Relative Decline, Eastern Questions, and Reform

The scale of the Ottoman defeat in the Russo-Ottoman War of 1768-1774 con­vinced many Ottomans that a fundamental break with the past was necessary if the empire was to survive in the long run.

Istanbul, however, was not the empire’s sole potential locus for institutional inno­vation. During the evacuation of Napoleon’s army from Egypt, a young Ottoman of­ficer of Albanian descent named Mehmed (Muhammad) Ali had closely observed the French and British armies. Upon assuming the post of governor of Egypt in 1805, Mehmed Ali put his newfound knowledge to work and raised his own European-style army. At Istanbul’s behest he dispatched his highly effective forces to Arabia in 1811 to subdue the rebelling House of Saud and their Wahhabi allies, and then in 1824 to Greece to quell an uprising there. After the Great Powers, acting in support of the Greek rebels, destroyed his fleet in 1827, Mehmed Ali rebuilt his forces and in 1831 turned them against the sultan to compel compensation for his losses. So fragile had the Ottoman state become that Mehmed Ali’s armies trounced those of the sultan. Only the interventions of the Russians and other Great Powers preserved the Ottoman dynasty.

In a pattern widely replicated around the globe, Mehmed Ali’s efforts to create, build, and sustain a modern army inevitably spurred reforms in areas beyond the narrowly military and transformed Egypt in the spheres of governance, education, medicine, and the economy, among others.

Istanbul had not been oblivious to the innovations that lay behind Mehmed Ali's successes. Sultan Mahmud II revived the project of raising a European-style mili­tary unit, but was careful to do so stealthily. Then, in 1826, after cleverly provoking the Janissaries to mutiny, he deployed his new force to annihilate them in their bar­racks. To underscore the importance of the act, the palace dubbed this bloodbath the “Auspicious Event” (Vaka-i Hayriye). The force of arms was now on the side of the forces of innovation.

Prodded by the internal logic of state institutional reform to expand the scope of reform still wider, Mahmud Il's successor, Sultan Abdulmecid I, in 1839 inaugurated the Tanzimat. An Ottoman Turkish word derived from the Arab root for order, Tanzimat means “restructuring.” The opening act of this comprehensive reform project was the promulgation of what became known as the “Gulhane” edict in reference to the park where Abdulmecid I's grand vizier read it aloud.

Although the idea behind the Tanzimat was to regenerate Ottoman power by rebuilding Ottoman state institutions along European lines, it would be an error to regard the project as an exercise in pure Westernization. The ultimate objective, after all, was not capitulation to Europe, but resistance to it. Europe's global expan­sion presented a multifaceted challenge. The sources of Europe's seemingly un­challengeable political power were not singular, but complex and inter-related.

Changes were not uniform, but varied considerably according to geography, oc­cupation, lifestyle, and religious belief, to name just a handful of factors. Adaptation to the new institutions and assimilation of new attitudes, however, entailed consid­erable social turmoil. The cultural, not just the narrowly political or technocratic, became a field of contention. Western hegemony not only undermined the legit­imacy of native regimes and traditional institutions, but it also complicated the question of how to replace or modify them. To many the obvious cure—imitating or borrowing institutions and practices from the West—was perhaps as bad as or even worse than the infection—domination by the West. The effect was to weave cultural anxieties in with political fights. In Qing China, for example, the Taiping and Boxer rebellions reflected mass cultural unrest as well as political dissatisfaction.

Yet arguably the depth of such crises was deeper still in the Muslim world for two reasons.

The Westernizing trend captured the Ottoman center. Indeed, some prominent Young Turks, products of the Tanzimat and its educational reforms, identified Islam as a source of Ottoman weakness and advocated positive science as a sub­stitute for religion among the elites.^[2415] By contrast, to this day some religious Turks regard the Tanzimat as a period of decay. Historians have tended to focus on state-building and to emphasize the secularizing currents. Islam, however, was by no means absent or in abeyance. The Naqshbandi-Khalidi, a branch of the Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi Sufi brotherhood that emerged on the Indian subcontinent and espoused a rigorous Sunni Orthodoxy, grew remarkably in numbers and in­fluence in the Ottoman Empire through the nineteenth century.

One of the more important consequences of the Tanzimat was to shift the bal­ance of power inside the Ottoman state away from the sultan to the bureaucracy, empowering especially the diplomats. The trend toward greater rationalization and centralization of power generated opposition not just from the representatives of older institutions and self-interested opponents of change. It also sparked a critique from more philosophically inclined cultural conservatives among the new intellec­tual class. Known as the “Young Ottomans,” these writers and thinkers worried that the pursuit of an ever more powerful centralized bureaucratic state with no norma­tive code to restrain it risked the creation of a monster. They looked to Islam as a constraint, and advocated grounding democratic institutions in Islamic principles and culture while warning against the superficial imitation of the West.

Among the most contentious points of reform was that of standardizing the legal status of Ottoman subjects without regard to religion. From its beginnings the Ottoman state had, in conformity with Sunni Islamic law, drawn sharp distinctions between Sunni Muslims and Christians and Jews. But through the nineteenth cen­tury the Ottoman state moved fitfully but unmistakably in the direction of uniform treatment in principle. In part this was because Ottoman statesmen recognized the potential payoff to be gained from harnessing the full energies of its total population (particularly the Christians, who were close to 40 percent of the empire and only becoming better educated and wealthier). In part it was because the Great Powers were pressuring the Ottomans to do so, and the latter hoped that by complying they could endow their state with greater legitimacy in European eyes and thereby ward off European intervention.

The Gulhane Edict did not declare non-Muslims as equals to Muslims before the law. The second major legislative act of the Tanzimat, the Reform Decree of 1856, however, came close. Coming toward the end of the Crimean War and designed to impress European observers and help secure loans from them, the edict expressly declared its contents to be for the benefit of all the sultan's subjects “without excep­tion” of “every religion and sect” and “forbade language or practices that ‘held some communities lower than others.' ”^[2419] Yet even as it removed some barriers to inte­gration and homogenization, it reaffirmed many of the historical privileges of the non-Muslim communities and granted new ones. Thus, for example, it permitted non-Muslims to enter the civil service and made them subject to conscription, but also offered to them the option of paying a tax in lieu of military service, the bedel. The practice effectively mimicked the traditional tax upon non-Muslim subjects that Islamic jurisprudents had prescribed and Muslim rulers had levied, known as the cizye. Most Christians preferred to avoid military service, an option that was not available to Muslims. Nonetheless, the very notion that the government would permit Christians to bear arms in defense of the sultan struck many Muslims as simultaneously absurd and alarming. The tension between the desire to integrate Christians and appease the European powers and the need of the state to maintain and intensify the loyalties of its Muslim subjects became a defining aspect of late Ottoman politics. The perception that Istanbul was yielding to outside pressure and abandoning the defense of Islamic principles and the interests of Muslims gained increasing popularity and hence destabilizing power from 1856 onward.^[2420]

The Tanzimat reached its high point in 1876 when under the newly enthroned Sultan Abdulhamid II the Ottomans adopted a constitution and elected a legislative body.^[2421] According to the criteria of progressive politics, the establishment of a con­stitutional monarchy placed the Ottoman Empire in the same league as the British and above the Russian, which would not adopt a constitution for another three decades. Moreover, the new constitution promised full equality to all Ottoman cit­izens regardless of religious faith. Its adoption marked an impressive achievement, but one born not solely of internal developments. Fear of European intervention, particularly in Bosnia-Herzegovina or Bulgaria where Christian-Muslim strife was stirring, had been another motive. The embrace of constitutional government promised to boost Ottoman legitimacy and thereby perhaps defuse the threat of intervention.

The hope was in vain. The Russian Empire attacked and in 1877-1878 dealt the Ottoman Empire a severe defeat that stripped it of much of its Balkan territory (namely Bulgaria, Montenegro, Romania, and Serbia) and three Caucasian prov­inces. Declaring that the external threat facing the empire precluded liberal politics at home, Abdulhamid II prorogued the parliament and suspended the constitu­tion. From thereon, he wrested control of the state back from the Sublime Porte and built an autocratic regime that used secret police and rigorous censorship, among other tools, to control and defeat political opponents. The loss of so many Balkan territories left the empire's population, which had been over a third Christian, pro­portionately more heavily Muslim. Responding to these changed circumstances, Abdulhamid II revived use of the title of caliph, made rich use of Islamic symbolism and rhetoric, and became a champion of Pan-Islam in a bid to forge stronger ties be­tween the Ottoman state and its Muslim subjects and also to add geopolitical weight by rallying sympathy from Muslims residing in colonies under European rule. The British and Russian empires' Muslim populations were larger even than that of the Ottoman Empire, and fear of unrest gave him a source of rare leverage.^[2422]

Abdulhamid II's autocratic rule and embrace of Islam led his opponents and their successors, including Republican Turkish historians, to tag him as a reactionary and his regime as thoroughly corrupt and backward. This description (not unlike that slapped on the Qing) is misleading. Abdulhamid II continued to push innova­tion, pouring heavy investments into infrastructure (railroads, bridges, ports and harbors, gasworks, telegraph networks, etc.), founding new schools and colleges to train state bureaucrats and experts, and presiding over the introduction of new forms of knowledge such as statistics to government analysis and planning. Indeed, Ottoman propaganda compared him to Peter the Great as a similarly ambitious, even radical, reformer. The Hamidian regime combined “the legitimizing strictures of Islamic law with the modern ideals of a Rechtsstaat,” yet it did so in the interest of perpetuating neo-patrimony.^[2423] Abdulhamid remained above the law in theory and in practice, and he used the bureaucracies and their rationalized planning and reg­ulatory processes to deepen and extend his control over the empire. By way of pho­tography he could observe and track developments throughout his domains while ensconced in his palace. The telegraph allowed him to receive information and issue orders almost instantaneously to posts almost anywhere in his realm. The systema­tization of personnel files helped remake the Ottoman bureaucacy along the lines of a contemporary European civil service, but it also facilitated the monitoring of gov­ernment personnel. Meanwhile, the sultan built an extensive network of informers and spies to watch over those in the government and many others besides.^[2424]

Abdulhamid II's prioritization of the survival of his person and his regime came at a cost. His stifling of criticism and debate in the army and civil bureaucracies impeded their functioning, bred dissension, and diverted energy into underground conspiracy. His banishment, then arrest, and finally sanctioned murder of Midhat Pasha, albeit exceptional, nonetheless deprived the empire of one of its most crea­tive and effective servants and chilled the initiative of countless others. His willful expansion of the bureaucracy beyond his depleted treasury's ability to support it ensured corruption by chronically leaving officials waiting for salaries in arrears.^[2425] In order to shore up internal support, he sometimes reversed centralization and ceded power, such as in eastern Anatolia where he deputized and subsidized Kurdish tribal chiefs to run their fiefdoms with minimal interference in exchange for pledges of loyalty.

Most significantly, under Abdulhamid II the Ottoman Empire continued to lag dangerously behind the European powers in relative strength. Although it may still have spanned three continents and held together an array of peoples, tongues, and faiths, it was an empire in name only. A more accurate description would be semi-colony. Its vulnerabilities went beyond the political and military to encom­pass the economic as well. Through the nineteenth century exports of raw materials to Europe increased, but so, too, did imports from Europe of manufactured goods. Often these imports were made from the Ottomans' exported raw material. The empire at the dawn of the twentieth century had no mechanized industry to speak of but was almost entirely agrarian, with little capital available for invest­ment. Worse, it was heavily in debt after having taken on foreign loans to finance its reforms and wars in the wake of the Crimean War. Foreign debt would remain a crippling constraint on Ottoman capacities and ambitions up through the end of the empire. One of the clearest indicators of the empire's status as a secondary power was the Ottoman Public Debt Commission, a quasi-governmental office es­tablished in 1881 and supervised by the Ottomans' creditors (and which had some similarities to the Chinese Maritime Customs Service established by the British in Qing China). The commission assumed control of multiple government revenue streams—generally the most valuable and easiest to collect, such as tobacco and silk—to guarantee repayment of the loans. The commission served as a useful tutor in efficient tax collection and governance, but that fact could not disguise that its existence was a violation of sovereignty. A still greater violation of sovereignty was the capitulations, which granted extra-territorial rights to Europeans, including Ottomans with European passports, enabling them to defy Ottoman laws when convenient (again, a practice forced also onto the Qing dynasty). Ottoman Muslims resented the capitulations intensely, and one of the first acts of the government fol­lowing Ottoman entry into World War I was to abolish them (in contrast, extrater­ritoriality was not fully ended in China until 1943).^[2426]

Frustration with Abdulhamid II's suppression of dissent and the belief that his rule was condemning the Ottoman Empire to further partition and loss spurred some intellectuals and then significant numbers of junior military officers and civil servants to conspire against him. Recipients of modern training and education, these opponents, commonly known as “Young Turks,” believed that preserving the empire demanded accelerated European-style reforms and in particular enhanced centralization and the restoration of the constitution. Hence in July 1908 army officers who were members of the underground Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) led a mutiny that compelled Abdulhamid II to reinstate the constitution and hold elections. The desire to forestall British and Russian intervention in Ottoman Macedonia had been the immediate trigger, but the mutiny had long been in prepa­ration. As their name suggested, these revolutionaries aspired to preserve the union of the empire's diverse populations or “elements” through the application of pro­gressive, i.e., Western, rationalizing reforms.^[2427]

The Constitutional Revolution famously sparked joyous celebrations throughout much of the empire as representatives of the various elements expressed hope that the return of constitutional rule would dissolve internal conflicts and tensions. Such expectations were not borne out. Less than a year later, in April 1909, former officers disgruntled for having been dismissed under the Unionists for their lack of educational credentials joined with disaffected religious authorities and in the name of restoring Islamic law attempted a putsch in Istanbul. Simultaneously, pogroms against Armenians broke out in Adana. The army swiftly put down the putsch and restored order, but unrest, sometimes violent, simmered in Eastern Anatolia, Albania, Yemen, and elsewhere in the periphery.

The most lethal development for the integrity of the Ottoman Empire, however, was not the various waxing (and waning) internal fissures. The Ottoman state could contain these.^[2428] Rather, it was the proliferation of the national idea, namely the be­lief that humanity is naturally divided into discrete communities known as nations, each of which deserves its own state. As European diplomats assimilated this idea, they increasingly began to employ it as a principle to guide their statecraft over the course of the nineteenth century. By definition, the national idea stripped the Ottoman Empire of legitimacy in the interstate system. It pointed toward a vision of a post-Ottoman order predicated on the empire's partition, with each “element” claiming undivided sovereignty over a specific territory. By promising to transfer legitimacy to those internal opponents of the empire that claimed to represent a national cause, it converted local powerbrokers seeking to preserve or expand their own positions against a centralizing state into national heroes—or traitors from the Ottoman center's perspective—resisting foreign control.

As part of their management of the Eastern Question, the Great Powers presided over the establishment in the Balkans of national states in Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, Montenegro, and Romania. They created the latter four through the Treaty of Berlin of 1878, which adjudicated the final settlement of the Russo-Turkish War that ended earlier that year. The treaty's identification of Armenians as a distinct pop­ulation worthy of Great Power patronage raised the possibility, even probability, of the eventual establishment of an autonomous or even sovereign Armenian entity in eastern Anatolia. The treaty both spurred some Armenians to take up arms in the hope of provoking European intervention on their behalf and also provoked anxieties among Anatolian Muslims about their future. The Armenians' Kurdish neighbors started mobilizing politically for fear that they might share the fate of Balkan Muslims and be driven from the lands they lived on. Sheikh Ubeydullah brought together Kurds across tribal and imperial boundaries in a revolt in 1881. Although it soon fell apart, Ubeydullah's revolt marked the beginning of the Kurds' mobilization along ethnic lines and revealed the potential of the national idea to inform behavior even where conditions for nationalist politics were lacking. Meanwhile, some Ottoman Turks began to reimagine Anatolia as the homeland and national refuge of the Turks. When articulating their visions of the future, activists on virtually all sides and in most corners of the empire increasingly drew on the concepts and vocabulary of nationalism. In short, the dynamics of the inter­state system were ineluctably reshaping the empire's internal politics along national lines.^[2429]

Although the empire's generally very low level of socioeconomic development may have precluded the emergence of truly mass nationalist movements, the inter­play of global economic processes with the empire's cultural and political conditions by the turn of the century had produced a “segmented bourgeois class formation” with an Ottoman-Muslim bureaucratic intelligentsia and a non-Muslim commer­cial bourgeoisie.^[2430] Over time the interests and aspirations of the two increasingly diverged. The former was committed to preserving and modernizing the empire, whereas members of the latter increasingly embraced separatist nationalisms even as they benefited from dependent integration into the world economy.

Moreover, following the Constitutional Revolution, outside powers displayed no charity. As Austria-Hungary formally annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina and Bulgaria formally renounced Ottoman title in 1908, Italy pounced in 1911 to seize Tripolitania and Cyrenaica (i.e., modern Libya), and Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, and Montenegro in 1912 attacked the Ottomans with devastating effect, driving the Ottomans out from the Balkans almost entirely. The Balkan Wars ended Ottomanism, the idea that a common allegiance to the Ottoman state and legal equality might bind all elements of the empire together (as the idea of the Chinese empire was also crumbling by the early twentieth century). They had also left the empire's proportionate share of the Muslim population still larger, and thereby further reduced the necessity of or utility in accommodating Christians. Furthermore, by exposing the fragility of the Ottoman polity, the wars stoked the trepidations of those who feared the empire's end and boosted the hopes of those who longed for its collapse.^[2431] The violence of 1912— 1913 convinced many Ottoman Muslims that apocalypse was imminent and that only radical action could avert the repetition of the Balkan experience in Anatolia.

Thus in January 1913 a clique from the CUP overthrew the elected govern­ment in a coup and installed a one-party dictatorship. The fact that the leader of that coup, Ismail Enver Bey (later Pasha), had been the “Hero of Liberty” of the Constitutional Revolution of 1908 revealed a seemingly remarkable evolution in the Unionists' agenda. Yet in reality the Unionists' progressivism had always been more that of elite-led social engineering than of liberalism. The institution of one-party rule facilitated their pursuit of centralized and more uniform admin­istration throughout the empire. Successful empires, however, successfully mo­bilize resources and manage difference among diverse populations by employing indirect rule judiciously, co-opting rather than supplanting local elites and other intermediaries between state and society and modifying governance as necessary to fit local conditions. The Unionists' efforts to impose tighter centralization, however, paradoxically often exacerbated centrifugal tendencies. Taxation and conscrip­tion are never popular, but centralization in the late Ottoman context posed two particular problems. One is that it antagonized local indigenous authorities, such as notables or tribal chiefs, many of whom could still mobilize significant support against a center that was poorly resourced, inexperienced, and overwhelmed by chronic crises. The second is that centralization in practice was often indistinguish­able from Turkification, and thereby at times alienated the empire's non-Turks. Thus in Albania, eastern Anatolia, the Arab lands, and elsewhere, local notables greeted Istanbul's assertiveness with suspicion, unease, and sometimes outright re­sistance. Some remained quiet, but began adjusting their calculations and making contingency plans. Sharif Hussein of Mecca, for example, distrusted the Unionists as secularizers and centralizers, and his suspicion that they wished to unseat him led him to begin contemplate breaking from the empire, which in fact he did to as­sist the British in World War I.^[2432]