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49-482: While the term "New Order" eventually came to encompass all of Selim III's reforms, the name was used contemporaneously to refer only to the reform's central innovation: the New Order Army . That army was largely a failure in its own time but reflected an important step in the stages of Ottoman attempts at reform. Selim III's desire for an army necessitated far-reaching changes in the bureaucracy and structure of

98-400: A contract as a going concern (not as a sub-infeudated fee ), that is to say as a unit producing a revenue stream, together with its workers and livestock, for exploitation by a tenant who was licensed by the contract, or firma , to keep all the revenue he could extract from the holding in exchange for fixed rents. Thus the rights to the revenue stream produced by the land had been farmed by

147-423: A favorable rent by overstating the riskiness of the cash flow stream and effectively managing the assigned debts as a skilled debt-collector and manager. They must ensure their ability to enforce debt payments, including resorting to legal action and paying standard fees for bringing a lawsuit under the government authority that is the farm's lessor. The tenant acts as a principal, not the lessor's agent. Tax farming

196-815: A modern artillery corps. Due to their distinctly modern nature, the army was named Nizam-ı Cedid , which has the meaning of 'New Order' in Ottoman Turkish. English-speakers borrowed the Ottoman Turkish word niẓām as "nizam" and applied it generically in the 19th century to the Ottoman army or to any Ottoman soldier. However, when war with the Russian Empire broke out once again in December 1806, Selim III hesitated to use his Western-drilled army in combat, despite its strong numbers of over 25,000. The old order strongly opposed this age of reform in

245-608: A much more effective infantry force than the Janissaries . After Austria and Russia defeated the Ottoman Turkish forces in the Russo-Turkish War of 1787–92 , the Ottoman Sultan Selim III ( r.  1789–1807 ) concluded that Ottoman military required serious reform if the empire was to survive. As a result, he began implementing a series of reforms aimed at reorganizing the military after

294-684: A new force to counterbalance the Janissaries , which were regularly accused of being both ineffectual and of holding too much political power. The irony, however, was that yeniçeri , the Turkish word for Janissaries, also means "new army", thus leading to the designation of Nizam-i Cedid ("New Order") forces instead. The mid-to-late 18th century witnessed increasing great power competition as new empires, most notably Britain and France, arose and consolidated their respective dominions. The Ottoman Empire increasingly seemed to be falling behind its rivals, especially Russia and Austria, which had each dealt

343-516: A show of Ottoman military weakness since 120,000 Janissaries were defeated by 8,000 Russian troops on the shores of the Danube. New Order reformers argued that the Janissary corps had grown from a hardened fighting force into an entrenched interest group with little interest in training and fighting. In 1789, Selim III inherited the throne from his uncle Abdulhamid at the age of 28. He also inherited

392-429: Is a technique of financial management in which the management of a variable revenue stream is assigned by legal contract to a third party and the holder of the revenue stream receives fixed periodic rents from the contractor. It is most commonly used in public finance , where governments (the lessors ) lease or assign the right to collect and retain the whole of the tax revenue to a private financier (the farmer), who

441-573: Is a non-heritable tax-farming system and was established under Sultan Mehmet II ; however this changed by the 18th century and holders of grants-for-life ( malikâne ) developed their own landowning class. It was officially terminated in 1856 during the Tanzimat reforms. Besides the Romans, historical examples include the tax collection methods of the Ptolemies , Seljuks , Mamluks , Ottomans ,

490-478: Is charged with paying fixed sums (sometimes called "rents", but with a different meaning from the common modern term) into the treasury . Farming in this sense has nothing to do with agriculture , other than in a metaphorical sense. There are two possible origins for farm . Some sources derive "farm" with its French version ferme , most notably used in the context of the Fermiers Generaux , from

539-406: Is related to the possibility of some debts forming the revenue stream being defaulted on or paid late, leading to variability in the revenue. The resulting figure becomes the maximum rent the tenant offers to the farm's lessor. The tenant's profit is the excess of revenues extracted from the farm, less the rents, administration, levying, and collection expenses. The tenant's skills lie in negotiating

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588-464: Is stated by these sources as having unusually been borrowed by Medieval Latin as firma or ferma and to have provided the Old French ferme "farm", Occitan ferma "farm". This is refuted by those sources which state firma to derive from classical Latin firmus . The word continued the same senses of "rent, farmed office, source of revenue, feast". The meaning "rent, fixed payment", which

637-639: The French State prior to Louis XVI (see ferme générale ), and Russia prior to 1862 and the Dutch East Indies (see pacht ) prior to the twentieth century. In many cases, such as the Abbasid practice of Iqta , these rights were granted by an authority, in this example the caliph, for services rendered or promised. In the Byzantine pronoia system, similar rights were often purchased from

