R1.4 The Ottoman Empire and the creation of Türkiye (circa 1790–1938)

In the late eighteenth century the Ottoman Empire ruled south-eastern Europe, Anatolia, the Arab lands and, in name, North Africa. Over the next 130 years it lost most of this territory, tried repeatedly to reform itself, and finally collapsed after the First World War, when a nationalist movement in Anatolia created the Republic of Türkiye (officially "Turkey" in English until 2022). The story shows how a multi-ethnic, multi-religious empire responded to European power and nationalism, and how a nation-state was built from its remains.

The timeline of the whole period shows a repeated pattern. A military or diplomatic disaster exposed the weakness of the state; reformers used the crisis to centralise power and adopt European methods; the reforms provoked resistance at home and did not stop the next loss of territory. The cycle repeated until the wars of 1911–1923 destroyed the empire.

The Ottoman Empire around 1790

The Ottoman state was ruled by a sultan of the House of Osman from Istanbul. Since the conquest of Egypt in 1517 the sultans had also claimed the title of caliph, leader of the Sunni Muslim community, although they made little political use of it before the late nineteenth century. Government was run by the grand vizier and his officials at the Sublime Porte, the name Europeans gave to the central government offices.

The empire was religiously diverse. Muslims were the majority in Anatolia and the Arab provinces, but Orthodox Christians (Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs, Romanians, Arabs), Armenian Christians and Jews lived throughout it, and in the Balkans Christians were the majority. Non-Muslims were protected subjects who paid a special tax and were organised for religious, educational and family matters into communities under their own religious leaders, later called millets.

Signs of weakness

By 1790 the army that had once threatened Vienna was no longer a match for Russian or Austrian forces. The Janissaries, the sultan's standing infantry, had become a hereditary corps whose members often worked as traders and craftsmen, drew pay without serving and opposed any reform that threatened their privileges. The timar system, under which cavalrymen held the revenue of land in return for military service, had largely decayed.

Central control of the provinces had also weakened. Local notables, the ayan, collected taxes as tax farmers, raised private armies and governed many districts in practice; in Rumelia (the Balkans) and Anatolia some were nearly independent. In the Arab lands, Mamluk households dominated Egypt and Baghdad, and the North African provinces of Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli were ruled by local dynasties that recognised the sultan only formally.

Defeat by Russia made these weaknesses obvious. The Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca (1774) ended a disastrous war: the Crimean Khanate became independent of the sultan (and was annexed by Russia in 1783), Russian merchant ships gained access to the Black Sea, and Russia won a right to make representations on behalf of an Orthodox church in Istanbul, which it later stretched into a claim to protect all Orthodox subjects. The Treaty of Jassy (1792) confirmed the loss of Crimea after a further war.

European observers described the army in harsh terms. William Eton, a British merchant who had lived in the empire and served in Russia, wrote a widely read survey at the end of the 1790s.

Besides that the Turks refuse all reform, they are seditious and mutinous; their armies are encumbered with immense baggage, and their camp has all the conveniences of a town, with shops etc. … In short, it is a mob assembled rather than an army levied.

William Eton, A Survey of the Turkish Empire, London, 1799. Eton is a hostile outsider whose book argued for Russian and British interests in the region, and he generalises about "the Turks" in a way typical of European writing of the time. His account is useful evidence of how Europeans saw Ottoman military weakness, and of the reputation that reforming sultans had to overcome, more than a neutral description of the army.

Selim III, the Napoleonic Wars and the loss of influence

Selim III (r. 1789–1807) was the first sultan to attempt reform on a European model. From 1793 he created the Nizam-ı Cedid, a new army trained and equipped in European style and paid from a separate treasury. He also opened the first permanent Ottoman embassies in European capitals (London in 1793, then Vienna, Berlin and Paris), so that the government would have direct knowledge of European affairs.

The reforms were cut short. In May 1807 the Janissaries and their allies among the religious scholars rose in Istanbul and deposed Selim. A reforming provincial notable, Alemdar Mustafa Pasha, marched on the capital in 1808 to restore him, but Selim was killed before he could be freed. His cousin Mahmud II (r. 1808–1839) survived to become the most important reforming sultan of the century.

The French invasion of Egypt, 1798

The Napoleonic Wars drew the empire into European conflict. In July 1798 a French army under Napoleon Bonaparte landed in Egypt, an Ottoman province, defeated the Mamluk cavalry at the Battle of the Pyramids (21 July) and occupied Cairo. The British admiral Nelson then destroyed the French fleet at Aboukir Bay (the Battle of the Nile, 1 August 1798), stranding the army. With British help, Ottoman and British forces expelled the French in 1801.

The invasion mattered more for its consequences than for its three years of occupation. It showed that a European army could take a central Arab province with ease. It drew Britain and France into a lasting rivalry over Egypt and the route to India. It also shattered Mamluk power and left a vacuum in Egypt, which an Albanian officer in the Ottoman army, Muhammad Ali, filled.

Russia, Serbia and the Balkans

In the Balkans the wars of the period encouraged the first national risings. Serbs revolted in 1804, at first against abusive Janissaries, and again in 1815; by 1830 Serbia had become an autonomous principality under its own prince. A Russo-Ottoman war (1806–1812) ended with the Treaty of Bucharest, which gave Bessarabia to Russia. The pattern of Balkan revolt backed by Russian pressure would recur throughout the century.

North Africa

Ottoman influence in North Africa was already slight in 1790, and the period ended it in most places. France invaded Algeria and took Algiers on 5 July 1830, beginning a long colonial conquest; the sultan could do nothing. In Tunisia the Husainid beys ruled in practice independently. In Tripoli (Libya), however, the Porte took advantage of a succession crisis to end the Qaramanli dynasty in 1835 and restore direct rule, which lasted until the Italian invasion of 1911. Egypt, meanwhile, became autonomous in practice under Muhammad Ali.

The diagram of the weakening of Ottoman power groups the causes into three kinds. In practice they were connected: the provincial notables and Janissaries prevented the central reforms that might have defeated rebels and invaders, and outside powers repeatedly intervened in internal revolts.

The rise of Muhammad Ali in Egypt

Muhammad Ali (in Turkish, Mehmed Ali; governor of Egypt 1805–1848) came to Egypt with an Albanian contingent of the Ottoman force sent against the French. In the chaos after 1801 he won the support of Cairo's religious leaders and merchants, and in 1805 the sultan recognised him as governor. On 1 March 1811 he had the leading Mamluks killed in the Cairo Citadel, where they had been invited to a ceremony, removing the last rival power in the country.

Building a modern state

Muhammad Ali then built the strongest state in the Ottoman world. He took control of most land and imposed state monopolies on the main crops, buying from peasants at fixed prices and selling abroad at a profit; from the 1820s long-staple cotton became Egypt's main export. He built textile factories, arsenals and shipyards, founded schools of medicine and engineering, and sent student missions to France. From 1822 he conscripted Egyptian peasants into a European-style army trained partly by French officers, which grew to more than 100,000 men by the late 1830s (estimates vary).

The costs fell on the peasantry. Conscription took young men from their villages for years; some mutilated themselves to avoid it, and there were revolts in the 1820s. The factories rarely made a profit and most declined after 1840. Historians such as Khaled Fahmy (All the Pasha's Men, 1997) argue that Muhammad Ali's aim was a powerful dynasty for his own family within the Ottoman world, not an Egyptian nation, an interpretation that challenges the older Egyptian nationalist picture of him as the "founder of modern Egypt".

From loyal governor to rival

At first the new army served the sultan. Between 1811 and 1818 Egyptian forces defeated the Wahhabi movement in Arabia and restored Ottoman authority in Mecca and Medina; in 1820–1822 they conquered Sudan. From 1825 his son Ibrahim Pasha fought the Greek rebels in the Morea (the Peloponnese), in return for the promise of Crete and the Morea. When the Egyptian fleet was destroyed at Navarino in 1827 and the Greek war was lost, Muhammad Ali demanded Syria as compensation. The sultan refused.

