Defining Ottoman Shipping

Before proceeding we must first come to terms with the full import of the phrase “Ottoman shipping.” Because the general category of Ottoman trade in the Indian Ocean is too large a topic to discuss in the space of this article, the more circumscribed category of shipping is adopted. As used here, the signifier “Ottoman” refers to both Ottoman government vessels and the private ships of Ottoman subjects. “Shipping” encompasses both ships piloted by Ottoman subjects, or ships lent out by Ottoman-origin merchants to others. Ottoman shipping can be said to have entered the Indian Ocean once it sailed, on the eastern extremity, past Muscat and the Straits of Hormuz, and, on the western extremity, past Mocha and the Straits of Bab al-Mandab. For the sake of argument, Ottoman ships that sailed to Batavia or Canton - neither of which are technically in the Indian Ocean - are included in this study.

From the first it must be clarified that there was nothing in the Ottoman experience remotely approaching the substantial diaspora of Iranian migrants in Mughal India or even the networks of Indo-Persians in the kingdom of Ayutthaya (Siam).Footnote ¹⁴ Be that as it may, the odd Ottoman expatriate is also to be found in the mix. As numerous French sources document, the governor of Bangkok in the mid-17th century was a “Turk” from Bursa (Brousse) who purportedly converted to Twelver Shiʿism.Footnote ¹⁵ One might suspect that this individual first migrated to Safavid Iran and then to the Shiʿi kingdoms of the Deccan, from where he journeyed to Ayutthaya in the company of a cohort of other merchant and military entrepreneurs of Iranian origin. What French observers understood as Bursa was more likely to have been Basra, which had innumerable early modern spelling variants. Migration from Bursa to Ayutthaya was not an impossibility, but considering Basra’s position near the Ottoman-Safavid frontier and readier access to the Indian Ocean, this seems a likelier candidate.

The historian’s first inclination might be to dismiss assertions that this figure was of Ottoman origin as just so much European ignorance. However, this is how the French naval officer the Comte de Forbin, who knew the Ottoman Mediterranean well, described his interaction with this figure in 1685:

Guy Tachard, the French Jesuit who wrote a famous account of Ayutthaya, had a more neutral run-in with this same governor, whom he called “By Nation a Turk and of the Mahometan Religion.”Footnote ¹⁷ He referred to all other Muslims in his account as “Moors.”Footnote ¹⁸ And as still other sources relay, this same figure served as the governor of Phetchaburi in 1687.Footnote ¹⁹ Further evidence of an Ottoman presence in these years comes from the famous account of the 1680s Safavid embassy to Ayutthaya, Safina-i Sulayman (The Ship of Sulayman), by Ibn Muhammad Ibrahim. There the author records, “When we arrived at the outskirts of the town [of Suhan] we were met by a man called [Çelebi]. He was from among the people of Rum, had settled in this country and enjoyed the honor of lately converting to Shiʿism.”Footnote ²⁰ That a Safavid observer made this distinction is further corroboration that the European label of “Turk” was no mere projection.Footnote ²¹

These examples from Ayutthaya demonstrate that although there are ambiguities in European records on Indian Ocean trade when it comes to classifying non-European actors, these ambiguities are not insurmountable. As Paul van Dyke has argued in the case of the Canton trade, the categories used by Europeans to classify Armenians, Muslims, Jews, and others were inexact, but they are sometimes telling in their inexactitude insofar as they reveal how such actors were seen by others and how they fashioned themselves.Footnote ²² Obviously, one cannot expect the categories used in European records to be watertight and mutually exclusive. Modern ethnographers they were not. To be fair, the distinction among groups is not always clear-cut in contemporary sources: as Jean Aubin once stressed, the term “Moorish” was used to describe a wide array of Muslim peoples.Footnote ²³ And yet “Turkish” appears with enough frequency in European records from the Indian Ocean for it to be considered a category apart. For example, to first take the case of British shipping records, should a so-called Turkish ship traveling from Muscat and captained by a merchant named Wirrigee (Virji, clearly the name of a Gujarati merchant) that landed in Calcutta in 1822 be regarded as an “Ottoman” vessel?Footnote ²⁴ What about the “Arab” vessels mentioned in the same list? Or the Arab merchants who frequented Bombay from the first part of the 19th century onward? If they were from Muscat they should not be considered Ottoman, but what then if they hailed from Kuwait? And does the answer change by the end of the century as a "British Gulf" began to emerge and places like Kuwait signed bilateral treaties with the British?Footnote ²⁵

Considering how disparate references to Ottoman subjects are in these shipping records, it is difficult to be systematic and arrive at a grand total of Ottoman shippers in the Indian Ocean. Fortunately, an even more promising source than British records are the shipping registers compiled by agents of the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, hereafter VOC) in the 17th and 18th centuries.Footnote ²⁶ Although hardly comprehensive in their accounting or rigorous in their use of categories, Dutch records from the western Indian Ocean did customarily differentiate among Armenian-, Bania-, Greek-, Jewish-, Iranian-, Indian-, Moorish-, and Turkish-owned ships and captains. Occasionally, “Moorish” functioned as a catch-all term for any non-European vessel, but evidence suggests that typically it was not used by the VOC’s servants as a mere synonym for Turkish. By cross-referencing the names of known Ottoman subjects with VOC records, one can safely conclude that “Turkish” (Turcks, Turks) was used specifically in reference to vessels owned by Ottoman Muslims.

Of course, if the aim here is to document Ottoman shipping in the round, then the disadvantage of the VOC’s nomenclature is that it typically does not distinguish Armenians, Jews, and Greeks by their Ottoman or non-Ottoman (Safavid, Mughal, European) origin. They are usually only referred to without the qualifying descriptor; that is, merely as Armenians, Jews, or Greeks; usually, but not always. By illustration, a VOC shipping list produced at Cochin in 1781 lists “Mahomet, a Turk, Thomas Ikar [?], a Greek, and Koerana Tarrika [?], a Turkish Jew.”Footnote ²⁷ All of these figures should be considered Ottomans. By extension, so should figures like Dimitrios Nicholai, a “Greek merchant of Philippopolis (Filibe)” (concerning whom more will be said below), and Isaac Surgun, a Jewish merchant with origins in Istanbul, but who settled in Malabar.Footnote ²⁸ Conversely, it would stretch the category of Ottoman shipping to breaking point if one attributed an Ottoman identity to the offspring of Nicholai or Surgun in the event that they knew nothing of Filibe, Istanbul, or the larger empire, but only the domains of western India.

One final point bearing consideration is whether ships should only be deemed Ottoman if they sailed under an Ottoman flag. References to Ottoman flags do appear sporadically in both European and Ottoman documentation, with an increase in the later 19th century. Insisting too strongly on this point, however, would ignore the fact that Asian, Ottoman, and European shippers routinely sailed under flags that did not correspond to their point of origin. Shipping did not abide by neat national categories, and a vessel’s flag was no mirror image of its captain and crew.

Rather than trying to resolve such ambiguities by adopting a very strict definition of what constituted an Ottoman, these ambiguities should be taken on board. They speak to the broader fuzziness of Ottoman shipping in the western Indian Ocean, to say nothing of the fuzziness of the precise maritime spaces of the Indian Ocean more generally.Footnote ²⁹ Even if pinning down Ottoman actors in the Indian Ocean often turns out to be imprecise, demonstrating an Ottoman presence in the Indian Ocean after 1650 is worthwhile, not least because it compels a rethink about the limits of the empire’s globality. As an earlier reviewer of this essay rightly cautioned, the notion of Ottoman shipping should be “an interpretive aid” rather than a “barrier to discovery.”Footnote ³⁰ That advice is followed below.

