Chapter Eight: Western Intrusions, Eastern Responses, 1768-1878

In the late-eighteenth century, the Ottoman Empire began to face a new set of challenges far greater than any it had yet confronted. The successful transformation that the sultanate had undergone in the seventeenth century had provided it with an imperfect, if-nonetheless effective system of government, but did not endow it with the economic structures and social practices needed to keep pace with the commercially dynamic states of Europe. As a result, starting in 1768 the Ottomans found themselves increasingly unable to fend off the aggressive Western powers or to prevent the success of national liberation movements in the Balkans. Above all, they could no longer keep the predatory Russian Empire from periodically seizing large swaths of strategic territory. The result was what Western leaders euphemistically referred to as the “Eastern Question”: the problem that Ottoman weakness posed to the balance of power on which European peace rested. For the next century and a half, the Eastern Question was a high priority and a constant menace to European security and stability that occupied Western diplomats who were intent on preventing volatility in the Ottoman Empire from sparking a general war.

While the imbalance in power between the West and the empire compelled European leaders to engage in seemingly constant crisis management, it prompted Muslims to undertake a searching reappraisal aimed at understanding what had gone wrong and at determining how they could best respond to the new challenges that the empire faced. Bureaucrats, intellectuals, provincial governors, and religious scholars alike offered a number of competing explanations for the empire’s weakness and prescribed a variety of often-conflicting reform proposals aimed at redressing the yawning gap in power that had opened between the Muslim world and the European states. Those efforts ultimately failed to arrest the West’s growing dominance or to prevent the loss of further territory. They did, however, succeed in creating a legacy of reform that would powerfully shape political and social views well into the twentieth century.

The European Powers and the Ottoman Empire

The Rise of the West

The source of the Eastern Question and the impetus for the reform efforts that emerged in the nineteenth century was the menace posed by the rise of the West. Between 1500 and 1800, Europe underwent a series of significant changes that opened a widening economic and military gap between it and other parts of the world. Its transformation began with the Commercial Revolution: the emergence of new trade routes, industries, and financial networks in the years following the discovery and exploitation of the New World that resulted in large parts of Europe shifting to a proto- capitalist economic system. Concurrently, the West underwent the Scientific Revolution. This new method of studying the material world and understanding humanity’s relationship to it broke with millennia of received wisdom and made new and vastly more sophisticated technological breakthroughs possible. In turn, the Scientific and Commercial Revolutions made possible an even more far-reaching transformation: the Industrial Revolution. First emerging in Britain in the eighteenth century, it produced a period of sustained economic growth vastly greater in scale than had been the case at any point in the past.

The West also drew strength from the emergence of two revolutionary new ideologies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: liberalism and nationalism. These new belief systems constituted a direct challenge to longstanding political theories and to the dynastic system that had predominated in Europe for centuries. Liberalism called for the replacement of hereditary privilege, the divine right of kings, and arbitrary rule with written constitutions, the consent of the governed, civil rights, and the rule of law. The related ideology of nationalism demanded that culturally homogenous groups of people, those who shared a language and history, should no longer be incorporated into dynastic empires overseen by unchecked kings but should instead rule themselves as independent, sovereign states.

On the surface, nationalism and liberalism seemed to impose substantial new constraints on the authority of Western rulers. After all, those ideologies explicitly challenged the monarchs’ claims to absolute rule and called for an end to their monopoly over foreign relations. Counterintuitively, however, nationalism and liberalism did not weaken central governments but instead enhanced their power. Liberalism reflected this seeming paradox from the very start. As political theorists and government ministers slowly realized, the British monarchy’s acceptance of Parliament’s power to set tax rates and to have a voice in foreign affairs had not resulted in the legislature curbing the executive’s conduct of foreign relations. Instead, Parliament enthusiastically funded and suppored the British state’s many expensive wars. Nationalism similarly strengthened the power of central governments, at least those that ruled culturally homogenous populations. Most notably, the revolutionary French state’s use of nationalist appeals in the Levée en Masse in 1793 had permitted it to quickly raise an army of one-and-a-half million conscripts to defend the country from Britain and Habsburg Austria, a mobilization on a scale that would have been inconceivable only a few years earlier.

The Russian Threat

Ironically, the most dangerous threat to the Ottomans, the Russian Empire, similarly lagged behind Western Europe. A staunch opponent of liberalism to the bitter end, it did not begin to industrialize until the late-nineteenth century and thus did not possess a dynamic economy similar to those of the Western European states. Nonetheless, thanks to Peter the Great’s (r. 1682-1725) military reforms and to Russia’s participation in both the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748) and the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), it fielded a fearsome military, one that was equipped with modern Western weapons and drilled in the latest tactics. Making matters worse for the Sublime Porte, St. Petersburg had a powerful desire to expand at Ottoman expense.

This aspiration was, at root, ideological. As far back as Ivan III (r. 1462-1505), Russian monarchs had described their empire as the “‘Third Rome’”: the rightful heir to the Byzantine Empire and, importantly, its former territory. Moscow, the imperial capital from 1547 until 1712, and the center of Russian Orthodox Christianity in turn was promoted as the successor of Rome and Constantinople as the spiritual center of the Christian world. The connection to the empires of old was a claim that Russian rulers took very seriously. Indeed, Ivan III had lent legitimacy to it not only by marrying a Byzantine princess, but also by styling himself tsar, or caesar, in imitation of the Byzantine emperors of old.

Thereafter, successive tsars pressed Russia’s claim to be the heir of the Byzantine Empire and to be entitled, by right, to its territory. For a long time, of course, that belief remained no more than an aspiration. Faced with a still-powerful Ottoman state, successive Russian monarchs found themselves unable to realize their dream of succeeding the Byzantine Empire. Indeed, it was only under the forbidding and strong- willed Catherine II (r. 1762-1796) that Russia began to transform that claim from ambition into reality. Determined to make real the pretension that the tsars were the legitimate successors to the Byzantine emperors, she pursued a “southern strategy” aimed at securing control of the Ottoman-held warm-water ports on the northern shore of the Black Sea from which Russian forces could subsequently threaten Constantinople and the straits. It was a bold program; astonishingly, it was also one that Catherine II succeeded in achieving.

Russo-Ottoman War, 1768-1774

She began to pursue her southern strategy with the Russo-Ottoman War of 1768-1774. From the beginning, the conflict went disastrously for the Ottomans. Having sat out the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years’ War, the sultanate had failed to remain abreast of the rapid evolution of European weapons and tactics that had occurred since 1740. As a result, Catherine II’s powerful and well-led troops easily thrashed the Ottomans’ much-larger armies and handily occupied both the Crimean Peninsula and the strategic Danubian Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia. Indeed, by the time the war ended in 1774, the Ottoman Empire’s heretofore-sophisticated supply system lay in shambles and its army was on the verge of collapse.

Treaty of Kuchuk-Kainarji, 1774

At first look, the Treaty of Kuchuk-Kainarji that concluded the war seemed to salvage at the negotiating table that which the Ottoman military had lost on the battlefield. The key was Western intervention. Keen to maintain the balance of power, European states led by the Habsburg Empire compelled Catherine II to give up the main territorial prizes, Wallachia and Moldavia, that her armies had won. Indeed, European diplomats managed to limit Russia’s tangible gains to relatively modest ones: a large indemnity, a few key fortifications and ports on the Black Sea coast, and some border regions in the north Caucasus. Thus, to the casual observer, the Ottomans appeared to have dodged a bullet.

Such an assessment is inaccurate though. The agreement was in fact a disastrous one for the Sublime Porte that fully reflected the scale of the empire’s military defeats from 1768-1774. Two provisions were especially damaging. First, the treaty granted Russia the right to protect Orthodox Christians in the sultan’s domain; seemingly innocuous at the time, this stipulation would serve as the justification that St. Petersburg would use to intervene in Ottoman affairs. Second, the agreement formally ended the sultan’s sovereignty over the Crimean Khanate and made the Tatars independent. This concession would prove to be a painful one for the Sublime Porte. It not only deprived the military of its best troops but also marked the first time that the empire had been compelled to cede territory with a predominantly Muslim population. Worse, as was widely understood at the time, Tatar independence was only a temporary condition destined to lead, as it did in 1783, to Russian annexation of the strategic Crimean Peninsula.

The war of 1768-1774 and the treaty that ended it thus constituted a critical turning point for the sultanate. As a result of them, the Sublime Porte had lost its most dependable soldiers, its monopoly over the Black Sea, and its freedom from foreign interference in its internal affairs. Perhaps worst of all, that conflict, and another, only slightly less-disastrous war with Russia from 1787-1792, had revealed that the sultan’s military no longer stood on an even footing with the armies of the European powers.⁸

Napoleon in Egypt, 1798-1801

The Ottoman Empire’s relative weakness was certainly clear to the ambitious French general, Napoleon Bonaparte (r. 1799-1814, 1815). Seeking to exploit the qualitative gap that had opened between the sultan’s military and those of the European states, the young general had begun plotting in the mid 1790s to seize territory in the Middle East from which he could interdict commerce between Britain and its economically vital colony of India. Those plans came to fruition in 1798 when he invaded and occupied Ottoman Egypt. Initially, the operation was a cakewalk for his disciplined soldiers. They easily took control of the province, demonstrating in the process that the divide between the military capabilities of the Western European states and those of the sultan’s army had widened substantially since the Ottoman Empire’s recent defeat at Russian hands. Most notably, at the Battle of the Pyramids outside Cairo in July 1798, Napoleon’s soldiers used their superior artillery, better tactics, and bayonet-equipped guns to decisively rout an Ottoman army in an engagement that came at the astonishingly modest cost of only thirty French lives.

Ultimately, however, Napoleon’s invasion did not prove successful. The destruction of his fleet by a British naval force in the Battle of the Nile in August 1798 rendered his position in Egypt untenable and thus dashed his grandiose plan to bring England to its knees by severing its communications with India. Eager to shed himself of a losing venture, Napoleon followed the defeat by passing command of his army in Egypt to one of his subordinates and returning to Paris. Eventually, an Anglo-Ottoman army, in which the disciplined British troops did the heavy lifting, defeated what remained of his expeditionary force at Alexandria in 1801 and compelled Paris to abandon the Egyptian operation.

The “Eastern Question”

The ease with which the French took Egypt confirmed what the Russian victories in the late-eighteenth century had suggested: that the Ottoman Empire was no longer a first-rate military power. Accordingly, attuned as they were to the strengths and weaknesses of the world’s states, European leaders thereafter factored the increasingly vast gap in military and economic power that had emerged between the Ottoman Empire and the West into their diplomatic calculations. Indeed, it was at that time that the Eastern Question first began to emerge as a central concern in European diplomatic circles.

Views of the Eastern Question differed. For Russian tsars and their ministers, the problems of the Ottoman Empire smelled of opportunity. They hoped to exploit its weakness in order to replace sultanic rule in the Balkans with dependent, Russian- dominated states. More importantly, they dreamed of finally achieving their long-held goal of taking control of Constantinople and the straits, thereby giving Russia both the prestige of possessing the former Byzantine capital and the tangible benefits of at last enjoying access to uninhibited warm-water ports. In contrast, diplomats from other states viewed the Eastern Question as a serious issue that threatened to undermine the broader, post-Napoleonic European peace. Leaders in Britain, France, and Austria in particular understood that the problems of the Ottoman Empire created a dangerous power vacuum; should any state, especially Russia, exploit its weakness to seize territory in the Balkans or take control of the straits, the European balance of power on which peace and security rested would be fatally undermined and the Continent would be plunged into a costly war.

