OTTOMAN EMPIRE

The last century and a half of the existence of the Ottoman Empire (1299–1922) has been subsumed under different rubrics and accorded different essences. Some see it as the expression of the Eastern Question—that is, the involvement of the European Powers in the problems of the disintegrating Ottoman state, which became the dominant concern of international relations in the nineteenth century. In this approach, the Ottoman Empire is allotted a rather passive role as, in the worst case, a Great Powers' pawn and, in the best case, a reluctantly accepted partner in the system of the international balance of power. While political and diplomatic works dominate in the treatment of the Eastern Question, it is also part and parcel of the economic and colonial expansion of the Great Powers (Russia, Great Britain, France, Austria-Hungary, Italy, and Germany). Works exploring these aspects, often within world systems theory, center-periphery relations, and colonial and postcolonial studies, emphasize the growing economic dependence of the Ottoman Empire—financial, commercial, and industrial—on the industrialized European West. Within the rubric, however, relatively little attention is accorded to internal developments.

For others, this period is characterized chiefly by the response of the Ottoman elites to the internal and external crises of the Ottoman polity. The focus is on the modernizing attempts at reform, the efforts to centralize the empire and curb the centrifugal tendencies of powerful provincial landlords (ayans), and adapt the state institutions to the new challenges coming from the west. Often this interpretation takes the shape of a linear teleological progression from the earliest hesitant Europeanizing endeavors in the eighteenth century, through the broad reform program and especially the constitutional movement of the nineteenth century, to the Young Turk Revolution (1908), and finally to the radical reforms of Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938) after 1923. This approach focuses mostly on the imperial center: the centralizing attempts of the sultans, the formation of a modern state bureaucracy, the elaboration of new institutions. It usually gives Balkan nationalisms and other minority movements short shrift, explaining them as mechanical exports of a western ideology or a combination between a handful of separatists buttressed by Great Power manipulation and incitement.

Another approach focuses on nationalism as the dominant ideology and practice that transformed the map of Europe and resulted in the disintegration of all European empires. As an ideology whose central goal and successful outcome was the creation of a series of independent nation-states, Balkan and Arab nationalisms are an organic element of Ottoman history. This approach is preferred in the historiographies of the secession states with their almost exclusive focus on the emergence, maturation, and victory of national-liberation struggles, a grand narrative in which the reform movement figures only as background, and the tribulations of the Eastern Question as side-effects that favored or hampered the ongoing progression of the national movements. Skewed as this approach may be, it is no less legitimate than the other two, which tend to underestimate the internal roots and power of nationalism and its effect on the reform movement.

Only by taking account of the complex dialectical interaction of all three processes can a balanced portrait of Ottoman developments in the long nineteenth century begin to appear. Several times during this period the three processes are intertwined in such a way that they produced a dramatic cumulative effect. This article attempts to link all three, and show how profoundly inter-related they all are. Still, it focuses primarily on the course and interplay between the westernizing reform movement and nationalism. The international aspect, which was instrumental for and intimately linked with the other two, will be duly invoked, but it is treated in more detail in a separate entry on the Eastern Question.

A caveat is in order about the geographical coverage of the article. The emphasis falls on developments in the European possessions of the empire (the Balkans), not only because this is an encyclopedia of Europe. With the exception of the Egyptian crises, events in the Near or Middle East became central and involved the European powers directly only at the beginning of the twentieth century, especially with the rise of Arab nationalism and the final disintegration of the empire during the First World War, the expansion of the British and French colonial empires, and the introduction of the mandate system. Otherwise, the Eastern Question of the nineteenth century was synonymous with the process of secession of the Balkan nations from the Ottoman Empire. The very name Eastern Question was born at the time of the Greek war for independence in the 1820s.