The Structure of Ottoman Shipping on the Indian Ocean, c. 1650–1775

Prior to undertaking a reconstruction of two Ottoman shipping networks, the structural factors molding the volume of Ottoman shipping in the Indian Ocean before 1800 have to be reckoned with. Five factors shaped the structure of maritime trade of the Ottoman Red Sea, the Ottoman Gulf, and the wider Indian Ocean in the long 18th century: (1) an Ottoman trade imbalance with India; (2) the near universal tendency of Ottoman vessels to engage in short voyages in the empire’s internal and borderland waterways, itself the by-product of ecological hindrances and the rise of Mocha and Muscat as rival ports; (3) the existence of a small Ottoman diaspora of merchants and mercenaries; (4) the establishment of European factories in Basra in fits and starts from the early 17th to the late 18th centuries and the concomitant attempts of European shipping to make inroads into Jeddah and Suez; and, finally, (5) periodic Ottoman investments in shipbuilding and shipping facilities in Suez and Basra. In what follows each of these factors is examined in miniature. In sum, these features underscore that an Ottoman absence from the Indian Ocean was not total, but also that the muted scale of the Ottoman presence was the outcome of a constellation of contingencies rather than a lack of state or private entrepreneurial will.

To begin with, speaking in too emphatic a tone of a trade imbalance between the Ottoman Empire and India teeters into anachronism.Footnote ³¹ As Dennis O. Flynn has persuasively argued, in early modern economies specie did not flow internationally because of nonmonetary trade deficits between regions or polities.Footnote ³² Instead, it is more accurate to say that the structural disadvantage faced by the Ottomans owed less to the outflow of silver from the empire per se, and more to the fact that the Ottoman domains offered little to Indian Ocean markets from its own resource endowments. It scarcely needs to be said that this was not a singularly Ottoman problem. Europeans trading in Asia faced precisely the same constraints.Footnote ³³ Nor should one overlook the fact that Ottoman glass, chinaware, and textile designs were sought after by Indian elite consumers, not least Tipu Sultan.Footnote ³⁴ Notwithstanding these qualifications, given our current knowledge it is safe to say that Ottoman merchants, like their European counterparts, had little to export to Indian Ocean markets. Arguably, this scarcity of in-demand goods actually increased the importance of silver as an export from the Ottoman lands.Footnote ³⁵ But despite Basra’s function as a key exporter of silver until the late 18th century, it was by no means the sole regional supplier. Indeed, several ports on the outer rim of the Indian Ocean—including Mocha, an erstwhile Ottoman port—supplied silver in abundance to the polities of early modern South Asia.Footnote ³⁶

At any rate, from the perspective of the Ottoman state, domestic trade in the interior parts of the Ottoman domains was of a greater volume and administrative concern than international trade.Footnote ³⁷ As for goods imported into the empire, Indian textiles were among the dominant commodities, in keeping with the rest of Afro-Eurasia.Footnote ³⁸ In her excellent study of Ottoman textile production and consumption, Amanda Phillips eloquently maintains that “Subjects in the Ottoman lands, removed from the oceanic trade that is thought to have shaped a new world order, were nonetheless enthusiastic participants in the exchange and eager consumers of new types of [textile] goods and styles.”Footnote ³⁹ Vibrant as the textile trade was, it would be wrong to assume that these trading connections necessarily grew more robust over time. In some sectors, trading connections seem to have diminished. For one, the gradual decline of the horse trade between Ottoman territories and western India in the late 18th and early 19th centuries is well documented.Footnote ⁴⁰ With that said, although the evidence is fragmentary and one cannot generalize from a handful of sources, there are indications that the India trade was no trivial affair. Daniel Panzac has cited a 1785 document that records 10 million livres tournois (5 million piastres) worth of goods imported from India to Istanbul as compared to 12 million livres tournois worth imported from Europe.Footnote ⁴¹

These fluctuating trading contacts can be explained in part by the second dimension of Ottoman maritime trade in the Indian Ocean: the prevalence of short, localized voyages. These were the consequence of ecological or technological constraints and political contingencies. In his classic study of the commercial life of 18th-century Cairo, André Raymond once clarified that

As Raymond also acknowledged, “we also do not know the date at which this division into spheres of influence was established.”Footnote ⁴³ Writing almost three decades later, Michel Tuchscherer pinpointed a more precise date, arguing that the Ottomans’ ouster from Mocha in 1635 by the Qasimi imams based in Sanaʿa effectively bisected the Red Sea trade in two, leading to a “Gujarati” domination of the southern Red Sea and western Indian Ocean. This reduced Ottoman shipping traveling outside the remit of the northern Red Sea.Footnote ⁴⁴ For their own part, the leading traders (tujjār) of Cairo leveraged Ottoman authority to maintain their monopoly over maritime trade between Suez and Jeddah.Footnote ⁴⁵

The resulting geographical division of Red Sea commerce resulted in what Nancy Um has called the “Jeddah Gap,” in which Jeddah served as a meeting point between the northern and southern Red Sea trade and functioned “as a barrier, limiting traffic and determining the nature of residence along the length of the Red Sea.”Footnote ⁴⁶ In those rare instances in which Indian merchants violated this boundary, such as by sailing north from Jeddah to Suez, they were punished.Footnote ⁴⁷ One of the many incongruities fostered by the Jeddah Gap was that Mocha developed multipolar trade links with India, especially with Surat, but maintained few direct links with the northern Red Sea. Nonetheless, the number of vessels traveling from Gulf ports like Basra and Muscat to Mocha, although smaller than their Indian counterparts, outnumbered ships from the ports of the subcontinent debarking at these two emporia.Footnote ⁴⁸ With Mocha serving as something of a choke point, Ottoman Suez was almost entirely deprived of direct associations with Indian Ocean ports, with Jeddah serving as intermediary.

These fissures in the map of Ottoman shipping persisted until the end of the 18th century, and even well thereafter. Still, it is vital to clarify that these shortened shipping routes were not a consequence of any Ottoman aversion to Indian Ocean trade. Ecological and technological obstacles were the key determinants. These impinged upon the itineraries of Indian shipping in the Red Sea too: as Raymond has also clarified, “ships coming from India rarely passed Mocha or Jeddah for fear of missing the monsoon which would bring them home.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Shackled though Indian ships were by the rhythms of the monsoon, Indian prominence in the Red Sea was exercised in other ways. One form this took was the prominence of Indian ships disembarking hajj pilgrims at Jeddah. The arrival of Indian ships was so dependable that in 1698 the sultan allocated an additional 5,000 kuruş from the annual tithe levied on Indian vessels to the son of the emir of Mecca. Typically, the emir was due half the revenue of the tithe (with the other half going to the governor of Jeddah), and the increase of the allowance in this instance was justified by the size of the emir’s family.Footnote ⁵⁰ The decision to augment the allowance bespoke a confidence that Indian ships would continue to arrive in Jeddah for the foreseeable future. It also suggests that little or no loss was felt by the Ottoman state by the fact that Ottoman merchants were largely bounded by the constrictions of the Jeddah Gap.

Despite this fact the Jeddah gap was overcome in those rare instances when the requisite investments were made by the Ottoman state. As Giancarlo Casale has documented, state-sponsored spice galleys traveled between Suez and Mocha in the 16th century.Footnote ⁵¹ What is more, the limited seafaring capacity of Ottoman vessels constructed in the Red Sea and environs of Basra stemmed from ecological barriers and not technological ignorance. Suraiya Faroqhi has demonstrated that the scarcity of wood in Egypt and neighboring parts of the northern Red Sea meant that the construction of ships was prohibitively expensive, as timber had to be brought from the Black Sea and India.Footnote ⁵² As a result, the stock of ships was often decrepit and pushed to extreme limits by their owners. To overcome these hurdles, Ottoman shipbuilders pursued various innovations. By the early 18th century, Indian wood was supplied in some numbers to shipbuilders in Suez, whose output was crucial to the provisioning of Mecca and Medina.Footnote ⁵³ Ottoman sources also record that the Valide Sultan Vakfi in Egypt purchased an Indian ship on at least one occasion to supply foodstuffs to the poor pilgrims of Mecca.Footnote ⁵⁴ Ottoman shipbuilders even directly imitated Indian technologies: beginning at some point in the 1750s and 1770s, ships built in the Suez tersāne (arsenal) increasingly were modeled on the style of the Indian ships at Jeddah.Footnote ⁵⁵

