Ottoman Empire

During the last century of its existence the question before the Ottoman empire was whether by coercion and conciliation it could hold itself together until the fruits of modernization would make its non-Muslim citizens content to remain within the empire. In its European provinces it failed because the Christians, partly animated by new sentiments of nationalism, would not be conciliated and the European powers would not allow the Ottomans to coerce them. Gradually the provinces became autonomous: Greece (1829), Serbia (1830), and the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia (modern Romania),which were unified in 1859. Greece became independent in 1832, Serbia, Romania, and Montenegro in 1878 as well as part of Bulgaria. By 1885 the Ottoman territories in Europe were reduced to Macedonia, Albania, and Thrace, and all of these except eastern Thrace were lost as a result of the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913. These changes were accompanied by extensive populations movements as old Muslim settlers fled from the new Christian rulers. In addition to those who emigrated from territory occupied by Russia, some 1,000,000 Muslims left the Balkans between 1870 and 1914. The Ottomans also lost control of North Africa: France took Algiers in 1830 and Tunisia in 1881. Britain occupied Egypt in 1882 and Italy annexed Libya in 1912. But in the Asian provinces the Ottomans held on and even extended their power in Arabia. Although there was some evidence of nationalist opposition in the Arab provinces, it was confined to a small minority, and in 1914 there seemed no reason why Ottoman power might not endure in Asia.

The collapse and extinction of the Ottoman empire was a consequence of World War I. The government—dominated by the CUP adventurers Talat and Enver Pasha—made the mistake of entering the war on the side of the Central Powers, and the defeat of Germany meant the end for the Ottomans. The Ottomans fought well during the first two years of the war although they suffered defeats at the hands of Russia in eastern Asia Minor. But in 1917-1918, when new British offensives began in Iraq and Syria, the Ottoman forces began to decline and by the time of the Armistice of Mudros (October 1918) the Ottomans had lost everything but Anatolia. The Ottomans were forced to sign the Treaty of Sèvres (1920), by which they lost not only the Arab provinces but suffered a partition of Anatolia. In opposition to Allied plans, and in particular to the invasion of Smyrna by Greece in May 1919, a nationalist movement had grown up under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and this movement carried on armed resistance until, in 1922, the Greeks were defeated and driven out of Anatolia and eastern Thrace. The sultan had been compromised by his acquiescence in Allied policies, and on November 1, 1922 the Ottoman dynasty was abolished and the empire came to an end. A year later there stood in its place the Republic of Turkey.

In the aftermath of the fall of the Ottoman empire no one had a good word to say for it. The Balkan states remembered it as a brutal oppressor, European liberals had long denounced it as the government of an alien horde, Arab nationalists claimed it had frustrated Arab potential for centuries, and Turkish nationalists saw it as a dangerous memory, which threatened the forward movement of the new secular republic. Its ideologies of Islam and Ottomanism were discredited. Yet a political system that endured for 600 years, longer than the empire of Rome in the West or the British Empire, and maintained itself over so large an area, must have had some merits. To Muslims it was a matter of pride and comfort: pride in its early victories, and comfort that it stood as a defence against the non-Muslim world. It is interesting that its most vigorous defenders at the end were the Muslims of India. To most of its non-Muslim citizens it was, until the 19th century, better than any obvious alternative. To men of ability it represented an arena through which they could and did move with ease in search of a better life. And it enabled a great variety of peoples (in 1914 still 25 million) of different languages, cultures, and religions to live together in some degree of harmony. It was an empire with a talent for war and government and also had grasped one great imperial secret: empires depend on minimal government for their survival; once they begin to interfere too much with the lives of their citizens, people begin to think they could run their own affairs better. The centralizing reform movement, which was intended to ensure the survival of the empire, may have been a main cause of its destruction. But the new states that succeeded the empire were to find that the ideologies of nationalism, with which they had opposed Ottomanism, were difficult instruments with which to rule multinational states. It may have been disappointment with the results of independence that has led to greater sympathy with, and greater interest in, the Ottoman empire by historians in recent years. In the Balkans the older view of the Ottomans as an alien intrusion has been modified by a new view of the Ottoman period as one of a synthesis of Turkish/Muslim and Byzantine/Balkan traditions. In Syria and Egypt also there has been more interest in the Ottoman period: “a maligned state” is the subtitle of a four-volume account of the Ottoman empire by the Egyptian historian, al-Shinnawi. But it remains true that the empire has been insufficiently studied or understood, principally because its language was abandoned. It is surprising that, while so much regret is expressed over the declining use of some minor European languages, a language of the European importance of Ottoman Turkish should have been allowed to disappear almost unnoticed. Like Latin and ancient Greek, Ottoman Turkish, for those who read it, remains a key to the study not only of an empire but a distinctive civilization.

The Ottoman legacy has been an important one. It is visible in art and architecture, in cuisine, music, and in lifestyles. And the political inheritance has been substantial. It was men educated in the Ottoman system and brought up on the ideas of the reform movement who ran the affairs of the Turkish republic and were the political leaders in the Arab states until the 1950s. In the Balkans, population movements and conversion left considerable problems for the successor states, notably with regard to the situation of Muslims living in Balkan states, especially Albania, Bosnia, Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, and Bulgaria. The Ottoman period also influenced the political structure of the Balkan states: by removing the old aristocracy and resisting the growth of large landed estates, the Ottomans assisted the development of a society dominated by peasants, with a weak middle class and, as a consequence, a strong and sometimes oppressive state. It has also been argued that Ottoman rule created a division in Europe. Those who hold this view claim that before the Ottoman conquest the Balkan states were developing in the same direction as the states of Western Europe, but that the Ottoman conquest turned their political development into a different, more authoritarian path. Those who would not go to this extent still concede that the Ottoman period may have accentuated an existing division between Orthodox and Catholic Europe.