TY - JOUR
AU - Öztan, Ramazan, Hakkı
AB - Abstract While much has been said about the roles played by the military technologies in the consolidation of modern states and empires, we know very little about the effects of similar processes on the violent collapse of empires. Shifting the analytic focus from the tools of empires to tools of revolution, this study accordingly examines the case of the late Ottoman Balkans where I trace the impact of illicit commodity chains on the late Ottoman revolutionary politics. I am particularly interested in the emergence of a global military surplus of military hardware as a result of the nineteenth-century global arms race and how these surplus weapons diffused among a range of sub-state actors, including the revolutionaries in the Ottoman Empire. I accordingly reconstruct the biographies of two entrepreneurs who played active roles in the illicit transfer of surplus weapons into the revolutionary organizations active in the Ottoman interior. In doing so, I hope to illustrate the ways in which the illicit exchange of surplus weapons stood at the center of the construction of political networks and loyalties in the Ottoman Balkans. During the last three decades of its existence, the Ottoman empire descended into an era of systemic political violence marked by an endless cycle of popular uprisings, rural irregular conflicts and urban guerrilla warfare. Rocking the majority of the empire from the Balkans to Eastern Anatolia, southern Syria to the Red Sea, these constant confrontations slowly chipped away Ottoman territorial control and brought the empire’s finances to ruin, effectively increasing the costs of its central control. Counter-measures designed to contain the rampant violence only made it more ubiquitous and divisive. By the end of the century, the use of violence accordingly emerged as the constitutive element of state-making and nation-building, employed by both the Ottoman state and those who challenged it, polarizing diverse communities across the imperial polity and consolidating identities on the ground.1 The resort to violence became particularly prevalent after the 1890s, when a range of revolutionary actors often referred to as komitadjis (‘committee members’) began to organize along the lines of secret societies across the Ottoman empire.2 Although these organizations featured fluid ideologies and diverse agendas, they not only shared an overarching goal — the overthrow of the repressive regime of Abdülhamid II (reigned 1876–1909) — but also embodied similar organizational and operative tactics such as a clandestine cell structure and the calculated use of violence. Unlike the earlier revolutionary organizations of the century, however, which were established during times of war to benefit from changes in the status quo,3 the late nineteenth-century Ottoman revolutionaries created enduring organizations which managed to pursue independent policies, exploit interstate rivalries, and eventually transform their home constituencies in radical ways. By the end of the century, neither the existence nor the violent tactics of these revolutionary groups were exceptional; instead they became a fundamental component of the way in which contentious Ottoman politics came to unfold. In accounting for the rise of revolutionary violence in its Ottoman setting, existing scholarship has often highlighted the role of interstate competition in animating local political actors by providing a range of political opportunities.4 The Ottoman state itself promoted this interpretation, blaming external backers such as Russia, Britain, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, Greece and Serbia for the collapse of its political order and the escalation of violence. The second factor similarly seen as central in the making of this political matrix was that of the roles fulfilled by the emerging ideologies of the nineteenth century in the broader radicalization of Ottoman politics.5 In embracing this approach, scholarship has often used nationalism, anarchism and socialism to function as shorthand to explain internal aspects such as group cohesion, motivation and mobilization, as well as the formation of trust on the ground.6 In doing so, it has framed political violence as the last resort of frustrated elites who tried to secure the intervention of the Great Powers in a bid to establish an ideologically defined future. Departing from the broader emphases on the roles of interstate competition and the spread of ideologies, this article approaches the contentious politics of the late Ottoman empire using the analytic categories of commodity flows, infrastructure and techno-politics. The historiography has certainly addressed at length how breakthroughs in the technologies of warfare, communication and transportation came to transform the existing states into more centralized and bureaucratic structures, and examined the ways in which ‘the tools of empire’ enabled Western imperialism to penetrate and govern areas that had so far escaped its control.7 Yet we know very little about how similar dynamics came to unravel in the violent collapse of empires. By arguing for an analytic shift from ‘tools of empire’ to ‘tools of revolution’, I offer a resource-centred approach to political violence that highlights the importance of the mechanics and logistics of revolution. Moving the discussion away from the impact of the travel of ideas and ideologues, I therefore focus on the effects of commodity flows and the roles played by the middlemen, such as arms dealers and smugglers. Accordingly, I do not frame political violence as a degree of conflict and the very last stage before the final resolution of national history. Instead, I see it as a form of conflict tied to larger structural transformations during what Eric Hobsbawm called ‘the Age of Capital’, when the non-industrial world was flooded by manufactured commodities from the West.8 I argue that the incorporation of the Ottoman empire into the world economy similarly meant its integration into what I call the global marketplace of revolution, in which Ottoman revolutionary actors enjoyed increasingly easier access to a range of tools of revolution thanks to globally expanding circuits of illicit exchange.9 I analyse this global phenomenon from the geographic angle of the Ottoman Balkans, where constant irregular warfare turned the countryside into a crucible of competing factions represented by a host of itinerant armed bands (çete).10 I explore how these revolutionary actors tapped into the illicit commodity chains fed by an ever-expanding global military surplus in the late nineteenth century whereby the heightened levels of arms race, coupled with the endless search for better weapons, continually provided a surplus of obsolete small arms for a range of underground customers. In what follows, I first sketch how a global arms race was set in train in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century, and examine the regional arms race that broke out between the Ottoman empire and its Balkan neighbours after the Treaty of Berlin (1878). I then examine the formation of coalitions of gun dealers, revolutionaries and smugglers by reconstructing the biographies of two obscure weapons dealers who played a critical role in the supply of revolutionaries in the Ottoman Balkans. In doing so, I hope to illustrate how global technological shifts and international trade came to empower revolutionary sub-state actors and contributed to the consolidation of a particular radical revolutionary culture in the late Ottoman Balkans. I the nineteenth-century arms race in europe and the ottoman balkans All governments are busy in preparing the deadliest possible weapons … Thirty years ago, the largest British cannon was a sixty-eight pounder, costing $561, which might be fired for $275. Now they have a 110-ton gun costing $97,500 to manufacture, and $935 to fire once.11 Throughout the nineteenth century, while the balance of power was minimizing the number and extent of military conflicts on the European continent, the Great Powers felt a growing need to be on a par with one another in terms of military technology and the size of their standing army in order to maintain the status quo. As one calculation put it, there were nearly a million more soldiers in Europe by 1898 than there were in 1858.12 The cost of having a standing army equipped with up-to-date technology was also steadily increasing. Between 1870 and 1914, Germany gradually emerged as the power that spent most on its army, while Austria-Hungary gradually fell behind in the arms race despite significant efforts.13 With greater investment in its navy from 1900 onwards, Britain opted to be more of a maritime imperial power than one with only a continental claim. France could match neither Britain’s navy nor Germany’s spending spree. ‘Only Russia could keep up with her [Germany], and that inefficiently’.14 The late nineteenth-century armaments programmes indeed ate up big chunks from national budgets across the globe. One German officer lamented that ‘the most progressive and the greatest states are precisely those which suffer most under this burden’: that is, those that could afford it.15 It was first a perceived French threat and then, after 1870, a German one that shaped British calculations regarding national defence. The introduction