In the Gulf, in step with prevailing norms in the southern Red Sea, maritime trade in and out of Ottoman Basra to western India was dominated by Arab and Indian nakhodas (ship captains), operating principally out of Muscat (in the case of the former) and Kachchh (in the latter). Merchants from the southern territories of Iran were also active in these spaces.Footnote ⁵⁶ As shown by the data on voyages to and from Basra assembled by Thabit A. J. Abdullah on the basis of East India Company (EIC) sources, the journeys made by Arab and Indian captains far outpaced those made by Ottoman and European vessels combined.Footnote ⁵⁷ Still, the European contribution, although of secondary importance, eclipsed Ottoman vessels. Meanwhile, while consumers in Cairo acquired goods from abroad via the port at Suez, Basra became a key transit area for those goods produced in India and Iran that eventually made their way to Aleppo and Istanbul.Footnote ⁵⁸

European sources, as will be seen, show that an Ottoman diaspora of sorts existed in the Indian Ocean. A precious few Ottoman sources also corroborate this. Although the precise numbers are unknown, this diaspora was predictably based in India. The 18th-century account of the Ottoman diplomat-trader Elhac Emin Pasha speaks of a “Rumi” community in India.Footnote ⁵⁹ Emin’s father, Yusuf Ağa, was a textile merchant, and both father and son were part of the Ottoman embassy to the Mughal court led by Mahmud Salim Efendi in the 1740s. Although a merchant-diplomat himself, in his account, Emin Pasha noted that this Rumi diaspora consisted mainly of mercenaries. One of those mercenaries who rose to prominence a few decades after Emin Pasha’s visit was Mustafa Pasha, originally of Greek origin, who was a fixture in Bengal during the transition to East India Company rule and a key ally of the French.Footnote ⁶⁰ Additional work remains to be done on the full breadth of the Rumi diaspora, but not all were soldiers of fortune. Ottoman-origin ship captains and merchants also were found in the retinues of Indian rulers. For example, when the Maratha ruler Shivaji sacked Mughal Surat in 1664, he dispatched a Greek merchant resident in the city to collect tribute from the VOC. Little can be said of this merchant, but he was sufficiently well known to the Marathas for them to trust him for this mission.Footnote ⁶¹

The fourth in the larger list of elements structuring Ottoman shipping on the Indian Ocean were the European “factories” (trading posts) lining its maritime boundaries. Factories at Mocha and Muscat had been established by European principals at various moments in the 17th century, but they were regularly snuffed out by the mercurial commercial calculations of European companies.Footnote ⁶² Ottoman merchants appear with some frequency in the records of these factories. In some cases in the 18th century, “Turkish” mariners manned VOC and EIC vessels traveling to Bengal, an advance on the propensity of independent Ottoman merchants in the 17th century to hitch a ride to India on European vessels.Footnote ⁶³

As a measure of Basra’s capricious relationship with Indian Ocean trade, European factories in the city struggled to survive for any period of time before 1700. Portuguese, VOC, and EIC factories at Basra between the 1620s and 1640s under the Afrasiyab pashas.Footnote ⁶⁴ From the Ottoman perspective, the legal basis of these factories was unclear, because the capitulations system familiar to the trading centers of the Ottoman Mediterranean was not extended to the region until the 1720s.Footnote ⁶⁵ As early as 1623, more or less a generation after Ottoman and Portuguese rivalry in the western Indian Ocean fizzled out, a Portuguese factory was set up in the city, composed in part of refugees expelled from Safavid Hormuz a year before.Footnote ⁶⁶ Dutch and English factories followed by the 1640s. Despite this, European factories in Basra appear to have disappeared by the 1650s and only were restored at the end of the century.Footnote ⁶⁷

Fitful commercial priorities go some way toward explaining this inconsistency, but so do testy relations with local Afrasiyab and Ottoman authorities. Relations between the European factors and the Ottoman administration were likely far better than typically portrayed by the Portuguese, VOC, and EIC sources. A clear measure of this is that the Europeans kept returning to Basra throughout the 18th century. Yet Basra’s contrepôt character guaranteed that the factories were fair weather institutions. What is more, a comparison of the operations of the VOC and EIC in Basra between the 1730s and 1760s reveals the complex nature of running a factory in a contrepôt. A Dutch dictionary in the 1730s had described Basra as possessing an “excellent port through which it carries on strong trade in Asia and Europe.”Footnote ⁶⁸ But over the next two decades the company’s Basra factory performed poorly. It was shuttered for good in the 1750s on account of malfeasance among the local factors, who also ran afoul of the Ottoman authorities. In turn, the Dutch moved their operations to the island of Kharg in the Gulf, which they then abandoned in 1766.Footnote ⁶⁹ The prospect of a return to Basra was often undermined by poor insecurity in the interior. For example, in 1763 a Dutch report relayed that local tribes in the hinterland of Basra had managed to cut off the waterways north of the city, which severed ties to Baghdad and other towns. Although this was only a temporary mishap, the same author predicted bad effects for the region and the stagnation of trade (stilstand van den handel).Footnote ⁷⁰

These were not ideal conditions for the EIC’s decision to reestablish its own factory in Basra that very same year. Unsurprisingly, the initial results were less than impressive. For example, although made anxious by the muscling in of the English, Dutch factors in early 1765 reported that “The maritime traffic (vaart) of the English to the Persian Gulf is very busy. In one year twelve of their ships arrived from Calcutta and Bombay in Bandar Bushire and Basra, however, as already mentioned in the previous general letter, their activities in the second port did not succeed at all.”Footnote ⁷¹ Still, by the early 1770s the Danish explorer Carsten Niebuhr observed that, among the Europeans, the English hand in Basra’s trade was the greatest.Footnote ⁷² As Niebuhr also reported, the foundation of the EIC factory at Basra at this time was precipitated by the decline of Bandar Abbas and the closing of a company factory at Isfahan. But in a reflection of the bad hand often dealt to Basra by circumstances outside its control, the EIC reestablished a factory at Bushire within short order, which helped precipitate Basra’s diminution.Footnote ⁷³ What is more, frustrated by the inability to get approval from Ottoman authorities for the removal of the three percent customs duty, the company downgraded its factory in Basra from an agency to a residency and even considered abandoning the city altogether, however the French operation in the city justified its presence.Footnote ⁷⁴

The French entry into Basra, which occurred at mid-century, was likewise far from straightforward: several figures in the French East India Company had protested adamantly against doing business there.Footnote ⁷⁵ French ships began visiting Basra in numbers from the 1730s, and between 1739 and 1744 a French consulate at Basra was active.Footnote ⁷⁶ Voyages continued apace for the next few decades despite the fact that by the 1740s the usual European laments about the precarity of trade were voiced with regularity by French factors.Footnote ⁷⁷ Still, as Indrani Ray once cautioned, the penchant for French merchants in Basra to emphasize the poor conditions of trade, to say nothing of “Turkish misrule” and Arab “piracy,” should not be taken at face value.Footnote ⁷⁸ After all, as the French records convey, Basra’s connections to the Indian Ocean trade were substantial until at least the 1760s, given a leg up by the redirection of trade away from Bandar Abbas, even if the city’s trading links were susceptible to sudden shifts. France’s own changing fortunes in the Indian Ocean also modulated Basra’s commercial fortunes. At the high point of French trade in Basra, the majority of the freight for inbound French voyages to the city originated at the French settlement of Chandernagore in Bengal.Footnote ⁷⁹ But with the onset of outright EIC rule in Bengal in the 1750s and 1760s, Chandernagore was reduced to a tiny French settlement of little economic importance. The knock-on effects for French trade in Basra were predictable.

The fifth characteristic of Ottoman maritime trade in the early modern Indian Ocean comprised episodic infrastructural improvements undertaken by Ottoman governors. As Faisal Hussain has shown, Basra was already a site of shipbuilding for riverine trade on the Tigris and Euphrates, since at least the 17th century.Footnote ⁸⁰ Nonetheless, it is not evident if any of the ships built in Basra were of oceangoing quality. What is more, from the beginning of the century complaints arose concerning the inadequate staffing and maintenance of Basra’s fleet. By the 1730s, Basra’s shipyard (tersāne) was commissioned to build vessels. There was also a nehri kapudan pasha appointed to oversee the maintenance of the state’s riverine ships. In 1765, two years after the Dutch complained about trade grinding to a halt thanks to tribal disturbances, the Ottomans replaced Basra’s nehri kapudan pasha, Mustafa Pasha, on account of not only his “lack of ability in maintaining the security and order” (zabt u rabt idem-i iktidarından) of the Shatt al-Arab, but also “the lethargy and negligence” (rahavet ve ihmalı) he displayed in the management of the sailors and frigates of the local fleet.Footnote ⁸¹

Perhaps in part to rectify Mustafa Pasha’s delinquency, the local governor was commanded in 1766 to build two additional frigates.Footnote ⁸² Basra would continue to function as a site of Ottoman ship construction in the following century, becoming a facility for the regional branch of the Ottoman navy. Yet the vast majority of the vessels constructed in its environs seem to have been earmarked for the northward journey up the Tigris and Euphrates, rather than a southerly journey into the Gulf and the Indian Ocean. And regardless of the investments in shipping infrastructure made by the Ottomans in this period, they proved inadequate when they were put to the test during the Zand siege a decade later in 1775. That story will be told in due course, but in the interim the narrative turns to two Ottoman shipping networks working within this structural framework.

