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Privileges extended by the sultan of the Ottoman Empire to foreign states for the benefit of their locally resident subjects. There were earlier examples, but the capitulations negotiated with France in the middle of the sixteenth century were the model for those subsequently granted to the other European powers. The capitulations were prompted chiefly by a mutual interest in the expansion of commerce between Europe and the Levant and the anxiety of the sultan and his household to be absolved of responsibility for administering the affairs of useful but perplexing strangers. They granted to the European states rights to trade and travel freely, pay low customs duties, no domestic taxes, and to have civil and criminal cases arising among and between their own subjects resident in the Ottoman Empire tried in their own consular courts.
From the point of view of diplomatic privileges and procedure the capitulations were important for three main reasons. In the first place, they tended to give a degree of protection to foreign envoys in Istanbul - provided their governments remained at peace with the ‘Grand Turk’ - before the customary international law of diplomacy began to be accepted in the Ottoman Empire in the course of the eighteenth century. In the second, since they were not regarded by the Turks as treaties between equals but personal acts of grace by the reigning sultan, until 1740 the capitulations had to be renegotiated when one sultan was succeeded by another. In the third place, since they were regarded as assuming friendship, any act of hostility by the beneficiary rendered them void; this feature of the capitulations was not surrendered by the Turks until 1774. With the continued weakening of the empire, by the end of the nineteenth century the capitulations gave such a degree of communal autonomy to foreigners that Sir Charles Elliot was able to observe that all of them had ‘almost the same immunities as diplomatists in other countries’. Not surprisingly, they became a major target of Turkish nationalism and were finally abolished by the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923.
Capitulations regimes were also established in Egypt, Muscat (Oman), Persia, the Trucial States of the (Persian) Gulf, China, and Japan. That in Muscat continued until 1958, while those of the seven Trucial States were ended only in 1971. See also letter of protection; unequal treaty. |
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