of rifled cannons as well as iron-clad ships by the French in the midst of the Crimean War, for instance, meant not only that the cannons were more effective and with better range, but also that warships could withstand existing coastal fortifications, including those of the British. The latter responded by building iron-clad ships of their own, instigating tests to improve technology and initiating a programme of new coastal defences that could survive the improved cannon assaults. Since the technologies with which the British responded evolved quickly, the final costs soared above initial estimates.16 By the 1870s, the French threat was eclipsed by Germany’s growing military capabilities. Its rise to the military hall of fame came through a series of military victories, first against Austria in the Battle of Königgrätz (1866) and then in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. The Dreyse needle gun proved crucial in the former confrontation, the Krupp gun throughout the latter.17 In the end, the Dreyse needle gun fired ‘three shots to the muzzle-loader’s one and possessed the supreme advantage that it could be fired lying down’.18 Although scholars rightly question whether there exists such a thing as war-winning weaponry, it is certain that nineteenth-century bureaucrats and observers believed that there was.19 An Ottoman officer, for instance, noted how the Dreyse needle guns had proved superior to the Austrian systems in the Battle of Königgrätz owing to their firepower as they fired eight or nine shots per minute.20 As Engels told Marx, ‘Prussia has five hundred thousand needle guns and the rest of the world has not five hundred’, and, until everyone else acquired the technology, ‘Prussia is on top’.21 Enmeshed in military prestige, from the 1870s both German war technology and its tactics, drill and staffing would become a model across the world. In 1869 the Ottoman empire, much impressed by German successes, adopted the Prussian model for its military organization among many other changes, and came to reorder its army into standing (nizam), reserve (redif ) and second-line units (mustahfız).22 The geopolitical isolation of the Ottomans in the aftermath of the Treaty of Berlin strengthened German influence even further in the following decades, as the Porte (the Ottoman central government) began to supply its troops with German advisers, rifles, cartridges and artillery.23 From the Ottoman point of view, procurement of up-to-date armaments was a deterrent first and foremost to Russia. Abdülaziz I (reigned 1861–76) was personally interested in reforming the Ottoman army and navy, and spent large sums on manufacturing ‘a Turkish ironclad completed from stem to stern on the Golden Horn, including the boiler, the necessary steam engine, and plate-rolling mills’.24 Although this industrial capacity amounted to no more than that of assembly, the sultan still invited the Russian ambassador to inspect his shipyards so that he might showcase his navy’s deterrence capability. In the end, Abdülaziz I indeed managed to create the fourth largest and most formidable navy of his time.25 While Ottoman attempts to deter Russian aggression continued unabated, the emergence and consolidation of new Balkan states such as Serbia, Greece, Bulgaria and Romania after the Treaty of Berlin complicated further the ongoing arms race in the eastern Mediterranean. All these newly independent and autonomous Balkan states would spend the last quarter of the nineteenth century modernizing their bureaucratic apparatus and building up their military capacity, emerging as formidable enemies capable of mobilizing large sections of their populations for military engagement.26 While the Balkan neighbours of the Ottoman empire began to pose significant military concern, the Porte was particularly afraid of a Balkan alliance, which could easily have challenged Ottoman supremacy in the region, as indeed happened during the Balkan Wars in 1912–13. Abdülhamid II would therefore spend the rest of his reign making sure that any attempt at such an alliance remained stillborn. Accordingly, he constantly pitted Montenegro against Serbia, and Greece against Bulgaria, and cultivated his neo-patrimonial relations with Albanian power brokers as a regional security check.27 The procurement of armaments only complemented such diplomatic tools. Bulgaria’s annexation in 1885 of Eastern Rumelia, at the time an autonomous Ottoman province, unleashed a series of confrontations that sparked a regional arms race in the Balkans. While the conflict between Bulgaria and the Porte was resolved peacefully, it culminated in the Serbo-Bulgarian War of 1885, which determined the peace terms. Ottoman purchases of artillery and mortars from the German firm Krupp, for instance, were made in 1885 and 1886 during the Eastern Rumelian crisis with Bulgaria and Russia.28 So were the purchases by Greece, which raised a loan of 100 million gold francs to cover the costs of military spending in the midst of the crisis.29 The vicious cycle of this regional arms race greatly strengthened the coercive capacity of the Ottoman empire’s former subjects. Just as heightened military confrontation increased spending, new models of existing weaponry also occasioned new rounds of orders. Such increased spending on their navies by Greece and Russia similarly triggered further purchases by the Ottomans.30 A later war between the Ottoman empire and Greece that broke out in 1897 over the crisis in Crete was a sound reminder to the Porte of its neighbours’ military build-up and its own deficiencies.31 Ottoman bureaucrats accordingly continued to monitor regularly the military equipment and budgets of the empire’s neighbours, registering any changes in the status quo.32 A report dated 11 February 1893, for instance, indicated that Bulgaria could muster a general military force of 211,632 when fully mobilized. It has approximately 150,000 8 mm Mannlicher rifles and 7,000 carbines for the cavalry. On top of these arms for regular soldiers, its militia is also equipped with Berdan and Krnka rifles.33 After also elaborating on Bulgaria’s cartridge supplies, the report contrasted the state of the Ottoman army and argued that the Porte was in need of new cartridges since the new smokeless powder had made older stocks obsolete. If smokeless powder was used for the Mauser rifles, the report concluded, the Ottomans could boast a rifle system on a par with that of the Lebel rifles used by France.34 In the late 1880s, the Lebel rifle was indeed the norm across the Continent. Its higher rate of fire even kept German aggression against France at bay as Bismarck felt that the German infantry could not compete.35 In the Ottoman context, too, the politics of procuring arms and other military equipment were similarly connected to the specific contexts of interstate competition that required states to survey their war-readiness on a regular basis as well as that of their neighbours and other competitors invested in the region.36 Rumours of purchase of military equipment piqued interest and initiated rounds of diplomatic enquiries since the timing and nature of a purchase as well as the parties involved could easily suggest new alignments.37 When Bulgaria considered placing another round of orders for seventy thousand Mannlicher rifles and forty thousand military uniforms in 1907, Ottoman bureaucrats immediately interpreted this as a sign of growing Bulgarian aggression against Ottoman control of Macedonia. In response, the Ottomans decided to supply the military units in its European territories with small-calibre Mauser rifles, while noting that the Porte’s Mausers were more plentiful and of a higher quality than Bulgaria’s Mannlicher rifles.38 Such pressures to acquire more up-to-date weaponry resulted in the emergence of an international class of weapons dealers whose business was to exploit, if not exacerbate, geopolitical interstate rivalries. The availability of the latest arms and munitions not only fed into their business but led to a military surplus which could also be marketed to willing underground customers. II the rise of private companies: towards a global surplus of military equipment If political rivalries drove the politics of armaments, growing industrial capacity in Europe enabled it. In the end, it was the industrial revolution that had made it possible for the bureaucrats to refurbish their armies with the latest technologies over a short period of time. This capacity stood in stark contrast to pre-industrial warfare, when technology changed very little. The standard firearms of the English infantry and the warships of the Royal Navy, for instance, remained roughly the same for more than three centuries, only differing in a handful of fine details.39 In early modern warfare, drills, tactics and control mattered more than technology per se.40 What brought victory was the ability to sustain repeated campaigns, ‘patient accumulation of minor victories and the slow erosion of the enemy’s economic base’.41 In technological terms, military conflicts therefore featured only a few technological surprises as late as the 1840s. Even the novelty of the Napoleonic armies lay not in technology (they still used muskets) but rather in conscription, command structure and mobilization of resources, which created a formidable force that was highly mobile