In 1831 Ibrahim invaded Syria. He defeated the Ottoman army at Konya in December 1832 and the road to Istanbul lay open. Mahmud II, unable to defend his capital, turned to his old enemy Russia, whose troops landed on the Bosphorus. The Treaty of Hünkâr İskelesi (8 July 1833) made Russia the sultan's ally and, in a secret article, obliged the empire to close the Dardanelles to foreign warships at Russia's request. Britain and France saw this as a step towards a Russian protectorate over the empire.

Mahmud tried to recover Syria in 1839. His army was defeated at Nezib in June; he died days later, and the Ottoman fleet sailed to Alexandria and defected to Egypt. This time Britain led the response. Under the London Convention of July 1840, Britain, Austria, Prussia and Russia offered Muhammad Ali hereditary rule of Egypt if he withdrew from Syria; when he refused, British and Austrian forces bombarded Beirut and Acre and forced Ibrahim out. A ferman of 1841 made the governorship of Egypt hereditary in Muhammad Ali's family, while limiting his army and confirming Ottoman sovereignty.

The significance of Muhammad Ali

The Greek War of Independence, 1821–1830

The Greek revolt grew from a mix of causes. A Greek merchant class had grown rich from Mediterranean trade, and many Greeks studied in Western Europe, where they absorbed the ideas of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution and a romantic view of ancient Greece. In 1814 Greek merchants in Odessa founded the Philiki Etaireia ("Friendly Society"), a secret society that planned a general rising. Its members hoped for Russian support, since the tsar was Orthodox and had fought the empire repeatedly.

The rising began in March 1821 in the Danubian principalities and in the Morea. In the Morea Greek fighters killed many of the Muslim inhabitants, notably at Tripolitsa in October 1821. The Ottoman government responded with reprisals: the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople, Gregory V, was hanged in Istanbul in April 1821, and in 1822 an Ottoman force killed or enslaved tens of thousands of the Greek inhabitants of the island of Chios. These events, publicised in Europe by poets and painters such as Byron and Delacroix, built sympathy for the Greek cause, known as philhellenism.

The chain of events from revolt to independence shows that the Greeks were close to defeat by 1827. Ibrahim Pasha's Egyptian army had retaken most of the Morea and Athens had fallen. What saved the revolt was the decision of Britain, France and Russia to impose a settlement. When their combined fleet entered the bay of Navarino, the Ottoman–Egyptian fleet was destroyed in a few hours on 20 October 1827. Russia then went to war with the empire (1828–1829), and the Treaty of Adrianople (1829) forced the sultan to accept Greek autonomy. The London Protocol of February 1830 made Greece fully independent; it became a kingdom under a Bavarian prince in 1832.

Impact of the Greek war on the empire

• The first successful national secession. Greece showed Serbs, Romanians and Bulgarians that an Orthodox people could leave the empire with Great Power help. Nationalism became the main threat to Ottoman rule in Europe.

• Great Power intervention became normal. Navarino set the precedent that the European powers would decide the fate of Ottoman provinces where Christians were involved.

• Military weakness confirmed. The sultan had needed his Egyptian governor to fight the rebels, which strengthened Muhammad Ali and led directly to the war over Syria.

• A push to reform. The war convinced Mahmud II that the Janissaries were useless, and he destroyed them in 1826, in the middle of the conflict.

• Communal mistrust. Massacres on both sides and the hanging of the Patriarch damaged relations between Muslims and Orthodox Christians across the empire.

Mahmud II and the beginnings of reform, 1808–1839

Mahmud II spent his first eighteen years building support and removing over-mighty provincial notables. He moved against the Janissaries only when he was sure of the religious scholars and the artillery corps. In June 1826 he announced a new European-style force; when the Janissaries mutinied, loyal troops shelled their barracks in Istanbul, killing several thousand, and the corps was abolished. Ottoman writers called this the Auspicious Incident.

With the Janissaries gone, Mahmud built a new army, the Victorious Soldiers of Muhammad, and laid the foundations of the centralised state that the Tanzimat would develop:

• abolition of the remaining timar land grants (1831) and their transfer to the treasury;

• the first Ottoman census of the male population (1831) and a postal service;

• ministries on the European model in place of the old offices of the grand vizier;

• a translation office (1833) that trained a new elite of officials with European languages;

• medical and military schools teaching in Turkish and French;

• the fez and European-style trousers and frock coats for officials (1829), replacing the turban as a sign that officials served the state, not a social rank;

• the Takvim-i Vekayi (1831), the first Ottoman official newspaper.

Mahmud also signed the Anglo-Ottoman Commercial Convention (the Treaty of Balta Liman) in August 1838. In return for British diplomatic support against Muhammad Ali, it abolished state monopolies throughout the empire and fixed low duties on imports. The treaty helped to undermine Muhammad Ali's monopoly system, but it also opened Ottoman markets to cheap British manufactures and limited the state's ability to protect its own industries.

By Mahmud's death in 1839 the central state was stronger at home than at any time for a century, but it had lost Greece, much of its control of Serbia, Algeria and Egypt, and depended on European diplomacy for its survival. The question of how long that support would last, and at what price, dominated the next half century.

The Eastern Question and European influence

The Eastern Question was the name Europeans gave to the diplomatic problem created by Ottoman weakness: if the empire collapsed, who would gain its territory, and could the balance of power in Europe survive the contest? From the 1820s to 1923 almost every European crisis in the Near East turned on this question.

The Russian tsar Nicholas I put the issue bluntly in conversations with the British ambassador, Sir Hamilton Seymour, early in 1853, describing the empire, in Seymour's reports, as a very sick man whose death might come suddenly, and proposing that Britain and Russia agree in advance on what to do. Britain refused, but the image of the Ottoman Empire as the "sick man of Europe" stuck.

Why the Eastern Question emerged

The powers were drawn in for three kinds of reasons, which the diagram of their interests summarises.

• Strategic. The Bosphorus and Dardanelles (the Straits) controlled access between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Russia wanted its warships to pass freely and feared any other power holding Istanbul. Britain saw a Russian presence in the Mediterranean or the Middle East as a threat to its routes to India, especially after the Suez Canal opened in 1869. Austria feared Russian influence among the Slavs of the Balkans.

• Religious. Russia claimed, on the basis of Küçük Kaynarca, to protect the Orthodox Christians of the empire, who numbered several million, most of them in the Balkans. France claimed to protect Catholics and the Christian Holy Places in Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Protection of Christians gave both a pretext to intervene in Ottoman internal affairs.

• Economic. After the 1838 trade convention the empire became an important market for British textiles and a source of grain, cotton and raw silk. From 1854 European banks lent heavily to the Ottoman government, and European investors built railways and ports. Creditors and investors wanted a stable empire that paid its debts.

These interests pulled in different directions. Most of the time Britain and Austria preferred to keep the empire intact as a barrier to Russia, while Russia alternated between seeking to dominate the empire (as in 1833) and seeking to partition it. As a result, Great Power rivalry both prolonged the empire's life and steadily increased foreign control over it.

The capitulations were a central grievance. By the nineteenth century European consuls distributed protection certificates to thousands of local Christian and Jewish merchants, who then paid lower taxes and could not be tried in Ottoman courts. This gave non-Muslim merchants an advantage over Muslim competitors and turned the capitulations into a form of extraterritoriality.

The Crimean War, 1853–1856

The Crimean War began with a dispute over the Holy Places. In 1852, under French pressure, the sultan gave Catholic clergy keys to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, a privilege the Orthodox claimed. Nicholas I sent Prince Menshikov to Istanbul in 1853 to demand a treaty recognising Russia's right to protect all the sultan's Orthodox subjects. The Porte, encouraged by the British ambassador, refused, since such a treaty would have given Russia a say over millions of Ottoman subjects. Russian troops occupied the Danubian principalities (Moldavia and Wallachia) in July 1853, and in October the empire declared war.