686-496: The Hundred of Normancross to the abbot and monks of Thorney to be held in fee-farm for an annual rent of 100 shillings which I order them to pay to my sheriff at Huntingdon. And I forbid any of my officers to do them injury or insult in respect of this. The Chief Rabbi of Egypt , Sar Shalom ben Moses was accused of tax farming, which led to his excommunication by Maimonides . The iltizam ( Ottoman Turkish : التزام )

735-402: The "New Revenue" system which was raised by reclaiming vacant tax farms for the state (Finkel 2005). The accumulation of capital had enabled local elites to challenge the centre, and they had no interest in giving up their power willingly. While some notables benefited from the reform, others, such as Tayyar Pasha, were excluded. The Janissaries became increasingly aware of the threats posed by

784-696: The British Royal Navy in successfully defending Acre . One third of the Ottoman forces were sent to aid British forces removing the French from Egypt while the Nizams also played the vital leading role in capturing Rashid . In September 1806 the governor of Scutari, Ibrahim-pasha Bushatli , led an army of Nizams against Deligrad fortress in the battle of Deligrad during the First Serbian uprising . Tax farming Farming or tax-farming

833-626: The Janissaries, and the Sublime Porte issued decrees praising their role in Ottoman history as well as assuring them that their salaries would continue. The military reforms, however, also entailed a whole host of economic reforms. The new military demanded new forms of taxation and the uprooting of entrenched elite groups, and the "New Order Army" had to be financed by a "New Treasury" ( Irad-i Cedid ). Absentee or irresponsible timar holders would find their licences cancelled and seized by

882-602: The New Order in 1807. Nizam-i Djedid Army The term Nizam-i Djedid Army ( Ottoman Turkish : نظام جديد , romanized :  Niẓām-i Jedīd , lit.   'new order') refers to the new military establishment of the Nizam-i Cedid reform program which started in the Ottoman Empire c.  1789 . The Nizam-i Djedid Army, largely a failure in its own time, nevertheless proved

931-455: The New Order reforms for which all others were named was military reform. Selim III, having seen his armies easily routed by European forces, brought foreign lecturers to serve as military advisers and organized two colleges for naval and army engineering, respectively, along European lines, with French as the language of instruction. Selim also embarked on an institutional reorganization of the armed forces bringing artillery and transportation into

980-458: The New Order to their privileges. In 1806, during the Edirne incident , local Janissaries and notables joined to lynch a qadi who had come to recite an imperial decree announcing the deployment of New Order troops to the region. Janissaries also exploited general resentment over Westernisation and higher taxes to fund the New Order to gain popular support for the rebellion that would bring an end to

1029-638: The Ottoman Empire - first evidenced in the Edirne incident in the summer of 1806 when Selim III's efforts to expand the New Order into Thrace were forcibly halted by a coalition of Janissaries and local ayans , and, later, by Selim's deposition in May 1807, during which the soldiers of the New Order were either disbanded or massacred. While the Nizam-i Djedid was ultimately a failure for Selim III,

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1078-934: The Ottoman Empire and profoundly reorganised contemporary Ottoman politics. The New Order, according to the historian Stanford Shaw , reflected a profound shift in Ottoman thinking on how to confront the West. Hitherto, Ottomans had conceived of beating the West by returning to the glory days of the 16th century, but the Nizam-i Djedid reforms were premised on the idea that Western ideas and processes had to be adopted to restore Ottoman global prestige. Nizam and cedid are loanwords from Arabic in Ottoman Turkish . The equivalent phrase in Arabic would be النظام الجدید , An-Niẓām Al-Jadīd , meaning "new order" or "new system". Selim III's forces were designed to be

1127-522: The Ottoman regime several defeats since the 1760s. The most notable of them was the 1774 Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca , which resulted in the loss of Crimea to Russia, which was also given major concessions: permission for its ships to sail freely in the Black Sea , access to the Mediterranean and consulates and an embassy in Ottoman territory. In 1774, Sultan Mustafa summed up the atmosphere of

1176-624: The Roman model were used in Ptolemaic Egypt , various medieval Western European countries, the Ottoman and Mughal empires, and in Qing dynasty China. As states become stronger, buoyed up by revenues brought in by tax farming, the practice was discontinued in favour of centralized tax collection systems. In part this was because tax farming systems tended to rely on wealthy individuals outside