and always on the offensive.42 From the 1840s onwards, however, the unending quest for a firearm that was fast to load, accurate to shoot and effective over a long range would begin to bear fruit.43 A number of important developments started to appear, significantly transforming firing mechanisms, types of barrel, ways of loading the firearm, and what one fired — both powder and bullet — thus greatly transforming the experience, speed, direction and scope of military engagements. Only growth in the capacity of industrial manufacture could accommodate such swift technological developments, however. Before the nineteenth century, weapons manufacturing capacity was quite modest. ‘Muskets could be used for decades’, wrote Gábor Ágoston. Unlike cannons, muskets were rarely surrendered when soldiers were routed from the field, and thus the manufacture of new muskets was ‘limited to replacing losses or matching the increase in musket-bearing troops’.44 With the industrial revolution, on the other hand, this ‘piecemeal and proto-industrial’ nature of domestic weapons production changed radically.45 To be sure, this shift to the industrial production of weaponry was not immediate but came in phases as states continued to manufacture weapons in their dockyards and arsenals despite the rise of private companies. During the 1860s and 1870s, for instance, the Ottoman empire maintained production of its own military equipment and made significant investments in machinery for its factories in Constantinople.46 When it became necessary to obtain new technologies such as rifles, breech-loading and needle guns, the Ottoman authorities often chose to modify their existing stockpile first before committing to a hefty contract from a private firm.47 During the 1860s and early 1870s, however, the American companies gradually emerged out of the civil war (1861–5) as worldwide suppliers of small arms, and found customers abroad in places like the Ottoman empire, where the sultan ended up making a number of purchases from these private manufacturers.48 Yet the period from the late 1870s onwards began to witness the rise of European companies that were to dominate the export markets, much to the dismay of American diplomats, who keenly observed the downward trend of American arms exports to the Ottoman lands.49 As competition picked up, so did the willingness of private companies to exploit geopolitical rivalries to sell more weapons. One such businessman, a certain Mr Johnson, for instance, would travel from war to war trying to sell military equipment to different warring parties. Upon hearing the news of a possible French attack on Siam in 1893, he rushed to Siam before the outbreak of hostilities in order to seal deals.50 In the Ottoman Balkans, Basil Zaharoff was one such ‘merchant of death’, who even bragged once in an interview that ‘I made wars so that I could sell arms to both sides. I must have sold more arms than anyone else in the world’.51 Zaharoff indeed managed to sell submarines to both Greece and the Ottoman empire by exploiting the rivalry between the two.52 While private companies certainly exploited regional political competition for their own benefit, they also managed to initiate a faster pace of change in war technology, which facilitated the emergence of surpluses in small arms on a global scale. While these surpluses were used to equip the military reserve, they also began to supply the troops of the newly emerging governments in the Balkans. Before 1878 Wallachia-Moldavia, which would eventually become Romania, was an important transit route for the supply and smuggling of surplus arms to autonomous Serbia as well as to the Bulgarian revolutionaries across the Danube.53 The military hardware generally came from Russia, Austria and France, a trade bitterly contested by the Ottomans as well as the British, who still preferred the preservation of the status quo in the Ottoman empire.54 As the Treaty of Berlin established independent and autonomous territories in the Balkans, potential customers for second-hand weapons only increased in number and demand. The principality of Bulgaria began to receive first Krnka and then more up-to-date Berdan rifles from Russia.55 Krnkas were older breech-loaders converted from their muzzle-loading originals, while the Berdan had proved itself as a single-shot rifle that could replace the Krnka. Yet there began to be surpluses of even Berdan rifles after the adoption in the early 1890s of the Mosin-Nagant, a Russian magazine rifle.56 The gradual shift from single-shot to magazine rifles produced similar surpluses in the Ottoman empire as well. As Mauser repeaters were purchased by the Porte in the late 1880s and early 1890s, some older Martini-Henry rifles and earlier-model Mausers gradually became surplus weapons, used either to supply the reserve units and gendarmerie or to equip Ottoman paramilitary organizations such as the Hamidiye regiments, an irregular cavalry force organized from select Kurdish tribes in Eastern Anatolia.57 Ironically, some soldiers in these regiments who were equipped with the surplus Martini-Henry rifles began to sell their older Berdans to the Armenians, ‘though they were well aware that these rifles, if used at all, would be used most likely against themselves’.58 As part of the regional arms race, Bulgaria, Greece and Serbia also began to acquire magazine rifles during the 1890s. The first two chose Austrian Mannlicher rifles, while Serbia opted for the German Mauser.59 As a result, the Ottomans’ neighbours in the Balkans began to incur significant surpluses of single-shot rifles (which were often ex-Russian weapons). These single-shot Krnka and Berdan rifles (ex-Russian, -Bulgarian or -Serbian), Gras rifles (ex-Greek equipment) and Martini-Henry rifles (ex-Ottoman or -Romanian) would slowly find their way into the caches of multiple revolutionary groups in the Ottoman Balkans, flooding the region with cheap, reliable and effective means of violence.60 In one estimate, the Ottoman commercial attaché in Ruse, in northern Bulgaria, told the Porte that the Macedonian revolutionaries had 3,000 Mannlicher, 2,800 Martini-Henry, 2,000 Berdan and 12,000 Krnka rifles.61 The types of gun seized by the Ottoman authorities after skirmishes with revolutionary groups illustrated a similar diversity of equipment and supply routes.62 These surplus weapons certainly dominated the second-hand weapons trade throughout the empire, but they should be seen as part of a larger world of smuggling operations in the eastern Mediterranean. For instance, the commodities seized by the guards of the Régie Company, the tobacco monopoly within the Ottoman empire, included not just rifles but also revolvers, cartridges, gunpowder, dynamite and tobacco, as well as any other commodity worth being smuggled.63 As for the rifles, these were Gras and Martini-Henry rifles, often with their cartridges, but the documents make frequent reference to ‘Russian-made rifles’ (Rus kapaklısı), a generic term which probably meant Krnkas and Berdans. The Porte was quite aware of how technological developments in small arms contributed to the creation of a vibrant world of contraband in the eastern Mediterranean. When it was rumoured that Greece was purchasing new rifles in 1900, for instance, Constantinople felt it necessary in a pre-emptive move to send a fast patrol ship to the Aegean islands to contain the smuggling of now obsolete Gras rifles into Ottoman lands.64 According to Cemil Efendi, an Ottoman captain, Gras rifles were widely available and openly on sale in places like Galos (modern Volos), a port city he frequented.65 Since the Macedonian revolutionaries were rivals of the Greek state in their claims to Ottoman Macedonia, they needed more than money or dealers to access the Gras rifles. ‘Certain insurgent leaders who spoke Greek without a foreign accent worked in Greece, purchasing arms with the connivance of the Greek authorities under the pretext that they were leaders of Greek bands, hostile to the Bulgarians’.66 This arms circuit was complemented by the Macedonian seasonal labourers, who bought their own rifles as instructed by the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization.67 While trying to control smuggling operations, the Porte also kept an eye on direct transfers of small arms from neighbouring powers into the hands of the various revolutionary organizations. Some of the intelligence the sultan received turned out to be a false alarm and included significantly exaggerated numbers, such as the alleged transfer of twenty-five thousand Mannlichers to Bulgarian revolutionaries.68 In an attempt to prove the complicity of neighbouring states in the revolutionary upheavals in the Balkans, on one occasion the Porte tried to keep track of the serial numbers of a batch of weapons seized from Macedonian revolutionaries.69 Although the serial numbers raised suspicions that the rifles most probably originated from a single order batch, the evidence was inconclusive since there were also reports that the revolutionaries had broken into military depots and stolen equipment.70 Such instances of theft were common not only in the states adjacent to the Porte but across the Ottoman empire, where smugglers also stole from arms depots, only to be caught when the scale of their theft became too large to ignore.71 Similar thefts were reported