On 30 November 1853 the Russian Black Sea fleet destroyed an Ottoman squadron at Sinop. British public opinion called it a massacre, and in March 1854 Britain and France declared war on Russia, joined in 1855 by Piedmont-Sardinia. Most of the fighting took place in the Crimea, around the siege of the Russian naval base of Sevastopol, which fell in September 1855; Ottoman forces also fought on the Danube and in the Caucasus.

The Treaty of Paris (30 March 1856) ended the war. The powers guaranteed the independence and territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire and admitted it to the Concert of Europe, the system of Great Power conferences. The Black Sea was neutralised, closing it to all warships, and Russia gave up its claim to a protectorate over the sultan's Orthodox subjects, whose protection became a collective European concern.

The table of the war's effects shows why historians see it as double-edged. The empire was on the winning side and its survival was guaranteed by treaty, but it paid with debt and with a European claim to supervise its internal affairs.

Lebanon, 1860

European influence also grew through local conflicts in the Arab provinces. In Mount Lebanon, the reforms and changing land relations of the 1840s and 1850s unsettled the old order of Druze and Maronite Christian notables. In 1860 a civil war broke out in which Druze fighters killed thousands of Maronites, and in July a massacre of Christians in Damascus followed. France landed troops in Beirut. Under the Règlement Organique of 1861, agreed with the powers, Mount Lebanon became an autonomous district (a mutasarrifate) under a non-Lebanese Ottoman Christian governor, with a council representing its religious communities.

The settlement kept Lebanon inside the empire but formalised both European oversight and the political organisation of religious communities. Ussama Makdisi (The Culture of Sectarianism, 2000) argues that this "sectarianism" was a modern product of Ottoman reform and European intervention, not an ancient hatred.

Balkan unrest and the Great Eastern Crisis, 1875–1878

In the Balkans, nationalism continued to erode Ottoman control. Moldavia and Wallachia united as Romania (1859–1862) under Ottoman suzerainty; in 1867 the last Ottoman garrisons left Serbia; in 1870 the sultan allowed a separate Bulgarian Orthodox church, the Exarchate, which became a focus for Bulgarian national feeling. Peasant grievances over taxation and landlords mixed with these national movements, and Russian Pan-Slav writers encouraged them.

The vertical timeline of 1875–1878 shows how quickly a local rising became a European crisis. In July 1875 Christian peasants in Herzegovina revolted against tax collectors, and the revolt spread to Bosnia. In April 1876 Bulgarian revolutionaries rose; the government suppressed the rising with irregular troops (başıbozuk) who massacred villagers, notably at Batak. Western diplomats who investigated at the time put the Bulgarian dead at about 12,000–15,000; later estimates run as high as 30,000, while some historians regard the contemporary reports as inflated. The rebels had also killed Muslim civilians at the start of the rising. In Britain, Gladstone, leader of the Liberal opposition, published a pamphlet that sold about 200,000 copies within a month.

Let the Turks now carry away their abuses in the only possible manner, namely by carrying off themselves. Their Zaptiehs and their Mudirs, their Bimbashis and their Yuzbachis, their Kaimakams and their Pashas, one and all, bag and baggage, shall, I hope, clear out from the province they have desolated and profaned.

William Gladstone, Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East, pamphlet, September 1876. Gladstone wrote as an opposition politician attacking the pro-Ottoman policy of Disraeli's government, and as a devout Christian; the list of Ottoman official titles mocks the whole administration. The pamphlet shows how the "atrocities" made it politically impossible for Britain to defend the empire in 1877, though Muslim victims of Balkan violence received no comparable attention in Europe.

Serbia and Montenegro declared war in June 1876 and Serbia was quickly defeated, but Russia then intervened. After the Ottoman government rejected reforms proposed by a conference of the powers in Istanbul, Russia declared war in April 1877. Ottoman forces held the fortress of Plevna (Pleven) for five months, but by January 1878 the Russian army was close to Istanbul. Hundreds of thousands of Balkan Muslims fled south as refugees.

The Treaties of San Stefano and Berlin

The Treaty of San Stefano (3 March 1878), dictated by Russia, created a large autonomous Bulgaria stretching to the Aegean, which Britain and Austria-Hungary saw as a Russian satellite. Under threat of a wider war, the powers met at the Congress of Berlin (June–July 1878), chaired by the German chancellor Bismarck, and revised the settlement.

The table comparing the two treaties shows that Berlin saved Macedonia and the route to Istanbul for the empire, but at a heavy price. The empire lost much of its Balkan territory and several million subjects, including some of its richest provinces, and its "protectors" Britain and Austria took Cyprus and Bosnia for themselves. The settlement left unresolved national questions in Macedonia, Bosnia and the Armenian provinces that caused crises for the next forty years.

The Tanzimat reforms, 1839–1876

The Tanzimat ("reorderings") was a programme of reform carried out by the Ottoman government between 1839 and 1876. It was led less by the sultans, Abdülmecid I (r. 1839–1861) and Abdülaziz (r. 1861–1876), than by a group of senior officials at the Sublime Porte: Mustafa Reşid Pasha, who had served as ambassador in Paris and London, and his protégés Âli Pasha and Fuad Pasha. All three had risen through the translation office and the embassies created by Selim III and Mahmud II.

Reasons for the reforms

The diagram of reasons for the Tanzimat shows that the reforms answered several pressures at once. The most immediate was military weakness: the defeats by Muhammad Ali in 1832 and 1839 showed that the central state could not defend itself. The reformers also needed British support to recover Syria, and a public commitment to reform and to the rights of Christians would win it and weaken the case for Russian or French intervention on behalf of Christian subjects.

Economic weakness made reform urgent. Tax farming meant that much of what peasants paid stayed with intermediaries, and the treasury could not pay a modern army. Finally, the reformers held a genuine belief, shaped by their experience of Europe, that a centralised state with uniform laws and equal subjects (an idea later called Ottomanism) would make every subject loyal to the empire and remove the grievances that fed nationalism.

The Edict of Gülhane, 1839

On 3 November 1839 the foreign minister Mustafa Reşid Pasha read the Edict of Gülhane (Hatt-ı Şerif of Gülhane) before officials, religious leaders and foreign diplomats in the rose garden of the Topkapı Palace. The edict blamed the empire's troubles on neglect of its ancient laws and promised new institutions.

These institutions must be principally carried out under three heads, which are: 1. The guarantees insuring to our subjects perfect security for life, honor, and fortune. 2. A regular system of assessing and levying taxes. 3. An equally regular system for the levy of troops and the duration of their service. … These imperial concessions shall extend to all our subjects, of whatever religion or sect they may be; they shall enjoy them without exceptions.

Edict of Gülhane (Gülhane Hatt-ı Hümayunu), proclamation of Sultan Abdülmecid I, 3 November 1839; English translation published by the Atatürk Institute of Modern Turkish History, Boğaziçi University. The edict was addressed to two audiences. To Ottoman Muslims it presented reform as a return to Islamic law and the empire's old greatness; to the European diplomats present, and in a French text circulated to the embassies, it promised security of property and equal treatment for Christians. Its value lies in showing the aims of the reformers and how carefully they had to justify change, not in showing what actually happened in the provinces.

The Reform Edict of 1856

The Reform Edict (Islahat Fermanı) of 18 February 1856 was issued under British and French pressure as the Crimean War ended, and its terms were noted in the Treaty of Paris. It went further than Gülhane: it promised non-Muslims equal access to government posts and military schools, equal liability for military service (which in practice Christians avoided by paying an exemption tax), mixed courts for cases between Muslims and non-Muslims, freedom to repair churches, and an end to insulting terms for non-Muslims in official documents. It also obliged the millets to reform their own governance, which reduced the power of the clergy and gave lay notables a greater say.

Many Muslims resented the edict. A Muslim chronicler and statesman, Ahmed Cevdet Pasha, recorded that many Muslims felt they had lost their sacred rights as the ruling community, and the Kuleli conspiracy of 1859 was a plot by religious conservatives and officers against the reforming government. Christian communities, for their part, often preferred their autonomous millet privileges to equal citizenship, and in the Balkans national movements wanted independence, not equality inside the empire.

