A Radical History of the World by Faulkner Neil

Author:Faulkner, Neil
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Book Network Int'l Limited trading as NBN International (NBNi)

The Ottoman Empire and the 1908 ‘Young Turk’ Revolution

Revolutions are infectious. Russia’s 1905 revolution was no exception. It set off a wave of revolutions, notably in Persia (1906), Turkey (1908), Mexico (1910), and China (1911). That in Turkey began a process that would transform the Middle East over the next two decades.

In 1908 the region was dominated by the Ottoman Empire, which ruled Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and western Arabia. This was the traditional empire founded by a Turkish-speaking warlord in the fourteenth century and built into a Eurasian colossus by great campaigns of conquest in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, when Ottoman armies had surged across the Balkans and into Central Europe as far as the gates of Vienna; across the East to the Caspian and the Persian Gulf; down both sides of the Red Sea, which became an Ottoman lake; and along almost the whole extent of North Africa, with Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Algeria all becoming Ottoman provinces.

The empire was ruled by an absolutist sultan and an apparatus of soldiers and officials. Ottoman civil society – landlords and peasants in the countryside, merchants and artisans in the towns – was divided for administrative purposes into separate ethno-religious ‘millets’ controlled by conservative community leaders. The main domestic preoccupations of the Ottoman state were maintaining internal order and collecting taxes. Civil society existed for the benefit of the imperial state. Economics served politics. The free development of economic and social forces was blocked by military-bureaucratic, feudal, and tribal elites determined to defend traditional power and privilege. Because of this, during the eighteenth century, geopolitical power had shifted from a stagnant Ottoman Empire to more dynamic European rivals.

As the central power waned, the inherent weakness of the empire – its lack of both geographical and national coherence – was exposed. In the early nineteenth century, Egypt became effectively independent under local satraps, and Greece won its freedom through armed insurrection. The Ottoman Empire became ‘the Sick Man of Europe’. But despite the mounting threat of fragmentation, the Ottoman ruling class resisted reform and modernisation. Successive attempts to engineer a ‘bourgeois revolution from above’ ran into the buffers.

What saved the Ottomans during the nineteenth century was the rivalry of the great powers and a flow of foreign loans and investments. Britain and France supported the Turks in the Crimean War (1853–6) as a bulwark against Russian southward expansion. Thereafter British and French bankers made loans to fund railways and armaments. Late nineteenth-century modernisation therefore turned the Ottoman Empire into a semi-colonial dependency. The regime of Sultan Abdulhamid II (1876–1909) spent 60 per cent of state revenue on the army and administration and 30 per cent on interest payments to foreign bankers.

In 1905–7, inspired by the Russian example, the Armenian subject-people of eastern Turkey rose in revolt against new taxes and military conscription. The Ottoman regime was unable to suppress the revolt. The taxes were cancelled and an amnesty granted. But before this had happened, the revolt had spread to other parts of the empire.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.