from Eastern Anatolia, where Ottoman soldiers also took to selling cartridges on a wide scale.72 The situation in Ottoman Macedonia was no different. On one occasion after a clash, troops reportedly sold two thousand Martini-Henry cartridges to nearby peasants.73 While, by the late nineteenth century, the diminishing capacity of the state made surplus weapons widely available across the Ottoman lands, ready to meet the demands of the revolutionaries, these weapons also proved very effective in guerrilla warfare because they were modern. The surplus rifles that saw widespread use in the Balkans were often the single-shot breech-loaders inherited from the 1870s. They were not only effective over a long range, but also weatherproof, unlike the muskets of the early nineteenth century. Since they were faster to load and did not misfire as often as the earlier designs had done, a smaller number of revolutionaries could sustain a high enough rate of fire to defend themselves against soldiers who were often better equipped. Because they were breech-loaders, revolutionaries could use them lying down, thus not exposing their bodies in shoot-outs and allowing a better use of terrain. It was such technical improvements that would enable them to fight in small numbers in rugged landscape against a greater concentration and military capacity of government forces. In one telling instance from April 1900, for instance, an Ottoman naval patrol attempting to intercept a group of bandits and smugglers off the coast of the island of Kaşot (modern Kasos) had to withdraw because the gendarmerie on board failed to match the rate of fire from ‘the perfect weapons of the bandits’.74 In Ottoman Macedonia, too, the gendarmerie lacked comparable weapons, only beginning to receive Martini-Henry rifles as a result of the Mürzteg reforms in 1904, and, after 1907, some Mausers.75 Indeed, the implications of the widespread availability of effective firearms had become a source of concern shared by governments elsewhere, in Eurasian borderlands and in Transvaal.76 ‘Even savages’, wrote Edward Callwell in characteristically racist fashion, ‘who a few years ago would have defended themselves with bows and arrows, are often found now-a-days with breechloading rifles’.77 In the Ottoman Balkans, as elsewhere, this level of availability was largely due to intermediaries, who were often small local dealers willing to trade these truly global commodities in catering to local revolutionary needs. III merchants of death: naum a. tufekchiev and the ivanov brothers Naum A. Tufekchiev (1864–1916) and the Ivanov brothers stood at the centre of the transfer of arms from the principality of Bulgaria to Ottoman Macedonia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.78 A prominent figure in many of the revolutionary organizations of his time, Tufekchiev had gained transnational notoriety in the early 1890s, and his infamous profile kept the Russian, Ottoman and Bulgarian authorities on their toes. He hailed from the southern Macedonian town of Resne (modern Resen) and was one of thousands of businessmen and intellectuals who left the Ottoman Macedonian lands to settle in the autonomous territories of the principality of Bulgaria after the Treaty of Berlin. As a result, his citizenship remained a matter of legal dispute, prompting intergovernmental debates over jurisdiction.79 Unlike the ambiguity of his citizenship, his last name instantly betrayed his profession: tüfekçi means gunsmith in Turkish, tüfek, rifle. Having received training in chemistry in Belgium, Tufekchiev’s expertise in handling chemicals made him indispensable among the turn-of-the-century revolutionary networks and conspiracies.80 His brother Dencho died in custody in 1891 after a failed assassination attempt on the Bulgarian prime minister, Stefan Stambolov, who was seen by radical revolutionaries at the time as a collaborator with the Ottomans.81 Naum Tufekchiev personally sought revenge for the death of his brother, playing a major part in the murder in 1892 of Georgi Valkovich, Stambolov’s ambassador to Constantinople, for which he was sentenced to fifteen years in an Ottoman prison. This kept him away from the imperial capital and he took refuge in Odessa, where, with diplomatic backing from St Petersburg, he managed to circumvent Ottoman and Bulgarian attempts to extradite him.82 Once back in Sofia, he worked in the Ministry of Public Works and became an active member of the Macedonian cause. In 1895 his plot against Stambolov finally succeeded when the former prime minister was stabbed to death on the streets of Sofia. Tufekchiev was sentenced to three years in prison but was released on bail, his discharge aided by a flood of threats against the judges and government ministers.83 His role in the plot, however, curtailed his later involvement within the Macedonian revolutionary organizations in Sofia as the rival factions began to blackmail him by threatening to divulge what they knew about his role in the assassination.84 Yet he seems to have compensated for whatever he lacked in popularity by accumulating wealth. In 1896 he was rumoured to have received a payment of 50,000 francs for the assassination of Stambolov and began to show ‘signs of a sudden accession of wealth’.85 In March 1898 he was acquitted as a result of ‘powerful influences’.86 With his path legally cleared, Tufekchiev was sought out by revolutionary organizations across the region. For instance, he was instrumental in putting Macedonian revolutionaries in contact with Armenians for the transfer of know-how between the two rebel organizations. Later, in 1905, he took part in procuring bombs for the Armenian Dashnaktsutyun’s failed assassination attempt against Abdülhamid II. The same year he also shared with Russian anarchists some of his bomb-making skills.87 He also took credit for preparing bombs seized on the Iranian border in 1908 originally destined to be used in the assassination of the shah.88 Tufekchiev was not just a plotter who made enemies among turn-of-the-century royal houses; he also maintained active membership of radical revolutionary committees in Sofia, which meant that, more often than not, he also had his hands full with enemies at home. But he had also cultivated friendships over the years. He and the Ivanov brothers were members of the Fraternal Union, a small circle that had formed in the aftermath of Stambolov’s assassination to challenge moderate voices among the revolutionaries in Sofia such as the journalist Kosta Shahov. Tufekchiev’s inner circle was one of the first to advocate armed action in Ottoman Macedonia, a position the revolutionaries in Sofia had difficulty in accommodating. The Macedonian revolutionaries, on the other hand, eager to exploit such divisions in Sofia for their own advantage, continued to court Tufekchiev and his cohort of radical activists. They had good reason to do so since Tufekchiev and the Ivanov brothers had been their major suppliers of weapons and cartridges since the late 1890s. It was Goce Delchev and Racho Petrov, representatives in Sofia of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, who sealed such deals. In 1899 both men actively campaigned for the election of Boris Sarafov as the head of the External Macedonian Organization in Sofia, an important figure who would be instrumental in the increased transfer of military hardware from Tufekchiev and the Ivanov brothers to the Macedonian revolutionaries.89 When compared to Tufekchiev, the Ivanov brothers came from an important merchant family with business connections across south-eastern Europe, trading commodities such as iron and timber.90 As the trade in second-hand weapons became profitable later in the century, the Ivanov brothers added the arms trade to their family’s expanding business portfolio, as other merchant families were doing elsewhere at the time. Indeed, the substantial bureaucratic paper trail that the brothers left behind attests to this active business agenda. While these records reveal little biographical information about the Ivanov brothers, we know that, like Tufekchiev, they hailed from Ottoman Macedonia, specifically from the village of Bansko in the district of Razlık (modern Razlog).91 We also know that two of the brothers, Todor and Minko, who were members of Tufekchiev’s inner circle, were involved in the recurrent plots against the Stambolov regime. In 1889 they were said to have been involved in the Panitsa plot against Prince Ferdinand of Bulgaria, but they escaped Stambolov’s crackdown following the failure of the conspiracy.92 The Ivanov brothers also seem to have owned a hotel in Sofia where they hosted all the plotters, including Tufekchiev, and Todor Ivanov was said to have been a member of the squad that murdered Stambolov in 1895.93 Despite such occasional outbursts of violence, however, Todor was a man of faith as he was reportedly a representative of the English Evangelists in Sofia. As generous men, the Ivanov brothers also seem to have shared the proceeds of their family venture by making regular donations to the revolutionary causes. Ottoman intelligence labelled them ‘one of the number one donors in Sofia’.94 They also contributed in kind in a way one might expect from an arms dealer. In 1900, for instance, they gave a hundred Snider rifles to the Macedonian revolutionaries free of charge.95 In