Legal, military, educational and administrative reforms

The Mecelle illustrates the Tanzimat method. Rather than copy the French civil code, as some reformers wanted, the government had Islamic law on obligations and contracts set out in numbered articles for use in the new courts. Reform was presented as rationalising Ottoman and Islamic tradition, not abandoning it.

Debt and growing European control

The Tanzimat state cost more than it raised. The government first borrowed abroad in 1854 to pay for the Crimean War, then borrowed repeatedly, often at high real interest rates, to pay salaries, buy warships (Abdülaziz built one of the largest ironclad fleets in the world) and repay earlier loans. By 1875 the nominal debt stood at close to £200 million; estimates range from about £190 million to £215 million. In October 1875, after poor harvests, the government suspended full payment on its loans.

The default had lasting consequences. Under the Decree of Muharrem (December 1881) the debt was reduced and a European-run Ottoman Public Debt Administration took direct control of several important revenues to pay the bondholders. Egypt, which had borrowed even more heavily under Khedive Ismail, went bankrupt in 1876 and was occupied by Britain in 1882.

The Young Ottomans and the constitution of 1876

Conservatives were not the only critics of the Tanzimat; a new educated generation attacked it too. The Young Ottomans, a secret society formed in 1865 by young writers and officials whose best-known figures were Namık Kemal and Ziya Pasha, building on the journalism of İbrahim Şinasi, attacked the Tanzimat statesmen as autocratic bureaucrats who copied Europe superficially and gave in to European demands. They argued for a constitution and a parliament, which they justified through Islamic principles of consultation, and for patriotism towards the Ottoman fatherland (vatan). Several had to work in exile in Paris and London.

Their chance came in the crisis of 1876. Reforming ministers led by Midhat Pasha deposed Abdülaziz in May 1876; his successor Murad V was mentally unstable and was deposed in August. The new sultan, Abdülhamid II, agreed to a constitution, which was proclaimed on 23 December 1876, the day a conference of the powers opened in Istanbul to impose reforms. The Ottoman constitution of 1876 created a two-chamber parliament with an elected lower house and confirmed equality of all subjects, but left the sultan strong powers, including the right to exile anyone considered a danger to the state. The first parliament met in March 1877.

How successful was the Tanzimat?

Historians have judged the Tanzimat in different ways. Roderic Davison (Reform in the Ottoman Empire, 1856–1876, 1963) treats it as a serious and partly successful attempt to modernise, limited by the size of the task and the shortness of time. Carter Findley (Bureaucratic Reform in the Ottoman Empire, 1980) shows that it created a modern civil bureaucracy, the Sublime Porte, that outlived the empire. Critics stress that it failed in its central political aim: Ottomanism did not stop the secession of Balkan Christians, and the reforms bred Muslim resentment and foreign financial control.

Abdülhamid II: repression and modernisation, 1876–1909

Abdülhamid II (r. 1876–1909) used the war with Russia to end the constitutional experiment. He exiled Midhat Pasha, the constitution's main author, in February 1877, and when deputies criticised the conduct of the war he prorogued parliament in February 1878. The constitution was never formally abolished, but parliament did not meet again for thirty years. Power moved from the Sublime Porte, where the Tanzimat statesmen had governed, back to the palace at Yıldız.

Methods of rule

• Autocracy and surveillance. The sultan ruled through palace secretaries and a large network of informers (jurnalcı) whose reports he read himself. Critics were exiled to distant provinces.

• Censorship. The press was tightly censored; words such as "constitution", "liberty" and even references to the assassination of rulers abroad were banned from print.

• Pan-Islamism. After the loss of most Christian Balkan provinces, Muslims formed a larger majority of the empire's population than before. Abdülhamid stressed his role as caliph, patronised Arab religious notables, built mosques and schools, and appealed to Muslims under British, French and Russian rule. This pan-Islamism aimed to strengthen loyalty at home and give the sultan influence abroad.

• Modernisation without liberalism. He continued Tanzimat reforms in education, transport and communications: telegraph lines, railways (the Hejaz Railway from Damascus to Medina, 1900–1908, was paid for partly by donations from Muslims worldwide), and a large expansion of state schools, including the civil service school (Mülkiye), the War Academy and the Military Medical School.

• Germany as a new partner. After the British occupation of Egypt, the sultan turned to Germany, which seemed to want influence without territory. German officers advised the army from 1883, and a German company won the concession for the Baghdad Railway in 1903.

Territorial losses and the Armenian question

Losses continued under Abdülhamid. France made Tunisia a protectorate in 1881 (Treaty of Bardo); Britain occupied Egypt in 1882 after crushing the Urabi revolt; Eastern Rumelia joined Bulgaria in 1885; and after a revolt and a short war with Greece in 1897, Crete became autonomous under international supervision in 1898. In Macedonia, Bulgarian, Greek and Serbian bands fought each other and Ottoman forces, and from 1903 the powers forced a programme of European-supervised police reform on the region.

Article 61 of the Treaty of Berlin had promised reforms in the provinces where Armenians lived, giving the Armenian question an international dimension. Armenian revolutionary parties formed in the late 1880s and early 1890s. The government saw them as a threat to the empire's survival in Anatolia and armed Kurdish irregular cavalry, the Hamidiye regiments (1891). In 1894–1896 a series of massacres of Armenians took place across eastern Anatolia and in Istanbul. Estimates of the dead in these Hamidian massacres range from about 100,000 to 300,000.

The emergence of the Committee of Union and Progress

The Young Turks were the loose movement of exiles, students and officers who opposed Abdülhamid and wanted the constitution restored. Its main organisation became the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP). It began in 1889 as a secret society among students at the Military Medical School in Istanbul, including İbrahim Temo and Abdullah Cevdet. Exiles in Paris, led by the positivist Ahmed Rıza, published newspapers and gave the movement the name "Union and Progress", taken from his motto of order and progress.

The diagram of the causes of the CUP's emergence groups four kinds of factor, which matched the four strands of the movement:

• Political repression turned educated men against the regime: students and officials could see their careers blocked by informers, and many critics spent years in exile or in prison.

• Military weakness and territorial losses horrified young officers. In Macedonia they fought Balkan insurgents while watching the powers impose reforms, and many concluded that the empire would be partitioned unless the regime changed.

• Foreign economic and industrial control, through the Debt Administration, foreign railway companies and the capitulations, was seen as humiliating and as a cause of Muslim economic backwardness.

• Modern education and ideas. Abdülhamid's own schools trained a generation in French, science and medicine. Students read the Young Ottomans, especially Namık Kemal's writings on the fatherland and liberty, and European positivism, Social Darwinism and nationalism.

The movement became dangerous to the sultan only when it reached the army. In 1906 officers and officials in Salonica (Thessaloniki), including Mehmed Talat (a post-office official) and officers of the Third Army in Macedonia, founded the Ottoman Freedom Society, which merged with the Paris CUP in 1907. Mustafa Kemal, then a young staff officer in Salonica, was a member, although never one of its leaders.

The Young Turk Revolution, 1908

The timeline of 1889–1913 shows how quickly the officers moved once they acted. In June 1908 rumours spread that Britain and Russia, meeting at Reval, had agreed to impose stronger European control in Macedonia. The CUP feared this would mean partition. In early July Major Ahmed Niyazi and then Enver took to the hills with armed followers, Muslim villagers in Macedonia demanded the constitution, and troops sent against the rebels refused to fight. On 23–24 July 1908 Abdülhamid announced that the constitution of 1876 was in force again.

The postcard captures the first mood of the Young Turk Revolution: crowds of Muslims, Christians and Jews celebrated together in Salonica and Istanbul. The CUP's aim, however, was not a liberal revolution in the European sense. It wanted to save the state from partition, and it saw the constitution as a means of uniting all communities behind the empire and of winning British and French goodwill.