1225-557: The Second Russian-Turkish War, which resulted in a humiliating loss for the empire and the reinforcement of the disaster of Küçük Kaynarca at the Treaty of Jassy in 1792. Selim headed a coalition of reformers and quickly convened a consultative assembly to advance tajdid , or renewal. While Selim III often receives credit for the military reforms, he was hardly the sole instigator. Ideas for reform, especially of

1274-429: The city of Chicago needed money and a deal was made to sell all 36,000 of the parking meter spots in the city for 75 years for 1.15 billion dollars to a firm called Chicago Parking Meters . Tax farming is not synonymous with modern privatized tax collection , where private individuals or companies collect taxes and pass them to the state in return for a commission or fee, without bearing any risk consequent of default by

1323-404: The crown. Though such arrangements in some respects seem similar to the feudal system, there are significant disparities, including continuance of state power and, at least in the case of pronoia , theoretical time limits on the grant. In many cases, including those mentioned, tax rights were not transferable or divisible, unlike feudal fiefdoms. Sometimes, as in the case of Miguel de Cervantes ,

1372-657: The efficiency of tax collection within Rome itself but the system quickly spread to the Provinces . Within the Roman Empire, these private individuals and groups which collected taxes in lieu of the bid (i.e. rent) they had paid to the state were known as publicani , of whom the best known is the disciple of Jesus Matthew the Apostle , a publicanus in the village of Capernaum in the province of Galilee . The system

1421-406: The goods to create a second profit source. Such abuses stifle economic growth by restricting the ability of the tradesman to reinvest in his business, limiting the quantity of taxes generated over the long-term. In Bangladesh and India tolls on bridges and roads and dues from public properties such as lakes and forests are often leased to private persons or firms. After the 2008 financial crisis,

1470-555: The government. New taxes were levied, and old taxes were reappropriated to fund the New Treasury, including taxes on alcohol and wool. Ottomans also embarked on broader reforms of the tariff system. While non-Muslims had enjoyed special privileges by manipulating the concessions, administrators strove to crack down on the loss of state rent. Selim III also reorganised the provinces from an administrative standpoint. In 1795, he proposed new governance structures in an attempt to reverse

1519-540: The income stream itself. In 1999 the National Board of Revenue in Bangladesh (NBR) negotiated with cigarette producing firms a minimum amount of value added tax (VAT) that should be paid per month even though VAT is an ad valorem tax, that is to say of variable yield. The NBR took this step because under the self-clearance system monitoring of production and sales of cigarettes proved to be difficult. It

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1568-407: The king or a lord by a tenant or vassal; rent, feast, benefit, assylum"), from Proto-Germanic * firmō, *firχumō ("means of living, subsistence"), from Proto-Indo-European * perk u- ("life, strength, force"). It is related to other Old English words such as feormehām ("farm"), feormere ("purveyor, grocer"), feormian ("to provision, sustain"), and feorh ("life, spirit"). The Old English word

1617-455: The lessor. Because this was the form of the farming transaction most known to popular society, the word "farmer" became synonymous with a tenant of an agricultural holding. According to other sources, the word farm comes from Middle English ferme ("farm, rent, revenue; revenue collected from a farmer; factor, stewardship, meal, feast"), from Old English feorm, farm ("provision, stores of food, supplies, possessions; provisions supplied to

1666-463: The mediaeval Latin firma , meaning "a fixed agreement, contract", ultimately from the classical Latin adjective firmus , firma , firmum , meaning "firm, strong, stout, steadfast, immoveable, sure, to be relied upon". The modern agricultural sense of the word stems from the same origin, in that a medieval land-"holder" (none "owned" land but the king himself under his allodial title) under feudal land tenure might let it (i.e. lease it out) under

1715-445: The memorisation of religious texts. The reform coalition with which Selim came to power was not stable. Different members of the bureaucracy used the New Order discourse as a way to secure personal advancement, switching sides on the question of reform depending on personal interests. For example, few local notables were pleased with new tax arrangements for that New Order Army since they undermined old tax-farming rent sources. Money for

1764-456: The military, had preoccupied the Ottoman political class for nearly a century before Selim III took the throne. The first Western-style military training in the Ottoman world was done without the Sultan's knowledge. In 1790, as Stanford Shaw documents, Koca Yusuf Pasha organised a separate corps to drill a select core of soldiers in the midst of the Second Russian-Turkish War. The primary focus on

1813-437: The model of European militaries. This included the usage of European training tactics, weapons, and even officers. These reforms troubled the Janissaries, who were suspicious and unreceptive towards the reforms. To this end, Selim III established the Nizam-i Djedid in 1797 in order to develop a replacement for the Janissaries. By 1806 this new army stood 26,000 men strong, equipped with French-style uniforms, European weapons, and