Two Case Studies of Ottoman Shippers

As already mentioned, calculating the total volume of “Ottoman” shipping in the Indian Ocean between 1650 and 1900 demands a more comprehensive survey of European shipping records (which I am currently undertaking). Instead of supplying provisional data at this juncture, it is best to use two concrete examples to illustrate the potential of European sources (in this case VOC records) to dredge up elusive networks of Ottoman shipping. The first of these examples is the family firm of the Çelebis, based alternatively at Surat and Basra. The second follows the voyages of a single Greek ship captain, Dimitri Nicholai. The former covers the period from the 1720s to the 1780s, and the latter covers the 1720s to early 1750s.

The Çelebis are well known to historians of early modern Indian Ocean trade thanks to their prominence in the life of early 18th-century Surat.Footnote ⁸³ The frequently cited late 17th-century account of the hajj, Anis al-Hujjaj by Safi bin Wali Qazwini, put their origins in Mosul.Footnote ⁸⁴ There is actually room for debate on this point. Basing his observations on the late-18th century Italian account of Domenico Sestini, John R. Perry once wrote that the family were “Armenians originally from Mosul, who traded between Surat and Basra five or six times a year, partly in their own ships (they had a shipyard at Surat) and partly using those of the East India Company: they brought cotton cloth, hardware, bamboo for Arab lances, firewood, and even stones, which were used for ballast and sold on arrival at Basra.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Yet even if the Çelebis were originally Armenians, they evidently did not remain Armenian Christians. According to the account of Khwaja Abd al-Qadir, the ambassador of Mysore sent to Istanbul by Tipu Sultan (to be discussed further below), the Çelebi family of Surat had five to six graves in the vicinity of Basra.Footnote ⁸⁶

The precise links between the Çelebis and the Ottoman administration in Basra have not been studied to any extent. These links are only indirectly referenced in European sources, but they do offer intriguing insights. Although European commentators tended to emphasize the predatory behavior Ottoman state officials directed at their own merchants, there was considerable synergy between political and merchant elites in places like Basra.Footnote ⁸⁷ Of course, that did not mean that the Çelebis and Basra’s pashas were always on good terms. In 1725 VOC sources record that a member of the family was imprisoned by the Ottoman governor of Basra.Footnote ⁸⁸ Other evidence scattered across archives suggests a happier relationship, however. In the 1780s there was debate among EIC factors in Basra and Surat over whether the Çelebis merited the protection of the company’s cruiser convoy. At one point the company factors in Basra reported that one of the family’s ships had been deployed by Ottoman authorities for operations against the Banu Kaʿb on the Tigris. It seems that the ship was used with the family’s permission by the Ottoman nehri kapudan pasha, one Haji Yusuf, who commanded one of these punitive expeditions against the Banu Kaʿb and was “well known to be one of Salla Chellaby’s people.”Footnote ⁸⁹

Ottoman patronage of the Çelebis was used by the EIC to withdraw cruiser protection for the family’s ships. And as additional fodder for justifying this stance, the EIC’s Surat factor noted around this time,

The family’s Surat branch also endured episodic harassment from other traders and local authorities.Footnote ⁹¹ One of the scions of the Çelebi family, Osman, featured prominently in an early 18th-century Persian account of the famous Surat-based Parsi merchant, Rustam Manakji.Footnote ⁹² Osman—who is described as a “Turki by caste (jāt)”—is a fixture in the account because a sizable part of Manakji’s biography is devoted to his efforts to secure the release of Osman’s ship. This had been seized by the Portuguese on its return from Jeddah in the 1720s. Manakji was helped in this affair by the fact that he was a broker for the Portuguese. When he protested to his Portuguese counterparts that they had violated an agreement with the Mughals by seizing the ship, his patrons explained to Manakji that they had seized Osman’s ship because “the ship carried Turks (Turkīān) on board and those Turks showed impudence (shokhī) to our people.”Footnote ⁹³ Out of deference to their Parsi broker, the Portuguese eventually relented and released the ship.

Notwithstanding occasional harassment meted out by Mughal, Ottoman, and Portuguese actors, the 1720s were precisely the moment when the family’s operations appear to have expanded dramatically in the Indian Ocean. The family’s name (frequently rendered “Tjellebi”) appears in hundreds of VOC sources. These predominantly come from three sites: Surat, Basra, and Persia (Bandar Abbas). All the same, Çelebi ships or factors are registered at one point or another at Jeddah, Mocha, Kharg, Muscat, Bombay, Cochin, Bengal, Madras, and Colombo (Fig. 1). These ships bore a cornucopia of commodities: pepper, cochineal, textiles, saffron, elephant tusks, coral, pearls, and specie. At various moments, the family leased out their vessels to other capitalists, such as in one episode later in 1781 involving the head of the VOC factory at Surat who planned to take the Çelebi family’s ship Stamboul to Canton to participate in the China trade.Footnote ⁹⁴ Owing to the hostilities between the British and the Dutch occasioned by the American War of Independence, the ship was impounded by the British for several years.Footnote ⁹⁵

Figure 1. Ports frequented by ships owned by the Çelebi family between approximately 1720 and 1791. Some of these voyages were undertaken by captains who leased ships from the Çelebis. Based on VOC sources. Map by Maarten Draper.

The arrival of the Çelebis’ ships was also a cause of comment in EIC sources. By one count, EIC shipping registers convey that between 1759 and 1780, fifteen ships owned by individual members of the family traded across the Indian Ocean, and not only between Surat and Basra, but also to Southeast Asia.Footnote ⁹⁶ The family’s operation was so sizable that it continued to compete with European shippers into the late 18th century.Footnote ⁹⁷ Impressive though this all was, the Çelebi family’s long residence in Surat is a reminder of the tendency of Ottoman long-distance merchants to settle in India more or less permanently. One of the last VOC sources mentioning the family, dated 1791, references a member resident at Bombay. (This frustrated the VOC because they were unable to pursue a legal case against him).Footnote ⁹⁸ Thus, the Baghdadi Jewish family, the Sassoons, who relocated to Bombay in the 1830s, were part of a longer trend of Ottoman merchants settling in colonial ports.

The second sample chosen to showcase how European shipping records can shed light on Ottoman shipping activity is that of the Greek captain, Dimitrios Nicholai (the spellings of his name vary considerably). VOC personnel record him as the native of a place alternatively called “Philippopolis” or “Philippoli” (or Filibe as the Ottomans called it; modern Plovdiv).Footnote ⁹⁹ He was among a handful of Ottoman Greeks who ended up in the Indian Ocean, whether in Bengal or Ayutthaya. Ships directly piloted by, or linked to, Nicholai are found in VOC registers at Surat, Cochin, Madras, Colombo, Malacca, and Batavia between roughly 1721 and 1757 (Fig. 2). Curiously, he does not seem to be mentioned in connection with Basra. What is more, in some cases vessels linked to Nicholai are called “Armenian ships,” and bear the names Jerusalem and the Bethlehem (a fitting parallel to Stamboul, one of the names of the Çelebi vessels).Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In the later 1750s one of Nicholai’s ships was registered sailing the route between Nagapattinam on the Coromandel Coast and Batavia in the hands of new owners.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Figure 2. Nicholai’s hometown of Filibe and the ports to which he or his ships, leased out to other captains, journeyed. Based on VOC sources. Map by Maarten Draper.