The Balkans had always been the demographic and economic center of the empire. In the middle of the nineteenth century, they comprised half of the Ottoman population (totaling around twenty-five million), and their population density was twice that of Anatolia, six times that of Iraq and Syria, and ten times that of the Arabian peninsula. Even on the eve of the Young Turk revolution, when the Ottomans were left with very few European possessions, the Balkan population still made up a good quarter of the total. In the nineteenth century, the Balkans continued to be the empire's agricultural, commercial, and manufacturing center, where the first factories and railroads made their appearance.

the reforms of selim iii and the serbian uprisings

The end of the eighteenth century saw the first confluence between the three processes. The Ottoman retreat from Central Europe after the Treaty of Karlowitz (1699) dramatically deepened after the Russo-Turkish War (1768–1774), the loss of the Crimea in southern Ukraine to Russia in 1783, and thus Ottoman monopoly over the Black Sea. This reintroduced the necessity for reforms, which had been put on hold for the several peaceful decades (1739–1768). Pre-eighteenth-century reforms aimed at resuscitating the institutions of the Golden Age of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The first serious rethinking of the empire's position in an international context, and a readiness to emulate foreign ways, came at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The military factor was decisive in shaping an awareness of the western challenge, and eighteenth-century reforms affected mostly the military sphere, although this period saw also the introduction of the printing press and borrowings in elite culture and fashion. The inspiration for reforms came mostly from French sources and models. At the same time, the innovations produced a strong reaction of vested conservative interests.

During the reign of Sultan Selim III (r. 1789–1807), eighteenth-century reforms reached their culmination and most sustained effort. For the first time, regular and permanent Ottoman embassies in the major European capitals were established (1792). The Russian annexation of the Crimea (1783), which gave Russia an outlet to the Black Sea, and another war with Austria and Russia (1787) provided the impetus for military reform. Selim opened military schools and set up a new infantry, the famous nizam-i cedid (new order), with European-style uniforms, imported rifles, and French instructors. By 1807 it numbered twenty-five thousand and was successful against Napoleon at the battle of Acre (1799). The janissary corps, the ominous infantry that had been the backbone of Ottoman success in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries but which, by the eighteenth century, had become militarily obsolete and a major financial burden, viewed the nizam-i cedid as such a threat, however, that Selim was forced to disband it. He was still deposed in 1807 and killed in 1808.

Selim's reforms coincided with the outbreak of the first national rebellion in the Balkans. The First Serbian Uprising (1804), which started as a spontaneous revolt against the misrule of the dahis (local janissaries opposed to Selim III), was led by the charismatic Karadjordje Petrovi? (1760s?–1817). The insurrection received ardent support from Serb merchants living in the Habsburg empire and attracted volunteers among the different Orthodox Balkan communities. In 1805, the Sublime Porte (or Porte, the name given to the Ottoman government) proclaimed jihad (holy war) against the Serbian insurgents. The Serbian revolt is a good illustration of the complex entanglement of Balkan events in international affairs. It coincided not only with a Russo-Turkish war (1806–1812), but also with the intricate political relationships in the Napoleonic era. Trying to benefit from Great Power rivalries, Karageorge maneuvered between Paris, Vienna, and St. Petersburg. His decision to take on Russia was instrumental in transforming the initial demands for autonomy to full independence. Serbia had over-thrown Ottoman control by 1807, but the deteriorating relations with Napoleon forced the Russians to conclude a peace treaty with the Ottomans, and the Porte launched a huge counter-offensive in 1813. The uprising was put down with such cruelty and vengeance that the population soon rose in a second revolt, under the leadership of Miloš Obrenovi? (1780–1860). While he deftly exploited the international situation after Napoleon's defeat, Miloš was careful not to pressure the Porte with unrealistic demands. His tactics paid off well: in 1830 Serbia was recognized as an autonomous hereditary principality. The subsequent decades saw the very slow transformation of the traditional system of local self-governing communities into a centralized bureaucratic state. In the economic sphere, the poor and egalitarian frontier society of Serbia began making modest strides in modernization only in the last decades of the nineteenth century, after it received full independence by the Treaty of Berlin (1878).

balkan enlightenment and the greek war for independence

The Serbian revolt of 1804, unlike its Greek counterpart of 1821, has often been dismissed as a spontaneous rising in a backward agrarian region without

a long-term national program and careful organizational preparation. Confining the Serbian revolt exclusively to the framework of the Belgrade district, however, consciously misses the point that both the Balkan Enlightenment as well as the national idea had made important strides among the Serbian elites of the adjacent Habsburg provinces who were in immediate and organic contact with their co-nationals in the Ottoman realm. What deserves stressing, however, is the combination between strong social discontent and fermenting national consciousness, even when the two were not always represented by the same social strata.