1862-418: The past would have understood them well, whether done mentally or by making marks in the sand. To determine the maximum rent they are willing to pay, the tenant estimates the long-term average yearly gross value of the revenue stream, based on past records and accounts, adjusting for any new circumstances affecting the future. They then deduct a risk element and a discount for the time value of money. The risk

1911-670: The reforming effort would continue during the reign of Mahmud II ( r.  1808–1839 ) following the destruction of the Janissary Corps during the Auspicious Incident of 1826. Military defeats at the hands of Russia would not cease however. In 1799, a contingent Nizam-i Cedid was involved in combat assisting Jezzar Pasha in his resistance against Napoleon in Palestine . A group of Nizam-i Cedid infantry and artillerymen supported Admiral Sir Sydney Smith of

1960-437: The same department. The investment quickly paid results, and several hundred New Order forces widely outperformed conventional Ottoman troops in the 1799 defense of Acre from Napoleon Bonaparte. The greatest threat to the New Order remained the Janissaries. Indeed, the Janissaries' shortcomings were simply indicative of deeper financial, organizational and disciplinary problems affecting the Ottoman state. In its initial stages,

2009-543: The state machinery, gangs , and secret societies . The key flaw in the tax farming system is the tension between the state, which seeks a long-term source of taxation revenue, and the tax farmers, who seek to make a profit on their investment in as short a time as possible. As a result, tax-farmers often abuse the taxpayers in various ways, tending them to switch their economic activity from strategic long-term projects to short-term revenue generation. In barter systems, tax farmers commonly undervalue taxes in kind , reselling

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2058-415: The tax farmer was a government employee, paid a salary, and all money collected went to the government. Tax farming was an important step in the history of economic development by providing a method for collecting taxes across a large area without the need for a tax-collecting bureaucracy , or during periods when such a bureaucracy is unworkable or impossible to maintain. Systems of tax farming similar to

2107-792: The taxpayer. Tax farming is speculative , meaning that the tenant of the farm bears the full risk of defaulted debts. In addition, a tenant is often required as a term of the lease to make an early rent payment, which must be financed from his own resources until the revenue stream subject to the farm has started to be collected. In the United Kingdom , some tax collection of "lower value debts" by HMRC has been outsourced to debt collection agencies from July 2010. However, debt collection agencies, like invoice factors, are not truly farmers of revenue streams, as they do not bear any risk of default. Rather they make loans in expectation of future receipts, such loans being always recoverable and secured on

2156-485: The time in verse: "The world is in decay, do not think it will be right with us; The state has declined into meanness and vulgarity, Everyone at the court is concerned with pleasure; Nothing remains for us but divine mercy". He died shortly thereafter. His successor and brother, Abdulhamid I , initiated a second war in an attempt to reclaim what had been lost in Crimea, but it was a disaster. A decisive battle in 1789 became

2205-504: The trend of the empire towards decentralisation. The government lacked military or financial resources to carry out the policy, however, and made centralization an "unattainable ideal". While the reformers called for revamping the Ottoman system and Europeanisation of the military, they were by no means antagonistic to Islam. In many cases, the call for reform saw Islamic renewal and military–administrative–economic renewal as intertwined and mutually dependent. Military discipline often entailed

2254-476: The whole reform had to be hidden to avoid provoking them by embedding the New Order troops within another unit. In theory, the Janissaries were also subject to reform and training according to the European style, but they would resist it in practice. While some of the more radical reformers urged Selim to abolish the Janissaries, that proved a major political problem in practice. There were also attempts to co-opt

2303-470: Was already present in the Old English word, was further strengthened due to the word's resemblance to the unrelated (so say these sources) Latin firmus ("firm, solid"), and firmitas ("security, firmness"). The tenant of a farm can only make a profit after carefully assessing its value. While modern financial management theory employs scientific formulae for such calculations, astute financiers of

2352-495: Was originally a Roman practice whereby the burden of tax collection was reassigned by the Roman State to private individuals or groups. In essence, these individuals or groups paid the taxes for a certain area and for a certain period of time and then attempted to cover their outlay by collecting money or saleable goods from the people within that area. The system was set up by Gaius Gracchus in 123 BC primarily to increase

2401-487: Was widely abused, and reforms were enacted by Augustus and Diocletian . Medieval English kings frequently made grants "in fee -farm", a form of feudal tenure . An example is the following writ of King William II (1087–1100) granting a hundred court to be held in fee-farm by Thorney Abbey : William, king of the English, to all the sheriffs and barons of Huntingdonshire , greeting. Know that I have granted

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