Conclusions

The Ottoman and Qing empires found themselves in very similar straits at the dawn of the twentieth century. The previous 50 years had seen them both in danger from half-hearted reform that often took place only under pressure from Western rivals or in the aftermath of some major internal crisis.

In the end, it was the impact of the Great War that brought the Ottoman Empire to grief; for the Qing, it was a revolution engendered from within. But the force that catalyzed these changes was similar in both cases: the necessity to engage with the newly imported ideology of the nation-state, without the clear political or economic roadmap that would chart the path from being a pre-modern empire. It is notable that both successor states,

republican Turkey, and China under its Republic and People's Republic, are still entities not entirely sure whether they are territorially bounded nation-states or civilizational states still harking back to an age when they were empires.

Although the Qing collapsed, the Chinese state remained similar in shape after 1912, while the Ottoman Empire split up under the pressure of imperialism. The reasons for their differing territorial fates have a great deal to do with the variation in pressure from the outside world. Two decisive factors stand out. The first is proximity to the European powers. Long after the Ottoman Empire itself ceased to pose any military challenge, the European powers as part of their internecine geopolitical competition found themselves compelled to seize upon and break off Ottoman holdings: Russia in the Caucasus and the Balkans; Britain in Egypt and Cyprus; France and Italy in North Africa. European interventions precipitated the dismantling of the Ottoman presence in the Balkans, and the local Balkan powers combined to all but finish it off there in 1912-1913. Britain, France, and Russia during World War I laid out their plan to end the Eastern Question by partitioning Anatolia and the remaining Ottoman Arab lands in the secret Sykes-Picot-Sazonov Agreement of 1916.

Despite the Bolsheviks' rejection and exposure of the deal as naked imperialism in 1917, the imperial powers largely replicated it three years later with the Treaty of Sevres. Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk), however, nullified Sevres by rallying remnants of the Ottoman Army and the Muslim population of Anatolia to reconquer Anatolia, establish there a new state, the Republic of Turkey, and abolish the sultanate (1923) and caliphate (1924). In the remaining Ottoman Arab lands, by contrast, the imperial powers successfully suppressed the resistance efforts and extended their rule over Greater Syria, Palestine, and Iraq.

The second factor that explains the differing territorial fates is the greater religious and ethnic variegation of the Ottoman population. Accompanying the steady territorial dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century was the related process of the “unmixing of the peoples” that saw massive flows of Muslims southward and eastward into the constricting Ottoman territory and of Christians out of it northward and westward.^[2448] The increasing need of states to generate solidarity with their populations to produce power and the enhanced legitimacy of the nation-state model, which linked territory and ethnicity, drove this new process of homogenization. In Anatolia it culminated in the mass annihilation of Armenian and Syriac Christians in World War I and the reciprocal expulsion of Greek Christians and reception of Muslims from Greece in 1923. And whereas a shared religious identity and sense of common interests could still sustain effective unity between Turks, Kurds, and other Muslims in Anatolia through 1923, in the wider Arab lands, where the imperial powers were more determined to intervene militarily and establish a presence, those ties, although extant, were no longer sufficient.^[2449]

The Qing, in contrast, did stay in one piece (with the exception of Outer Mongolia, which became an independent state).

However, its unity was precarious. The devolution of power from the central government to the provinces after the Taiping rebellion made it harder for the court to exercise authority, and this effect continued after the establishment of the Republic in 1912, which was deeply affected by splits between militarist leaders for much of the period up to 1937 (ironically, the invasion of China during World War II would reduce the power of many of those militarists). A common phrase of the era was that China might be “split up like a melon.” Even though China did, precariously, manage to maintain unity at least in official terms through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was, to adapt the words of the Duke of Wellington, “a damned close-run thing.”

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Source: Bang Peter F., Bayly C.A., Scheidel Walter (eds.). The Oxford World History of Empire. Volume Two: The History of Empires. Oxford University Press,2020. — 1352 p.. 2020

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