However, the leaders of those states proved better at perceiving the risks inherent in the Eastern Question than at managing them. Divided among themselves and unable to resist taking advantage of the Ottoman Empire, they never found a satisfactory way to resolve the Eastern Question. Instead, left to fester, it increasingly strained relations between the Great Powers and helped to bring about the First World War. That conflict lay in the distant future at the time that French troops left Egypt, however. In the meantime, the centrality of the Eastern Question in European diplomacy waxed and waned, rising when problems arose in the Balkans or when Russia sought to expand at Ottoman expense and falling when other crises took precedence.

Nationalist Revolts

In keeping with this pattern, the Eastern Question remained on the back burner during the cataclysmic Wars of Napoleon (1803-1815) even as it grew substantially more complicated due to the appearance of nationalist revolts in the European part of the Ottoman Empire. The first of these occurred in Serbia. Emerging out of a local conflict among Ottoman officials in 1804 and drawing strength from socioeconomic grievances that had little to do with Serbian identity, the revolt only belatedly acquired nationalist overtones. It ended in 1816, when the Sublime Porte, bowing in part to Russian pressure, granted autonomy to the province.

A similar nationalist rebellion broke out in Greece in 1821. In two ways, it was reminiscent of the recently resolved Serbian revolt. First, it too arose out of a conflict within the Ottoman ruling class and only belatedly transformed into a nationalist movement. Second, like the Serbian uprising, it succeeded as a result of foreign involvement, in this case, the intervention of Russia, Britain, and France. Their motives for becoming involved varied. St. Petersburg interceded in hopes of turning Greece into a protectorate; in contrast, London and Paris intervened partly to curb the tsar’s ambition and partly to satisfy increasingly pro-Greek public opinion.

The support of these states proved critical in helping Greece gain independence. In 1824, the powerful ruler of Ottoman Egypt, Pasha Mehmet Ali (r. 1805-1848), had deployed his army and navy against the rebels at the Sublime Porte’s request; in short order, his disciplined forces defeated the insurgents and restored sultanic control over Greece. Perversely, however, his intervention proved to be too successful. Faced with the prospect of an outright Greek defeat, the people of France and Britain pressured their governments into joining with Russia to rescue the rebellion. Accordingly, in 1827, an Anglo-Russian-French naval force destroyed the combined Egyptian-Ottoman fleet at Navarino. The battle proved to be a turning point. With the European states now firmly committed to the rebels, the Sublime Porte concluded that victory was no longer possible. In 1829, as a result, it agreed to grant Greece its independence.

The Historical Debate: Nationalism

Understandings of nationalism and, especially, the origins of the Greek and Serbian nationalist movements, have changed markedly in recent decades. Prior to World War II, most scholars argued that nationalism was the natural precondition for the nation-state. According to this view, each nation, or ethnically-defined group of people, is a fixed or essential entity, meaning that it has always existed and that its fundamental characteristics, its culture, beliefs, and language, are unchanging. When faced with oppression, a people that does not enjoy self-determination will, because of its shared sense of nationalism, seek independence in order to form a nation-state; in other words, nation precedes state. Thus, according to this perspective, the independence drives that occurred in the Balkans in the nineteenth century were the natural and inevitable product of the innate nationalism of the peoples who lived there. Having suffered under the yoke of oppressive Ottoman rule for centuries and able to look back to a time when their forebears had enjoyed independence, the various peoples of the region took advantage of the empire’s growing weakness to rise up and regain their long-lost and much-cherished independence.

After 1960, a new generation of historians and political scientists began to challenge this conception of nationalism. They reject outright the idea that nations are essential and timeless. Instead, these scholars argue that each is a cultural construct that originates in a particular time and set of circumstances. They also contend that nationalist campaigns are not typically mass movements. On the contrary, they are almost always the products of small groups of elites who organize them in order to achieve political or economic ends that they could not attain under outside rule. Only after they have successfully achieved independence and established a state do those groups set about creating a sense of national identity, a task they undertake for the purpose of securing the loyalty of the people who live within the new country’s borders. In other words, this interpretation contends that a widely held sense of national identity does not precede the creation of the state; instead, it emerges after the state’s establishment, and does so as a result of a concerted effort on the part of powerful interests to establish a shared sense of membership in what the influential political- scientist Benedict Anderson calls the imagined political community of the nation.

Based on this conception of nationalism, scholars of the Ottoman Empire like Donald Quataert now dismiss the older idea that surging nationalist sentiments caused by purported Ottoman misrule produced the independence movements that rocked the Balkans after 1800. Drawing on Anderson’s ideas, they argue that through the mid- nineteenth century, nationalism and national identity remained foreign concepts in a region in which occupation and religion rather than ethnicity or even language defined identity. Thus, scholars arguing from this perspective contend that nationalism did not spark the emergence of independence drives in the Balkans; instead, small groups of local elites created and led those movements in order to achieve narrow political and economic goals. Later, after they had won independence from the sultanate, those elites began to promote new, nationalist-based identities in order to secure the loyalty of the people that they ruled. In other words, this interpretation holds that it was only after elites had achieved independence that they developed new national symbols and repurposed historical events into collective, nationalist myths and thus created the “imagined political community” on which a shared sense of national identity rests, most notably when Serbian nationalists transformed the Battle of Kosovo (1389) from an ordinary military defeat into a glorious if doomed, lost-cause struggle against foreign domination.

French and British Support

In conjunction with these revolts, renewed Russian aggression brought the Eastern Question back to the forefront in the late 1820s. At that time, St. Petersburg was anything but shy about acting to achieve its goals vis-à-vis the Ottoman Empire. Taking advantage of the Greek revolt, the tsar had followed the Battle of Navarino by going to war with the now-nearly defenseless sultanate. Russia won a quick victory and secured significant concessions through the Treaty of Adrianople that ended it. Later, after Russian troops protected Istanbul from the army of the rebellious Mehmet Ali in 1833, a stunning case of the fox guarding the hen house, the tsar’s government compelled Sultan Mahmud II (r. 1808-1839) to sign the Treaty of Hunkar Iskelesi, which, while nominally a defensive agreement between equals, was, in reality, an entirely one-sided deal that promised to reduce the Ottoman Empire to little more than a Russian protectorate.

These actions greatly alarmed the British and French governments. Much of their concern lay rooted in the diplomatic risks that they perceived in tsarist dominance of the Ottoman Empire. Both Paris and London were acutely aware that Russian control of the straits or the Balkans would pose a grievous danger to the balance of power in Europe and likely produce a devastating general war among the Great Powers. For that reason alone, they were determined to limit St. Petersburg’s influence over the Sublime Porte and, especially, to prevent it from acquiring Constantinople or the empire’s territory in the Balkans.

London had a second, more self-interested geostrategic reason to oppose the growth of Russian influence in the Ottoman Empire: the threat that tsarist dominance of the sultanate would pose to its vital Indian colony. Keenly aware of India’s critical importance to the security and economic strength of Britain, London viewed Russia’s efforts following the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815) to expand into the Middle East and Central Asia with mounting alarm. The result was the “Great Game”: the economic, political, and diplomatic struggle between London and St. Petersburg for influence over the regions that lay between India and Russia. Unsurprisingly, the Ottoman Empire loomed large in Britain’s approach to the Great Game. If Russia was able to exploit the Sublime Porte’s weakness to gain control of ports on the Persian Gulf, its ships would be in a position to interdict the vital maritime communications with India on which the security and economic might of the British Empire rested. Conversely, if London could preserve the Ottoman Empire intact, it could function as a critical buffer state that could help to contain Russian influence.

Paris and London’s concerns about Russian influence over the Sublime Porte also stemmed from the substantial economic stake that they had acquired in the sultanate. Their commercial preeminence in the empire was largely a function of the capitulatory treaties that they had signed with Istanbul in the late-sixteenth century. Thanks to the exemption from Ottoman taxes and customs duties that those agreements afforded them, British and French merchants had gradually assumed control of the empire’s lucrative international trade. Their economic dominance of the Ottoman Empire grew even more substantial starting in the late 1830s. In a treaty we will discuss in more detail presently, the Sublime Porte agreed in 1838 to transform the Capitulations into free-trade agreements that established import duties at rates so low that the empire could no longer protect domestic industries from European competition. Over the course of the nineteenth century, as a result, the Ottoman Empire gradually became a neo-colony of France and Britain, serving as a source of cheap raw materials and a market for their factory-produced finished goods.

Making matters worse, the capitulatory agreements included a provision that allowed Ottoman Christians to purchase certificates called berats from European consulates entitling them to the same tax exemptions and legal protections that European merchants enjoyed. Originally intended to be a limited perquisite reserved for a small number of diplomatic translators, the system came to be massively abused in the nineteenth century when hundreds-of-thousands of Ottoman subjects obtained berats and the tax advantages that they conferred. As a result, European-affiliated merchants, particularly those whose berats linked them to Britain and France, came to dominate the coastal trade in the empire, while European consulates, entitled to oversee the legal affairs of their states’ berat holders, assumed sovereign powers within the empire.

London and Paris had a great deal at stake economically in the continued independence of the sultanate. Were St. Petersburg to solidify its dominant position in the empire, it could replace the capitulations with protective tariffs, a move that the Sublime Porte was too weak to make on its own. In turn, those Russian- enforced tariff barriers would likely shut British and French merchants out of the Ottoman Empire and, in so doing, deny their factories both the raw materials they needed for the production of finished goods and the overseas markets necessary for the disposition of their surplus production.

Thus, for a combination of strategic and economic reasons, Britain and France gradually shifted their approach to the Ottoman Empire after the Napoleonic Wars. Determined both to retain their privileged commercial position and to prevent St. Petersburg from upsetting the prevailing diplomatic order, they committed themselves to preserving the empire’s territorial integrity and to limiting Russian influence over the Sublime Porte. British Foreign Minister Lord Palmerston (1784-1865) neatly summarized this new approach shortly after the signing of the Treaty of Hunkar Iskelesi. Henceforth, he declared, it was British policy that “[t]he Ottoman Empire was to be preserved, supported, reformed, and strengthened.”

The interplay between Russian aggression and French and British support for the sultanate would establish a recurring, cyclical pattern in the Ottoman Empire’s diplomatic affairs. Each cycle would begin with the sultanate suffering a serious military setback either at the hands of Russian-backed nationalist groups or tsarist armies and then being forced to sign a peace agreement in which it either ceded substantial territory or made significant concessions to St. Petersburg. Alarmed by the threat both to their narrow economic interests and to the broader balance of power, Britain and France would then respond by joining with other concerned states such as the Habsburg Empire to compel Russia to agree to a reduction, but not a full rollback, of the concessions it had secured from Istanbul. In doing so, Paris and London would ensure the survival of a smaller, but-still coherent and independent Ottoman state even as they acted to appease popular opinion at home by pressing the Sublime Porte to implement reforms designed to improve the rights of the empire’s non-Muslims. This ‘six-step forward, five-step back’ pattern first began to take effect shortly after the conclusion of the Greek War of Independence when London compelled Russia to accept more-limited gains in the Treaty of Adrianople than its military success over the Ottomans merited; it would remain in effect for the remainder of the nineteenth century.

