Ottoman history in the nineteenth century was
dominated by European wars and expansion. The Europeans madly
scrambled for territory throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth
century. Some of this was European territory, but far and away, the
bulk of the territory that Europeans desired was non-European. Human
history has never seen such rapid and frenetic annexation of
territory as occurred in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. The end result for the Ottomans was the loss of Empire,
and, finally, the loss of the Ottoman dynasty itself.
The first major Ottoman war, the Crimean
War (1854-1856), came with Russia. Like so many of the later
conflicts with Europe, this one was initiated not by the Ottomans,
but by the Europeans. Russia was primarily interested in territory.
Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Russia had
slowly been annexing Muslim states in Central Asia. By 1854, Russia
found itself near the banks of the Black Sea. Anxious to annex
territories in Eastern Europe, particularly the Ottoman provinces of
Moldavia and Walachia (now in modern day Romania), the
Russians went to war with the Ottomans on the flimsiest of pretexts:
the Ottomans had granted Catholic France the right to protect
Christian sites in the Holy Land (which the Ottomans controlled)
rather than Orthodox Russia. That, according to the Russians,
justified going to war with the Ottomans.
This war is unique in Ottoman history in that the
outcome wasn't heavily influenced by the Ottomans themselves. The war
soon became a European war when Britain and France allied with the
Ottomans in order to protect their lucrative trade interests in the
region. The war ended badly for the Russians, and the Paris peace of
1856 was unfavorable to them. In textbooks, the Crimean War is
presented entirely from the perspective of the Europeans, for it
brought home the fact that more European powers were willing to
overthrow the old order than to maintain it. It had, though,
important consequences for the Ottoman Empire, as well. From this
point onwards, the Ottoman Empire saw itself as being heavily
controlled by Europeans. The Crimean War initiated a decline in
Ottoman morale and a helplessness. Europeans, for their part, no
longer saw the Ottomans as an equal force to be reckoned with, but as
a tool to be used in larger European concerns.
In the twilight of Ottoman history, the European
power that looms largest was Russia. The expansionist Russians
desired several key territories from the Ottomans, and the only thing
that really prevented them from aggressively annexing them was the
balance of power in Europe. In particular, they feared Austria and
Germany, which did not want to see Russia in control of eastern
Europe. The real prize for the Russians was the city of Istanbul,
which the Russians still called Constantinople. If they could seize
this city, that meant that they would control all trade between
Europe and Asia that proceeded through the Black Sea. The Ottomans,
for their part, had lost morale. The old military state, confident in
its ability to protect the Islamic world from European predation, was
crumbling in its confidence because of a series of defeats and draws
in wars with Russia.
In 1875, the Slavic peoples living in the Ottoman
provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina (currently the state of
Bosnia-Herzegovina), led an uprising against the Ottomans in order to
gain their freedom. The general weakness of the Ottomans led two
independent, neighbor Slavic states, Montenegro and Serbia, to aid
the rebellion. Within a year, the rebellion spread to the Ottoman
province of Bulgaria. The rebellion was part of a larger political
movement called the Pan-Slavic movement, which had as its goal
the unification of all Slavic peoples&emdash;most of whom were under
the control of Austria, Germany, and the Ottoman Empire&emdash;into a
single political unity under the protection of Russia. Anxious also
to conquer the Ottomans themselves and seize Istanbul, the Russians
allied with the rebels, Serbia, and Montenegro and declared war
against the Ottomans.
The war went very badly for the Ottomans, and by
1878 they had to sue for peace. Under the peace treaty, the Ottomans
had to free all the Balkan provinces, including Bosnia, Herzegovina,
and Bulgaria. Russia also took substantial amounts of Ottoman
territory as "payment" for the war. The Ottomans fell out of the
picture, but the Russian victory produced a European crisis over the
expansion of Russia. That, however, is not our concern.
The history of Europe in the latter half of the
nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth is a sordid
history of land grabbing and conflict among European states. The
Ottoman Empire, nearing its death, was dragged into these conflicts
and beaten into its grave.
In 1911, Italy and France were in competition over
Libya. Fearful that France might attack the Ottoman Empire and seize
Libya, the Italians attacked first. They defeated the Ottomans and,
through a peace treaty, obtained the Dodacanese Islands and Libya
from the Ottomans.
Seeing this as a good idea, the states of Greece,
Serbia, Bulgaria, and Montenegro attacked the Ottomans, hoping to
gain all of the Ottoman provinces in the north of Greece, Thrace, and
the southern European coast of the Black Sea. They easily defeated
the Ottomans and drove them back, almost to the very edge of Europe.
The Second Balkan War erupted just two years later (1913), when
Greece, Serbia, and Montenegro disapproved of the amount of territory
that Bulgaria had annexed. Joined by the Ottomans, these three powers
managed to roll back Bulgarian territorial gains. This was the last
military victory in Ottoman history. It is a strange note in history
that this last defeat and triumph for the Ottomans would precipitate
a situation that would snowball into the First World War. Although
this is a story for another day, the Ottoman territories that fell
into European hands precipitated a crisis among European powers that
would eventually lead directly World War I.
As a result of this conflict and the Treaty of
Versailles in 1919, the Ottomans lost all their territory in Syria,
Palestine, Arabia, and Mesopotamia. The European powers fought each
other in Africa and the Middle East by encouraging revolution among
the peoples there. The British, for instance, promised Arabs
independent states if they revolted against the Ottomans and aided
the British. By 1919, the Ottoman Empire was reduced to Turkey only,
which extended from the southern European shores of the Black Sea, to
Asia Minor in the west, to Iran in the east, and Syria and Iraq,
newly created states in 1919, in the south. Ottoman power had
effectively come to an end. The Russians, torn apart by a revolution
in 1917, never did annex Istanbul and the Dardanelles; the city is
still under the control of Turkey.
In 1922, Ottoman rule officially came to an end
when Turkey was declared a republic. While the Ottomans were
suffering from defeats in Europe, internally they were faced with
revolution by liberal nationalists who wished to adopt Western style
governments. These nationalists called themselves the "young Turks,"
and in the early 1920's, they began an open revolt against the
Ottoman government. The goal of the revolution was to modernize and
westernize Turkey, and the primary theoretician of that change was
Mustafa Kemal ,who is called in Turkish history,
Ataturk, of "Father of the Turks." As president of Turkey from
1922 to 1928, Ataturk introduced a series of legislative reforms that
adopted European legal systems and civil codes and thus overthrew
both the Shari'ah and the kanun . He legislated
against the Arabic script and converted Turkish writing to the
European Roman script. He legislated against the Arabic call to
prayer and eliminated the caliphate and all the mystical Sufi orders
of Islam. It is not an exaggeration to say that Ataturk is one of the
most significant political figures in Islam, for he was the first to
theorize and put into practice the secularization of the Islamic
state and society. Nothing like it had ever happened in the whole of
Islamic history, and, despite the radicality of Ataturks reforms, the
Turkish republic has remained an independent and secular Islamic
state. Efforts to emulate this secularization, however, have by and
large been unsuccessful in other Islamic states.