Overlooking the fact that he had migrated out of the Ottoman domains, the “Greek merchant” (Grieks koopman), as VOC sources label him, should still be regarded as an Ottoman subject for two reasons. The first is that he strove to maintain contact with his family in Filibe, although with what regularity is unknown. In 1748 the Dutch ambassador to the Sublime Porte, Baron de Hochepied, was forwarded a letter written from Muscat “by a Greek merchant signed Dimitri, son of [Hadji Kyriaki]” requesting that another enclosed letter be dispatched to his father in Filibe. The baron followed through on his side of the bargain, but as he told his VOC counterparts “I have just learned that his father has been dead for a year in Philippopolis. If I receive any letters for this Dimitri, his son, I will take the liberty, Sir, of sending it to you forthwith.”Footnote ¹⁰² Nicholai’s ability to mobilize Dutch political and commercial networks says a good deal about his relationship with VOC employees across the Indian Ocean.

The second reason a migrant like Nicholai should be seen as an Ottoman is that other contemporary native sons of Filibe also aimed to gain a toehold in the Indian Ocean trade. A 1751 letter from de Hochepied in Istanbul documented the request of “Constantine Mavrudoglou of Philippoli”—one of his honorary dragomans—“for the recovery of his property abandoned in Batavia at the death of one of his Commissioners[,] who died there some two years ago.”Footnote ¹⁰³ The name of the deceased commissioner was Dimitrios, “son of Passa Arhanassi of Philippoli.” Mavrudoglou requested that de Hochepied issue a bill of exchange to Baron Imhoff, the VOC’s governor-general of the East Indies, “requesting him to collect all the effects of his aforementioned deceased Commissioner.” In the same document de Hochepied remarked that Mavrudoglou had sent yet another commissioner, “Sterio de Philippopoli,” to Basra to carry out various tasks. Unfortunately, Sterio died in the city. Therefore, Mavrudoglou requested that Sterio’s effects be collected and held until further notice.

These networks merit special mention because they show that, whether in the case of Dimitrios Nicholai or Constantine Mavrudoglou, Ottoman subjects with roots in Rumelia leveraged personal and professional networks to participate in Indian Ocean trade. Whereas Mavrudoglou played the part of a stationary capitalist sending out his agents to and fro, Nicholai was in the thick of it, plying the seas and integrating himself within shipping networks in the western and eastern Indian Ocean. Clearly, Indian Ocean commercial structures were extensive enough to entice private Ottoman shippers and capitalists to become involved in the trade, but only on an individual basis. The next section, however, looks at how the potential expansion of Basra’s shipping prospects was attenuated by events in the late 18th century.

The Zand Siege of Basra and the Rise of Muscat and Bombay, 1775–1800

As the ships owned by the Çelebis, Nicholai, and their like were fanning out across the Indian Ocean, Basra’s position within frameworks of Indian Ocean shipping was capricious. As argued above, Basra was frequently reduced to the status of a contrepôt over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries. At turns in the last quarter of the 18th century, however, it looked as if it was an entrepôt in the making. Geopolitics would ultimately preempt this. More than any other development, the 1775–76 siege and three-year occupation of Basra by the forces of the Iranian ruler Karim Khan Zand not only exposed the weaknesses of Ottoman rule in southern Iraq, but also scared away foreign commercial interests. Not all shippers engaged with Basra felt the sting, to be sure. Fifty years ago Holden Furber maintained that the losses experienced by Basra as a result of the Zand takeover were recouped by commercial actors in the western Indian Ocean shifting their activities to the Red Sea and East Africa.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Among these were the Çelebis, regarding whom Furber wrote, “In 1779–80, a ship belonging to the [Çelebi] merchant princes of Surat, sailed from Mocha to Surat with three lakhs of rupees in gold, four lakhs in silver, one lakh in pearls, ten bales of almonds, and 200 maunds of ivory. Another ship of theirs unloaded five lakhs of gold and silver rupees in Bombay.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Scattered across a series of ports in the Indian Ocean, the Çelebis had the means to recover from commercial collapse in Basra. But Basra as a whole suffered dearly from this process of redirection.

Of course, Basra was no stranger to violent political spectacle. It had been hotly contested throughout the 17th century, host to a set of rival claimants to power in which Ottoman authorities were but one player among many.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The 18th century carried forward that trend, but nothing matched the high drama of the Zand siege, which ended with a brief Persian occupation that only collapsed with the sudden death of Karim Khan Zand in 1779. Since the late 1750s Karim Khan Zand had been locked in intermittent conflict against Ottoman populations or Ottoman proxies, including the Banu Kaʿb Arabs of Khuzestan. On account of Karim Khan Zand’s ambitions for territorial aggrandizement, the Ottomans and the EIC briefly found a common enemy and launched a disastrous amphibious assault against him in 1765. Thereafter, in a bid to overwhelm the Banu Kaʿb with naval might, the Zand ruler extended an olive branch to the EIC, encouraging the corporation to establish a factory at Bushire. Bearing naval pretensions of his own, Karim Khan Zand redirected his ambitions and initiated a war against the imam of Muscat shortly thereafter.

In due course, Karim Khan Zand turned his eyes to the prize of Basra, and in 1775, he sent his brother-in-law to besiege the town, whose defenses were breached a year later.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ For the next three years Basra was beset by a decline in commerce, and by the time the town returned to Ottoman hands in 1779 considerable damage had been done to its erstwhile commercial climb. Before the fall of the town, the EIC had a strong hand in supporting the Ottoman defense. So large was the company’s naval commitment to the Ottomans in Basra that in 1774 a report was written from Bombay Castle stating, “As a considerable part of our marine force is employed at Bassora and in the Persian Gulf, we have at present not a sufficient marine force for the protection of our trade on the Coast of Malabar from the Maratha fleet, which, it is most probable, will attempt making some depredations on it.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Although this reference underscores that the EIC was but one of many contenders for power in the western Indian Ocean in this period, it also evoked the underwhelming nature of Ottoman naval capacities in the vicinity of Basra.

Ottoman sources also capture some of the implications of the siege and occupation on Basra’s ties with the western Indian Ocean. For example, one document records that the inhabitants of Basra did much to weaken the occupiers so that “gradually the army of the Persians were ground down and became incapable of resistance.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ But the best chance of breaking the siege came, as the same document went on to relate, only with the arrival of a fleet of ships from Muscat. Given its own conflict with the Zand dynasty from the late 1760s, Muscat did not welcome a Zand-controlled Basra, but likely preferred an Ottoman-controlled port. The relief force dispatched by the imam reportedly contained “four hundred small and large vessels and twenty large merchant ships” (dört yüz sagır ve kebir sefa’in ile yiğirmi büyük gırablardan ibaret eylediği).Footnote ¹¹⁰ It is probable that this was merely, as Patricia Risso maintains, “the annual coffee fleet, enlarged and better armed.”Footnote ¹¹¹ Accurate numbers or not, the fleet surely eclipsed the naval resources of the local Ottoman governor.

The Ottoman documentation relays some additional repercussions from Muscat’s intervention. An imperial decree written in the aftermath of the Zand occupation stressed the historical ties between Muscat and the Ottomans (az kadim islafimizdan berü), and despite the Ibadi identity of Muscat’s imam underscored that both sides constituted a common Sunni front against the “heretical” Shiʿa of Iran.Footnote ¹¹² The annual arrival of Muscat’s ships in Basra, and their fastidious honoring of Ottoman customs duties, were also praised. As the document recounted, when the Zand threat materialized outside of Basra, Ömer Pasha sent the imam of Muscat a letter requesting assistance. A bevy of “small and large” ships were duly dispatched to Basra and the city was saved. In some ways, the document can be read as an Ottoman attempt to paint the Muscat imam’s intervention as an act commensurate with his status as an Ottoman vassal. It scarcely needs to be said that this illusory interpretation of the terms of Muscat’s intervention against Zand was based on a willful Ottoman misreading of their ability to exert authority over the imam and his parvenu commercial dominion.

