Financial Problems of the Navy During the Reign of Abdülhamid II

Abstract

The reign of Sultan Abdulhamid II (1876-1909) has been called the Dark Age of the Ottoman navy. For 20 years, from the end of the Russo-Turkish War in 1878 to the outbreak of the war with Greece in 1897, the main fleet remained moored in the Golden Horn and did not perform any significant mission while its material became increasingly obsolete. This decline in Ottoman naval power has commonly been at tributed to Abdulhamid II who both doubted the navy's loyalty and feared its potential for rebellion. However, this appears to be a very superficial inter pretation when one considers the importance of naval power during the late 19th century. A far more likely cause of the weakening of the Ottoman navy is the series of financial crises that the Ottoman empire underwent during the Hamidian period. As rapid innovation in naval technology drastically increased the costs of naval power in this period, success in maintaining a powerful navy was closely related to the financial health of the nation.1 In this article, the financial problems of the Ottoman navy will be ex amined under the following four headings: 1) Ottoman budgets and naval allocations; 2) The navy and its loans; 3) The financial crisis of the navy; 4) Countermeasures undertaken by the Sublime Porte, the Ministry of Fi nance, and the navy. The analysis will demonstrate that the financial problems of the Otto man empire played an important role in the decline of Ottoman naval power during the reign of Abdulhamid II.