The movement proclaimed its aims in programmes circulated in 1908. In one, translated in an English collection of 1912, it called for ministers responsible to the elected chamber, a vote for all Ottoman men over twenty, and the right to form political associations, and stated that "The Turkish tongue will remain the official state language." The combination of constitutional rights with Turkish as the language of the state already pointed to the tension in the CUP's programme between equal Ottoman citizenship and Turkish dominance.

Counter-revolution and the deposition of Abdülhamid, 1909

The revolution brought immediate losses. In October 1908 Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria declared full independence, and Crete proclaimed union with Greece. Strikes, boycotts and a free press created disorder, and conservatives and liberals both opposed the CUP. On 13 April 1909 (31 March in the Ottoman calendar) soldiers in Istanbul mutinied, joined by religious students, demanding the restoration of the sharia and the dismissal of CUP officers; this was the 31 March Incident. An "Action Army" marched from Salonica, retook the capital, and the parliament deposed Abdülhamid on 27 April in favour of his brother Mehmed V, who had little power.

In the same weeks, in the province of Adana, mobs and soldiers killed some 20,000 Armenians (estimates range from about 15,000 to 30,000). The Adana massacre, during the period of the counter-revolution, ended many Armenian hopes that the constitutional regime would protect them.

The CUP's programme and the impact of its reforms

From 1909 to 1918, except for a period in 1912–1913, the CUP dominated government, at first from behind the scenes through cabinets and parliament. Its policies developed under the pressure of war and loss:

Turkism grew because Ottomanism seemed to have failed. Christians still left the empire, and Albanians and some Arabs turned against the CUP's centralisation. The losses of 1912–1913 pushed the leadership further. Historians such as Feroz Ahmad (The Young Turks, 1969) stress the CUP's modernising and nationalist programme, while Erik-Jan Zürcher argues that it was above all a movement of officers and officials determined to save the state by any means.

The Raid on the Sublime Porte, 1913

In 1912 the CUP lost power to a government of its opponents. As the Ottoman army collapsed in the First Balkan War and the government seemed ready to surrender Edirne (Adrianople), Enver led a group of officers into a cabinet meeting at the Sublime Porte on 23 January 1913. The war minister, Nazım Pasha, was shot dead and the grand vizier forced to resign. This Raid on the Sublime Porte returned the CUP to power. After the assassination of the new grand vizier, Mahmud Şevket Pasha, in June 1913, the CUP arrested and exiled its opponents and ruled alone, dominated by Enver (war minister from 1914), Talat (interior minister) and Cemal (navy minister and later governor of Syria).

The impact of conflict, 1911–1918

Between 1911 and 1923 the Ottoman state and its successor were at war almost continuously. These wars destroyed the empire, killed or displaced millions of its people and transformed the politics of those who survived.

The Italo-Turkish War, 1911–1912

In September 1911 Italy, seeking a colony in North Africa, invaded Tripolitania and Cyrenaica (Libya), the empire's last province in Africa. The British occupation of Egypt prevented the Ottomans from sending an army by land, and the Italian navy controlled the sea. Young Ottoman officers, among them Enver and Mustafa Kemal, slipped into Libya and organised Arab and Bedouin resistance, in alliance with the Sanusi religious order, which kept the Italians to the coast. Italy then attacked elsewhere, occupying the Dodecanese islands in the Aegean in 1912. With the Balkan states preparing to attack, the empire signed the Treaty of Ouchy (October 1912) and gave up Libya.

The war showed the empire's weakness at sea, encouraged the Balkan states to strike while the Ottomans were distracted, and gave a group of young officers experience of guerrilla warfare and of mobilising local Muslim populations, experience they used later in Anatolia.

The Balkan Wars, 1912–1913

In 1912 Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece and Montenegro, encouraged by Russia, formed the Balkan League to drive the Ottomans out of Europe. In the First Balkan War (October 1912 – May 1913) the Ottoman armies, caught in the middle of reorganisation, were defeated within weeks. Greece took Salonica, the birthplace of the CUP; Serbia took Kosovo and northern Macedonia; Bulgaria reached the Çatalca lines outside Istanbul and besieged Edirne, which fell in March 1913. Albania declared independence. Under the Treaty of London (May 1913) the empire kept only a strip of land in Thrace.

The victors then fought over Macedonia. In the Second Balkan War (June–August 1913) Serbia, Greece, Romania and the Ottomans attacked Bulgaria, and Enver led the army that retook Edirne in July 1913, which made him a national hero. Even so, the empire had lost almost all of its European territory, which had been the core of the state for five centuries.

The impact of the Balkan Wars went beyond territory:

• Refugees. Hundreds of thousands of Muslims fled or were expelled from Macedonia and Thrace into Istanbul and Anatolia, many after massacres by Balkan armies and irregulars. Their experience embittered Ottoman Muslims against Christians.

• Radicalisation of the CUP. The losses brought the CUP back to power by coup and convinced its leaders that Christian minorities were a threat and that Anatolia must be made secure as a Muslim, Turkish homeland. Many historians see 1912–1913 as the moment Ottomanism was abandoned in practice.

• Demographic change. With the loss of most Christian-majority provinces, the empire became overwhelmingly Muslim, and Anatolia became its heartland.

• Foreign policy. Isolated and fearing partition, the CUP looked for an alliance with a Great Power.

Entry into the First World War

The CUP leaders had sought alliances with Britain, France and even Russia, but were refused. On 2 August 1914 a small group, including Enver and Talat, signed a secret alliance with Germany. Two German warships, the Goeben and the Breslau, escaped the British navy into the Dardanelles and were nominally sold to the Ottoman navy; Britain had already seized two battleships being built for the empire in British yards, which had been paid for partly by public subscription and whose loss caused anger in Istanbul. On 29 October 1914 the Ottoman fleet, under a German admiral, shelled Russian ports in the Black Sea. Russia, Britain and France declared war in early November.

Historians weigh several reasons for entry. The empire feared partition and believed only a Great Power alliance could prevent it; Germany offered gold, arms and the chance to recover lost territory from Russia, and seemed likely to win. The CUP also hoped to end the capitulations (abolished in September 1914) and to rally Muslims through a declaration of jihad, issued in November 1914 by the Şeyhülislam. Mustafa Aksakal (The Ottoman Road to War in 1914, 2008) argues that entry was a deliberate choice by Ottoman leaders seeking to escape isolation, not something forced on them by Germany.

The fronts, 1914–1918

The vertical timeline of the war shows a pattern of early disasters, unexpected defensive victories and final collapse. In the Caucasus, Enver's winter offensive at Sarıkamış (December 1914 – January 1915) ended in catastrophe: most of the Third Army died in battle or of cold and disease. In 1915, however, Ottoman forces defeated the Allied attempt to force the Dardanelles and take Istanbul. The naval attack failed on 18 March 1915, and the landings on the Gallipoli peninsula from 25 April were contained and finally evacuated in January 1916.

Mustafa Kemal, commanding a division and later a group of divisions, played a decisive part in holding the heights at Ari Burnu (Anzac Cove) in April and at Anafartalar and Chunuk Bair in August 1915. Gallipoli made him a national figure. In Mesopotamia, an Ottoman army forced a British-Indian force to surrender at Kut in April 1916.

From 1916 the tide turned. Russian forces took Erzurum and Trabzon in eastern Anatolia; British forces took Baghdad (March 1917) and, from Egypt, advanced into Palestine, taking Jerusalem in December 1917. After the British victory at Megiddo (September 1918), Damascus fell on 1 October. Bulgaria's surrender cut the land route to Germany. On 30 October 1918 the Ottoman government signed the Armistice of Mudros, and the CUP leaders fled on a German ship.

The war on the home front

The war devastated civilian life. Conscription took most adult men from the villages; requisitioning and the loss of labour cut harvests; disease spread. In Greater Syria and Mount Lebanon an Allied naval blockade, locusts, requisitioning and hoarding caused a famine in which, by most estimates, at least 100,000 and possibly over 200,000 people died in Mount Lebanon and Beirut alone. Cemal Pasha, governing Syria with sweeping powers, had Arab nationalists tried and hanged in Beirut and Damascus in 1915 and May 1916. Taken together with Muslim and Christian civilian deaths from disease, hunger and displacement in Anatolia, the war years were among the most destructive in the region's modern history.