The eighteenth century saw the emergence and consolidation of an indigenous Balkan entrepreneurial merchant class. This group was made up almost exclusively of non-Muslims, for whom the military and the state bureaucracy were closed, and who were preferred partners in the expanding European trade. The "conquering Balkan Orthodox merchant" who came to dominate the imperial trade included the most diverse ethnic elements—Serbs, Vlachs, Bulgarians—but Greeks dominated, so much so that by the second half of the eighteenth century (and until the first decades of the nineteenth) Greek had become the lingua franca of Balkan commerce and, to a great extent, of education and cultural production in general. The growing wealth of this entrepreneurial class, accompanied by increased self-esteem, made the arbitrariness and lack of security of property and life in the Ottoman Empire particularly intolerable. These merchants—well traveled, cognizant of foreign habits and manners, speaking and reading several languages—engaged or fostered others to engage in literary and educational pursuits. They provided the material support for schools, libraries, and numerous publications, and supported the secularization of school curricula. Thus (barring exceptions), one can speak of the commercial basis of the Balkan Enlightenment, as well as its strong diasporic character. In terms of expression, there was a growing interest in history, an influence coming from both the Enlightenment obsession with the classical past as well as from romanticism. Historicism, a common feature of the Balkan Enlightenment, became also one of the building blocks of the separate Balkan nationalisms.

The event that attracted the greatest contemporary attention and gave birth to the notion of the Eastern Question was the Greek War for Independence (1821–1828). Ideologically and politically, it was prepared by the whole current of ideas and events of the previous half-century: the spread of the Enlightenment and the ideas of the French revolution; the example of the Serbian uprising; the rise and strength of philhellenism in Europe. Of particular importance was the ideology of figures like Rigas Velestinlis (also known as Rigas Pheraios, 1757–1798) and Adamántios Koraïs (1748–1833). The "Society of Friends," founded in 1814 in Odessa, the center of a powerful Greek commercial diasporic community, organized the revolt. It was shaped on Masonic principles, and worked to achieve a broad Balkan Christian network with the aim of creating a Christian pan-Balkan state.

The Greek uprising came at a most inopportune moment of the international conjuncture. The principles of the Holy Alliance, announced at the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815), were strictly observed by the Great Powers and, despite pro-Christian sympathies, all denounced the Greeks as illegitimate rebels against a legal monarch. At the same time, hundreds of philhellenic volunteers from all over Europe flocked to Greece, joining the rebellious armies that at first gained considerable victories. Quite remarkable was the steady number of volunteers from other Balkan ethnic groups who fought actively on the side of the Greeks: the Bulgarians alone numbered over fourteen thousand.

In subsequent years, however, the Greek insurgents displayed an enormous degree of factionalism, and Mahmud II (1785–1839) managed to enlist the military support of Egypt. This would have provided the fatal blow against the insurgents, were it not for the intervention of Russia, Britain, and France. Following Russia's victorious war against the Ottomans (1828–1829), the London Protocol of 1830 sanctioned the formal secession of the first independent nation-state carved out of the Ottoman Empire. Created as a poor rump state, with roughly a quarter of the ethnic Greeks, in the next decades independent Greece developed as a protectorate of Russia, Britain, and France, making slow economic and social progress, and dominated by powerful irredentist feelings focused on recovering the territories inhabited by Greeks and still under foreign Ottoman rule. Its national doctrine, based on the assumption of the unbroken community of modern Greece with its classical and medieval past, and the redemption of territories inhabited by Greeks, aimed at the resurrection of the Byzantine Empire with Constantinople as its capital. It reaped slow but steady success toward the end of the century, reached its culmination during the Balkan wars, and found its fiasco with the Asia Minor invasion in the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922).