The Crimean War, 1853-1856

There was, however, one major exception to this pattern: the Crimean War of 1853-1856. In that instance, rather than acting to reduce the tsar’s gains after his armies had defeated the sultan’s forces, Britain and France instead went to war with Russia in order to prevent it from assuming de facto control of the Ottoman Empire. The conflict had complex origins. Nominally, it was the byproduct of France’s successful campaign to have the sultan transfer control of the Christian Holy Sites in Palestine from the Orthodox Church to the Catholic Church. In reality, the war stemmed from Tsar Nicholas I’s (r. 1825-1855) attempt to use this religious dispute as a pretext for pressuring the Sublime Porte into granting his government sovereign power over the empire’s vast Orthodox Christian population, a concession that would have reduced the Ottoman state to little more than a Russian appendage had it gone into effect. News of the tsar’s demand hit London and Paris like a bombshell. Already alarmed by Nicholas I’s earlier suggestion that London and St. Petersburg should partition the Ottoman Empire, or, as he famously called it, “the sick man of Europe,” the French and British governments responded by joining with the Sublime Porte to declare war on Russia. Fought almost exclusively on the peninsula for which it was named, the Crimean War differed from earlier conflicts between the Ottoman and Russian Empires in that it was the tsar’s forces rather than the sultan’s that were on the defensive. Costly to all its participants, the struggle finally came to an end in 1856 when the fall of the key port of Sevastopol compelled Nicholas I’s successor, Tsar Alexander II (r. 1855-1881), to sue for peace.

The Treaty of Paris that formally ended the war seemed on the surface to be a significant diplomatic victory for the Ottomans. Thanks to Britain and France’s desire to keep the Russians out of the Middle East, it contained terms that appeared to secure the empire from further tsarist depredations. It barred Russia from operating or maintaining naval forces on the Black Sea, compelled it to renounce any right to intervene on behalf of Orthodox Christians in the empire, and even required it to cede a small amount of territory in Bessarabia to the sultanate. More importantly, the treaty gave the Ottoman Empire a new degree of international legitimacy by welcoming it into the Concert of Europe: the diplomatic structure that the victors in the Napoleonic Wars had created to maintain peace and order in nineteenth-century Europe.

Ironically, however, it soon became clear that the war had weakened rather than strengthened the sultanate. The primary problem was the war’s cost. The expense of the war had been far greater than anticipated and compelled the Sublime Porte to take out substantial international loans. Unfortunately for the Ottoman government, those obligations soon revealed themselves to be beyond its capacity to service. As a result, the Sublime Porte found itself in a steadily worsening fiscal position. Making matters worse, it soon became clear that London and Paris lacked the strength to ensure that Russia continued to abide by the terms of the Treaty of Paris, particularly after France’s stunning defeat in the Franco-Prussian War in 1871. Thus, in the long run, the Crimean War not only resulted in the Ottoman Empire becoming mired in a gradually worsening fiscal crisis that left it at the mercy of its foreign creditors but also failed to offer it any real long-term security against the Russian threat.

Pan-Slavism

Despite its defeat in the Crimean War, Russia had not abandoned its efforts to assume a dominant position in the Balkans or to control the straits. In fact, it remained as committed as ever to exploiting Ottoman weakness to its advantage. With military threats, diplomatic pressure, and proposals to partition the empire having backfired so spectacularly in 1853, however, St. Petersburg felt compelled to pursue a subtler strategy toward the Ottoman Empire after 1856. That new approach centered on using the increasingly popular ideology of Pan-Slavism as a stalking horse for the advancement of Russian interests. A variation of nationalism, Pan-Slavism had emerged in the mid-nineteenth century as a purported ideology of national liberation. It held that the Slavic peoples of the Balkans were groaning under the weight of oppressive and alien Ottoman rule and that they could best achieve their independence through collective action.

Pan-Slavism thus appeared to provide St. Petersburg with a powerful ideological tool it could use to advance its designs on Ottoman territory. The key was its indirect approach. Supported by a well-orchestrated Russian propaganda campaign and by substantial covert assistance, Pan-Slavism had the potential to nurture nationalist movements and, eventually, independent states among the millions of Slavs who lived in the Ottoman Empire’s Balkans territory without directly implicating St. Petersburg. As the most powerful Slavic state and as the self-proclaimed protector of the Slavic people, Russia would then be in a position to gradually assume suzerainty over these new nation-states. In other words, Pan-Slavism promised to achieve through indirect means that which Russia had been unable to secure through intimidation or outright conquest.

The Russo-Ottoman War of 1877-1878

Russia’s new approach began to pay dividends in the 1870s. Coming against the backdrop of the Ottoman government’s default on its international debt obligations, a topic we shall explore further in a moment, nationalist uprisings broke out among the Slavs of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1875 and spread to Bulgaria in April 1876. Taking advantage of the crisis, the autonomous principality of Serbia stepped up the pressure on the Sublime Porte by declaring war two months later. The tsar’s ministers were gleeful. With much of the Balkans in revolt, Russia appeared to have a golden opportunity to achieve its goal of assuming a dominant position in the region. Still, past experience suggested that St. Petersburg needed to move cautiously. Accordingly, wary of repeating the aggressive approach that had sparked the Crimean War, it refrained from taking actions that might risk provoking Paris and London and instead waited to see how the situation developed.

It did not need to wait long. Lurid press reports about the “Bulgarian Horrors,” a series of bloody attacks in which ill-disciplined Muslim irregulars massacred thousands of Bulgarian Christians, had poisoned the British and French publics against the Ottoman Empire. As a result, London and Paris were unable to provide Istanbul with diplomatic support during the crisis. Now free to act, Tsar Alexander II responded by throwing caution to the wind and declaring war on the Ottoman Empire in early 1877.

Unsurprisingly, the fighting went disastrously for the Ottomans. Despite vigorous early resistance by the sultan’s army, superior Russian forces won a series of decisive victories on the frontier and then advanced rapidly into the empire. As a result, the Sublime Porte was compelled to sue for peace in January 1878. Signed just two months later, the Treaty of San Stefano that formally ended the war reflected both Russia’s battlefield victories and the Ottoman Empire’s diplomatic isolation. By its terms, the sultan ceded substantial territory in the Caucasus and agreed to the creation of a huge, independent Bulgarian state that stretched from the Black Sea to the Aegean coast, thereby dividing the Ottoman Empire’s remaining Balkan possessions in half. More importantly, as it was well understood that Bulgaria was going to be a Russian protectorate, the treaty effectively made St. Petersburg the dominant power in the Balkans and, pivotally, gave it unimpeded access to the Mediterranean for the first time.

The Treaty of Berlin, 1878

In securing those gains, however, Russia had once more badly overplayed its hand. Its sudden expansion into the Balkans posed a serious challenge to the balance of power on which European peace rested while its newfound access to the Mediterranean threatened London’s vital communications with India via the recently opened Suez Canal. As a consequence, the earlier pattern wherein Britain and the other powers intervened to prevent Russia from dismembering the Ottoman Empire reasserted itself, his time in the form of the Congress of Berlin, an international meeting that took place in the summer of 1878 in the capital of the recently unified German Empire. Dominated by states such as Britain that wanted to rollback Russia’s recent achievements, the conference replaced the Treaty of San Stefano with a new accord, the Treaty of Berlin, that undid many of the gains that St. Petersburg had secured earlier that year. It focused largely on Bulgaria. The Treaty of Berlin dramatically reduced Bulgaria in size, made it an autonomous part of the Ottoman Empire rather than an independent state, and, to the great relief of the British government, stripped it of territory along the Aegean Sea.

These revisions were substantial, but, even with them, the events of 1877 and 1878 constituted a crushing setback for the Sublime Porte. Put simply, while the Treaty of Berlin may have eliminated the worst aspects of the Treaty of San Stefano, it also contained new and revised provisions that seriously weakened the empire. It affirmed Russia’s territorial acquisitions in the Caucasus, allowed the Habsburg Empire to occupy Bosnia-Herzegovina, imposed a stiff indemnity on Istanbul, and, most importantly, granted independence to the heretofore autonomous principalities of Montenegro, Serbia, and Romania. Meanwhile, in separate agreements, Britain took possession of Cyprus in exchange for a promise to guarantee the empire’s Middle Eastern possessions, and France acquired title to the nominally-Ottoman province of Tunisia. These losses were enormous in both territorial and, especially, demographic terms. Indeed, while half the population of the empire had lived in its European provinces prior to the crisis, thereafter, the share that lived west of the straits fell to a mere 20 percent.

The Ottoman Public Debt Administration, 1881

The Congress of Berlin had one other vital consequence: it compelled the sultanate to accept the establishment of the Ottoman Public Debt Administration (OPDA) in 1881 in exchange for a significant restructuring of the Sublime Porte’s international financial obligations. Set up in 1875 after the sultanate stopped servicing its foreign loans, the OPDA was a vast bureaucracy managed and staffed not by Ottoman officials but instead by Westerners appointed by the Sublime Porte’s international creditors. These officials, who had a mandate to ensure the continued payment of the bonds on which the empire had defaulted, controlled a significant share of the sultanate’s tax revenue. Efficiently run, its impact on the empire was decidedly mixed. On the one hand, it succeeded over the next two decades in restoring the Sublime Porte’s creditworthiness on international money markets and in substantially reducing its foreign debt. On the other, by granting its international creditors first claim on the empire’s tax revenues, it ceded an enormous degree of sovereignty to the West and turned the empire into a de facto financial colony of the European powers. Just as important, the OPDA starved the Ottoman state of the revenue it needed to construct desperately needed infrastructure and to support economic development and thus ensured that it remained locked in a position of dependency in relation to the industrial West.

The Eastern Response

The challenge that the increasingly powerful Western states posed to the Ottoman Empire shocked the sultan’s subjects and sparked a great deal of soul searching both within the empire and in the broader Muslim world. The power of the Russian army and, especially, the discipline, tactical skill, and advanced weapons of the French and British troops that had fought in Egypt during the Napoleonic Era had made abundantly clear to even the most insular of observers that the Ottoman Empire and the broader Muslim world had fallen distressingly far behind the West in technological and military terms. It was a sobering realization, one that raised a number of troubling questions. How had the heretofore weak and impoverished West overtaken the once- mighty Ottoman Empire? How could the march of history, hitherto understood to be unfolding according to a divinely-ordained plan in which the umma steadily outpaced other cultures, have gone so distressingly off course? Most pertinently, how could Muslims best respond to the challenge that the increasingly powerful and aggressive West posed?

These questions produced an enormous outpouring of thought, debate, and action over the course of the nineteenth century. Indeed, a wide variety of movements, some top-down, others populist, would emerge seeking to provide answers to these questions and a path forward for the empire and the Muslim world. The conclusions that they drew were varied, often contradictory, and, ultimately, unsuccessful in arresting the sultanate’s continued decline relative to the West. Nonetheless, by establishing patterns that later political and social movements would adopt, the ideas developed at that time would ultimately prove to be of enormous long-term significance for the development of the Middle East.

Westernizing Reforms in the Ottoman Empire: The Tanzimat Era, 1826-1876

The most important of the reform efforts of the nineteenth century was the Tanzimat program undertaken by the Ottoman state. Meaning literally “reorganization,” it was a top-down initiative designed to westernize the empire through the adoption of European economic, social, and political practices. Launched by Sultan Mahmud II (r. 1808-1839) and overseen by reform-minded bureaucrats, it was an ambitious effort, one that appeared poised during the mid-nineteenth century to thoroughly modernize the sultanate.