The Armenian Genocide

In 1915–1916 the CUP government deported and destroyed the Armenian population of Anatolia. On 24 April 1915 the authorities arrested several hundred Armenian community leaders and intellectuals in Istanbul, most of whom were later killed. In late May the government approved a Temporary Law of Deportation (the Tehcir Law). Over the following months Armenian men in many towns were separated and shot, and women, children and the elderly were driven on foot towards the deserts of Syria, especially Deir ez-Zor. Hundreds of thousands died from killing, starvation and disease on the marches and in the camps. Assyrian and Greek Christians were also killed and deported.

Most estimates of Armenian deaths range from about 600,000 to more than one million, and many scholars give figures of around one million or higher; the uncertainty reflects incomplete pre-war population figures and records. The deportations were organised by the central government and the CUP, using a "Special Organisation" of irregulars. The government justified them as a wartime security measure after Armenian resistance at Van in April 1915 and Russian advances in the east.

Foreign diplomats reported what they saw. The US ambassador in Istanbul, Henry Morgenthau, cabled Washington in July 1915.

Deportation of and excesses against peaceful Armenians is increasing and from harrowing reports of eye witnesses it appears that a campaign of race extermination is in progress under a pretext of reprisal against rebellion.

Henry Morgenthau, US ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, telegram to the Secretary of State, Constantinople, 16 July 1915. Morgenthau was a neutral diplomat (the USA was not yet at war) writing a confidential report to his own government, not propaganda; he based it on consular and missionary eyewitnesses. The telegram shows that contemporaries already understood the deportations as a policy of destruction, and that a neutral power felt unable to stop it. His later memoir, Ambassador Morgenthau's Story (1918), was written for publication during the war and is more openly partisan.

Most historians and genocide scholars, and many states including the United States (in 2021), recognise these events as the Armenian genocide. Taner Akçam (A Shameful Act, 2006; The Young Turks' Crime against Humanity, 2012) uses Ottoman documents to show central planning by the CUP; Ronald Grigor Suny ("They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else", 2015) stresses how fear of defeat, the losses of 1912–1913 and the CUP's view of Armenians as an internal enemy radicalised policy into genocide. The government of Türkiye acknowledges that many Armenians died but rejects the term genocide, describing the deaths as part of a wartime tragedy that also killed many Muslims. Historians of the events do not treat the question of whether genocide took place as an open scholarly debate; the denial is a position of the Turkish state.

The Arab Revolt, 1916–1918

In the Arab provinces the war ended Ottoman rule. In correspondence with the British high commissioner in Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon (1915–1916), Sharif Hussein of Mecca was led to believe that Britain would support Arab independence in return for a revolt. The Arab Revolt began in the Hejaz in June 1916. Led by Hussein's son Faisal, with British money and advisers including T. E. Lawrence, Arab forces took the port of Aqaba (July 1917), harassed the Hejaz Railway and entered Damascus with the British in October 1918.

The revolt had limited military weight compared with the British army, and most Arabs, including many Arab officers in the Ottoman army, stayed loyal to the empire. Its significance was political: it ended the sultan-caliph's claim to lead all Muslims, given that the guardian of Mecca had rebelled, and it gave Arab nationalists a claim to independence. Meanwhile Britain and France had divided the region into zones of influence in the secret Sykes–Picot Agreement (May 1916), and Britain promised a Jewish national home in Palestine in the Balfour Declaration (November 1917). These agreements, and the mandates that followed, shaped the modern Arab states and the conflict over Palestine; for the empire, they meant that its Arab provinces were lost for good.

The Turkish War of Independence and the Treaty of Lausanne, 1919–1923

The Armistice of Mudros allowed the Allies to occupy the Straits and any "strategic points" they chose. British, French and Italian troops occupied Istanbul from November 1918 and parts of Anatolia; France occupied Cilicia in the south, and Italy landed in the south-west. Armenians and Greeks hoped to win independence or union with Greece in the eastern and western provinces. The sultan, Mehmed VI Vahdeddin, and his government cooperated with the occupiers in the hope of keeping the dynasty and a small state.

The decisive event was the Greek landing at İzmir (Smyrna) on 15 May 1919, approved by the Paris Peace Conference. Greek troops and local Greeks killed hundreds of Muslims in the first days, and the occupation spread inland. For Anatolian Muslims, who had seen what had happened to the Muslims of the Balkans, it threatened the loss of the Aegean heartland. Local "Defence of Rights" societies, many organised by former CUP members and officers, began armed resistance.

Mustafa Kemal and the organisation of resistance

Mustafa Kemal (born in Salonica in 1881) was by 1919 one of the few senior commanders untarnished by defeat. The government sent him to Samsun, on the Black Sea coast, as an army inspector with wide powers to restore order; he arrived on 19 May 1919 and instead used his position to organise resistance. In the Amasya Circular (June 1919) he declared that the independence of the nation was in danger and that the government in Istanbul could not defend it. Congresses at Erzurum (July–August) and Sivas (September 1919) united the regional resistance groups under a Representative Committee chaired by Kemal.

The nationalists set out their aims in the National Pact (Misak-ı Millî), adopted by the last Ottoman parliament in January 1920. It demanded the full independence of all territories with a Muslim (Ottoman Muslim) majority within the armistice lines of October 1918, plebiscites in disputed areas, security for Istanbul and the Straits, and the abolition of the capitulations. It did not claim the Arab lands, which it accepted were lost.

When the Allies formally occupied Istanbul in March 1920 and arrested nationalist deputies, Kemal called a new assembly. The Grand National Assembly opened in Ankara on 23 April 1920 and claimed to be the only legitimate government; it elected Kemal its president. The sultan's government condemned the nationalists as rebels, the Şeyhülislam issued a fatwa against them, and in 1920 the country fought a civil war as well as a war against invaders.

The Treaty of Sèvres, 1920

On 10 August 1920 the sultan's government signed the Treaty of Sèvres. It left the Ottoman state with Istanbul and a part of central and northern Anatolia. The Straits were placed under an international commission; Greece received eastern Thrace and the administration of İzmir and its region, with a plebiscite after five years; an independent Armenian state was to receive a large part of eastern Anatolia; a local autonomy, possibly leading to independence, was proposed for the Kurds; and the Arab lands became British and French mandates. The capitulations were restored and the powers were to control Ottoman finances.

Sèvres was never ratified. For the nationalists it confirmed that the sultan's government was willing to accept partition, and it united most of Anatolian Muslim opinion behind Ankara. "Sèvres" became a byword in Turkish politics for foreign plans to divide the country.

Winning the war

The timeline of the War of Independence shows how the nationalists fought their enemies one by one. In the east, the army under Kâzım Karabekir defeated the Armenian republic in the autumn of 1920. The nationalists also won Soviet support, since both opposed the Western Allies: the Treaty of Moscow (March 1921) and the Treaty of Kars (October 1921) fixed the eastern border, and Soviet Russia sent gold and arms. In the south, guerrilla resistance and battles at Maraş, Antep and Urfa wore down the French, who signed the Ankara Agreement in October 1921 and withdrew. Italy withdrew without much fighting.

The main enemy was Greece, whose army advanced deep into Anatolia in 1921 with British encouragement. İsmet Pasha (later İnönü) halted it twice at İnönü (January and March–April 1921). In August–September 1921 the Greek army attacked towards Ankara, and the nationalists, under Kemal's direct command, held it in a 22-day battle on the Sakarya River. A year later the Great Offensive of 26 August 1922 broke the Greek lines at Dumlupınar; the Greek army collapsed and retreated to the coast. Nationalist forces entered İzmir on 9 September. Days later a fire destroyed the Greek and Armenian quarters of the city; responsibility is disputed, and many Christians died or fled.

Several factors explain the nationalist victory:

• Leadership and organisation. Kemal united regional resistance into one movement, created a government with a claim to legitimacy, and showed skill as a commander and politician; the officer corps and many officials trained by the CUP served the movement.