the reforms of mahmud ii and the tanzimat

Well into the Greek war of independence, the Ottoman Empire experienced what came to be known as the Auspicious Event: the destruction of the janissary corps by Sultan Mahmud II in 1826. Mahmud II had barely survived the conservative coup of 1808 and, while sharing his cousin Selim III's reformist views, he patiently waited for eighteen years, in the meantime building alliances and securing loyalties. The janissary corps had long lost its military significance, and its refusal to fight or poor performance against the Russians (1806–1812) and the Greek rebels in the 1820s alienated their support to the point where Mahmud II succeeded in annihilating them once and for all. The road was open for more sustained changes and, as usual, military reform was at the center. A new army along European lines was constructed, this time with Prussian instructors; a territorial militia emulating the Prussian was set up. Increased attention was devoted to education, both for military and civilian purposes. The changes in the central administration saw the gradual formation of ministries of the western type. A new stratum of bureaucrats was recruited and trained in western ways and languages (primarily French). A new postal system was set up; the first Ottoman newspaper appeared; European clothes were introduced. Mahmud II's reform reached also into the legal and agricultural systems. Most importantly, Mahmud II succeeded largely in his greatest goal: to centralize the empire by curbing the local power of the ayans, guilds, religious leaders, and tribes.

The big challenge came from Egypt. After Napoleon's failed invasion (1798–1799), Mehmet Ali (r. 1805–1848), an Ottoman officer of Albanian descent, became Egypt's virtual ruler. In 1824 he came to the rescue of Mahmud II against the Greeks, who were saved from destruction only by the intervention of the three Great Powers: Russia, France, and Great Britain. Muhammad Ali had implemented Europeanizing reforms with French help and built a strong army. Having most of the Arab provinces under his control, twice during his reign he challenged Mahmud II's power (1832–1833 and 1838–1839). Only Great Power involvement, seeking to keep the status quo, stripped Mehmet Ali of his gains. In the following decades Egypt moved further away from Ottoman control: a nominal possession after British occupation in 1882, Egypt was finally lost in 1914, to become a British colony.

At the height of the second Egyptian crisis, Mahmud II died and was succeeded by Abdülmecid I (r. 1839–1861). Determined to continue his father's work, alarmed by the military situation, and seeking to impress the western powers, the new sultan staked on the reformists within the bureaucracy, first and foremost Mustafa Re?id Pasha (1800–1858), and later his followers Ali Pasha (1815–1871) and Fuad Pasha (1815–1858). A proclamation of principles, the Hatt-i ?erif of Gülhane (1839), was promulgated, guaranteeing security of life, honor, and property, regular taxation and army recruits, and, most importantly, equality of all religions before the law. The latter was a radical breach with the ancient Islamic tradition, and proved extremely controversial. While it gave impetus to the non-Muslim communities, it strengthened the conservative Islamic opposition. The subsequent period, known as the Tanzimat (Reorganization, 1839–1871), continued and deepened the transformation begun in the previous years. It expanded significantly the area of state activity from its usual focus on the military and finance, into education, public works, law, administration, diplomacy, and, less successfully, the economy. It also marked the ascendancy of the bureaucracy and its emancipation from the sultan's control. During the Crimean War (1853–1856), at a time when Ottoman military weakness was exposed again, and in an attempt to mollify the Great Powers, the Porte reaffirmed its commitment to reform with the proclamation the Hatt-i Humayun (1856), which reiterated and developed the stance of the 1839 edict.

The Tanzimat has left a legacy of controversial assessment. Some saw it as too drastic, others as palliative and insufficient. Often, unfairly, it was accused of lack of genuine commitment, of using reforms simply to placate the Great Powers. Part of this came from the chronological coincidence between moments of international or domestic crises and reform spurs. This should be read rather as a tribute to the tactics of the reformists, who had to overcome strong opposition, and usually were able to gain the upper hand at such moments. Ultimately, it demonstrates the intimate interrelationship between all above-mentioned processes. By the 1860s, a new generation of reform-minded bureaucrats, with new perceptions of government, progress, and nation, had appeared. Impatient with the growing (especially financial) dependence on European powers, and with the autocratic tendencies of the later Tanzimat reformers, this new generation of reformers advocated democratic, constitutional ideas. They also harbored the utopia of creating a common Ottoman consciousness, something that disregarded the already advanced processes of nationalism. Known under the name of Young Ottomans, these reformers engaged passionately in literary activities, often in European exile. Their movement coincided with the intensification of another national cause in the Balkans, the Bulgarian.