Indeed, in the realignment of regional power that followed the passing of the Zand threat, Muscat’s rise served to reroute trade away from Basra, reducing it once again to a contrepôt.Footnote ¹¹³ Events far outside of the Gulf had underwritten Muscat’s ascendancy in Indian Ocean shipping over the past several decades. The late-century export boom along the coasts of western India, from Surat to Bombay and Malabar, was a bonanza for Muscati ship captains.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Their prevalence in wider maritime circuits had the knock-on effect of swelling Muscat’s status as a first-rate entrepôt of the western Indian Ocean, which was realized by 1800.

On the Ottoman end, the eclipse of the Zand dynasty in 1779 engendered a rethink among a few Ottoman bureaucrats, both in Basra and Istanbul, about Ottoman naval strength. In 1779 a report was composed detailing a meeting between the Ottoman reisülküttab (chief scribe), Süleyman Feyzi Efendi, and the British ambassador in Istanbul. The subject of their conversation was the death of Karim Khan Zand and the circumstances of the siege of Basra. The meeting laid bare the discrepancies in Ottoman and EIC maritime capacities, with Ottoman weakness on the route to India (Hindistan canibinde) sharply contrasted with British might.Footnote ¹¹⁵ The conversation also touched upon the knotty subject of EIC ships traveling to Suez. English ships had begun traveling to Suez because the siege had ruined connections (rabita bozulub) between English traders and Basra. However, objections from the Ottoman-Mamluk emirs of Egypt—in spite of a firman sent by the Ottoman center to allow the ship to land—blocked the ship’s free passage.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Local power holders in Ottoman Egypt continued to detain EIC craft inbound from the Indian Ocean until the end of the century.

In 1781 Süleyman Pasha, now the vali of Baghdad, commissioned British factors in Basra to construct a number of gallivats for him.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Ottoman documentation reveals that Süleyman Pasha’s intention in commissioning these craft was to strengthen Basra’s defenses, but British documentation also records that he wanted to boost Basra’s trade and put an end to his overreliance on EIC ships. The cost for the ships came to the tune of 50,000 kuruş.Footnote ¹¹⁸ “The ships are being built,” an Ottoman report stated, “in a place by the name of Bombay.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ The payment was arranged in such a way that “a portion of import duties on coffee would be allotted to the British Resident [of Basra], either in cash or in kind.”Footnote ¹²⁰ It is possible that these gallivats were constructed by Parsi shipbuilders in Bombay, who in these decades were famed for their prominence in that industry.Footnote ¹²¹

Nevertheless, the purchase and delivery of the gallivats proved anything but smooth. For the next five years there was much hand-wringing among the EIC’s factors in Basra, Süleyman Pasha, and the Ottoman center over the payment of the bill, to say nothing of the outstanding debts due to the company dating back to the siege.Footnote ¹²² For their part, the Ottomans were dissatisfied with the EIC’s failure to provision the promised ships in a timely fashion. Repeatedly, Süleyman Pasha requested confirmation through his agent and firsthand that the ships would be dispatched. As he communicated on several occasions, if he received word from the company that they would not be sent, then he would instead commission the construction of ships at the imperial arsenal in Baghdad.Footnote ¹²³ Eventually, at least two of the ships were delivered, and they were used for internal trade and policing. And yet the fact that Süleyman Pasha had adequate materiel to construct the ships in Baghdad confirms that Ottoman shipbuilding was by no means a defunct industry at the end of the 18th century, in need of outsourcing to Europeans. As proof, in 1780 Süleyman Pasha and the Ottoman center exchanged correspondence concerning the allocation of funds needed to bring a group of carpenters and shipbuilders from the imperial arsenal in Istanbul to Basra.Footnote ¹²⁴

For the next several years the EIC and the Ottoman authorities in Basra came to a mutual understanding of one another’s aims, albeit with sporadic moments of conflicting interests. One threat to the working relationship came in 1786 when the embassy of Tipu Sultan, the ruler of Mysore, which was undertaking a diplomatic mission to the Ottoman Porte, landed at Basra.Footnote ¹²⁵ The embassy’s mission was to establish relations with the Ottoman sultan and to solicit assistance in Mysore’s protracted wars with the EIC and its Indian allies. Tipu’s ambassador, Khwaja Abdul Qadir, wrote an account of his journey and commented on the Ottoman administration in Basra and the local trading scene.Footnote ¹²⁶ First, he related that the imam of Muscat, in league with English, French, and Mysorean merchants and the Çelebi family, paid a three percent duty on goods at Basra. This concession was granted by Ottoman authorities in exchange for the assistance during the Zand siege. Second, he recorded that the Ottoman naval allotment in Basra was made up of “eleven large ships and two small ones. In addition to these are two or three trading vessels.”Footnote ¹²⁷ Mysore’s attempt to set up a factory in Basra, a self-conscious imitation of European factories in India, signaled the hopes that Tipu and his lieutenants placed on the commercial potential of the town.Footnote ¹²⁸ It was the only factory Mysore earmarked for Ottoman territory. Tellingly, the rest were situated in French possessions or Muscat, one of Basra’s commercial rivals. Nothing came of either factory, however.

Despite a string of commercial setbacks experienced by the city, European commentators saw a good deal of potential in Basra’s trading prospects, but unfavorable perceptions of Ottoman officialdom were a sticking point. In a representative sample, the German scholar Friedrich Ferdinand Drück wrote in his panoramic account of Asia’s geography:

Drück’s testimony was of a piece with contemporary European descriptions detailing the supposedly predatory character of Ottoman authorities in Basra. Nonetheless, it was right about two aspects of Ottoman Iraq’s maritime trade. The first was the potential divide between the economic aims of Ottoman political officials and private subjects. Second, it accurately presaged that Muscat’s commercial star was waxing, while Basra’s was waning.

New Connections and Obstacles, 1800–1870s

The first half of the 19th century ushered in seismic shifts in the Ottoman Empire’s relative economic position at the global level. The geopolitical remaking of the Indian Ocean by European empires, and the infrastructure of steam and print that underpinned it, increased Ottoman connections to the Indian Ocean as never before, but not on terms of the empire’s own making. What the new technologies and economic realities of the 19th century made possible was a restructuring of the empire’s relationship with the Indian Ocean. Now, ecological constraints like the Jeddah Gap could be overcome by the steam engine. With a booming trade portfolio, Basra’s contrepôt status stood a chance of being consigned to the past too. Investment in Ottoman shipbuilding and maritime trade were energetically pursued by Ottoman public and private actors. And yet the Indian Ocean dimension of Ottoman shipping remained comparatively muted. The reasons, however, were complex.

The prospects for Ottoman shipping looked rather dim in the Red Sea and the Gulf in the half century before 1850. The challenges were multiple, not least because the political and economic equilibria of the previous decades were being dramatically upended. In the Gulf the attacks launched by the Saudis in 1803 against southern Iraq destabilized Ottoman rule. As during the Zand siege almost thirty years before, the imam of Muscat rode to the rescue in 1804, motivated in part by his desire to collect his annual tribute from the Ottoman governor. Yet the imam’s own power was being inexorably chipped away by the Saudis, the British, and regional rivals like the Qasimis. Probably on this account the Ottoman governor felt confident enough to refuse to pay tribute to the imam. This rebuff, combined with the Ottomans’ lack of preparations against the Saudis, prompted the imam to set sail for Muscat in a huff. He was murdered on his way back.Footnote ¹³⁰ With even more powerful forces amassing in the Gulf, Muscat’s decline hardly redounded to the benefit of Ottoman Basra.

In the Red Sea matters looked little better from the perspective of boosting Ottoman shipping at any rate. Although such accounts should not be treated as unvarnished mirrors of reality, European observers recorded at the end of the 18th century that shipping between Suez and Jeddah had declined.Footnote ¹³¹ This extended to European traffic as well, for despite a growing French commercial presence in Egypt in this period European efforts to break into the Red Sea trade—including a late-century Austrian attempt—ran aground.Footnote ¹³² The near monopoly of Cairo’s tujjār and the reluctance of the Ottoman center and the Ottoman governor of Jeddah alike to allow European ships to sail to Suez from ports in the Indian Ocean goes some way toward explaining this, but the evidence is still inconclusive.