the early 1900s, they also loaned rifles from their stockpiles to rifle clubs run by revolutionary organizations where those sympathetic to the revolutionary cause received weekend training for the coming general rising.96 Their contribution to the revolution also took more indirect forms. In late 1900, for instance, one of the brothers conveniently served on the jury in the case of a Macedonian operative who managed to be acquitted even though he had been caught red-handed in the assassination of a ‘Turkish spy’.97 In autumn 1895 one of the Ivanov brothers assumed the leadership of the External Macedonian Organization in Sofia, much to the surprise of many, who expected Tufekchiev to succeed Trayko Kitanchev. Under the watch of the Ivanov brothers, the committee managed to issue 200,000 francs’ worth of what were called ‘liberation bonds’, which were redeemable upon the establishment of Macedonian autonomy. There were reports that most of these bonds were purchased by rich Bulgarians abroad, particularly those who lived in Bucharest. But the influx of funds into Sofia initiated a flurry of charges of fraud that eventually led to the removal of the Ivanovs from the leadership of the committee and the start of an internal investigation.98 Their removal from the revolutionary cadres did not put an end to the brothers’ involvement in the trade in second-hand weapons, however. A dangerous undertaking by its nature, their trade often required them to navigate dangerous paths in the late nineteenth-century Balkans, and establish new business connections. In autumn 1895 the Ottoman consulate in İvraniye (modern Vranje), a Serbian town close to the Ottoman and Bulgarian border, reported that Todor Ivanov had been sighted in the region, which also piqued the interest of the local Serbian authorities. Following investigations carried out by the Ottoman and Serbian officials, it became clear that he had come to establish contact with a certain Vasu Maksimov, an infamous smuggler based in İvraniye who led operations in the region. The Ottoman consul guessed that Ivanov was there to evaluate the Serbian reaction to the arrest of these four trespassing revolutionaries and hoped to open an alternative smuggling route via Serbia at a time of decreased Serbian border patrols and increased Ottoman vigilance. The Ottoman report made references to the Ivanov brothers’ activities back in Sofia and noted that the family business was famous for having previously smuggled Martini-Henry rifles into Ottoman territory.99 Todor Ivanov’s trip to İvraniye took place in September 1895, less than two months after the assassination of Stambolov. Perhaps he had left Sofia because his name was linked to the murder. Or, more likely, perhaps he sensed the burgeoning business prospects as a result of the removal of Stambolov from office and went ahead to lay the groundwork. At any rate, Stambolov, a former revolutionary himself, who had firmly kept a lid on the various revolutionary organizations in Bulgaria, was now out of the equation. This meant that the revolutionaries could begin to enjoy greater freedom in Sofia, which often meant better access to government officials and favours. Through one such connection in 1896, in part facilitated by Tufekchiev, the Ivanov brothers managed to strike a deal with Nikola Ivanov (no immediate relation), minister of war in the cabinet of Konstantin Stoilov, for the purchase of thousands of Krnka and Berdan rifles no longer needed by the Bulgarian army.100 The transaction included about 14,800 infantry rifles and 24,000 cavalry carbines that were in serviceable condition, but the small batch of Martini-Henry rifles that were part of this deal were not ‘fit for use without repairs’.101 The Porte was quick to protest this transaction vehemently, but Sofia argued that it did not need these rifles any longer, now that its troops were equipped with Mannlicher repeaters. Ottoman intelligence noted that these surplus rifles purchased by the Ivanov brothers had been shipped out of different military depots to various locations in Bulgaria and were being sold in markets and fairs for six francs apiece. While Muslims were not allowed to purchase these rifles as a general rule, Christians living in Muslim villages were offered even lower prices.102 Such transactions were particularly bothersome to the Porte, which had already developed a heightened sense of anxiety over regional security owing to the outbreak of hostilities with Greece in the spring of 1897.103 Among one of the Ivanovs’ customers in 1897 was the young Yané Sandansky, a budding Macedonian revolutionary at the time who would later reach prominence within the organization representing the leftist faction.104 Apart from the sale of these weapons to the peasants at large, particularly those close to the porous Ottoman border, it was exactly transactions like Sandansky’s that worried the Ottoman authorities most.105 In the end, Constantinople still defined surplus rifles such as the Krnkas, Berdans and Martini-Henrys as belonging within the sphere of the regular army and thus the staple of conventional combat.106 Despite assurances to the contrary from the Bulgarians, the Ottoman officials asked for guarantees to ensure that these weapons would not very soon end up in the hands of revolutionaries.107 They accordingly suggested that the Bulgarians should follow the practice of other countries and barter the surplus weapons as part of the new armaments deals with European companies, and in this way soothe the concerns of their anxious neighbours.108 The fears of the Ottomans were not unfounded. A British informant in Filibe (modern Plovdiv) reported the arrival at the local railway station of a batch of two hundred Krnka rifles, which were then transported on to Krichim, a town at the foot of the Rhodope mountains, where the rifles were loaded onto mules to be smuggled into the Ottoman interior through the mountain passes.109 These border crossings continued to take place, and the authorities on either side of the border were unable to intercept the shipments in any meaningful way.110 First, the geography of the border between the Ottoman empire and Bulgaria did not make things any easier, with a mountainous landscape covered with forests and criss-crossed by tracks connecting small hamlets, making it a perfect smuggler’s nest. Then there was the lack of enthusiasm to intercept on the part of Bulgaria, where the legal grounds for seizing such weapons were almost non-existent since Bulgarian law, in ways similar to the Greek regulations, covered the second-hand trade only in explosives and cartridges, not rifles.111 On the Ottoman side, although there were clear orders from Istanbul to contain such illicit cross-border flows, the willingness to do so among the higher echelons of Ottoman bureaucracy often did not trickle down to the lower levels, which lacked both personnel and resources. In particular, the Ottoman border guards seem to have been generally reluctant to intercept the illicit crossings, particularly at night. The British military attaché noted after a visit to the region that ‘the Turkish posts on the frontier are very inefficient at night, as they barricade themselves in their blockhouses and care little whether the insurgents pass or not if they are not themselves attacked’.112 With this absence of effective surveillance on either side of the border, the majority of the Ivanovs’ shipments made it into the Ottoman interior. In late 1897, however, the Ottoman authorities uncovered an important cache of hundreds of rifles and cartridges, as well as bombs and dynamite, in the town of Vinitsa in the province of Manastır.113 The discovery not only alerted the authorities to the scale of the smuggling of military hardware in the region but also confirmed their earlier suspicions about the weapons sales to the Ivanov brothers. Despite the seizure of such caches in Ottoman territory, the Ivanov brothers continued to supply Macedonian revolutionaries across the border. Their trade consisted in cleaning thoroughly the surplus rifles they had bought in bulk at a low price and then selling them to the revolutionaries and peasants at a fair price.114 In 1900 the Bulgarian prime minister, Todor Ivanchov, admitted that there was indeed ‘a good market [for the Ivanovs’ hardware] in Macedonia among both Mussulmans and Christians’115 and their trade persisted for many years. The Ivanovs would receive the rifles in batches from military depots and move them around Bulgaria from one spot to another according to demand. In one such instance, late in 1902, a shipment by them of a batch of rifles by train from the coastal town of Burgas to Çırpan (modern Chirpan) in central Bulgaria alarmed the Ottoman authorities, who immediately began to exert pressure on the Bulgarian authorities and to seek assurances.116 The brothers were also reported to have actively armed revolutionary bands which had infiltrated the Ottoman territories through the mountain passes.117 The business interests of the Ivanov brothers were not limited to rifles, however. In 1896, on the occasion mentioned above when they bought surplus rifles from the Bulgarian government, the weapons came with their cartridges and the Ivanovs accordingly became involved in emptying the gunpowder from their shells. To this end, they established what appear to have been sweatshops