• Motivation. The Greek occupation and Sèvres convinced many Anatolian Muslims that they were fighting for their homes, as Balkan Muslims had lost theirs.

• Diplomacy. Soviet aid and agreements with France and Italy left Greece isolated; Britain was unwilling to send an army.

• Greek weaknesses. Greek lines of supply were long, Greek politics divided after the return of King Constantine in late 1920, and the Allies withdrew support.

Kemal later presented his decision in 1919 in his six-day speech (Nutuk) to the congress of the Republican People's Party in October 1927.

In reality, the foundations of the Ottoman Empire were themselves shattered at that time. Its existence was threatened with extermination. … In these circumstances, one resolution alone was possible, namely, to create a New Turkish State, the sovereignty and independence of which would be unreservedly recognised by the whole world. This was the resolution we adopted before we left Constantinople …

Mustafa Kemal, speech to the congress of the Republican People's Party, Ankara, 15–20 October 1927 (Nutuk); English translation published in Leipzig, 1929. Kemal gave the speech after he had defeated his rivals and closed the opposition party, and he used it to present himself as the man who had foreseen a republic from the start. Historians such as Erik-Jan Zürcher note that in 1919–1920 the movement in fact spoke of defending the sultan-caliph and the Muslim nation, and that rivals such as Kâzım Karabekir and Rauf Orbay played a larger part than the speech allows. The source is valuable for the official Kemalist account of the War of Independence and for how he wished it to be remembered.

The abolition of the sultanate and the Treaty of Lausanne

After the Armistice of Mudanya (October 1922), the Allies invited both the Ankara and the Istanbul governments to a peace conference. Kemal used the invitation to settle the question of the dynasty: on 1 November 1922 the Grand National Assembly separated the caliphate from the sultanate and abolished the sultanate. Mehmed VI left Istanbul on a British warship on 17 November, and his cousin Abdülmecid was elected caliph with no political power.

The Treaty of Lausanne was signed on 24 July 1923 after months of negotiation led by İsmet Pasha. It recognised a sovereign Turkish state within roughly the borders of today, including eastern Thrace and İzmir. The capitulations were abolished and Turkey took on a share of the old Ottoman debt. The Straits were demilitarised under an international commission (until the Montreux Convention of 1936). The question of Mosul, claimed by both Turkey and British-mandated Iraq, was left to the League of Nations, which gave it to Iraq in 1926.

The comparison of Sèvres and Lausanne shows the scale of the nationalist achievement. Lausanne was the only peace treaty after the First World War negotiated, not imposed, by a defeated state, and it achieved almost all the aims of the National Pact. Its costs fell on the peoples who had hoped for states of their own, the Armenians and the Kurds, and on the populations moved by the exchange.

The population exchange

A separate convention signed at Lausanne on 30 January 1923 provided for a compulsory population exchange between Greece and Turkey, the first of its kind under international law. It was based on religion, not language: about 1.2 million Orthodox Christians (many of whom had already fled in 1922) left Anatolia for Greece, and about 400,000 Muslims left Greece for Turkey. Only the Greeks of Istanbul and the Muslims of western Thrace were exempt. The exchange made Anatolia overwhelmingly Muslim and completed the transformation, begun with the Balkan wars and the Armenian Genocide, of a multi-religious empire into a largely homogeneous nation-state.

The rule of Atatürk, 1923–1938: political reform

Mustafa Kemal (who took the surname Atatürk, "father of the Turks", in 1934) used victory to build a new state. Ankara became the capital on 13 October 1923 and the Republic of Turkey was proclaimed on 29 October 1923, with Kemal as president and İsmet Pasha as prime minister. On 3 March 1924 the assembly abolished the caliphate, expelled the Ottoman dynasty, closed the separate religious schools and replaced the office of Şeyhülislam and the Ministry of Religious Affairs with a state Directorate of Religious Affairs. The religious courts were abolished the following month.

The constitution of April 1924 declared that sovereignty belonged without condition to the nation and was exercised by the Grand National Assembly. In practice power lay with the president and his party, the Republican People's Party (CHP), founded in 1923. When former comrades from the War of Independence, including Kâzım Karabekir and Rauf Orbay, founded the Progressive Republican Party in November 1924, it was allowed to exist only until June 1925, when it was closed after the Sheikh Said rebellion.

Establishing the single-party state

The rebellion of 1925 gave the government emergency powers. The Law on the Maintenance of Order (March 1925) allowed it to ban any organisation or publication it considered a threat; it remained in force until 1929. Independence Tribunals, special courts first created in 1920, tried and executed rebels and opponents. In 1926, after a plot to assassinate Kemal at İzmir was uncovered, the tribunals tried the plotters together with leading former CUP figures and opposition politicians; several were hanged, and the generals of the Progressive Republican Party were tried and acquitted but removed from politics.

The diagram of the Kemalist state shows how the system worked from 1925. In 1930 Kemal allowed a friend, Fethi Okyar, to found a loyal opposition, the Free Republican Party, but it attracted such large crowds of discontented peasants, merchants and religious conservatives that it was closed within about three months. The experiment showed how much opposition existed, and the regime responded by tightening control. In 1931 the CHP adopted the Six Arrows as its programme; they were written into the constitution in 1937.

Kemalism, the ideology of the regime, had a historical and cultural programme. The Turkish History Thesis of the early 1930s claimed that the Turks were an ancient people from Central Asia who had spread civilisation across the world, and the Sun Language Theory (1935–1936) claimed Turkish as the origin of all languages. These theories, taught in schools and promoted by new institutes for Turkish history and language, aimed to give citizens pride in a Turkish, not an Ottoman or Islamic, past.

Social and cultural reform

The most far-reaching reforms aimed to make Turkish society secular and to change daily life, dress and identity along European lines. They were carried out quickly, by law, in a few years.

The table of reforms shows that the programme had two linked aims. Secularism (laiklik) in Kemalist Türkiye meant less a separation of religion and state than state control of religion: the Directorate of Religious Affairs paid imams and wrote sermons, while independent religious institutions were closed. Westernisation of law, dress and script aimed to make Turks part of what Kemal called "contemporary civilisation" and to break the hold of the Ottoman and Islamic past on the new generation.

The alphabet and education

The alphabet reform of November 1928 replaced the Arabic script, which suited Turkish vowels poorly, with a Latin alphabet designed by a commission in a few months. Within weeks all publications had to use it. Adults were taught in the Nation's Schools, evening and travelling classes that enrolled large numbers in their first years. Literacy remained low, however: figures based on the censuses put it at roughly 8–11 per cent in 1927 and about 15–20 per cent in 1935 (estimates differ), with large gaps between towns and villages and between men and women. The reform also cut the new generation off from Ottoman literature and documents, which was partly its purpose.

Women

The Civil Code and the vote changed the legal position of women more than in most European countries of the time: Turkish women could vote in national elections before women in France or Italy. Women entered the professions and universities, and the regime used images of unveiled, educated women as symbols of the new nation. The veil was discouraged and banned in some municipalities but never banned by national law. In the countryside, practices such as religious marriage, polygamy and arranged marriage continued, and women's rights were granted by the state rather than won by an independent women's movement; the regime closed the Turkish Women's Union in 1935.

Economic reform and industrialisation

The new state inherited a war-ravaged, overwhelmingly agricultural economy. Many of its merchants, artisans and skilled workers had been Armenians and Greeks, and their destruction and departure left large gaps. At the İzmir Economic Congress (February–March 1923) the government promised to support private enterprise, and in the 1920s it relied mainly on private business, encouraged by laws and state-backed banks such as the İş Bankası (1924). The tithe on agricultural produce, a heavy burden on peasants, was abolished in 1925, and railways were bought from foreign companies and extended.

The Great Depression ended this approach. Prices for Turkey's main exports (tobacco, raisins, figs, cotton) collapsed after 1929, and from 1930–1931 the government adopted étatism (devletçilik), state planning and ownership of industry, while keeping private property. Sümerbank (1933) and Etibank (1935) were state holding banks that built and ran factories and mines, and the First Five-Year Industrial Plan (1934), drawn up with Soviet advice, built textile mills (the Kayseri cotton mill opened in 1935), paper, glass, cement and steel works.