While the Tanzimat program did not officially begin until the 1830s, it had important antecedents in an earlier reform effort launched in response to the crushing defeats the Ottoman military had suffered at the hands of Russia in 1768-1774 and in 1787-1792. Alarmed by these reverses, reform-minded officials determined that the empire had to begin fielding modern armies organized and equipped along European lines if it wished to avoid further territorial losses. As the reformers soon realized, however, doing so was not simply a matter of changing the armed forces’ composition or its equipment. Instead, the sultanate could only maintain a modern military if it had a sophisticated and growing economy, one that could supply the advanced weapons and complex logistical systems on which contemporary warfare depended.

Increasingly, they also grasped that the modernization of the empire’s military and economic superstructure would fail absent a more fundamental, root-and-branch reform of Ottoman society. Such was the lesson that they drew from Western Europe’s recent history. It showed that the extension of civil rights and the institutionalization of social and political equality, at least for men, were necessary preconditions for a rapidly growing economy; after all, the countries that had extended such rights to their people had also been the first to industrialize.

Those legal guarantees were also prerequisites for the creation of a mass military composed of motivated soldiers. This last point was the paradoxical lesson of the Levée en Masse. By guaranteeing rights to its citizens and thus ceding power to them, the government of France had secured the loyalty of the French people and ideologically bound them to the survival of the republican state. As a result, it had been able to raise and field the huge armies of highly motivated soldiers needed to defend the revolution in the mid 1790s. The success of the Levée en Masse dramatically shaped the thinking of Ottoman reformers, while universal conscription could greatly strengthen the state, it could only be implemented if men were granted universal rights.

However, instituting universal rights would prove very tricky in the Ottoman Empire because such a legal arrangement ran counter to the structure of its society. It did so in two ways. First, according to the prevailing Ottoman system, the sultan’s subjects enjoyed varying rights and privileges depending on the group to which they belonged. The most fundamental distinction was religious: Muslims enjoyed greater status than did non-Muslims. Even among the sultan’s Muslim subjects, however, rights differed greatly. For example, while all Muslims paid lower taxes than did Christian and Jewish subjects, some, most notably the Janissaries and certain guild members, were exempt from paying taxes altogether. Second, individuals in this system did not typically interact directly with the central state; instead, intermediary groups, be they millets, guilds, religious orders, etc., mediated between their members and the central government. For example, a Greek Christian would pay taxes to a local tax farmer and would abide by a legal system administered and enforced by the Orthodox Church. The individual in question would thus have no direct dealings with the central government; instead, the multezim to whom that person remitted taxes and the Greek Orthodox ecclesiastical officials who oversaw the legal system under which he or she lived would indirectly connect them to the Sublime Porte.

Since these intermediary groups accorded their members disparate privileges, instituting the universal rights that reformers hoped would bind people to the state required, as a first step, that the Sublime Porte abolish those bodies or eliminate their legal standing. Once it had done so, the state could then build direct relationships with its people, particularly with the sultan’s heretofore socially and legally inferior non- Muslim subjects, and grant them the civil liberties that the reformers believed would ensure their loyalty. Eliminating the empire’s many corporate bodies would not be an easy task, however. Those groups were deeply embedded in the structure of Ottoman society and had leaders that would staunchly oppose any change that threatened to reduce their authority.

Military Reforms: the “Auspicious Event,” 1826

One group in particular promised to bitterly resist the reform efforts: the Janissaries. A serious problem for the Sublime Porte for some time, the Janissaries had become a millstone around the neck of the Ottoman Empire by the turn of the nineteenth century. They were not only militarily ineffective, but, worse, they had fueled instability by deposing sultans and by using their location adjoining the palace to repeatedly block any meaningful efforts to reform the government or the military. Indeed, they would play a leading part in crushing an effort to create a new, modern corps called the Jadid, or New Order Army, that reform-minded officials hoped would give the empire a force that could fight European armies on an equal footing.

Launched in the 1790s under the direction of Sultan Selim III (r. 1789-1807), the New Order Army was an experimental force that fought using modern European weapons, tactics, and discipline. Small in size, it proved its worth when it managed to stand toe-to-toe with Napoleon’s elite troops in Egypt in 1799. In fact, it performed so well against the French that Selim III and his ministers ordered the New Order Army’s expansion. Unfortunately for the reformers, the Janissaries did not share their enthusiasm for the Nizam-I Jadid. They had grudgingly tolerated the New Order Army when it had been a small, experimental force, but they feared that its growth would cost them their dominant political position and thus were determined to prevent its expansion. Accordingly, in conjunction with other conservative forces, the Janissaries rose up in rebellion in 1807.

After deposing and killing Selim III, they made certain that there would be no further attempts to reform the military by compelling the new sultan, Mustafa IV (r. 1807-1808), to disband the New Order Army. The successful uprising demoralized the reformers. Having seen firsthand what Western soldiers were capable of, they believed that the empire could only stave off its enemies if it too possessed a modern army such as the Nizam-I Jadid. In their eyes, therefore, the Janissary revolt had not merely set the Ottoman military back for decades but had also enormously complicated the Sublime Porte’s efforts to navigate a rapidly worsening diplomatic environment. The uprising did come with a silver lining, however: it clarified the initial step that the reformers needed to take if they wished to achieve a broad restructuring of the Ottoman government. That is, the events surrounding Selim III’s deposition demonstrated that the first move in any consequential reform effort would have to be the elimination of the Janissary corps. Until it had been eradicated, no meaningful restructuring of the empire was possible.

This destruction finally came to pass in the mid 1820s as a result of careful planning on the part of Sultan Mahmud II and his advisors. Aware that the qualitative gap between the armies of the Ottoman Empire and those of the Western powers was continuing to widen, Mahmud II had for some time hoped to restart Selim III’s military reform program. Recalling what had happened to his predecessor, however, he grasped that he needed to move very carefully lest he incite the Janissaries and their supporters. The new military modernization initiative that he announced in 1826 thus called not for the creation of a new, competing force like the Nizam-I Jadid but instead for the gradual restructuring of the Janissary corps itself along European lines. In other words, it seemed to be a compromise proposal that promised to finally provide the empire with a modern army while simultaneously permitting the Janissaries to retain their privileged political position. Even this moderate proposal did not sit well with the corps, however. Complaining that the new training regimen was contrary to their traditional methods, the Janissaries responded by once again rising up in revolt. It seemed like an inauspicious beginning to the reform program. Indeed, to the casual observer, it appeared that Mahmud II’s effort to modernize the military had begun unravelling even before it started.

However, the sultan and his advisors were unfazed by the Janissaries’ latest rebellion. Aware that the soldiers were likely to resist the restructuring program, the reformers had quietly laid the groundwork for a military operation against them should the need arise. Well in advance, they had rallied key groups and institutions to their side in order to ensure that they had support for the move against the corps. More importantly, before announcing the reform proposal, the sultans’ advisors had deployed to the palace a substantial force of dependable soldiers that had been secretly trained and equipped with modern European weapons. Then, using the revolt as a pretext, the reformers ordered the loyal soldiers to mount a sudden assault on the corps’ barracks. It was an enormous success. Making liberal use of modern cannons, the sultan’s troops killed 6,000 Janissaries in a mere twenty-one minutes and reduced their barracks, the physical manifestation of the Janissaries’ power, to a smoldering ruin. By nightfall, the “‘Auspicious Event,’” as the assault soon came to be known, had completely eradicated the corps. The road to reform now lay open.

The reformers moved quickly to take advantage. Unsurprisingly, they began by aggressively pushing forward with their military modernization scheme. Over the next few decades, they dramatically increase the size of the central government’s army and rebuilt it along European lines. As a result, Ottoman soldiers were soon wearing Western-style uniforms, training in accordance with the most up-to-date military doctrines, and going into battle equipped with modern weapons.

Mahmud II and his advisors had only gotten started. Determined to push forward with the more fundamental changes that they believed the empire needed, they followed the destruction of the Janissaries by launching a series of social, economic, and political reforms. These included greater central government control over the provinces, a census conducted in 1830-1831 that permitted the treasury to assert control over the collection of taxes, and the reorganization of the bureaucracy along modern, European lines through the creation of new departments including the ministries of finance, foreign relations, and interior.

They also instituted far-reaching changes to the laws that governed how men could dress, a move that constituted the first step in the elimination of social distinctions between groups. Traditionally, the government had enforced a complex series of sartorial laws that visibly differentiated people according to their rank and status. These required the sultan’s subjects to wear clothing that indicated their religious affiliation and class status and included a series of tortuously complex rules about the type, size, and color of turbans that each rank of Ottoman official could wear. Seeking to move the empire toward a system of greater equality, Mahmud II ordered that the existing sartorial laws be superseded in 1829 with new regulations that imposed a common dress code designed to obscure social and political hierarchies and to undermine group identity. Central to this effort was the replacement of the myriad turbans that officials had worn with a new type of hat, the fez, that men of any rank or religion could wear.

Rose Chamber Edict, 1839

The reform effort took a major step forward in 1839 when Sultan Abdulmejid I (r. 1839-1861) issued the Rose Chamber Edict. This proclamation formally inaugurated the Tanzimat Era by promising a comprehensive array of reforms. These included the replacement of tax farming with a fair system of direct taxation, the promulgation of laws guaranteeing the security of life and property, the establishment of an equitable system of military conscription, and the creation of an efficient bureaucracy. Importantly, the promised provisions were universal in nature and thus bound the government to legally and socially emancipate the sultan’s millions of non-Muslim subjects. The Rose Chamber Edict did not itself carry the force of law; instead, it merely affirmed that the government would soon pass such legislation. Nonetheless, by committing the state to a sweeping program of reform aimed at erasing the legal privileges enjoyed by the different intermediary bodies, the proclamation marked a watershed moment in the empire’s history and ushered in a period of rapid change.

Under the direction of the central bureaucracy, which emerged as the dominant political force during the Tanzimat Era, the Sublime Porte followed with a series of reforms in the 1840s and early 1850s aimed at remaking the empire’s social, political, and economic systems along the lines articulated in the Rose Chamber Edict. In the social realm, the government instituted mixed commercial courts for hearing cases involving people from different confessional groups, drew up plans for a system of compulsory, secular education centered on a curriculum that stressed loyalty to the state, and replaced the term dhimmi with the designation “non-Muslim Ottoman,” thereby blurring the previously sharp legal distinction between Muslims and non- Muslims. In economics, it sought to effect greater growth by introducing paper money, by stabilizing the value of the currency, by adopting the practice of state budgeting, and by enacting a new commercial code based on French law that included provisions for bankruptcy and partnerships. Politically, finally, it adopted a national flag and a national anthem as unifying symbols, established the first post offices in the empire, and sought to exert greater central control over the provinces.

Hatti-i Humayun, 1856

Issued in 1856, a second statement of intent extended and clarified the Rose Chamber Edict. Though the reformers enthusiastically supported it, the announcement’s genesis lay not in their hopes for further restructuring but instead in Britain’s insistence on the issuance of a more concrete elaboration of the new rights that the sultan’s subjects were to enjoy. Two issues drove London to call for a new declaration. First, the British government was keenly aware that continued discrimination along religious lines abetted St. Petersburg’s ability to use its claim to be the protector of Orthodox Christians to stir up instability in the Balkans. Second, as in other Western states, popular opinion in Britain was increasingly dissatisfied with the continued second-class status of Ottoman Christians and had begun to demand that the British government pressure the Sublime Porte to move forward with the reforms it had promised in 1839. Accordingly, shortly before the Crimean War came to an end, London made both admission into the Concert of Europe and continued British diplomatic support of the empire contingent on the issuance of a new statement that would articulate the rights that the Rose Chamber Edict had promised to non-Muslims.