the bulgarian national movement and the millet system

Nationalisms in the Balkans are coterminous with the gradual disintegration of two imperial formations: on the one hand, the Ottoman state; on the other hand, the Orthodox community, institutionally encompassed in the Rum millet (the Roman or Greek nation, that is, the Orthodox Christians conquered by Islam). It is the Bulgarian case that paradigmatically illustrates this double process. The millet system (i.e., the division of the population into self-governing confessional bodies beyond the Muslim community) by the middle of the nineteenth century encompassed the Jews, the Armenians or Monophysites, the Catholics, the Protestants, and the largest of them all, the Greek-Orthodox (Rum) community. As a largely Orthodox people, the Bulgarians belonged to the Rum millet. Although there had been patriotic stirrings from the second half of the eighteenth century, a sustained movement for educational and religious emancipation began in the 1820s. Until the Bulgarians began to organize their own secondary school system, the existing Greek establishments fulfilled the need for secular education among their own commercial elites. Between 1830 and 1870, a network of close to two thousand Bulgarian schools appeared, offering free education and entirely supported by the local communities. Guilds and town councils financed schools and other cultural institutions, and provided scholarships for training of teachers and students abroad. This was accompanied by the feverish publishing of textbooks, reference books, translations, and original literary works, as well as the launching of a lively periodic press. There is no doubt that this cultural revival, as well as the underlying economic progress, was directly stimulated by the favorable conditions introduced by the Tanzimat reforms.

During the 1860s and 1870s, the church struggle came to a head. It did not spring from any kind of doctrinal issues, but was essentially a political movement for a separate church. It was triggered by protests in the 1820s against the venality of the Greek clergy, in support of appointing Bulgarian high priests, and in support of the use of Bulgarian in sermons, but there were no demands for a separate church until the middle of the nineteenth century. In 1860 the Bulgarians in Constantinople virtually declared their ecclesiastical independence, and in the next decade they seceded unilaterally from the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. This secession was not immediately recognized. The Greek Patriarchate objected strongly to losing a sizeable number of its flock after it had effectively lost the Greeks of independent Greece. The Russians, on whom Bulgarian hopes had been pinned, were averse to seeing a blow to Orthodox unity. Finally, the Porte enjoyed the opportunity to manipulate a seething dispute between two of its important communities. The conflict was finally resolved in 1870 with a sultan's firman (decree), which officially recognized the Bulgarian church and established a separate Bulgarian millet. This was an unprecedented move, effectively changing the rationale of the millet system, which had been conceived as the system of institutionalizing and managing religious, not ethnolinguistic groups. The Bulgarian church was instituted as an exarchate, and was promptly excommunicated by the Greek Patriarch. Of the seventy-four Orthodox dioceses, twenty-five immediately joined the exarchate, eight were divided, and, most importantly, the rest could be transferred to either jurisdiction with a vote of the flock. This started a passionate struggle exacerbating the already much deteriorated relations between Greeks and Bulgarians. In all fairness, it can be concluded that the rise of Bulgarian nationalism entailed first the process of differentiation within the Orthodox commonwealth.

One of the reasons the Porte finally supported Bulgarian church independence in 1870 after having disregarded their numerous petitions for years, if not for decades, was that in the meantime the Bulgarian political movement, which had gained momentum in the 1860s, was becoming swiftly radicalized. With the activities of Georgi Rakovski (1821–1867), Liuben Karavelov (1834–1879), Vasil Levski (1837–1873), and Khristo Botev (1848–1876), the independence movement received serious impetus and began the preparations for a national revolution.

the eastern crisis (1875–1878) and ottoman constitutionalism

In the mid-1870s, the Eastern Question acquired particular relevance and reached a new stage. Not only did it create or reaffirm de facto independent Balkan states, but it also marked a new level of Great Power involvement. In 1875, the situation turned explosive when the Christian peasants in Bosnia-Herzegovina rebelled against their Muslim

lords. While the uprising was characterized by the explosion of a social question, it was also informed to some extent by religious opposition and awareness of pan-Serb and pan-Slav national programs. It was soon followed by a more mature political revolt in Bulgaria, prepared by revolutionaries with the express purpose of Bulgarian independence. While the April Uprising of 1876 proved abortive and was crushed mercilessly, its bloody demise caused a wave of public opinion in Europe favorable to the Bulgarian cause.