From the turn of the century Ottoman Egypt witnessed European maritime rivalries in the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean converge on the province as it became a site of outright British and French naval conflict. Shortly thereafter, Egypt became a de facto autonomous domain ruled by Mehmet `Ali. Although his shipbuilding program paled in comparison to his spectacularly violent reforms to the army, the Ottoman Albanian impresario still harbored ambitious plans for his naval forces. Some of this ambition was communicated to the sultan. As a case in point, in 1812 Mehmet `Ali wrote to the sultan that the customary ships bearing goods from Yemen and India had not arrived at Suez from Jeddah. For his part, the governor of Mecca (recently recovered from the Saudis) hesitated to release ships to Mehmet `Ali. In turn, Egypt’s governor requested the sultan’s permission to build some of his own ships at Suez.Footnote ¹³³

As is well known, in these years Egypt’s rapid development as a supplier of cotton to Europe reoriented its commercial axes and solidified its status as a supplier of raw materials in the international industrial order. Maritime power was not to be the province’s strong suit. Moreover, Egypt’s naval resources endured setbacks. During Mehmet `Ali’s intervention in the Ottoman–Greek wars he shared the fate of his Ottoman allies in losing the majority of his fleet at the Battle of Navarino in 1827.Footnote ¹³⁴ The reconstruction of an Egyptian fleet became a priority in turn. Although Egyptian territorial aggrandizement down the left bank of the Red Sea over the course of the century saw a modest expansion of the state’s shipping capacities, construction of vessels for commerce on the Nile dominated the attention of the state fisc.Footnote ¹³⁵ The Egyptian share in Indian Ocean shipping therefore was shallow, even if the 1869 opening of the Suez Canal later connected it as never before to the region.

In the 1830s the twin threats posed by Mehmet `Ali’s territorial expansion into Palestine and Syria and the encroachment of British authority into Oman and the Trucial Coast threatened Ottoman access to the Indian Ocean.Footnote ¹³⁶ By 1840, Palestine and Syria had been regained by the Ottomans, but two years previously an unequal commercial treaty signed at Balta Liman between the Ottoman and British governments crystallized the Ottomans’ inferior position in the hierarchy of great powers. Still, the effects of the treaty on Ottoman commerce were neither immediate nor evenly spread. In particular, European predominance in Indian Ocean shipping was not uniform, least of all in the Ottoman Gulf, thanks to a mixture of private and public Ottoman initiative in the decades to come. What is more, the proclamation of the Tanzimat in 1839 birthed a veritable cult of centralizing and developmental progress, a cult that extended no less to Iraq than to the core provinces of the empire, thanks to the activities of figures like Midhat Pasha.Footnote ¹³⁷

The Ottoman center’s ambition to better integrate the littoral regions of the Red Sea and the Ottoman Gulf into the central imperial structure demanded the expansion of shipping, overseas trade endeavors, and the removal of internal threats to state power. Even if shipping in and out of Basra in the first half of the 19th century appears fairly subdued, there was a considerable base from which to begin. The city was frequented by fair numbers of foreign entrepreneurs, including a sizable contingent from Najd, and local merchants from the interior regions of the province. But in yet another iteration of what had happened with the Çelebi family in an earlier epoch, there was a tendency among native-born Basran merchants to resettle in Kuwait or Muscat, from where they carried on trade with India.Footnote ¹³⁸ From the other end, the slow infiltration of European vessels into the inland riverine trade posed a potential economic challenge to the monopoly of Ottoman Arab vessels. Far from carrying all before them, the Europeans had to contend with a persistent Ottoman-Arab mercantile presence in this sector. The ensuing struggle for preeminence was drawn out and without obvious victor by the last quarter of the century.Footnote ¹³⁹

On the other hand, a modest number of Ottoman vessels made calls at Bombay and Calcutta in the 1810s and 1820s, but these were negligible compared either to the Indian vessels paying visits to Basra or the Muscati ships journeying to Bombay. Meanwhile, from the early part of the century, the EIC’s operation at Basra was scaled down to an assistant residency.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Despite this downgrading, the Ottoman trade deficit with India—which now in a fully integrated global economy had serious implications in a way it did not in earlier centuries—continued to grow amid the massive expansion of imports into the empire from the 1830s.Footnote ¹⁴¹ An earlier section of this article suggested that an early modern Indo–Ottoman trade imbalance was of no great significance on its own. But the structural shifts attendant to the new global economic order of the 19th century elevated import-export discrepancies into a chief determinant of imperial trading power. What is more, although Ottoman subjects commissioned European ships to freight their goods to ports in the Indian Ocean, they did not participate in large numbers as circulating capitalists abroad. That signaled a division of labor in the export economy of Ottoman Basra that was hard to unmake once it crystallized.

Just the same, in the 1840s and 1850s, there were signs of Ottoman state investment in shipbuilding capacity in Basra. In 1851 a lengthy Ottoman report was produced detailing the need to build ships at Basra.Footnote ¹⁴² The report was a monument to the robust procedural norms of the Tanzimat bureaucracy, with various leaves bearing the seals of either the Meclis-i Vükela (Council of Ministers) or the Meclis-i Bahriye (Council of the Navy). Select private shippers also kept state officials in Basra informed about developments in the western Indian Ocean: while docked in Basra in 1859 the captain of a large ship called the Hoca Bey, completing a return journey from Bombay, reported to authorities that the imam of Muscat, who the captain had the chance to meet, had treated him well and expressed his high regard for the Ottoman military.Footnote ¹⁴³

State officials in Basra also tried to get involved in oceanic, rather than merely riverine, shipping. In 1861 higher-ups in the navy were sent some reports by the governor of Baghdad and some indeterminate captains that cheered the initiation of a successful steamer service between Baghdad and Basra, and the fact that corvettes produced in the dockyards of Basra had recently traveled to Bombay and back.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ For all this initiative, there was a recognition elsewhere that Basra’s shipbuilding capacity had its limitations: in 1863 a memorandum produced by the governor of Baghdad asked the central authorities if it was permissible to procure an affordable ship from India because there were no ships produced in Basra’s dockyards suitable for navigating the coast of East Africa (Habeş).Footnote ¹⁴⁵ For its part, Ottoman Massawa had been home to some modest efforts at shipbuilding in these years, but these craft appear to have been used for local voyages.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ It should be noted that a good number of these sources speak in terms of constructing or purchasing a singular “ship” rather than plural “ships.” Presumably, while the capital resources were scanty, the ambitions of the bureaucrats were not.

The reassertion of Ottoman power in Yemen in the 1870s supplied additional pretexts for augmenting shipping in the Red Sea. By that point, Mocha, previously the leading regional port, had gone into headlong decline. This was precipitated in part by a rogue Ottoman agent who sacked the southern portion of the town in the early 1830s, with a British naval squadron playing the role of an accomplice in the proceedings.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ The advent of an Ottoman vilayet in Yemen some four decades later slightly restored Mocha’s commercial reputation, but not to any great extent. The port never regained the status it had held under the Qasimis for a century and a half after 1635. Meanwhile, Aden’s rise as a British colonial port ensured that regional shipping, including that of Parsi shipping magnates, was redirected to a more lucrative center.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ For the remainder of the empire’s rule in Yemen there was no shortage of imperial ships sailing along the coasts of Yemen. Some of these sailed to Basra and perhaps a fair share to India, but their captains appear to have been more or less independent actors. Yet for the government, when it came to shipbuilding, the priority was security along the coast, not commerce.Footnote ¹⁴⁹

Instead of trying to beat the European imperialists at their own game, an alternative option for the Ottoman government was to find diplomatic means of protecting and co-opting private Ottoman shipping interests within Indian Ocean colonies. The creation of Ottoman consulates in Bombay and Calcutta in 1849 was part of a larger state effort to engage with Indian Ocean shipping beyond the borders of the empire. In fits and starts for the next seven decades, the consulates expanded throughout India and the Dutch East Indies. These permitted the Ottoman state to exercise a modicum of extraterritorial influence when it was struggling to exert its authority into the reaches of its own empire in the Gulf.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ The motivation for creating the consulates was, in the words of a later official communiqué, intended to “protect the rights and settle the debts” of Ottoman merchants who plied the maritime trade between the Hijaz, Iraq, and India and who had become residents of Bombay.Footnote ¹⁵¹