In response, the reformers who dominated the Ottoman bureaucracy pushed the sultan to issue a follow-up edict in 1856, the Hatti-i Humayun, that focused on articulating the new legal and social position that the empire’s Christian and Jewish minorities would henceforth enjoy. It guaranteed religious freedom, explicitly opened civil-service employment and schools to non-Muslims, promised the abolition of the death penalty for Muslims who converted to Christianity or Judaism, ended the jizya, and, most notably, made non-Muslims subject to conscription for the first time. As important, the edict marked the point at which the sultanate replaced its traditional embrace of Sunni Islam as a means of legitimating the government with Ottomanism, a new ideology designed to counter the centrifugal force of nationalism through the promotion of loyalty to the Ottoman state on the basis of universal equality.

The Hatti-i Humayun marked another important step in the empire’s reform efforts. However, it is important to understand that many of its provisions were not as sweeping as they may have appeared at first look. The ban on the death penalty for apostasy on the part of Muslims was symbolically important, for example, but of little practical consideration in light of the fact that the Ottoman government and religious hierarchy had long tolerated conversion to Judaism or Christianity. More importantly, the elimination of the jizya and the expansion of the draft to include non-Muslims turned out to be largely cosmetic. It is true that the edict expanded conscription to encompass Christians and Jews; however, the Hatti-i Humayun also included a provision permitting non-Muslims to pay an annual exemption tax that released them from the obligation to serve. Both the Ottoman government and the empire’s religious minorities embraced this loophole. Keen to avoid serving in the sultan’s army, non-Muslims were only too happy to pay the exemption tax. Though securing large numbers of committed recruits was a key aim of the reform program , the Ottoman government was perpetually in such desperate financial straits that it was more than willing to forego soldiers in exchange for tax revenue. In practical terms, the Hatti-i Humayun resulted in the perpetuation of the jizya system, the payment of a tax in lieu of military service, albeit as a voluntary arrangement and under a new name.

The limits of the Hatti-i Humayun were also evident in the fact that many Ottoman subjects saw little improvement in their rights or legal standing as a result of the reform effort. This reality was most apparent with regard to Muslim women. While they did gain access to education thanks to the Hatti-i Humayun, they saw no liberalization to their sartorial code and continued to face legal action when dressed in a manner that the state deemed too revealing. Worse, the gradual adoption of secular laws based on Western codes came at the cost of many of the property rights that Muslim women had traditionally enjoyed under Islamic law.

Still, these important caveats aside, the Hatti-i Humayun and the other Tanzimat reforms were of enormous consequence thanks to the fact that they mounted a direct challenge to the corporate structure of Ottoman society. The embrace of universal, individual rights and the effort to establish a direct connection between the state and its subjects squarely undermined the authority of the guilds, millets, and religious orders. Likewise, the related efforts to eliminate tax farming and to assert central control over outlying parts of the empire weakened the position of the local notables and provincial governors who had long mediated between the Sublime Porte and the people of the provinces. Finally, the guarantee of religious freedom that was inherent in the emancipation of Jewish people and Christians and the elimination of Islam’s central social and political position in the empire eroded the privileged position that Muslims had long enjoyed and undercut the power of the ulema.

Opposition

Predictably, the Tanzimat reforms generated hostile reactions from those who lost status and privilege. Muslims were the most vocal in complaining about them. Ordinary Muslims protested the relative decline that the changes brought to their social standing, while the ulema criticized the gradual displacement of Islamic law by secular legal codes and condemned the idea of social equality between Muslims and dhimmi. As one conservative religious scholar declared shortly after the issuance of the 1856 edict, “‘[f]or Muslims this is a day to weep and moan.’” However Muslims were not alone in complaining about the Hatti-i Humayun. Provincial governors and rural notables also bitterly fought what they correctly saw as a threat to their autonomy and wealth. Perhaps surprisingly, even the leaders of the millets, bodies whose members clearly stood to gain, contested the Tanzimat. What explains their hostility? Why did they oppose a reform effort that sought to enhance the rights of the empire’s non- Muslims? They did so for reasons of naked self-interest. Jealous of their authority, they demanded that the state refrain from directly granting new rights to individuals and called on it to instead apply the new privileges through the millets, an arrangement that would have permitted them to maintain the power that they wielded as intermediaries between the central government and the communities they had long overseen.

Assessment

In the face of this opposition, how effective was the reform program at restructuring the empire along Western lines and at building a new sense of Ottoman identity? While it certainly had its successes, in the end the results were at best mixed. On the one hand, the reform effort had succeeded in destroying the Janissaries, dramatically improved the military, and modernized the central bureaucracy. Of pivotal importance, it had also helped to solidify British support against both the internal threat that Mehmet Ali posed from Egypt and the external challenge that Russia presented. On the other hand, many of the reforms failed to produce the intended results owing to a combination of poor execution and externally imposed limits. For example, the effort to provide universal, compulsory education stumbled due to the lack of qualified teachers. Similarly, attempts to foster the development of a modern economy foundered in the face of the Capitulations and the low import duties that the European powers had compelled the empire to accept in exchange for their diplomatic support.

Most importantly, the Tanzimat movement had failed spectacularly in achieving that which had emerged as the empire’s most pressing reform goal: winning the allegiance of its non-Muslim population. Despite the government’s efforts, neither the reform program nor the Ottomanist ideology that the reformers had promoted with such vigor found traction with the sultan’s non-Muslim subjects. The vast majority were either unmoved by the Sublime Porte’s efforts to win their loyalty or had fallen under the influence of one of the nationalist ideologies that the new, ethnically defined states of the Balkans had begun promoting in hopes of winning the loyalties of their co- nationalists who still lived under the sultan’s rule. By the 1870s, in other words, no promise to rationalize the tax code, to reform the legal system, or even to grant universal rights and equality to all subjects could persuade the vast majority of the empire’s remaining Christian subjects to express a sense of loyalty toward an empire that many were ambivalent about and that a growing number wished above all else to leave. The response to the Sublime Porte’s revocation of the provision permitting non- Muslims to purchase exemptions from conscription in 1908 made the failure of both the reformers’ integrationist program and their promotion of Ottomanist ideology emphatically clear. Rather than embracing their newfound rights or accepting the responsibilities that went with them, tens of thousands of the sultan’s Christian and Jewish subjects responded to the prospect of serving in the Ottoman military by promptly emigrating to the Americas.

The Young Ottomans

Mounting frustration with the limited success and undemocratic nature of the top-down Tanzimat program led to the emergence a competing reform effort known as the Young Ottomans. Originating in the 1860s, this new movement was composed of a loose coalition of liberal Muslim intellectuals, journalists, and writers. Disappointed by the inability of the Tanzimat reforms to secure the empire, they came to a seemingly simple but also hugely influential idea: that Islam and constitutional democracy were complementary and could be integrated. This they proceeded to do. They merged the ideas of Western Enlightenment thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) and Montesquieu (1689-1755) with Islam’s social-justice values and the Qurʾan’s embrace of shura, or consultation, which they interpreted as a divine endorsement of Islamic democracy. The result was a blueprint for a government that was both democratic and Islamic. One, the Young Ottomans believed, that could provide the just rule that the people of the empire sought even as it demonstrated to the predatory West that the sultanate was a modern state capable of self-rule rather than a premodern one requiring neo-colonial tutelage.

The Young Ottomans did not need to wait long to see their dream of a constitutional order take form. A succession of problems in the mid-1870s undermined the legitimacy of the existing government and opened the door to the kind of sweeping political changes that they proposed. The first crisis was a fiscal one. After a serious drought in Anatolia and the onset of a global depression in 1873, tax receipts fell to the point that the Ottoman treasury could no longer service the empire’s massive debt obligations. As a result, to the shock of European governments and domestic investors alike, the Sublime Porte went into default in October 1875. Meanwhile, as we have seen, the concurrent outbreak of nationalist revolts in the Balkans plunged the Ottoman Empire’s European territories into a complex diplomatic and military crisis that Russia seemed well positioned to exploit. Finally, Sultan Abdulaziz (r. 1861-1876) further complicated what was an already difficult situation by attempting to use the Balkan revolts as a pretext to end the Tanzimat and to reassert sultanic absolutism. Coming on the heels of the other crises, Abdulaziz’s brazen move led the reformers in the bureaucracy to conclude that they had to take extreme actions. Accordingly, they joined forces with the Young Ottomans to launch a coup in early 1876 that put Abdulaziz’s brother, Abdülhamit II (r. 1876-1909), on the throne.

Now firmly in control of the state, the Young Ottomans and their allies wasted little time in remaking the empire along liberal, democratic lines. They started by drafting and putting in place a constitution that reflected both Islamic values and recent Western political science. Based on Belgium’s constitution, it transformed the empire into a constitutional monarchy, albeit one that lodged substantial power in the sultan’s hands. With the increasingly grim Balkans crisis as a backdrop, they followed by holding elections for a bicameral parliament formally known as the General Assembly. It began meeting, to great fanfare, meeting in March 1877. Thus, despite the manifold crises of the mid 1870s, democracy appeared to be taking root in the empire.

Unfortunately for the reformers, Abdülhamit II was a staunch opponent of constitutional democracy. Indeed, he had begun plotting a return to absolutist rule from the moment he took the throne. It did not take long for him to put his plan into action. Armed with sweeping emergency powers accorded him by the very constitution he sought to overthrow, the sultan took advantage of the war that had broken out with Russia to prorogue the assembly and to suspend the constitution in February 1878. Firmly in control of the capital, he followed by intimidating the Tanzimat reformers and the Young Ottomans into accepting what amount to a self-coup, or autogolpe. Thus, in less than a year’s time, the Ottoman Empire’s Islamic-based, liberal constitutional government, the dream of the Young Ottomans, had been replaced by a return to sultanic despotism.

Despite the failure of the movement in the short term, the Young Ottomans proved to be enormously influential in the long run both in the capital and in the broader Middle East. Indeed, while their ideas played no role whatsoever in shaping the structure of the government or the spirit of the laws under Abdülhamit II, their vision of an Islamic democracy would remain the starting point for most political thinking inside the empire for decades thereafter. Most notably, it would inform the political views articulated by an important underground resistance movement called the Committee for Union and Progress (CUP) that we will examine in the next chapter.

Westernizing Reforms in Egypt

The Tanzimat bureaucrats and the Young Ottomans were not the only top-down Westernizing reformers in the empire in the nineteenth century. In fact, they were not even the first. Several decades earlier, a separate modernization effort had begun in the autonomous Ottoman province of Egypt, first under the direction of its Albanian-born governor, Mehmet Ali and later under his grandson, Ismail (r. 1863-1879). For a time, their restructuring effort appeared to be enormously successful and even seemed to outdo the central government’s Tanzimat modernization program. However, Mehmet Ali and Ismail’s achievements ultimately proved to be ephemeral. Not only did their reform effort flounder in the face of concerted European opposition, but, worse, it paved the way for Britain to take control of Egypt on an ostensibly temporary but ultimately permanent basis in 1882.