It is in these circumstances that one can observe the playing out of the third symbiotic process, the Ottoman constitutional movement. In December 1876, a conference of ambassadors met in Constantinople to discuss the Eastern Crisis and propose remedies, mostly by creating autonomous districts. In a move to counter the dictate of the Great Powers, the Porte responded by promulgating the first Ottoman constitution. It was obviously motivated by Great Power pressure to placate the national movements, but also by the

modernizing faction, which in the constant struggles within the Ottoman elites had been pushed to the side and now used this event as an opportune moment to act. The constitution was largely the work of Midhat Pasha (1822–1883), a prominent reformer who had been governor in Bulgaria and Iraq, intermittently occupying other high positions, and who became the leader of the Young Ottoman movement. The Ottoman constitution of 1876 was limited and the first parliament short-lived. Abdul-Hamid II (r. 1876–1909) dissolved it in a year, but it became the rallying cry and program of generations of reformers to come.

The display of reform as a deterrent to European pressure also played its role. Sensing Britain's reluctance to press the Porte further, Abdul-Hamid II took an intransigent position toward the proposals of the ambassador's conference, which precipitated Russia's declaration of war (1877–1878). Russian troops eventually reached the outskirts of Constantinople and imposed the Treaty of San Stefano (March 1878). It gave full independence to Serbia, Montenegro, and Romania, which had unified the autonomous principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia in 1859. Its chief and most controversial provision was the creation of a large Bulgarian state, following the frontiers of the Bulgarian exarchate, and therefore perceived by the Bulgarians as the true and just recreation of their nation-state. This proved unacceptable to the other Great Powers, who feared that it would unduly strengthen Russia's strategic advance toward Constantinople and the straits. As a consequence, the Congress of Berlin (June–July 1878), while reaffirming Serbian, Montenegrin, and Romanian independence, divided Bulgaria in three parts, and incited future Bulgarian irredentist feelings aimed at redeeming the territories under foreign rule. The first stage of this struggle was completed when the autonomous Bulgarian Principality was unified with Eastern Rumelia (1885). Macedonia, on the other hand, remained the open wound of the Bulgarian national program. The Treaty of Berlin also endorsed the occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina by the Habsburgs, the culmination of a trend from the end of the seventeenth century when the Ottomans, having reached Vienna, began their gradual retreat and the Habsburgs expanded eastward at their expense. The treaty also authorized the occupation of Cyprus by the British, marking the direct involvement of this power in the spoils of the empire.

The Eastern Crisis of the 1870s represents a milestone in Balkan and European history. For Europe, it marked the disintegration of the Three Emperors League of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia, and the intensification of Austrian-Russian rivalry in the Balkans that had developed in the aftermath of the Crimean War. It marked the beginnings of a reversal in British policy, which heretofore had been the staunchest supporter of Ottoman integrity, and the beginnings of a German predominance in the empire. It also set the tone for the intensification of Balkan national conflicts, which culminated in the Balkan Wars.

the rise of albanian and turkish nationalism

The three decades of Abdul-Hamid II's autocratic rule, the empire's growing economic dependence on Europe, and the continuing secessionism of its minorities triggered strong opposition among young army officers and educated Turks, especially students in the military and medical schools. In 1889, a clandestine organization, the future Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), was formed. Also known as the Young Turks, its members were by no means ideologically unified: there was a strong cleavage between Turkish nationalism (led by Ahmed Riza [1858–1930]) and Ottoman liberalism (led by Prince Sabaheddin [1877–1948]), as well as between the Paris exiles and the locally based secret revolutionary cells. This cleavage explains, on the one hand, the strong support that the CUP received at first among some minority groups—Jews, Armenians, Albanians, Kurds, Greeks, and other Christians—and their subsequent alienation when faced with the Turkifying drive of the Young Turks. They were all unified, however, in their drive to restore the constitution.

The last two decades of the nineteenth century witnessed the rise of two Muslim nationalisms: Turkish and Albanian. Coalescing somewhat later than the Christian nationalisms of the empire, they were undoubtedly reactive and preservationist and, at the same time, emulated the national movements of the Christian minorities in many ways. By the turn of the century, three ideological trends in public life served as poles of cohesion among Muslim Turks: traditional Islam, Ottomanism, and, increasingly, Turkish nationalism, whose major exponent was the sociologist Mehmet Ziya Gökalp (c. 1875–1924), a member of the CUP. While also focused on the preservation of the empire's territorial integrity, Turkish nationalism was premised on an ethnolinguistic identity, promulgating the hegemony of the Turkish element within the empire and stressing the links to other Central Asian Turkish-speaking peoples (unlike Ottomanism, which strived to create a type of Ottoman citizenship regardless of ethnic and linguistic distinctions).

