The Young Turk era deepened, accelerated, and polarized the major views that had been gathering momentum in the Ottoman Empire during the nineteenth century: Ottomanism and nationalism, liberalism and conservatism, Islamism and Turkism, democracy and autocracy, centralization and decentralization – all to the point where the empire might well have blown up had this not been accomplished by the events of World War I. This era, almost more than any other, has attracted scholars of modern Ottoman history, and it has been studied in such detail that it is difficult to believe that it was so short. Yet the politics, wars, and personalities of the period have so diverted its scholars that, to the present time, almost nothing has been done to study the modernization that it brought in even the darkest days of war. During this tragic period, four major wars decimated the population of the empire, raised its internal tensions to the breaking point, and threatened to destroy all the efforts of the sultans and reformers who had sought valiantly to save it during the previous century. Nevertheless, it was a time of regeneration during which the accomplishments of the Tanzimat and of Abdulhamit II were synthesized in a manner that laid the foundations of the modern Turkish Republic.

Reaction to the Revolution

The Young Turk Revolution had involved a cooperative effort of the CUP and various nationalist groups in Europe, so that the immediate internal reaction to the sultan's restoration of the Constitution was a wave of mass demonstrations, without equal in the empire's long history, in Istanbul and other major cities.