HIST363: Global Perspectives on Industrialization

While it is not always considered as part of the history of European imperialism, not least because the core of its empire was never conquered by European powers, it is still appropriate to examine the decline of the Ottoman Empire alongside more conventional expressions of European empire-building.  Simply put, while the Ottoman Empire suffered from its fair share of internal problems, European imperialism played the single most significant role in undermining its sovereignty and coherence until it finally collapsed in World War I.        

By the late nineteenth century Europeans casually referred to the Ottoman Empire as the "sick man of Europe" and debated "the eastern question," namely how Ottoman territory should be divided between the great powers of Europe.  That attitude was a microcosm of the attitude of Europeans toward most of the world at the time: foreign territories were prizes for the taking, the identities of the people who lived there and the states that ruled them of little consequence thanks to the (short-lived, as it turned out) superiority of European arms and technology.  The great irony in the case of the Ottomans, however, was that the empire had been both a European great power in its own right and had once dominated its European rivals in war.  How did it become so "sick" over time?

Some of the reasons for Ottoman decline were external, most obviously the growth in European power.  The Ottomans were never able to make headway against European powers in the Indian Ocean, and as European states build their global trade empires the Ottoman economy remained largely landlocked.  Likewise, the European Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had no analog in Ottoman lands; it took until 1727 for a state-approved printing house printing secular works and there were no significant technological breakthroughs originating in the later Ottoman Empire.  

The state that proved the greatest threat to Ottoman power was Russia.  Russia went from a backwards, politically fractured region to a powerful and increasingly centralized state under its Tsar Peter the Great (whose reign is described in the previous volume of this textbook).  Peter launched the first major Russo-Ottoman war and, while he did not achieve all of his military objectives, he did demonstrate the growing strength of the Russian military by seizing Ottoman territory.  In 1744 the empress Catherine the Great's army crushed Ottoman forces and captured the Crimean Peninsula, securing the Russian dream of warm water (i.e. it did not freeze during the winter) ports for its navy.  Catherine also forced the Ottomans to agree to the building of an Orthodox cathedral in Constantinople and the "protection" of Orthodox Christians in Ottoman lands – this was a massive intrusion into Ottoman sovereignty over its own subjects.

Other issues that undermined Ottoman strength were internal. Notably, the Janissaries (who had once been elite slave-soldiers who had bested European forces during the height of Ottoman power) that had played such a key role in Ottoman victories under sultans like Selim I and Suleiman the Magnificent were nothing more than parasites living off the largess of the state by the mid-eighteenth century, concentrating their time on enrichment through commerce rather than military training.  In 1793 a reforming sultan, Selim III, created a "New Force" of soldiers trained in European tactics and using up-to-date firearms, but it took until 1826 for the Janissaries to be eliminated completely (they were slaughtered by members of the New Force under the next sultan, Mahmud II).

Meanwhile, the Ottoman economy was largely in the hands of Europeans by the turn of the nineteenth century.  "Capitulation Agreements" that had begun as concessions to religious minorities had been extended to European merchants over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  By the late eighteenth century, both Europeans and their local (i.e. Ottoman) agents were basically above the law in Ottoman territories and they also enjoyed freedom from most forms of taxation.  The state was helpless to reimpose control over its own economy or to restrain European greed because of the superiority of European military power, and European trading companies reaped huge profits in the process.

The nineteenth century was thus an era of crisis for the empire.  In 1805 the Ottoman governor of Egypt, Muhammad Ali, seized power and governed Egypt as an indepedent state despite being (on paper) an official working for the Ottoman government.  In 1839 Resid Pasha, a high-ranking official serving the sultan Abd al-Macid, instituted a broad reform movement, the Tanzimat, that introduced sweeping changes to Ottoman governance and law, culminating in a liberal constitution and the first meeting of an Ottoman parliament in 1876.  The same year, however, the reactionary Sultan Abdulhamit II (r. 1876 – 1909) came to power and soon did everything he could to roll back the reforms.  Abdulhamit heavily emphasized the empire's Muslim identity, inviting conservative Sunni clerics from across the Islamic world to settle in the empire and playing up the Christian vs. Muslim aspect of European aggression.  In the process, he moved the empire away from its traditional identity as religiously diverse and tolerant.

Part of Abdulhamit's emphasis on Muslim identity was due to a simple demographic fact, however: much of the non-Muslim territories of the empire seized their independence either before or during his reign.  The Greek Revolution that began in 1821 garnered the support of European powers and ultimately succeeded in seizing Greek independence.  Serbia became completely independent in 1867, Bulgaria in 1878, and Bosnia passed into Austrian hands in 1908.  Simply put, the Christian-dominated Balkans that had been part of the Ottoman Empire for centuries slipped away thanks to the strength of modern nationalism and the military support they received from sympathetic European powers.

Meanwhile, while Abdulhamit hoped in vain that doubling down on his own role as sultan and caliph would somehow see the empire through its period of weakness, other Ottoman elites reached very different conclusions.  High-ranking officers in the Ottoman military educated in the (European-style) War College established during the Tanzimat formed a conspiratorial society known as the Committee for Union and Progress (CUP) in 1889.  Disgusted by what they regarded as the hopelessly archaic approach of Abdulhamit, they launched a successful coup d'etat in 1909 and set out to remake the empire as a modern, secular, and distinctly Turkish (rather than diverse) state.  World War I, however, began in 1914 and ultimately dealt the empire its death blow as European powers both attacked the empire directly and encouraged uprisings among its ethnic and religious minorities.

When the dust settled, one of the leaders of the CUP, Mustafa Kemal, led a Turkish army to expel European forces from the geographic core of the former empire, namely Anatolia, and form a new nation in its place.  Soon known as Atatürk ("Father of the Turks"), Kemal pushed through a constitution that explicitly rejected the state's Muslim identity, adhering instead to the secularism of European and American countries.  It also, however, represented a nation of ethnic Turks, with minority groups either expelled or slaughtered outright.  The most horrific violence of the Turkish revolution was directed at the Armenian minority, with over a million Armenians forced on death marches into deserts or murdered outright.  While the state of Turkey refuses to acknowledge it to this day, historians have long recognized that the Armenian massacres amounted to a full-scale genocide.

To sum up, the Ottoman Empire was beset by external pressures in the form of growing European military might and European intrusion into its economy.  It also suffered from internal issues, most notably the corruption of the Janissaries and the intransigence of reactionaries like Abdulhamit.  Its reform movements culminated in the CUP revolution of 1909, but world war tore the empire apart before those reforms had time to take effect.  And, while Turkey entered the world stage as a modern nation, it was a modern nation with the blood of over a million people on the hands of its leaders.  In that sense, Turkey was like European imperialism in reverse: Western European states left a trail of bodies as they built empires around the globe while Turkey's genocidal crime came about during imperial collapse.