Albanian nationalism was the only Balkan nationalism without a secessionist program, because its predominantly Muslim population saw its best protection under the umbrella of the retreating Sublime Porte. The Albanian cultural revival began in the 1860s among its Italian diaspora, inspired by the ideas of the Italian movement for unification, the Risorgimento. Politically, the Albanian Prizren League (1878) opposed any attempt to annex Albanian-populated territories by the newly independent Balkan Christian states and aimed at achieving cultural autonomy within the Ottoman Empire. At first tolerated and even encouraged by the Ottomans, the League made great strides in establishing a network of schools and publishing numerous books and newspapers. By 1886, however, the Porte cracked down and the use of Albanian was banned, triggering a wave of emigration. In the following decades, the activities of the Albanian diaspora intensified. At the same time, part of the remaining Albanian elites became outposts of extreme conservatism, supporting the counterrevolution against the westernizing efforts of the Young Turks, whereas others were radicalized over the Young Turks' nationalist policies.

It was around the Balkan wars that events in Albania came to a head. With the immediate danger of partition stemming from the plans of the victorious Balkan alliance, the Albanians in 1912 were forced to give up their traditional strategy of autonomy and opt for independence. More importantly, international circumstances were favorable: Albanian independence was strongly advocated by both Italy and Austria-Hungary, to prevent Serbian expansion to the Adriatic. With the Treaty of London (1913), Albania was recognized as an independent nation-state under a six-power guarantee.

from the young turk revolution to world war i

The decade leading to the Great War was punctuated by the Young Turk Revolution (1908) and the Balkan wars (1912–1913). The unresolved minority question in Macedonia, the activities of Greek and Bulgarian guerrillas, and especially the drastic repression of the Ilinden revolt (1903) precipitated Great Power pressure to resolve the Macedonian crisis. CUP officers argued that only a return to constitutional government could offset European intervention. By 1906 revolutionary cells had spread among serving officers in field formations, prominent among them Mustafa Kemal, the future Atatürk. These patriotic Muslim Turks were calling for the efficient defense of the empire, which could be achieved only by toppling the incompetent government. Japan's triumph over Russia (1908) was seen not only as a victory of an Oriental power against a European one, but also as the defeat of an autocrat by a constitutional regime. In July 1908, a genuine revolutionary situation forced Abdul-Hamid II to restore the constitution, and after the unsuccessful attempt at counterrevolution in 1909, he was deposed in favor of Mehmet V (r. 1909–1918). By that time, the nationalist faction among the Young Turks had taken the upper hand. It embraced repressive and centralizing policies and imposed a program of Turkification not only upon the non-Muslims, but tried to force the Turkish language upon Arabs, Albanians, and other non-Turkish Muslims. From 1913, after it had crushed all internal opposition, the Young Turks ruled through the Triumvirate of Cemal, Enver, and Talat.

The Young Turks could not stop the disintegration of the empire. In 1908 Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria proclaimed full independence, and Crete, although unsuccessfully, declared union with Greece. In 1911 Tripolitania was lost to Italy. Most devastating were the Balkan wars (1912–1913), both politically and demographically, resulting in the emigration of considerable Muslim masses into Anatolia. In 1912 Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece, and Montenegro created a common front with the purpose of expelling the Ottoman Empire from its last European possessions. In this they largely succeeded, and all of Ottoman Europe, with the exception of Constantinople and its immediate hinterland, was lost. Only the Second Balkan War between the allies over their spoils allowed the Ottomans to retrieve Eastern Thrace, and the final borders coincide with the early twenty-first century's Turkish frontiers in Europe. The road to World War I and the final demise of the empire in the Middle East was set.

See alsoAlbania; Balkan Wars; Congress of Vienna; Crimean War; Eastern Question; Greece; Millet System; Montenegro.

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Maria Todorova