in at least two different locations in Bulgaria, one in Ruse in the north and the other in Filibe in the south. On 24 June 1897 the Ottoman deputy commissioner in Filibe reported the operation of such a factory just outside the city.118 A few days later, in the early afternoon of 6 August, the Ivanovs’ factory in Ruse captured worldwide attention when, for reasons that remain unclear, it exploded with a huge blast that enveloped the sky with heavy smoke and left behind eighty-four victims, some between the ages of 10 and 20. Since the factory was located on the banks of the Danube, those who could run away from the explosion jumped into the river in the hope of survival, but many victims were burned to death. According to the reports, those who died included twenty-six young Armenian workers, refugees who had been locked inside the sweatshop waiting for the nightly search conducted to prevent theft. One of the Ivanovs was arrested after the explosion but was quickly released on bail.119 Despite such tragedies, the business of the Ivanov brothers continued to boom in the late 1890s and early 1900s at a time when Sarafov, the head of the External Macedonian Organization in Sofia, was organizing the funding and purchase of new weapons for the Macedonian revolutionaries; the Ivanovs continued to be one of their suppliers.120 Over the course of eighteen months, Sarafov claimed to have sent about 10,000 Krnka and 1,100 Mannlicher rifles, more than 1,000 revolvers and 1.5 million cartridges to the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization.121 While the exact share of the Ivanov brothers in this trade remains unclear, they remained on the radar of the Ottoman authorities after the turn of the century. On 22 March 1903, for instance, an intelligence brief warned that they had transferred six thousand Krnka rifles to Niš in Serbia, and were planning to smuggle them into the Ottoman province of Kosovo by way of Vasu Maksimov.122 This was the same route that Todor Ivanov had scouted back in 1895, and the same smuggler whom he had contacted. Their business also seems to have thrived during the Ilinden Uprising, which broke out in August 1903. On 7 September the Ottoman commissioner in Sofia reported that bands of one or two hundred people had daily been taking the road from Sofia towards Köstendil (modern Kyustendil) and Dupniçe (Dupnica) to join the rebellion, and that the rifles and ammunition these bands needed were being publicly picked up from the Ivanov brothers’ depots.123 * * * The Bitolya (Manastır) group also began to collect rifles, not so much because these weapons were needed yet, but because ordinary people needed a visible sign of the seriousness of their intentions and gained confidence from the possession of a gun.124 The Ottoman Balkans had never been a society without guns, but, by the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the region truly became what might be called a ‘gun society’ when its inhabitants increasingly connected themselves with the illicit circuits of the global marketplace of revolution.125 In their approach to the region, scholars have often highlighted the role of ideologies and the context of Great Power rivalries to explain the violent collapse of the Ottoman empire. As Keith Brown has noted, however, contemporary observers of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization’s capacity ‘wrote more about the number of guns it had stockpiled than about its ultimate intentions or underlying ideology’.126 The Porte and its bureaucrats were similarly more concerned about the means of violence than about the appeal of abstract ideas, since the growing availability of illegal modern arms and ammunition across the empire presented an increasingly serious challenge to the sultan’s monopoly on violence. The Porte continued to define single-shot weapons such as the Martini-Henry rifles as the property of the state, and therefore saw them as tools of conventional combat. For example, a report from November 1890 pointed out that both the regular Ottoman troops and the roaming bandits were equipped with the same Martini-Henry rifles. The failure of the state to disarm its population, the report argued, not only would make it difficult for regular troops ‘to exterminate the bandits’ but also would force the state to acquire new weapons in the near future to maintain the upper hand in these irregular conflicts.127 By the late 1880s and early 1890s, the Porte was indeed purchasing Mauser repeater rifles, but their distribution among regular soldiers took many years.128 Commenting on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ottoman Yemen, Vincent Wilhite noted how the new rifle technologies increased the eagerness of rebels to engage in battles that ‘could last a day or more, with extended exchanges of rifle fire’, a process that drained the Ottoman troops both physically and morally.129 Combined with the difficulties presented by the rugged terrain, as one Ottoman officer put it in regard to Ottoman Macedonia, ‘ten battalions would not suffice to capture 100 men’.130 Ottoman anxiety about security reached its height during the Ilinden Uprising, when the British legation estimated that the gradual Ottoman mobilization across the region had reached figures ‘equal to those of the Turco-Russian War of 1877–78’.131 While much has been said about the role of ideology and Great Power politics in the animation of local political actors, the role played by commodity flows remains an under-studied topic. This article is an attempt to address this gap and, in doing so, shift our analytic focus from tools of empire to tools of revolution. While the growing availability of such tools certainly strengthened the contentious actors militarily, they also held important implications for the formation of political trust as well as organizational empowerment. As the Macedonian historian Ivan Katardžiev observed in the case of the Ottoman Balkans, ‘Weapons had magical power in the revolutionary mobilization of the village masses. They were a tangible proof of the possibility that the goals of the organization would be realized, and provided a sense of security in the eyes of a disempowered population’.132 Even before they were put to use, weapons stood at the cornerstone of the ways in which trust was secured and loyalties sustained. Their growing availability therefore became the crucial component in how the global political economy empowered revolutionary political conduct, both materially and mentally. Footnotes * " I should like to thank Isa Blumi, Wesley Sasaki-Uemura, Peter Sluglett and Erik-Jan Zürcher for their insightful comments and suggestions. Correspondence address: Istanbul Medipol University, Kavacık Kuzey Kampus, C 134, Beykoz/Istanbul, Turkey. 1 " As Mark Mazower has noted, there has been a growing interest in the study of violence since the 1990s: Mark Mazower, ‘Violence and the State in the Twentieth Century’, American Historical Review, cvii, 4 (Oct. 2002). In the field of Ottoman studies and south-eastern Europe, too, scholars have become been increasingly keen to study the role of violence in the transformation of late Ottoman society: see George W. Gawrych, ‘The Culture and Politics of Violence in Turkish Society, 1903–1914’, Middle Eastern Studies, xxii, 3 (July 1986); Basil C. Gounaris, ‘Preachers of God and Martyrs of the Nation: The Politics of Murder in Ottoman Macedonia in the Early Twentieth Century’, Balkanologie, ix, 1–2 (Dec. 2005); Uğur Ümit Üngör, ‘Rethinking the Violence of Pacification: State Formation and Bandits in Turkey, 1914–1937’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, liv, 4 (2012); Keith Brown, Loyal unto Death: Trust and Terror in Revolutionary Macedonia (Bloomington, 2013); İpek Yosmaoğlu, Blood Ties: Religion, Violence, and the Politics of Nationhood in Ottoman Macedonia, 1878–1908 (Ithaca, 2014); Tolga U. Esmer, ‘Economies of Violence, Banditry and Governance in the Ottoman Empire around 1800’, Past and Present, no. 224 (Aug. 2014). 2 " All the (in)famous and major underground revolutionary organizations of the late Ottoman empire date back to this period, with the Hunchaks founded in 1887, the Committee of Union and Progress in 1889, Dashnaktsutyun in 1890, the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization in 1893 and the External Macedonian Organization in 1895. 3 " Ioannis Zelepos, ‘Amateurs as Nation-Builders? On the Significance of Associations for the Formation and Nationalization of Greek Society in the Nineteenth Century’, in Hannes Grandits, Nathalie Clayer and Robert Pichler (eds.), Conflicting Loyalties in the Balkans: The Great Powers, the Ottoman Empire and Nation-Building (London, 2011), 80. 4 " Michael A. Reynolds, Shattering Empires: The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires, 1908–1918 (Cambridge, 2011); Harris Mylonas, The Politics of Nation-Building: Making Co-Nationals, Refugees, and Minorities (Cambridge, 2012). For a similar reading on Ottoman Macedonia, see Mehmet Hacısalihoğlu, Jön Türkler ve Makedonya Sorunu, 1890–1918 [The Young Turks and the Macedonian Problem] (Istanbul, 2008). 5 " For a critique, see Ramazan Hakkı Öztan, ‘Nationalism in Function: “Rebellions” in the Ottoman Empire and Narratives in its Absence’, in M. Hakan Yavuz with Feroz Ahmad (eds.), War and Collapse: World War I and the Ottoman State (Salt Lake City, 2016). 