoes of the Emerald Isle were almost exclusively of the Irish Lumper variety. When Irish farmers put all their chips on tuber in the high stakes game of nutritional roulette, the risks of food shortages escalated. The plant disease that triggered the so-called Potato-Famine in Ireland, a fungus called blight, spread to the island during the 1840s and had an almost instant impact. British imperial authorities we unable to stem the tide of starvation that swept over Ireland. In fact, many were insensitive or indifferent to the sufferings of the Irish. An extreme case would be that of Assistant Secretary to the Treasury Charles Edward Trevelyan, who had previously served in India. He found the famine a serendipitous means of reducing the Irish population, famously saying "The judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated... The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people."

However absent the sympathies of English politicians may have been, evidence of Ottoman compassion for the suffering of British subjects is contained in this letter referring to the astonishment and gratitude of Queen Victoria at the receipt of a generous donation from the Sultan. Indeed, there was tremendous need for relief in Ireland at the time, and the Great Famine roused munificence among people as far away as the Choctaw, a Native-American tribe only recently relocated by the US government to Oklahoma. For the Ottomans, however, this symbolic gesture also came with a certain assertion of parity between the two polities. Perhaps it can even be read as a clever reminder from a semi-subordinate ruler to the empire on which the sun never set of its own mortality and imperfections, sort of like Hugo Chavez's offer of aid to the US in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. In any case, the letter refers to the Ottoman gesture of benevolence as an auspicious indicator of a potential era of good feelings between the two states.

Accompanying this letter was another expression of gratitude, this time carrying a much different political significance. One of the chief moral causes that seemed to legitimize the rise of British hegemony over the nineteenth century was that of abolition. A number of factors led to the rise of anti-slavery movements in England during the late eighteenth century. Once slavery had been judged illegal in England, advocates of abolition sought application of the law elsewhere. The practical consideration that the American colonies, home to the world's largest slave-based agricultural economy, were no longer part of the British Empire by 1783 certainly made the situation easier. The first major abolition law in 1833 and the incremental liberation of slaves (and compensation of their former owners) over the next decade led to the legal - if not always the practical - elimination of the slave trade throughout the British Empire.

This is where the Ottomans enter the picture. Ottoman traders played an active part in the slave trade in Africa and elsewhere, meaning that abolition in regions of the British Empire such as the Indian Ocean required Ottoman cooperation. The practice of slavery in the Ottoman Empire, which (unlike in Europe) was not racial, was however codified in imperial legal structures. The use of the word esir, which can refer either to slaves or "captives" as in prisoners of war and the life, reflects their pervasiveness. While by 1847, some reforms had been made in the Ottoman Empire to limit the trade of white slaves such as Circassians, a practice long decried by the racist "morality" of the Ottomans' critics in the West, no such changes had been made regarding African or "zenci" slaves.

The second letter presented here expresses the Queen's gratitude for Ottoman promises of coordination with the British in Basra and the straights of Hormuz in implementing a ban on the African slave trade. The agreement appears to be limited to slavery in so far as it relates to the British Empire; British ships or ships bound for and coming from the British Isles were the principal targets of inspection. Of course, this promise of coordination was not tantamount to a complete abolition of slavery by the Ottomans themselves, which in principal occurred during the 1880s and in practice some years later. Nor did it mean that the slave trade would not continue in the British Empire, where the illicit traffic of humans continued for decades to come. However, it was an important sign of cooperation.

The mutual acknowledgement of certain problems, whether starving Irish peasants in England of enslaved Africans in the Ottoman Empire, appears as a small step in a diplomatic transition towards global legal norms. Yet, whatever moral agreement this represented was largely symbolic, as the Ottomans could no sooner end the Great Famine than the British could end the slave trade. All we are left with is the reciprocal amity of two governments that united amidst these quite distinct tragedies of blight and captivity in a larger discussion of global diplomacy.

Source: BOA, İ-HR 40/1888 (15 May 1847)

potato

slaves