Mehmet Ali

Mehmet Ali’s meteoric rise occurred in the aftermath of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798. Deployed to the province as an officer in 1801, he took part in the Anglo- Ottoman military operations that ended the French occupation. However, Mehmet Ali did not leave the province following the French defeat. Instead, sensing opportunity in the power vacuum that followed the evacuation of British troops in 1803, he arranged to remain in Egypt. Making skillful use of both his considerable diplomatic talents and the 6,000-man military force he commanded, he then mounted a successful bid to compel the powerful Mamluk landowners to accept him as the province’s new ruler. He followed in 1805 by securing Selim III’s reluctant acknowledgement of him as governor. Finally, six years later, he removed the last meaningful restraint on his rule when he had his soldiers massacre the Mamluks while they were attending a ceremony in the capital (an incident that would inspire the Auspicious Event).

With the Mamluks out of the way, Mehmet Ali was now free to pursue his goals unhindered. They were ambitious. He wanted nothing less than to break with the Ottoman Empire and establish a powerful, dynastic state centered on Egypt. A shrewd man, he understood that the task he had set himself was a daunting one. Achieving independence from the sultan and maintaining it in the face of the challenge that the rising European powers posed would require a strong army and navy. In turn, such a military would demand an efficient central bureaucracy and a strong economy, one that was not merely able to generate the tax revenue that the state needed but that was also sophisticated enough to produce the uniforms, supplies, and state-of-the art weapons that the army and navy required. In other words, Mehmet Ali could only achieve his political objectives if he first modernized and industrialized Egypt.

He moved aggressively to do so from the moment he eliminated the Mamluks, starting with seeking new sources of revenue to fund his ambitious program. He boosted government tax receipts by replacing the iltizim tax farms with direct levies and by imposing taxes on Egypt’s many awqaf, despite the fact that endowed land traditionally enjoyed tax-exempt status. He followed by establishing state monopolies over the sale of key agricultural products including wheat, sugar, and, of special importance, the high-quality, long-staple cotton that Egypt produced in abundance and that Europe’s textile mills voraciously demanded. To maximize the state’s take, he bought these crops from peasants at fixed, low prices and then sold them internationally at higher, market-rate ones. These initiatives, particularly the export monopolies, were successful. Thanks in part to the high price of grain during the Napoleonic Wars, Mehmet Ali’s government was soon collecting substantial amounts of revenue.

He used that income to support an aggressive industrialization program. He established workshops that could manufacture goods that the province had previously imported like rope, metal items, and chemicals, and he hired European experts to help establish the schools, technical institutions, and military academies needed to produce the skilled workers and soldiers on whom his ambitions depended. More importantly, he lavished funds on a new textile industry that he hoped would be able to compete with the more mature ones in Britain, Belgium, and France. Boosted by governmental support and cheap, state-subsidized cotton, it expanded rapidly. Indeed, by 1840, the Egyptian textile industry was producing more than 1.2 million items of calico per year. Finally, he tapped the state’s new revenue sources to construct the workshops and shipyards required to make the uniforms, tents, muskets, cannons, and warships that his modernized military would require.

Now adequately equipped and supported, it quickly proved its worth. At the sultan’s request, he deployed troops to the Hijaz from 1811 to 1818 to reconquer Mecca and Medina from the Wahhabis, a puritanical Arabian religious group that had seized the Holy Places in 1806. Well-armed and disciplined, his soldiers soon drove the Wahhabis back into the desert; as a reward, the sultan permitted him to add the Hijaz to the territory that he governed. Not long thereafter, he further expanded his fledgling empire by invading and annexing Sudan.

Changes in the Egyptian military’s system of recruitment soon made his army even more powerful. Beginning in 1822, Mehmet Ali abandoned his earlier reliance on traditional slave soldiers in favor of conscripting Egyptian peasants into a new, French- trained army patterned after Selim III’s Nizam-I Jadid. It was a fearsome and effective force. Equipped with modern weapons, his disciplined army of Egyptian soldiers was, without question, the most powerful military force in the Middle East.

Indeed, it was so much more capable than the as-yet reformed Ottoman military that Sultan Mahmud II felt compelled in 1824 to offer Mehmet Ali’s son, Ibrahim (r. 1848), control of Cyprus, Crete, and the Morea in exchange for Egyptian assistance in suppressing the Greek Revolt. In the short term, the intervention proved successful. Under Ibrahim’s effective-if-brutal command, Mehmet Ali’s powerful military made short work of the Greek rebels and quickly returned the region to Ottoman rule. However, the very success of the Egyptian army proved to be its undoing. Ibrahim’s victory over the Greeks alarmed Russia, France, and England, which, for different reasons, supported Greek independence. The result, as noted earlier, was Western intervention in the conflict on the Greek side and, ultimately, the Battle of Navarino in 1827 that cost Mehmet Ali the modern navy that he had so painstakingly constructed.

Navarino soon produced a serious crisis in the Ottoman Empire. Bitter over the destruction of his fleet, Mehmet Ali demanded that the sultan compensate him for his losses by granting him control of Syria. By that point, however, Mahmud II had become leery of his nominal subordinate’s rising power and was determined to prevent him from further expanding his territory. Wagering that the Greek campaign had weakened the Egyptian army to the point that the Ottoman military could defeat it, he consequently rebuffed Mehmet Ali’s demand. Furious, the latter responded by ordering Ibrahim to invade Syria in 1831. It soon became clear that Mahmud II had miscalculated badly. With the Egyptian army having long since fully recovered from the fighting in Greece, Ibrahim quickly overran Syria before pressing on with an invasion of Asia Minor. There followed several months of fruitless negotiations after which Ibrahim decisively crushed a much-larger Ottoman force near Konya in December 1832. The battle dramatically raised the stakes. It not only put the integrity of the Ottoman Empire into question but also transformed what had been an internal conflict into a full-blown international crisis.

With Britain paralyzed at that time by domestic political issues, Russia took the lead in resolving what came to be known as the First Egyptian Crisis. Believing that a weak Ottoman Empire was more conducive to its territorial ambitions than a dynamic and powerful Egyptian state, St. Petersburg deployed troops to protect Istanbul and compelled Mehmet Ali to order Ibrahim to withdraw from central Anatolia. The war thus ended with the sultan still firmly in power and with nearly all of Asia Minor remaining under direct imperial control. Still, the settlement was a highly favorable one for Mehmet Ali. In exchange for halting his advance on the capital, the agreement he had negotiated with St. Petersburg added Syria, Crete, and the Anatolian province of Adana to his burgeoning empire-within-an-empire.

Neither Mehmet Ali nor the Ottoman government were satisfied with the terms of the Russian-brokered agreement, however, and their competing efforts to alter it would produce another confrontation, the Second Egyptian Crisis, in 1839. Mehmet Ali set it in motion. Intent on securing a complete break with the empire, he offered £3 million to the sultan in May 1838 in exchange for full independence. Unwilling to countenance what would have been the loss of nearly all of the Ottoman Empire’s Arab territories, Mahmud II declined his nominal subordinate’s offer. Instead, three months later, his government countered the Egyptian ruler’s proposal by agreeing to the Treaty of Balta Liman with London. On the surface, it appeared to be little more than a one-sided economic agreement that came at great cost to the sultanate. A monument to free trade, it banned monopolies throughout the empire and thus fully opened Ottoman markets to British merchants.

However, those economic giveaways came with substantial political benefits for the Sublime Porte. Analyzed on that level, in fact, the agreement revealed itself to be a peculiarly shrewd move on Istanbul’s part, one that would greatly weaken Mehmet Ali’s position. It promised to do so in two ways. First, as its provisions applied to Egypt, which remained, legally, a part of the Ottoman Empire, the agreement required Mehmet Ali to abolish the export monopolies on which his military power rested. Second, since British merchants operating in Egypt would only benefit from the treaty’s economic concessions if that province formally remained part of the Ottoman Empire, the agreement ensured that London would continue to back the Sublime Porte’s efforts to prevent the Egyptian ruler from gaining independence.

Now confident that it could count on Britain’s support, Mahmud II’s government moved to force a crisis by attacking Syria in 1839. Militarily, the invasion was an utter disaster for the empire. Disciplined and better equipped, a much-smaller Egyptian force thoroughly routed the Ottoman army in June 1839. Diplomatically, however, it was a rousing success. Just as Ottoman officials had hoped, concerns about the possible dismemberment of the empire pushed the British government to intervene to end the crisis. With the support of several other European states, it gave Mehmet Ali an ultimatum in the summer of 1840 thinly disguised as a choice. If he agreed to accept the sultan’s nominal authority, his position would become hereditary and he would retain control of southern Syria; if he instead pressed on with the war, Britain would instead compel him to immediately return all of Syria to sultanic rule.

Mehmet Ali badly miscalculated when faced with this order. Determined to achieve real independence rather than mere autonomy, he defied London’s demand and continued his war with the sultan. The vast gap between Egypt’s military power and that of the rapidly industrializing European states quickly made clear the futility of this decision, however. The British government promptly responded by ordering the Royal Navy to sever the supply lines on which Ibrahim’s troops depended for food and ammunition, thus exposing them to defeat by Ottoman forces. Mehmet Ali had no answer to London’s move. Accordingly, he reluctantly agreed to pull his soldiers out of Syria in early 1841.

The Egyptian ruler had suffered a huge diplomatic setback in the Second Egyptian Crisis. It is true that he had secured an agreement in which the sultan formally recognized him and his descendants as the governors of Egypt. However, that concession had come with a stiff price tag: Egyptian control of Syria and the abandonment of his cherished dream of independence. Worse, defeat imposed a second-order cost of vastly greater consequence. As he was well aware, the continuation of Ottoman suzerainty over Egypt meant that he and his successors would have to abide by the terms of the empire’s foreign agreements including, most importantly, the Treaty of Balta Liman. As such, he was compelled in the wake of the Second Egyptian Crisis to dismantle the state monopolies and to drastically lower the export duties that had constituted the financial foundation on which his army, his program of industrialization, and, ultimately, his power, rested. As a result, Mehmet Ali’s state-centered modernization program lurched to a halt in the early 1840s.

Scholars have long been divided over the efficacy of his top-down development plan. Some argue that his forced-industrialization program, particularly the textile industry that he built, produced impressive results and that Mehmet Ali’s development scheme was on track to industrialize Egypt. That it failed was only because the European states denied Mehmet Ali’s government the right to erect protective tariffs or to subsidize its domestic production. However, others are considerably less impressed with Mehmet Ali’s achievements, contending that the Egyptian textile industry’s reliance on expensive animal labor rather than coal or other power sources suggests that the province did not experience a genuine industrial revolution in the 1820s and 1830s. More broadly, it is argued that the failure of Mehmet Ali’s industrialization plan stemmed from internal shortcomings rather than from European efforts to kill a potential competitor in its cradle and that it would have failed regardless of Western actions.

Whether Egypt was doomed from the start or undermined by the industrial states, the outcome was the same: Mehmet Ali’s plan to turn his state into a military and industrial power ground to a halt in the wake of the Second Egyptian Crisis. Indeed, within just a few years, Egypt’s powerful military had shrunk to a shell of its former self. More importantly, the province’s once-rapidly growing, proto-industrial economy had been transformed into a colonial appendage of Britain that supplied its factories with raw materials and served as a market for its finished goods.

Khedive Ismail

However Mehmet Ali’s dream of turning Egypt into a modern state was not completely dead. Elevated to the rank of khedive, a Persian title analogous to the term ‘viceroy,’ his grandson Ismail launched a second, top-down effort to transform the province into an economic power beginning in the early 1860s. His achievements were briefly dazzling and appeared for a time to have put Egypt on a path that would soon see it join the ranks of the world’s economically developed states. In the end, however, his ambitious program proved to be a spectacular and costly failure. Mismanagement and, more importantly, the staggering foreign debt on which his modernization scheme rested would not only prevent Egypt from transforming into an industrial power but would also pave the way for Britain to turn the province into a de facto colony in 1882.

Ismail was a man of enormous ambition. Though he did not seek to make Egypt a great military power as his grandfather had, he shared his predecessor’s desire to dramatically modernize its economy and to achieve political independence from both Istanbul and the increasingly rapacious European powers. Accordingly, he embarked on a massive, state-led development program. To increase agricultural exports, he ordered the government to construct numerous new port facilities and to dig thousands of miles of irrigation canals. Meanwhile, to end the country’s dependence on low-margin agricultural exports, he expanded Egypt’s rail network, built huge numbers of schools, and subsidized industries like sugar refining, paper milling, and cotton processing. Finally, to give the country the sheen of modernity, he invested huge sums into a project to transform Cairo into a European-style city. He constructed wide, straight boulevards, outfitted fashionable neighborhoods with gas lighting, and laid out a series of new parks and public gardens. He also ordered the erection of a new palace, an opera house, and a national theater.

These were important projects to Ismail, but they paled in comparison to the centerpiece of his modernization scheme: the Suez Canal. The waterway was the fulfillment of an age-old dream to connect the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea at the point where Egypt proper meets the Sinai Peninsula. The mid-nineteenth century seemed a propitious time to finally realize that vision. With the globe becoming more and more economically connected thanks to the industrialized states’ seemingly insatiable demand for raw materials, the proposed canal promised to be well utilized and immensely profitable. However, Egypt did not possess the capital and technical knowledge to construct the waterway itself. Accordingly, Ismail’s predecessor, Said (r. 1854- 1863), had entered into a joint venture with a French consortium under the direction of the famed engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps (1805-1894) to dig the canal. By the terms of the agreement, the French would supply capital, equipment, and technical knowledge in exchange for a 56 percent share of the canal while the Egyptian government would provide land and corvée labor, uncompensated work by Egyptian peasants, and would retain the remaining 44 percent stake. Construction began under de Lesseps’s direction in 1856. Completed in 1869, the canal contributed enormously to the growth in world trade that occurred in the late-nineteenth century. Almost overnight, it massively cut the cost to ship goods between Europe and South, Southeast, and East Asia and opened the east coast of Africa to European imperial penetration and control.

It also gave Ismail the opportunity to present himself as a modernizer and global leader. He did so most famously in 1869 when he celebrated the canal’s completion by hosting the cultural and political elite of Europe at a lavish series of parties, ceremonies, fireworks displays, and feasts highlighted by a performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Rigoletto and by a ceremonial procession of ships headed by the French Empress Eugénie’s (1826-1920) royal yacht. It was an impressive series of events and seemed to suggest that, under Ismail’s leadership, Egypt was poised to join the ranks of the world’s developed states.

While the khedive’s economic-development program appeared enormously impressive for a time, it ultimately proved untenable. What explained its failure? At root the problem was fiscal. Thanks to the interplay of three related issues, the Egyptian government would find itself facing a serious budget crisis at the end of the 1860. First, corrupt and ill-suited to overseeing the flood of initiatives that the khedive rushed to undertake, the Egyptian government proved incapable of either completing projects in a timely manner or keeping them under budget. Second, Ismail himself was an infamous spendthrift who lived lavishly and who spent extravagantly on edifices such as the Opera House and the Egyptian Museum in Cairo that were designed not to be financially self-sustaining but instead to boost his international standing.

These factors were surely important, but it was ultimately the means by which Ismail had financed his economic-development program that pushed his government to the fiscal brink. As we have seen, the Treaty of Balta Liman had barred Egypt from imposing export duties or from operating state-owned agricultural monopolies. As such, the treaty left Ismail with no option but to underwrite his aggressive modernization scheme by securing loans on international money markets using the tax proceeds of future cotton crops as collateral. At first, the terms were very good. Thanks to the North’s blockade of the Confederacy during the American Civil War (1861-1865), the value of Egypt’s cotton crop soared, and Ismail was able to borrow at very low interest rates. However, after Southern exports began to flood the market following the Union victory in 1865, cotton prices, and with them, Egypt’s tax receipts, collapsed. Thereafter, Ismail could only pay his existing debt by taking on new loans at ever-higher rates of interest. By 1870, the situation had become unsustainable. With one-third of the state’s revenue committed to servicing the debt, the Egyptian government and Ismail’s economic modernization program were teetering on the brink of bankruptcy.

The khedive responded by taking drastic actions to keep Egypt solvent. While well-intentioned, these efforts reflected short-term thinking and merely served to push his government into an even deeper fiscal hole. Such was certainly the case with the Muqabala Law that went into effect in 1872. It offered landowners the opportunity to receive a permanent, 50 percent reduction in their tax assessment in exchange for an immediate payment of six-years’ worth of tax revenue. Unsurprisingly, the Muqabala Law proved to be very popular with those wealthy enough to take advantage of it, and it generated a quick infusion of funds in its first few years. With equal predictability, however, it severely depressed the collection of taxes in subsequent years and thus deepened rather than eased the growing debt crisis.

Thereafter, the situation progressively worsened. By the mid 1870s, pressure from Egypt’s creditors compelled Ismail to sell Egypt’s 44 percent stake in the Suez Canal to the British government. This transaction once again brought a quick injection of cash, but, like the Muqabala Law, it did so at the cost of long-term revenue and thus could only slow rather than arrest Egypt’s ongoing slide into insolvency. Finally, in 1876, the bill came due. No longer able to meet its obligations, Egypt called a moratorium on the payment of its international debts, in effect announcing that it was bankrupt.

At that point, the British and French governments intervened to ensure that their bondholders were made whole. Initially, London and Paris did so by imposing on the Egyptian government what was known as the system of Dual Control; similar to the OPDA, it was designed to ensure that the khedive’s government collected sufficient revenue to service its debts. By its terms, a British economist would serve as Egypt’s minister of finance and a Frenchman as minister of public works. Controlling Egypt’s budget, they were tasked with ensuring that it could fund its international debt, now consolidated at a rate of 7 percent. But how would they come up with the revenue to meet that obligation? They did so by imposing a biting austerity regime on the Egyptian government—one that saw wages and positions in both the bureaucracy and army savagely cut.

Ismail initially accepted this arrangement. Dependent on the European states for trade and financing, he had little choice but to comply. Chafing at the loss of power, however, he soon soured on the system of Dual Control and laid plans to exploit popular bitterness about the European-imposed austerity program to alter the terms of the agreement. He made his move in 1879 when he dissolved the cabinet and formed a new one that did not include any European ministers. He simultaneously demanded that his creditors lower the terms of Egypt’s consolidated debt to 5 percent. Unsurprisingly, these moves did not go over well in Europe. Unwilling to accept either Ismail’s challenge to their authority or a further reduction in the interest paid to French and British holders of Egypt’s debt, London and Paris refused to negotiate. Instead, they responded by pressuring Sultan Abdülhamit II to remove the khedive. Desperate at that moment for British and French support against Russia, the Ottoman ruler was quick to comply. Accordingly, the sultan deposed Ismail in 1879 in favor of the khedive’s son, Tawfiq (r. 1879-1892), who quickly reinstated the system of Dual Controls.

The ʿUrabi Revolt, 1881-1882

Even then, Egyptians continued to resist Western dominance. This time, however, opposition did not come from the political elite but instead from the officers in the Egyptian army. Furious that the austerity measures that the Dual Control government had imposed had cut their wages in half in order to satisfy the interests of European bondholders, a group of officers led by the revolt’s namesake, Colonel Ahmad ʿUrabi (1841-1911), organized a series of popular, proto-nationalist demonstrations in 1881 under the slogan “‘Egypt for the Egyptians’” aimed at compelling Tawfiq to accept a list of reforms. Their demands included the formation of a new cabinet, the approval of a new constitution, and the reconvening of the Assembly of Delegates, a heretofore weak legislative body established in 1866 that Ismail had officially ended in 1879. Facing broad popular support for the revolt, the cautious Tawfiq had no choice but to comply. As a result, by February 1882, Egypt had a constitution, an empowered legislature, and a reform-minded cabinet in which ʿUrabi himself served as minister of war.

The events of 1881 and early 1882 greatly alarmed Britain and France. ʿUrabi’s presence in the government raised the prospect that Egypt might stop meeting its debt obligations under the Dual Control system and even the possibility that it might unilaterally abolish privileges such as the Capitulations that Europeans had long enjoyed in the province. Unwilling to countenance such changes, the French and British governments responded by sending a joint fleet to Alexandria for the purpose of intimidating the Egyptians into backing down. However, the deployment failed to achieve that end. Instead, the arrival of the warships merely served to enrage the Egyptian people and to intensify the impasse between Cairo and the European states. By early July, as a result, Egypt had become a tinderbox, a country destined to burst into flames in the presence of the tiniest of sparks.

One was not long in coming. A fight between a Briton and an Egyptian in Alexandria in early July quickly transformed into a bloody riot in which over 125 Egyptians and 50 foreigners died. The British fleet, but not the French one, which had received orders from Paris to refrain from using force, responded to the incident by bombarding Alexandria on July 11, 1882, causing heavy loss of life. Three days later, British troops landed with orders to restore order and protect Western property. Though London claimed that its occupation was temporary, it made clear the following year that it intended to remain in Egypt indefinitely by sending Evelyn Baring (1841-1917), the future Lord Cromer, to assume the position of consul general, a title that only slightly disguised the fact that, he, rather than Tawfiq, was Egypt’s real ruler.

Ismail’s modernization attempts thus ended in disaster for Egypt. Economically, it had not only proven to be every bit as unsuccessful as his grandfather’s industrialization scheme but, worse, had given rapacious Western imperialists the opportunity to reduce Egypt to economic servitude. Thereafter, foreign businesses and governments owned a huge and growing share of the province’s economy including its greatest asset, the Suez Canal, and they opted to repatriate their considerable profits to Europe rather than to reinvest them in Egypt’s development. The political impact was even worse. The province may have technically remained an autonomous part of the Ottoman Empire, but, after 1882, it was in reality a British colony in all but name, one that served both as the primary artery connecting the metropole to its prized colony of India and as the nexus of London’s system of imperial defenses.

Populist Reform Movements

Not all of the Muslim reform efforts of this period were top-down ones such as those that occurred in the Ottoman capital and in Egypt. On the contrary, the nineteenth century was a time of vigorous debates among intellectuals, religious leaders, and other non-elites over how Muslims could best resolve the problems of their time, particularly the challenge posed by the West, and reclaim what they saw as the Islamic world’s rightful place as the globe’s preeminent power. These debates produced a variety of populist reform movements including two of enormous lasting influence: Wahhabism and Islamic modernism.

Wahhabism

Wahabism predated substantial European penetration of the Middle East but would come to offer an influential framework for understanding the source of Muslim weakness and for responding to the Western challenge. Its founder and namesake, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703-1792), developed its broad outlines while a religious student in Medina. While there, his teachers had exposed him to the writings of the thirteenth-and-fourteenth century Sunni theologian, Ibn Taymiyyah (1263-1328), who had argued that Muslims could regain God’s blessing in the wake of the Mongol conquest by returning to the core values and practices of the early community of believers and by purging those who refused to do so.

Drawing heavily on Ibn Taymiyyah’s ideas, Abd al-Wahhab’s new conception of Islam revolved around three broad, interrelated points. First, stressing tawhid or the oneness of God, it held that the only acceptable way to practice Islam was by focusing one’s devotion exclusively on Allah. The inclusion of any intermediary figure or practice in the act of worship, be it the intercession of the Shiʿi Imams, the popular practice of praying at the tombs of Muslim saints such as Muhammad, the veneration of Sufi pirs, or even the observance of many religious holidays, was to engage in idolatry or polytheism and was therefore shirk. Second, like Ibn Taymiyyah, Wahhabism championed the older ideology of Salafism: the idealization of the first few generations of Muslims and the belief that Islam could reform itself and end the problems of the present day only through a return to the practices of the early umma. Accordingly, Wahhabism held that all additions to the practice of Islam made after the seventh century had to be ruthlessly excised. Finally, drawing explicitly on the ideas of Ibn Taymiyyah and indirectly on Kharijism, Abd al-Wahhab’s conception of Islam maintained that God required all believers to engage in jihad against Muslims who had corrupted the religion. All who resisted the imposition of Wahhabism’s strict rules, anyone such as Shiʿa and Sufis who had added new practices to the faith, and those who practiced shirk were kafirs, or apostates, whom the umma was obliged to takfir, or excommunicate, and kill.

At first, Abd al-Wahhab’s doctrine alienated many people; indeed, he was forced to flee his hometown of Al-‘Uyana, in eastern Arabia after he had a woman stoned to death for adultery. Soon, however, his message of religious renewal through a return to the practices of the past gained a small but highly-committed following. Among them was Muhammad Ibn Saud (r. 1726-1765), the ambitious chief of a small tribe that controlled the oasis town of Dariyah in the inhospitable central region of Arabia called the Najd. Perceiving the benefits that could accrue from an alliance, the two men agreed to an arrangement in 1744 in which Ibn Saud recognized Abd al-Wahhab’s religious authority while Abd al-Wahhab acknowledged Ibn Saud’s secular power. It would prove to be a momentous agreement, one that at last gave Abd al-Wahhab the opportunity to put his religious teachings into practice.

The Wahhabi-Saudi alliance soon flourished. Under the skilled military leadership of Ibn Saud and his successor, Abdulaziz (r. 1765-1803), the zealous and disciplined Wahhabi fighters quickly won control of central Arabia. They followed by launching religiously motivated raids into Ottoman territory. In 1802, Abdulaziz’s zealous and uncompromising soldiers attacked Karbala during the festival of Ashura. Brutally sacking the city, they killed more than 2,000 Shiʿa worshippers and destroyed the Imam Hussein Shrine, the burial place of the Third Imam. More spectacularly, Saudi forces seized Mecca and Medina from the sultan four years later. There, they banned the consumption of coffee and tobacco, ordered all books other than the Qurʾan burned, and compelled men to wear beards and women to seclude themselves. They even destroyed the tombs of Muhammad and other prominent early Muslims to prevent people from worshipping at them.

Wahhabi control of Mecca and Medina posed a serious threat to the Ottoman government. Not only did it prevent the treasury from receiving substantial and much- needed tax revenues from the Hijaz, but, more importantly, it made a mockery of the Ottomans’ claim to be the protectors of the Holy Places and thus undermined the legitimacy on which the dynasty’s rule rested. Intent on nipping this new threat in the bud, the Sublime Porte responded by ordering Mehmet Ali to recapture the Hijaz and to put an end to the Wahhabi menace. Though resistance was fierce, the Egyptian ruler succeeded in doing so. His troops not only restored the Holy Places to Ottoman control in 1811 but, after further hard fighting, managed to bring the Saudi state to heel in 1818.

Despite its military defeat, however, Wahhabism remained a potent ideology. It persevered under the protection of a revived Saudi state and maintained a small but committed following of Muslims who believed that the umma had lost its way. Later, its austere, Salafist conception of Islam, previously shunned by most believers, would begin to acquire a degree of theological legitimacy. Indeed, after the turn of the twentieth century, growing numbers of Sunni Muslims would come to view it not merely as a way to purify and revive Islam but also as a prescription for how. Through scrupulous adherence to the canonical understanding of the traditions of the early umma believers could reform their society and meet the growing challenge that European imperialism posed to the Muslim world. Wahhabism thus offered a very different model for addressing the European threat than that advanced by the top-down, Westernizing reformers in Istanbul and Cairo, one that stressed that the Muslim world could parry the West not by imitating it but instead by regaining God’s trust through a return to the practices of the salaf.

Islamic Modernism

Salafism also shaped the ideas of the Islamic Modernist movement that emerged in the late-nineteenth century. Like the Wahhabi, Islamic modernists such as the Egyptian Muhammad Abduh (1849-1905) were critical of those who called for Muslims to abandon their cultural traditions in favor of the wholesale adoption of Western ideas and values. They also agreed that Muslims needed to revive the practices and principles of the first few generations of believers. However, while the Wahhabis wanted to do so in order to reestablish a society based on the conservative religious scholars’ canonical understanding of the early umma, the modernists instead sought to return to the values of the first Muslims for the purpose of freeing the contemporary Islamic world from what they saw as the suffocating tyranny of the superstitious and close-minded ulema.

Islamic Modernism’s emergence as a powerful force in the Middle East stemmed largely from the work of the Iranian-born writer and political activist Jamal al-Din al- Afghani. His early life gave no hint of his later radicalism. He received a typical Shiʿa education, followed the conventional path of an affluent Iranian, and held unremarkable views. His understanding of the world changed with great suddenness, however, when he witnessed Britain’s brutal response to the anti-imperialist Sepoy Rebellion of 1857 while a student in India. Shocked by the violence with which the British suppressed the revolt, he experienced a dramatic and sudden transformation into a committed, lifelong foe of imperialism, a change that led him to think deeply about how the Muslim world could most effectively respond to the rising threat that the West posed.

He began by first seeking to understand how Islamic civilization had fallen so far behind the West. To al-Afghani, the fact that Europe had managed to vault ahead was puzzling in light of the Muslim world’s onetime enormous lead in commerce, science, and philosophical thinking. During the Arab Empire’s golden age, he noted, Islam’s intrinsic rationalism and embrace of reason had made the Caliphate the most scientifically and intellectually advanced civilization on earth. Indeed, modern Western science and technology, however impressive it may have been, ultimately rested on earlier Muslim breakthroughs. So what had happened? How had the Islamic world fallen behind?

In al-Afghani’s view, the answer was clear. He argued that the key moment in the Muslim world’s intellectual decline had occurred in the thirteenth century when the religious scholars had exploited the crisis atmosphere that the Mongol irruption had created to entrench themselves as the unquestioned arbiters of Islam. Emphasizing taqlid, the uncritical acceptance of existing views, and calling for the closing of the gates of ijtihad, the superstitious religious scholars had effectively barred any effort to question their stifling, canonical understanding of scripture or religious law. Having secured a monopoly over how people understood the Qurʾan and the shariʿa code, and thus over what kind of thinking was permissible, they followed by imposing rigid limits on scientific and intellectual inquiry that left little room for further discoveries. As a result, al-Afghani concluded, Islamic civilization had become an intellectual backwater that remained stuck in a Medieval mindset while the once intellectually inferior Europeans had surged ahead.

How then, could the Muslim world end the monopoly that the ulema had established over understandings of the shariʿa code and the Qurʾan? Al-Afghani’s answer lay, ironically, in reexamining the values of the first three generations of believers, the source of the conservative religious scholars’ dominance of Islam. Doing so, he contended, would permit Muslims to retake control of the past from the ulema and to purify Islam of the religious scholars’ superstitious and anti-intellectual beliefs, thus permitting people to once again benefit from the religion’s intrinsic rationalism.

Al-Afghani’s leading disciple, the Egyptian legal scholar Muhammad Abduh, was particularly vociferous in arguing for a return to the Islam of the Salaf as a way of breaking the dominance of the religious scholars. To Abduh, the religion of the first Muslims was not the rigid or fixed system that the ulema described, but instead a dynamic set of vital moral and intellectual guidelines that people could revisit and reinterpret to meet the needs of each age. By retaking control of the past from the religious scholars, he continued, Muslims could reopen the gates of ijtihad and thus engage in a much-needed critical reinterpretation of the sources of religious law, the qiyas, ijma, sunna, and even the Qurʾan, aimed at bringing the shariʿa code in line with the needs of the contemporary world. Free to reason once again, Muslims would thereafter achieve the scientific and technological breakthroughs that had in earlier times been the hallmark of Islamic civilization and, in so doing, would erase the gap in power that had opened between the West and the Middle East.

The Islamic Modernists did not reserve their barbs exclusively for the ulema. Instead, they were also highly critical of advocates of Westernization such as the Tanzimat reformers, who, as we have seen, called not just for the adoption of Western technologies, but also for the wholesale restructuring of Islamic societies along European lines. The Islamic Modernists agreed that Muslims could and should adopt European technologies and build on Western science. Indeed, they were forthright in arguing that Muslims could counter the Western threat only by adopting European weapons, commercial methods, and factories. However, the modernists vigorously disagreed with the notion that the Islamic world also had to adopt European social arrangements and values. On the contrary, they insisted that Muslims needed to fit Western technologies and science strictly within the context of traditional Islamic values such as social justice. To do otherwise was to court disaster, as the calamitous efforts to remake Egypt along Western lines had made all too clear.

The Islamic modernists applied similar reasoning to political issues. Most notably, like the Young Ottomans, Abduh sought to develop a form of democracy that was rooted in Islamic values rather than in the Western ideas that had informed the Tanzimat reformers’ program. Toward that end, he recast ijma, the idea of consensus that the ulema had for so long used to uphold their monopoly over religious questions, to mean popular sovereignty, and he joined the Young Ottomans in reconceiving shura to mean self-rule; in so doing, he gave Muslims the foundation on which they could construct an indigenous system of representative government, one rooted in Islamic values rather than in the Western Enlightenment.

Conclusion

Reform efforts of the nineteenth century such as Islamic Modernism cast long shadows in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Many later movements directly or indirectly found inspiration in their ideas, and some even drew specifically on their programs. For instance, al-Afghani’s ideas were instrumental in shaping the views of Hasan al-Bana (1906-1949), the founder of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, while Abd al-Wahhab’s puritanical understanding of Islam would provide the ideological underpinnings of both the modern Saudi state and twenty-first century Jihadi groups such as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Meanwhile, the Tanzimat reformers’ top-down approach to modernization would shape the efforts of Arab nationalist such as Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser (r. 1954-1970) to remake their countries after World War II.

However, while they may have been influential on later social and political movements, the reform efforts of the nineteenth century ultimately failed to achieve the goals that their proponents had sought. They had proven unable either to end the imbalance between the Muslim Middle East and the industrializing West or to arrest the Islamic world’s continued relative decline. Indeed, despite the efforts of the reformers, European exploitation of the Ottoman Empire accelerated in the early-twentieth century. Ultimately, the inability of the nineteenth-century reform movements to halt the decline of the empire dimmed their appeal and opened the door to the emergence of new, secular-nationalist movements such as Turkism and, later, Arab nationalism that would displace the earlier reform efforts as the dominant modes of resistance to continued Western encroachment in the Middle East. It is to the appearance of these new ideologies and to the global conflict that would nurture them that we shall next turn.