6 " Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860–1914 (Berkeley, 2010). 7 " Daniel R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1981); Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca, 1989); Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States, ad 990–1992 (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 67. 8 " Adria Lawrence, ‘Driven to Arms? The Escalation to Violence in Nationalist Conflicts’, in Erica Chenoweth and Adria Lawrence (eds.), Rethinking Violence: States and Non-State Actors in Conflict (Cambridge, 2010), 145; Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848–1875 (London, 1975), 47–8. 9 " For a growing body of literature on illicit connections in the late Ottoman world, see Isa Blumi, ‘Thwarting the Ottoman Empire: Smuggling through the Empire’s New Frontiers in Yemen and Albania, 1878–1910’, International Journal of Turkish Studies, ix, 1–2 (Summer 2003); David Gutman, ‘Sojourners, Smugglers, and the State: Transhemispheric Migration Flows and the Politics of Mobility in Eastern Anatolia, 1888–1908’ (State Univ. of New York, Binghamton, Ph.D. thesis, 2012); Julia A. Clancy-Smith, Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, c.1800–1900 (Berkeley, 2011). 10 " By ‘irregular warfare’, I mean conflicts in which ‘rebels privilege small, lightly armed bands operating in rural areas … [they] have the military capacity to challenge and harass the state but lack the capacity to confront it in a direct and frontal way’: Stathis N. Kalyvas and Laia Balcells, ‘International System and Technologies of Rebellion: How the End of the Cold War Shaped Internal Conflict’, American Political Science Review, civ, 3 (Aug. 2010), 418. 11 " ‘A True Poet: The Poetry of Peace and the Practice of War’, Buchanan’s Journal of Man, i, 7 (Aug. 1887), 10–11. 12 " Francis Wrigley Hirst, The Political Economy of War (London, 1915), 81–2. 13 " For a study of how Austria-Hungary tried to keep up with the western European arms race, see Manfred Reinschedl, Die Aufrüstung der Habsburgermonarchie von 1880 bis 1914 im internationalen Vergleich: der Anteil Österreich-Ungarns am Wettrüsten vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg (Frankfurt am Main, 2001). 14 " A. J. P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848–1918 (Oxford, 1954), p. xxviii. Taylor also provides significant statistical information on military spending by the Great Powers. 15 " Francis McCullagh, Syndicates for War: The Influence of the Makers of War Materials and of Capital Invested in War Supplies (Boston, 1911), 1. 16 " Robert H. Welborn, ‘The Arms Race Begins: The Problem of National Defense and Technological Change in Great Britain, 1859–1866’, Proceedings and Papers of the Georgia Association of Historians, vi (1985), 65–7. 17 " Max Boot, War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today (New York, 2006), 143. 18 " Michael Howard, War in European History (London, 1976), 102. 19 " For an excellent survey of different scholarly positions on a wide range of equipment from chariots to the impact of machine guns and artillery, see George Raudzens, ‘War-Winning Weapons: The Measurement of Technological Determinism in Military History’, Journal of Military History, liv, 4 (Oct. 1990). 20 " Kaymakam Ali Rıza Bey, Esliha Hakkında bir Makale [An Article on Weapons] (Istanbul, 1291 [1874/5]), 6. 21 " Quoted in Sigmund Neumann and Mark von Hagen, ‘Engels and Marx on Revolution, War, and the Army in Society’, in Peter Paret (ed.), Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age (Oxford, 1986), 275. 22 " Ahsene Gül Tokay, ‘The Macedonian Question and the Origins of the Young Turk Revolution, 1903–1908’ (Univ. of London Ph.D. thesis, 1994), 8. 23 " See Naci Yorulmaz, Arming the Sultan: German Arms Trade and Personal Diplomacy in the Ottoman Empire before World War I (London, 2014). 24 " Jonathan A. Grant, Rulers, Guns, and Money: The Global Arms Trade in the Age of Imperialism (Cambridge, Mass., 2007), 20–1. 25 " Emir Yener, ‘Osmanlı Donanmasında Buhar ve Zırh Devrimi, 1830–1876’ [The Steam and Armour Revolution in the Ottoman Navy], Toplumsal Tarih, cxcviii (2010), 54. 26 " Siniša Malešević, ‘Wars that Make States and Wars that Make Nations: Organised Violence, Nationalism and State Formation in the Balkans’, European Journal of Sociology, liii, 1 (Apr. 2012), 40–1. 27 " Tahsin Paşa, Abdülhamid: Yıldız Hatıraları [Abdülhamid: Memoirs from the Yıldız Palace] (Istanbul, 1931), 62–3, 87–8, 93. 28 " Yorulmaz, Arming the Sultan, 102–5. 29 " Richard Lewinsohn, The Mystery Man of Europe: Sir Basil Zaharoff (Philadelphia, 1929), 71. 30 " Ibid., 200–1. Ottoman diplomatic agents were instrumental in the regular monitoring of military activity and innovation abroad. For some of their reports, see Birol Çetin, ‘Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nda Askerî Teknolojilerin Takibi, 1700–1900’ [An Overview of Military Technology in the Ottoman Empire], in Hasan Celâl Güzel, Kemal Çiçek and Salim Koca (eds.), Türkler [The Turks], 21 vols. (Ankara, 2002), xiii. 31 " The National Archives, Kew (hereafter TNA), FO 78/4802/372, Constantinople, 2 June 1897; FO 78/5190/100, enclosure, Constantinople, 7 Mar. 1902. 32 " For the detailed budget of the Bulgarian Ministry of War for 1893, see Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi (Ottoman Archives of the Prime Minister’s Office), Istanbul (hereafter BOA), Y.PRK.MK, 5-95, 29 Cemazeyilevvel 1310. On how a change to the budget alerted the Ottomans, see BOA, Y.MTV, 254-23, 6 Şevval 1321. 33 " BOA, Y.PRK.MYD, 12-45, 1, 30 Kanunusani 1308. 34 " Ibid., 2. 35 " Eric Dorn Brose, The Kaiser’s Army: The Politics of Military Technology in Germany during the Machine Age, 1870–1918 (New York, 2001), 49–50. 36 " For Ottoman intelligence on the military activities of Bulgaria during the Graeco-Ottoman War of 1897, see BOA, HR.SFR(04), 757-5, 9, 25 Haziran 1313. 37 " For an earlier example of an Ottoman inquiry into rumours of the purchase of arms and ammunition by Bulgaria from Vienna in 1881, see TNA, FO 78/3308/18, Sofia, 9 Mar. 1881. 38 " BOA, Y.PRK.ASK, 245-73, 2, 30 Mart 1323. 39 " Keith Krause, Arms and the State: Patterns of Military Production and Trade (Cambridge, 1992), 54. 40 " Gábor Ágoston, Guns for the Sultan: Military Power and the Weapons Industry in the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge, 2005), 202. 41 " Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800, 2nd revised edn (Cambridge, 1996), 43. 42 " Peter Paret, ‘Napoleon and the Revolution in War’, in Paret (ed.), Makers of Modern Strategy, 127–9. 43 " Robert Crews, ‘Trafficking in Evil? The Global Arms Trade and the Politics of Disorder’, in James L. Gelvin and Nile Green (eds.), Global Muslims in the Age of Steam and Print (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2014), 124. 44 " Ágoston, Guns for the Sultan, 200. 45 " Emrys Chew, Arming the Periphery: The Arms Trade in the Indian Ocean during the Age of Global Empire (London, 2012), 21. 46 " Uğur Ünal, ‘Sultan Abdülaziz Devri Osmanlı Kara Ordusu, 1861–1876’ [Ottoman Land Forces during the Reign of Abdülaziz, 1861–1876] (Gazi Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 2006), 126–9. 47 " Ahmet Mithat Efendi, Üss-i İnkilap [The Basis of Reform] (Istanbul, 2004), 84; Metin Ünver, ‘Teknolojik Gelişmeler Işiğinda Osmanlı-Amerikan Silah Ticaretinin İlk Dönemi’ [The Early Years of the Ottoman–American Arms Trade in the Light of Technological Developments], Ankara Üniversitesi Tarih Araştımaları Dergisi (TAD), xxxii, 54 (Sept. 2013), 212. 48 " İhsan Satış, ‘19. Yüzyılın İkinci Yarısında Osmanlı-Amerika Silah Ticareti’ [The Ottoman–American Arms Trade in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century], History Studies: International Journal of History (Oct. 2011). 49 " Consul-General in Istanbul to Charles Payson, Assistant Secretary of State, no. 62, 20 Dec. 1879, in Despatches from United States Consuls in Constantinople, 1820–1906 (Washington, 1961): National Archives, Washington, microcopy T 194, roll 14. 50 " Hirst, Political Economy of War, 98–102. 51 " Quoted in Anthony Sampson, The Arms Bazaar in the Nineties: From Krupp to Saddam, new edn (Sevenoaks, 1991), 50. 52 " Lewinsohn, Mystery Man of Europe, 74–5. 53 " BOA, MVL, 1074-20, 4 Rabiülevvel 1284. 54 " Grant, Rulers, Guns, and Money, 37–47. 55 " Ibid., 46–7. 56 " The Armenian revolutionaries specifically positioned themselves as recipients of old weapons that were easy to procure. ‘We were unable to go to Europe; nor were European weapons able to reach Armenia’: Talat Paşa’nın Hatıraları [Memoirs of Talat Pasha], ed. Enver Bolayır (Istanbul, 1946), 46. 57 " See BOA, Y.PRK.ASK, 24 Temmuz 1320; Janet Klein, The Margins of Empire: Kurdish Militias in the Ottoman Tribal Zone (Stanford, 2011), 2, 107. 58 " TNA, FO 78/4916/334, enclosure 2, Tabreez, 2 May 1898. 59 " Ragıb Rıfkı, Balkan Hükümetlerinin Teşkilat-ı Askeriyesi [The Military Organization of the Balkan States] (Dersaadet [Istanbul], 1328 [1910/11]), 4–16. 60 " Revolutionaries also acquired limited numbers of magazine-fed Mannlichers from Bulgaria, although these were almost always reserved for the leadership: BOA, Y.PRK.MK, 12-66, 2, 13 Zilhicce 1320. 61 " BOA, HR.SFR(04), 217-38, 4 Muharrem 1320. 