Étatism produced real industrial growth from a low base, and Turkey weathered the Depression better than many agricultural countries. Its limits were also clear. Agriculture still employed the large majority of the population, and peasants paid for industrialisation through low crop prices and taxes; little was spent on village roads, schools or health. Living standards in the countryside changed little by 1938.

Opposition and its suppression

Atatürk's reforms provoked resistance, especially from religious conservatives and from the Kurds of the east, many of whom had supported the War of Independence as a struggle of all Muslims and saw the abolition of the caliphate as a betrayal.

• The Sheikh Said rebellion (February–April 1925). A Kurdish religious leader of the Nakşibendi Sufi order led a rising in the south-east that combined Kurdish nationalism and anger at the abolition of the caliphate. The army crushed it; Sheikh Said and dozens of others were hanged, and the government used the revolt to close the opposition party and pass the Law on the Maintenance of Order.

• The Ararat revolt (1927–1930). A Kurdish nationalist rising around Mount Ararat, organised by the Xoybûn league, was suppressed by large military operations in 1930.

• The Menemen incident (December 1930). A small group of religious rebels near İzmir killed a young reserve officer, Mustafa Fehmi Kubilay. The regime responded with martial law and executions and made Kubilay a martyr of the secular revolution.

• Dersim (1937–1938). The government's military campaign in Dersim (renamed Tunceli), a mountainous Alevi Kurdish region with a tradition of autonomy, included bombing and mass killings and deportations of civilians. An official Turkish report gives 13,160 dead; other estimates are considerably higher, and the events are described by many Kurds and some historians as a massacre.

Opposition also took everyday forms: villagers kept wearing traditional caps, read the Qur'an in Arabic in secret, and voted with their feet for the Free Republican Party in 1930. The regime's answer combined repression with education through the schools and People's Houses. Most historians conclude that opposition could not stop the reforms while Atatürk lived, but that it showed how shallow their roots were outside the towns; much of it re-emerged when multi-party politics returned in 1946–1950.

Foreign policy

Atatürk's foreign policy aimed to secure the borders won at Lausanne and avoid new wars. Turkey signed a Treaty of Friendship and Neutrality with the Soviet Union (1925), joined the League of Nations (1932) and formed the Balkan Pact with Greece, Romania and Yugoslavia (1934), reconciling with its former Greek enemy. The Montreux Convention of July 1936 restored Turkish control and the right to fortify the Straits. The province of Hatay (Alexandretta), under French mandate in Syria, became autonomous in 1938 and joined Turkey in 1939, after Atatürk's death.

Atatürk died on 10 November 1938 in the Dolmabahçe Palace in Istanbul, of cirrhosis of the liver. İsmet İnönü succeeded him as president.

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How far did Atatürk transform Türkiye?

Perspectives and debates

Decline or transformation?

For much of the twentieth century historians described the nineteenth-century empire through a "decline" narrative. In The Emergence of Modern Turkey (1961), Bernard Lewis presented Ottoman history after the sixteenth century as a long decline, from which reforming sultans and statesmen tried to rescue the state by adopting Western methods, a process that culminated in the Kemalist republic. This view echoed both European writers of the time (the "sick man of Europe") and the Kemalists, who presented the Ottoman past as backward in order to stress the achievement of the republic.

Since the 1980s many historians have rejected the decline thesis. Donald Quataert (The Ottoman Empire, 1700–1922, 2000) argues that the empire adapted and transformed itself: its bureaucracy, schools, communications and economy grew, and it survived far longer than European observers predicted. Historians of this school point out that "decline" judges the empire only against the military power of Western Europe, and reads its history backwards from its collapse in 1918. Others reply that the loss of territory and the empire's growing financial and military dependence on Europe were real, and that "relative decline" remains a useful description of its international position.

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Was the Tanzimat a success?

Roderic Davison and Carter Findley stress the Tanzimat's achievements in law, administration and education; Şerif Mardin (The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought, 1962) shows how the reforms created a gulf between a Westernised official elite and the wider Muslim population, a divide that shaped Turkish politics into the republic. Balkan national historians, by contrast, have often treated the reforms as empty promises that did nothing to change Ottoman rule over Christians. The judgement depends on the measure: as state-building, the Tanzimat largely succeeded; as a way of holding a multi-religious empire together, it failed.

Continuity or a clean break, 1908–1938?

The official Kemalist account, expressed in Atatürk's Nutuk, presented the republic as a new beginning created by the national struggle from 1919, with little debt to the Ottoman past or the discredited CUP. Erik-Jan Zürcher (Turkey: A Modern History, 1993; The Young Turk Legacy and Nation Building, 2010) argues instead for a "Young Turk era" from 1908 to 1950. The leaders of the republic, including Atatürk and İnönü, were CUP members; the resistance of 1919 was organised by CUP networks; and Turkish nationalism, secular reform, a state-backed Muslim business class and the removal of Christian minorities were all CUP policies before they were Kemalist ones.

M. Şükrü Hanioğlu (Atatürk: An Intellectual Biography, 2011) traces Atatürk's ideas to the scientism, materialism and Turkism of the late Ottoman educated elite. The continuity argument does not deny change: the abolition of the sultanate and caliphate, the civil code and the alphabet went far beyond anything the CUP attempted. It does suggest that the "revolution" of the 1920s was the work of the same generation of officers and officials who had ruled since 1913, now free of the dynasty and of the empire's multi-religious population.

Assessing Atatürk

Older biographies, such as Lord Kinross (Atatürk: The Rebirth of a Nation, 1964), and Andrew Mango's detailed Atatürk (1999), present him as a gifted and largely admirable statesman who saved Turkish independence and modernised a backward society, while acknowledging his authoritarian methods. In Türkiye he has been the object of an official cult, protected by law since 1951. More critical historians, including Zürcher and Hanioğlu, stress the authoritarian single-party state, the use of force against religious and Kurdish opposition, the narrow social base of the reforms and the exclusion of minorities from the national identity. Since the 1990s, religious conservatives and Kurdish historians in Türkiye have also challenged the Kemalist account from their own perspectives.

The table of historians shows that the debates are linked. Those who stress decline tend to see the republic as a break and Atatürk as a saviour; those who stress transformation tend to see continuity from the Tanzimat through the CUP to the republic, and judge Atatürk as the most radical of a line of state-building reformers.

Applying the ideas in exam questions

Question 1: Muhammad Ali and the decline of Ottoman power

Question 2: the Tanzimat

Question 3: the emergence of the CUP (with a full essay plan)

Question 4: the impact of conflict

Question 5: the impact of Atatürk's rule

Self-check

• To do:

  I can describe the structure of the Ottoman state around 1790 (sultan, Porte, millets, Janissaries, ayan) and explain its weaknesses.

• To do:

  I can explain the reforms of Selim III and why they failed.

• To do:

  I can explain the impact of the Napoleonic Wars, including the French invasion of Egypt in 1798, on Ottoman power.

• To do:

  I can explain the loss of Ottoman influence in North Africa (Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya).

• To do:

  I can explain the rise of Muhammad Ali, his reforms and his wars with the sultan, and judge his significance.

• To do:

  I can explain the causes, course and impact of the Greek War of Independence, including Navarino and the role of the Great Powers.

• To do:

  I can explain Mahmud II's reforms, including the destruction of the Janissaries in 1826 and the trade convention of 1838.

• To do:

  I can explain the strategic, religious and economic reasons for the emergence of the Eastern Question.

• To do:

  I can explain the causes and impact of the Crimean War and the Treaty of Paris of 1856.

• To do:

  I can explain the Balkan crises of 1875–1878 and compare the Treaties of San Stefano and Berlin.

• To do:

  I can explain the reasons for the Tanzimat and describe the Edict of Gülhane and the Reform Edict of 1856.

• To do: