A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire Read online

  A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE Late Ottoman Empire

  A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE Late Ottoman Empire

  M. Şükrü Hanioğlu

  PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

  PRINCETON AND OXFORD

  Copyright © 2008 by Princeton University Press

  Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

  In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY

  All Rights Reserved

  Frontispiece: Spectators watching a military balloon given the name Osmanlı (Ottoman) in Istanbul (1909). Resimli Kitab, 2/9 (June 1909), p. 872.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hanioğlu, M. Şükrü.

  A brief history of the late Ottoman empire/M. Şükrü Hanioğlu.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-691-13452-9 (alk. paper)

  1. Turkey—History—19th century. 2. Turkey—History—Ottoman Empire, 1288–1918. I. Title.

  DR557.H36 2008

  956'.015—dc22 2007061028

  British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

  This book has been composed in Minion Typeface

  Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

  press.princeton.edu

  Printed in the United States of America

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  For Arsev

  Mazi ve müstakbel ahvâline vakıf ve belki ezel ve ebed esrarını ârif olmağa insanda bir meyl-i tabiî olduğundan ale-l-umum nev‘-i beșerin bu fenne [tarih] ihtiyac-ı ma‘nevîsi derkârdır.

  Since man has a natural aptitude for comprehending past and future affairs, and perhaps also for unlocking the secrets of eternities past and future, humanity’s spiritual need for this science [history] is evident.

  —AHMED CEVDET, Tarih-i Cevdet, 1 (Istanbul: Matbaa-i Osmaniye, 1309 [1891]), pp. 16–17

  Contents

  List of Figures

  ix

  Acknowledgments

  xi

  Note on Transliteration, Place Names, and Dates

  xiii

  Introduction

  1

  1.

  The Ottoman Empire at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century

  6

  2.

  Initial Ottoman Responses to the Challenge of Modernity

  42

  3.

  The Dawn of the Age of Reform

  55

  4.

  The Tanzimat Era

  72

  5.

  The Twilight of the Tanzimat and the Hamidian Regime

  109

  6.

  From Revolution to Imperial Collapse: The Longest Decade of the Late Ottoman Empire

  150

  Conclusion

  203

  Further Reading in Major European Languages

  213

  Bibliography

  217

  Index

  231

  Figures

  1. The Ottoman Empire ca. 1795

  xvi

  2. “Ottoman Africa” including the “Principality (Emaret) of Tunis” and the “Region (Hıtta) of Algeria”

  10

  3. An Ottoman sketch dated January 23, 1818, depicting the Shaqrā’ fortress

  14

  4. A painting (ca. 1791) depicting Sultan Selim III and his Grand Vizier Koca Yusuf Pasha

  43

  5. Sultan Mahmud II in traditional garb before the destruction of the Janissaries in 1826

  64

  6. Sultan Mahmud II in his new uniform after the destruction of the Janissaries

  65

  7. Ottoman provinces and autonomous principalities in Europe in 1833

  68

  8. The record of Governor Mehmed Haydar Pasha ibn Abdullah’s estate (1849) marshaling his books

  97

  9. An Ottoman cartoon depicting a conversation between a traditional and a modern lady

  101

  10. Ottoman deputies 1877

  120

  11. Ottoman Empire after the Berlin Congress of 1878

  122

  12. Sultan Abdülhamid II in the early days of his reign

  124

  13. The first page of the journal Terakki (Progress) dated March 20, 1901

  127

  14. The Congress of Ottoman Liberals in Paris, February 1902

  146

  15. The Young Turk Revolution in Monastir, July 23, 1908

  148

  16. Elections of 1908. Crowds carrying ballot boxes to counting centers

  151

  17. Ottoman deputies 1908

  152

  18. The Action Army in Istanbul, April 24, 1909

  155

  19. A CUP central committee note dated June 8/9, 1909

  158

  20. Demonstrations before the Sublime Porte immediately after the CUP raid on January 23, 1913

  166

  21. The Banco di Roma branch in Tripoli of Barbary (ca. 1909)

  169

  22. Partition of the European provinces of the empire after the Balkan Wars of 1912–13

  172

  23. Muslim refugees from the Balkans in the capital (December 1912)

  174

  24. The violet line dividing the British and Ottoman spheres of influence according to the 1914 Anglo-Ottoman Convention

  176

  25. Belkıs Şevket aboard an Ottoman Bleriot XI/B with Captain Fethi Bey

  184

  26. The partition of the Ottoman Empire according to the Sèvres Treaty of 1920

  194

  27. Turkey and the other successor states according to the Lausanne Treaty of 1923

  198

  Acknowledgments

  I HAVE INCURRED numerous debts of gratitude while engaging in the research and writing of this book. First and foremost, I should express my deepest gratitude to Michael A. Cook and Jesse Ferris, who have read successive drafts of the entire manuscript and offered generous help in organizing the text. They also drew my attention to points which I might otherwise have overlooked. I am also grateful to my learned colleagues András P. Hámori and Stephen Kotkin, who read the final draft and provided excellent remarks and suggestions. Likewise, I am indebted to my colleagues Mustafa Aksakal, Nancy Coffin, Robert P. Finn, Said Öztürk, İskender Pala, and Milen Petrov for answering numerous inquiries and supplying valuable information. I would also like to express my thanks to the two anonymous reviewers for offering insightful comments toward improving this book.

  Special thanks are due to Princeton University Press for its careful execution of a difficult task. At the Press, editors Brigitta van Rheinberg and Sara Lerner answered a myriad of questions with competence and good humor, accommodated all requests, and coordinated the publication. Dimitri Karetnikov, the illustration specialist, managed to produce illustrations that look better than the originals. Karen M. Verde, with her extremely thorough and professional work, considerably exceeded my expectations in a copyeditor. I would also like to express my thanks to Dr. Christopher L. Brest for his help in drawing the maps and to Dr. Lys Ann Weiss for preparing the index.

  I am indebted to the administrations of the Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi and Müftülük Arşivi, both in Istanbul, not only for access to their collections but also for many of the illustrations that appear in this book. I likewise wish to thank Mr. Mehmet Darakçıoğlu, Dr. Fatmagül Demirel, Ms. İffet Baytaş, and Mr. Sabit Baytaş for their help in obtaining some of the illustrations. Thanks are also due to the managers and office staff of the Near Eastern Studies Department: Kathleen O’Neill, Christine Riley, A
ngela Bryant, Danette Rivera, Pınar Gibbon, and Tammy M. Williams for their continuous technical support during the preparation of this study.

  It is my pleasant duty to record my gratitude to the University Committee on Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences for making grants toward the cost of my research in Istanbul in 1994 and 2001. I collected all the data regarding books read by members of the Ottoman ruling (askerî) class and Ottoman constitutionalism during these two research trips.

  Last but not least, I thank my wife Arsev for once again sacrificing the time it took me to work on another book.

  MŞH

  Princeton, NJ

  May 2007

  Note on Transliteration, Place Names, and Dates

  NAMES AND TITLES in Ottoman Turkish are rendered according to modern Turkish usage and not by strict transliteration. Arabic names and titles are transliterated according to a slightly simplified system based on that of the International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES). Sources in Slavic languages are transliterated using the modified Library of Congress transliteration system. For geographical names frequently encountered in material in the English language, common English usage is preferred. Thus we have Damascus, Monastir, and Salonica, not Dimashq, Bitola, and Thessaloniki. For all other place names, to avoid confusion, the designations current in the contemporary Ottoman successor states of the Balkans and Near East have been employed. In accordance with The Chicago Manual of Style, frequently used foreign terms are italicized only on their first appearance. Gregorian equivalents of both Muslim Hicrî (Hijrī) and the Rumî (Rūmī) dates are provided in square brackets where considered necessary. The Hicrî calendar is lunar and starts from the Hijra in A.D. 622; the Rumî calendar was a solar version of the Hicrî calendar based on the Julian calendar.

  A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE Late Ottoman Empire

  FIGURE 1. The Ottoman Empire ca. 1795.

  Introduction

  THIS BRIEF HISTORY aspires to cover a period of almost one-and-a-half centuries, during which enormous changes took place over a vast geographic area. As if this were not ambitious enough, the need to place the events of 1798–1918 in context requires a description of Ottoman reality in the late eighteenth century by way of background, as well as some discussion of the legacy bequeathed by the late Ottoman Empire to the new nation-states that emerged on its ruins. The compression of so much history into a concise book naturally necessitates certain choices and omissions, as well as the privileging of trends and analyses over facts and figures. The general nature of this work thus precludes a thorough discussion of any particular issue or field. Specialists—whether of cultural, diplomatic, intellectual, literary, military, political, social, or economic history—may thus be somewhat disappointed with the result. But they may find some compensation in the attempt to integrate the advances made in multiple subfields into a general framework that offers a new approach to the study of late Ottoman history.

  There is also a more ideological problem. The usual human failure to take account of historical contingency has been reinforced by prevalent nationalist narratives in the Ottoman successor states, producing a conception of late Ottoman history that is exceedingly teleological. It is often assumed that the emergence of the Republic of Turkey in Anatolia, and of the neighboring nation-states in the surrounding territories of the disintegrated Ottoman polity, was the inevitable and predictable result of the decline of a sprawling multinational empire. This retrospective approach to late Ottoman history has become, it seems to me, a major obstacle to viewing the period as it really was. In particular, it distorts key historical processes by pulling them out of their historical context and placing them in a contrived chain of events leading up to the familiar post-imperial world. The point is not to deny the significance of the link between the successor nation-states—especially Turkey—and their Ottoman past; on the contrary, retrieving the historical roots of modern phenomena is a vital and worthy undertaking. But the attempt to frame late Ottoman history in a narrative of imperial collapse to the relentless drumbeat of the march of progress—usually associated with Westernization, nationalism, and secularization—prevents a clear understanding of the developments in question. Rectifying this error is a major goal of this book.

  An illustration may help clarify this point. Any deep, evocative understanding of Turkish Republican ideology necessarily entails retrieving its intellectual progenitors of the late Ottoman period. But a nuanced, contextualized examination of the ideological debates of late Ottoman times should avoid projecting this later historical reality of a struggle between revolutionary secularists and religious conservatives onto an earlier, altogether different one. Nor will it do to simplify historical reality by depicting two imaginary camps upholding the contending banners of scientific progress and religious obscurantism—as is too often the case with modern commentators blinded by the modern Republican reality. The importance of a work like The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought,1 in this context, is the corrective insight that the Young Ottomans were not secularist opponents of religious obscurantism, forming a link in the chain leading to secular republicanism; rather, they were the proponents of a uniquely Islamic critique of the new Ottoman order of the 1860s.

  Thus, in order to locate the origins of modern Turkish official ideology in late Ottoman history, I have first tried to provide an account of late Ottoman history that does not assign it a teleological mission. More generally, I have avoided the fashionable but misleading tendency to see late Ottoman history primarily in terms of a struggle between competing ideologies. Although one of the tasks I have set myself has been to fill one of the more glaring lacunæ in the study of the late Ottoman period—intellectual history—I conclude that the ideas debated did not, in the final analysis, serve as the engines of historical change. A contextual analysis of the most important historical developments of the period places a premium not on ideologies as the driving force of history, but on the oppressive weight of circumstances, which inhibited the freedom of realistic policy makers who sought to innovate. For example, if we are to explain the Islamist policies adopted by the staunch secularists of the Committee of Union and Progress (hereafter CUP), we must first recognize that such contradictions exist (which is impossible from the Republican perspective), and then look to structural realities—like the increasing proportion of Muslim citizens in the empire that the CUP leadership inherited from its pious predecessor—to help us explain them. Likewise, if we are to make sense of the modernizing policies of Abdülhamid II, we must first avoid the trap of associating his rule with backward religiosity, and then look to imperial parallels in Europe, inter alia, to understand his reaction to the challenges of the day.

  My narrative emphasizes historical trends and processes more than single events, placing them within an analytical framework with four principal dimensions: the persistent imperial ambition to centralize, the shifting socioeconomic context, the key challenge of forging an Ottoman response to modernity, and the need to integrate Ottoman history into world history. Let me take each of these in turn.

  First, where the nationalist narrative portrays the struggle of an oppressed people to liberate themselves from the Turkish yoke, I introduce a paradigm of struggle between the imperial drive to centralize and a variety of centrifugal forces. As the imperial center took advantage of the possibilities afforded by modern technology to launch an ambitious attempt to centralize and modernize the mechanisms of control over the loosely held periphery, nationalist movements, the aspirations of local rulers, and international encroachments exerted an ever-stronger pull in the other direction. Seen in this light, nationalism provided a powerful new ideological framework for the mobilization of the masses in the perpetuation of an older and more fundamental struggle between center and periphery.

  Second, the struggle between center and periphery involved a wholesale transformation of the old order of the empire. Administrative reform entailed radical changes to economic relations, to Ottoman culture, a
nd to the fabric of society. Thus, I have found it necessary to treat social, cultural, and economic developments within this larger context, and not as phenomena occurring in a vacuum. As with the question of ideas, here, too, I have avoided the tendency to ascribe historical developments to a single social or economic cause. Just as, for example, it is unhelpful to seek the origins of the Young Turk Revolution in the rise in inflation, it is equally misleading to ascribe opposition to the printing press to “religious fanaticism” alone, while ignoring the socioeconomic basis of this opposition among thousands of individuals who made a living from manuscript production. Historical developments in the late Ottoman period did not stem from simple economic, social, or cultural reasons, but were affected by all three.

  Third, instead of the worn-out paradigms of modernization and Westernization, I have tried to write in terms of the Ottoman response to challenges brought on by the onset of modernity. The Ottoman state was not unique in adapting to modernity, though its task was perhaps more arduous than that of European states, if only because modernity was initially a European phenomenon (although a uniquely Ottoman version of modernity had emerged, arguably, by the late nineteenth century). Similar challenges confronted European contemporaries and provoked similar responses, of which the Ottoman establishment was not unaware. More important, analyzing societal transformation as the response of state and society to external challenge once again helps us avoid seeing change as driven by an ideology of modernization. This is not to deny that over time the concepts of modernization and Westernization became slogans in their own right. But it is to assert that the simplistic picture of an uncompromising hostility to modernity confronting enthusiastic support for its wholesale adoption across an unbridgeable divide is to a large extent a fiction. The similarities between Young Ottoman constitutionalism, rooted as it was in Islamic principles, and later Young Turk constitutionalism, grounded in an intensely secular outlook, are greater than many would care to admit. Similarly, the “pious Caliph” Abdülhamid II’s responses to the challenge of modernity did not differ significantly from those of his grandfather Mahmud II, nicknamed the “infidel sultan” by devout Muslims ever since. Westernization, too, was not just a matter of importation. Rather, it was a complex process of acculturation, in which Western ideas, manners, and institutions were selectively adopted, and evolved into different forms set in a different context.