One of the first Ottoman consuls was Basralı Timurzade Abdulvahab Ağa, a native of Basra but an established resident of Bombay. Abdulvahab Ağa was charged with “keeping track of the activities of ships coming to the port of Bombay” from Jeddah, Yemen, Basra, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Habeş.Footnote ¹⁵² Over the next decade officials appointed as Ottoman consul generals were of diverse backgrounds. For example, in 1856 one Mirza `Ali Muhammad Khan was appointed honorary Ottoman consul general in Bombay.Footnote <sup>153</sup> A justice of the peace and scion of a Persian mercantile magnate who owned Bombay’s enormous Mazagaon dockyards, Mirza `Ali exemplified one of the many Indian industrialists and shipowners who attained such prominence in Bombay’s public sphere in these decades. A letter of recommendation written in support of his application by an agent of the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company recounted that Mirza `Ali’s father had emigrated from Iran to Calcutta and served as agent for the Ottoman sultan, the khedive, the imam of Muscat, the nizam of Hyderabad, and “several other Asiatic Princes.”Footnote ¹⁵⁴

Nevertheless, by the 1870s the capacity of Ottoman consulates to operate as outposts of Ottoman merchant capitalism was obstructed by two factors. The first was the reticence of European colonial powers to endorse the growth of Ottoman consulates.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Second were the restrictions the Ottoman government imposed upon the internal operations of the consulates. As Jeffrey Dyer has delineated in his pioneering study of the consulates, salaried Ottoman consular officials were banned from “engaging in commercial activities during their consular tenure under penalty of dismissal.”Footnote ¹⁵⁶ This preempted the emergence of Ottoman merchant capitalists in the consular service; that is to say, officials who could fuse overseas commercial interests with political influence. On the other hand, unsalaried honorary consuls of non-Ottoman origin were able to combine bureaucratic and mercantile activities.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ This supplied an opening for Indian and Ceylonese Muslim capitalists, many of whom had preexisting portfolios in shipping, to combine their diplomatic and economic power in the service of the Ottoman government.

Plans to further expand the network of Ottoman consulates in the Indian Ocean were nonetheless encumbered by a comparatively low engagement among Ottoman capitalists with Indian Ocean trade. This undermined the raison d’être of the consulates, which were established primarily to protect the commercial interests of Ottoman subjects. But with so few of those subjects engaged in trade with India, their relative absence served as partial justification for colonial officials to obstruct the foundation of additional branches. It also compelled the Ottoman government to rely on Indian portfolio capitalists for the shouldering of its administrative burdens in India. Whether in Karachi, Bombay, Madras, Calcutta, Rangoon, Colombo, or Singapore, these unsalaried consular officials were often merchants of South Asian Muslim origin.

Outsourcing and Would-Be Ventures, 1880–1900

Late 19th-century Ottoman designs to augment the Ottoman share of private and state trade in the Indian Ocean were intermittent, but nonetheless attention-grabbing for their grandiose aspirations. The thwarting of these aspirations is far from surprising, for there was no shortage of structural constraints working against them. On the one hand, these constraints stemmed from competing priorities of state investment. Michael Christopher Low and Camille Lyans Cole have demonstrated the successful capacity of Ottoman state institutions to foster infrastructural development in the late Ottoman Hijaz and Iraq.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ On the other hand, as Cole has further shown, the late Ottoman conviction that Basra was to be first and foremost an agricultural colony surely worked against any overseas commercial ventures.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ The burden of Ottoman government debt undoubtedly also diminished any effort to synergize Ottoman state developmentalism with private mercantile networks of foreign or Ottoman provenance. And yet that did not entirely prevent Ottoman commentators from floating ideas for the expansion of commercial opportunities beyond the empire’s borders.

Ottoman government investment in shipping had more modest aims initially. Frederick Anscombe’s work conveys the ins and outs of Ottoman attempts to get a nascent shipping industry under way in the Gulf.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ One also notes a growing concern within Ottoman government circles about the weakness of Ottoman shipping. In one instance, a lengthy 1887 telegraph sent to the grand vizier’s office betrayed that Ottoman officials in Basra were trepidatious about the dominance of British ships in the vicinity of the city, another spur for augmenting Ottoman shipping.Footnote ¹⁶¹ In the Red Sea, by contrast, the obstacles were more difficult to surmount. For example, in 1890 it was rumored that, owing to the negligence (ihmalları) of Ottoman officials in Jeddah, the eastern branch of the İdare-i Mahsusa - the ‘Special Administration,’ the name for the state-owned imperial shipping company - went belly-up.Footnote ¹⁶² Yet a year later the Ottoman treasury earmarked funds for the purchase of two additional steamers for the Hijaz.Footnote ¹⁶³ By 1898 a further 100,000 Ottoman lira credit was opened by the naval ministry to expand the size of the İdare-i Mahsusa by twelve steamers. In the language of the documentation, this would serve the needs of the Ottoman military as well as hajj pilgrims.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ But even these geopolitical imperatives would do little to compensate for the paltry uptake among private actors. Even so, in a revealing Ministry of Interior communiqué from Basra in 1900, it was observed that the maritime trade operating in the vicinity of the city would do well to transport high-value commodities on steamers rather than small boats with low freighting capacities.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ The communiqué alludes to the Lynch Company Steamer transporting “Ottoman trade goods” between Basra and Baghdad, but it is unclear if the report’s main concern was more the security of these goods or the outsized influence the company possessed over this traffic. If the source is any indication, in the half-century since plans were first made to expand Basra’s port infrastructure, Ottoman shipping around Basra was largely the preserve of small-time entrepreneurs.

This brings the narrative back to the point at which this article began: the scheme to establish an Ottoman trading house in Bombay. The suggestion by the Ottoman consul general in Bombay, Kadri Bey, apprehended immediately the difficulties the Ottoman government faced in recouping the revenue gains to be had from the enormous terms-of-trade boom that accompanied the empire’s integration into the global economy in the 19th century.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ In 1899, a decade after Kadri Bey’s report stopped the plan for a trading house dead in its tracks, a short proposal was sent to the Ottoman authorities by a Bombay-based merchant proposing the creation of an Ottoman steamship company. Such an entity was perhaps a predictable choice given the precedent of Şirket-i Hayriye, the first state-run joint-stock company to operate in the empire and which had been merged with the İdare-i Mahsusa in the 1880s.Footnote ¹⁶⁷

Yet the company had far greater pretensions, for, as the petitioner envisioned, it would wrest control of India’s trade from foreign ships. After all, the commodities trade emanating from various parts of India to Basra and Jeddah was vast, but “foreign steamers are appropriating Islamic profits.” The gains ceded to foreigners were even more frustrating given that the Ottoman steamship line, the İdare-i Mahsusa, was already extant, to say nothing of various other “Ottoman agents” involved in the regional shipping. Were these to throw their weight into the Bombay trade, there would no longer be any need for foreign steamers, the petitioner optimistically suggested. Stressing the benefits to redound to religion, state, and the “public good” by such an endeavor, the petitioner envisioned the scheme as a wider collaborative enterprise.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ Not only would Ottoman ministries and the customs administration facilitate the transfer of commodities to Basra and Jeddah; Muslim merchants in India were said to be standing at the ready to throw themselves into the enterprise. Should the Ottoman government deign to follow the petitioner’s advice, then he would obligingly serve as the company’s Bombay agent.Footnote ¹⁶⁹

The 1899 petition was not the first attempt to bring an Ottoman steamship company and a Bombay-based Muslim capitalist together. A decade or so earlier one Gujarati Muslim entrepreneur, Haji `Abd Allah `Arab, had suggested that the İdare-i Mahsusa operate such a line between India and Jeddah.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ As with so many Ottoman shipping ventures, despite its high-flying aspirations, this scheme ran aground before being launched. A last gasp in the story of Ottoman shipping in the Indian Ocean came from the pen of an Ottoman traveler journeying through Ceylon and India in these years, Selanikli Tevfik. Devoting several paragraphs to the potential commercial benefits of an İdare-i Mahsusa shipping line between Basra and India, Tevfik’s account nonetheless acknowledged that Indian Muslim ship captains would have to be recruited to the enterprise for it to succeed.Footnote ¹⁷¹ Domestic Ottoman shipping resources were surely too slim to shoulder the burden.