62 " After an encounter in July 1903, for instance, the Ottoman authorities seized two Bulgarian Berdans, two Serbian Berdans, six Martinis, three revolvers and fifty-four Mannlicher rifles (two different models): BOA, TFR.I.M, 1-66, 7, 21 Rabiülahir 1321. 63 " Smuggling operations were so widespread that the records of confiscation by the Régie have a generic quality to them. For examples of such reports, see BOA, DH.MKT, 637-15. 64 " BOA, İ.HUS, 80-91, 14 Şubat 1315. 65 " BOA, Y.PRK.BŞK, 52-131, 23 Haziran 1313. 66 " Frederick Moore, The Balkan Trail (New York, 1906), 251. 67 " Brown, Loyal unto Death, 151. 68 " BOA, BEO.A.MTZ(04), 126-79, 1, 22 Zilhicce 1322. 69 " BOA, HR.SFR(04), 230-47, 2 and 4, 18 Nisan 1905. 70 " The Ottoman commissioner in Sofia reported that Bulgarian revolutionaries had indeed burgled one such depot in Varna and another close to Sofia: BOA, HR.SFR(04), 230-19, 1, 9 Mart 1321. These thefts often required a number of accomplices from among the military, and there is a good deal of evidence that junior officers in the Bulgarian army facilitated such thefts: TNA, FO 78/5293/74, Sofia, 14 Apr. 1903. However, the serial numbers often provided little information. The numbers on bolts, breech-pieces and barrels routinely did not match, suggesting that they were smuggled in separately and then assembled. TNA, FO 78/4916/334, enclosure 2, Tabreez, 2 May 1898. 71 " For correspondence regarding the theft of fourteen Martini-Henrys from a depot in Rize and how the investigation uncovered more stolen rifles in the process, see BOA, DH.TMIK.M, 169-6, 15 Nisan 1320. 72 " TNA, FO 78/4916/334, enclosure 2, Tabreez, 2 May 1898. 73 " TNA, FO 78/5268/452, enclosure 108, Manastır, 2 Aug. 1903, fo. 5. 74 " ‘mukabeleten şakiler üzerine silah atmışlarsa da şakilerin mükemmel olan silahları hasebiyle torpido üzerlerine varamamıştır’: BOA, Y.PRK.EŞA, 35-34, 6 Nisan 1316. 75 " Tokay, ‘Macedonian Question and the Origins of the Young Turk Revolution’, 174. 76 " Crews, ‘Trafficking in Evil?’, 127–8. 77 " Charles Edward Callwell, Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice (London, 1906), 24. 78 " Борис Й. Николов [Boris J. Nikolov], Вътрешна Македоно-Одринска Революционна Организация Войводи и ръководители, 1893–1934: Биографично-библиографски справочник [The Voivodes and Heads of the Internal Macedonian–Adrianople Revolutionary Organization, 1893–1934: Biographical Bibliographical Guide] (Sofia, 2001), 173. Tufekchiev had three brothers: Dencho (or Dimitur), Nicholas and Dimitri. The Ivanovs were a larger family, with five brothers: Nicholas, Minko, Lazarus, Todor and Boris. 79 " Duncan M. Perry, Stefan Stambolov and the Emergence of Modern Bulgaria, 1870–1895 (Durham, NC, 1993), 224–32. 80 " Süleyman Kâni İrtem, Ermeni Meselesinin İçyüzü: Ermeni Isyanları Tarihi, Bomba Hâdisesi, Adana Vak’ası. Meclis-i Mebusan Zabıtları [The Inside Story of the Armenian Question: The History of the Armenian Revolts, Bombing Incident, the Adana Case. Minutes of the Ottoman Parliament], ed. Osman Selim Kocahanoğlu (Istanbul, 2004), 107. 81 " However, they succeeded in killing the finance minister, Hristo Belchev, who was with Stambolov at the time: Duncan M. Perry, The Politics of Terror: The Macedonian Liberation Movements, 1893–1903 (Durham, NC, 1988), 33. 82 " BOA, Y.A.HUS, 257-155, 2, 18 Mart 1892. 83 " TNA, FO 78/4662/101, Sofia, 18 July 1895, fos. 136–42; FO 78/4662/117, Sofia, 12 Aug. 1895, fos. 223–4; FO 78/4663/14, Sofia, 4 Sept. 1895, fos. 20–1. 84 " TNA, FO 78/4753/5, Sofia, 8 Jan. 1896, fo. 19. After Tufekchiev had been pronounced not guilty in the Stambolov trial, however, he took up similar tactics and published a series of ‘revenge’ letters that provoked internal problems within the government in Bulgaria, leading to the resignation of the Cabinet: TNA, FO 78/5219/171, Sofia, 18 Nov. 1902. 85 " TNA, FO 78/4754/74, Sofia, 30 Apr. 1896, fos. 39, 43. 86 " TNA, FO 78/4851/32, Sofia, 11 Mar. 1898, fo. 86. 87 " Anna Geifman, Thou Shalt Kill: Revolutionary Terrorism in Russia, 1894–1917 (Princeton, 1993), 201; Timothy Edward O’Connor, The Engineer of Revolution: L. B. Krasin and the Bolsheviks, 1870–1926 (Boulder, 1992), 72–3. 88 " İrtem, Ermeni Meselesinin İçyüzü, 107. In the liberal atmosphere that followed the Young Turk Revolution in 1908, Tufekchiev left Sofia to visit his home town of Resne; he also visited Ohrid, where Süleyman Kani (later İrtem) was serving as governor. Kani noted that Tufekchiev would later play an important role in brokering the alliance between the Ottoman empire and Bulgaria at the outbreak of the First World War. 89 " Perry, Politics of Terror, 42–3, 53–6, 68–74, 84. 90 " BOA, HR.SFR(04), 749-43, 1, 1 Teşrinievvel 1311. 91 " Ibid. 92 " TNA, FO 78/4753/5, Sofia, 8 Jan. 1896, fo. 19. For a brief account of the plot, see R. J. Crampton, Bulgaria (Oxford, 2007), 134–6. 93 " Perry, Stefan Stambolov and the Emergence of Modern Bulgaria, 224–32. 94 " BOA, BEO.A.MTZ(04), 181-7, 2, 18 Eylül 1311. 95 " These rifles were produced in the 1860s but superseded by the later Martini-Henrys: ‘Secret Minutes of the Supreme Macedonian–Adrianople Committee, September 20th–October 3rd, 1900’, in Macedonia: Documents and Material, ed. Voin Bozhinov and L. Panayotov (Sofia, 1978), 447. 96 " TNA, FO 78/5217/54, Sofia, 15 Apr. 1902, fos. 199–200. 97 " TNA, FO 78/5080/130, Sofia, 21 Oct. 1900, fo. 139; FO 78/5080/150, Sofia, 8 Dec. 1900, fos. 213–14. 98 " TNA, FO 78/4663/141, Sofia, 4 Sept. 1895, fos. 18–20; FO 78/4663/157, Sofia, 24 Sept. 1895, fos. 118–19; FO 78/4753/2, Sofia, 5 Jan. 1896, fos. 3–6. 99 " BOA, BEO.A.MTZ(04), 181-7, 2, 18 Eylül 1311; 5, 31 Ağustos 1311. 100 " Perry, Politics of Terror, 166. 101 " TNA, FO 78/4853/35, Sofia, 11 Feb. 1897, fos. 78–9. 102 " BOA, HR.SFR(04), 757-5, 2, 15 Mayıs 1313. 103 " Ibid., 1-1, 1-2, 9 Muharrem 1315. 104 " Mercia MacDermott, For Freedom and Perfection: The Life of Yané Sandansky (London, 1988), 31. 105 " BOA, HR.SFR(04), 757-5, 2, 15 Mayıs 1313. 106 " BOA, HR.SFR(04), 219-81, 2, 15 Teşrinievvel 1318; HR.SFR(04), 217-50, 3 Nisan 1318. 107 " BOA, HR.SFR(04), 219-81, 2, 15 Teşrinievvel 1318. 108 " Ibid. 109 " TNA, FO 78/4853/96, Sofia, 21 Apr. 1897, enclosure 22, Philippopolis, 17 Apr. 1897, fos. 254–5. 110 " For the seizure of a batch of these rifles by the Bulgarian authorities in early May 1897, see TNA, FO 78/4854/111, Sofia, 12 May 1897, enclosure 31, Philippopolis, 9 May 1897, fos. 5–6. 111 " TNA, FO 78/5217/53, 12 Apr. 1902, fos. 193–4. 112 " TNA, FO 78/5331/230, enclosure 24, Constantinople, 31 Mar. 1904. 113 " TNA, FO 78/4854/221, Sofia, 17 Dec. 1897; Perry, Politics of Terror, 76–9. 114 " BOA, Y.PRK.MK, 10-108, 25 Haziran 1317. 115 " TNA, FO 78/5079/41, Sofia, 14 Apr. 1900, fos. 143–4. 116 " BOA, HR.SFR(04), 219-81, 2, 15 Teşrinievvel 1318. 117 " The Bulgarian authorities managed to stop only one in three of these bands before they crossed the border: TNA, FO 78/5017/84, Sofia, 14 June 1899, fo. 65. 118 " BOA, HR.SFR(04), 757-5, 7, 12 Haziran 1313. 119 " TNA, FO 78/4874/169, Sofia, 3 Sept. 1897, with enclosure from Rustchuk [Ruse], 30 Aug. 1897, fos. 189–95; ‘Fifty-Six Persons Killed’, New York Times, 8 Aug. 1897, 1; ‘Scenes at the Rustchuk Explosion: Spectators Petrified by Horror’, Sydney Morning Herald, 5 Oct. 1897, 2. 120 " Perry, Politics of Terror, 167. 121 " Ibid., 83–4. 122 " BOA, BEO.A.MTZ(04), 90-47, 1, 9 Mart 1319. 123 " BOA, Y.PRK.MYD, 25-73, 4, 25 Ağustos 1319. 124 " Mercia MacDermott, Freedom or Death: The Life of Gotsé Delchev (London, 1978), 151. 125 " The term ‘gun society’ comes from Shula Marks and Anthony Atmore, ‘Firearms in Southern Africa: A Survey’, Journal of African History, xii, 4 (1971). 126 " Brown, Loyal unto Death, 145. 127 " BOA, İ.DH, 1205-94332, 7 Teşrinisani 1306. There were also reports that Gras rifles, particularly widespread among the Greek revolutionaries but also used by the Macedonians and Bulgarians, had a better range when compared to Martini-Henry rifles, which equipped the Ottoman soldiers: Vincent Steven Wilhite, ‘Guerrilla War, Counterinsurgency, and State Formation in Ottoman Yemen’ (Ohio State Univ. Ph.D. dissertation, 2003), 324. 128 " The Ottoman soldiers received neither the rifles nor any proper drill. In the war with Greece in 1897, for instance, only one in ten divisions were given Mausers. Similarly, during the Balkan Wars, 1912–13, most Ottoman soldiers did not know how to use Mausers. Mesut Uyar and Edward J. Erickson, A Military History of the Ottomans: From Osman to Atatürk (Santa Barbara, 2009), 211. Yet the phenomenon was not peculiar to the Ottoman context: most of the Russian troops who participated in the war with Japan in 1905 were not given Mosin-Nagant repeater rifles, instead using single-shot rifles throughout the war. 129 " Wilhite, ‘Guerilla War, Counterinsurgency, and State Formation in Ottoman Yemen’, 324. 130 " TNA, FO 78/5190/170, enclosure, Constantinople, 9 Apr. 1902. 131 " TNA, FO 78/5268/521, Therapia, 28 Aug. 1903, fo. 286. 132 " Quoted in Brown, Loyal unto Death, 146. © The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2017
TI - Tools of Revolution: Global Military Surplus, Arms Dealers and Smugglers in the Late Ottoman Balkans, 1878–1908
JO - Past & Present
DO - 10.1093/pastj/gtx034
DA - 2017-11-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/tools-of-revolution-global-military-surplus-arms-dealers-and-smugglers-7cAja4bSWK
SP - 167
VL - 237
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -