Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-27gpq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-26T23:42:12.565Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

2 - The Tanzimat II

from PART I - OTTOMAN BACKGROUND AND TRANSITION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2009

Reşat Kasaba
Affiliation:
University of Washington
Get access

Summary

In Ottoman history, the term Tanzimat (literally ‘the reforms’) designates a period that began in 1839 and ended by 1876. Literary scholars speak of ‘Tanzimat literature’ produced long after 1876, arguing that the literature displays continuities that warrant such usage. Reform policy also displays continuities after 1876. Yet the answer to the critical question of ‘who governs’ changed. The death of the last dominant Tanzimat statesman, Mehmed Emin Âli Paşa (1871), and the accession of the last dominant Ottoman sultan, Abdülhamid II (1876), decisively changed the answer to that question.

Background

No disagreement surrounds the beginning of the Tanzimat, for several watershed events occurred in 1839, including a change in ‘who governed’. However, Ottoman efforts at modernising reform had begun much earlier. The catastrophes that alerted Ottomans to the menace of European imperialism began with the Russo-Ottoman War of 1768–74, ending with the disastrous Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca. That treaty launched the series of crises known to Europeans as the ‘Eastern Question’, over how to dispose of the lands under Ottoman rule. Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt (1798) was equally traumatic, although temporary in its effects compared to Küçük Kaynarca, as it showed that the imperialist threat was not localised in the European borderlands but could make itself felt anywhere. These crises stimulated demands in both Istanbul and the provinces – for example at Mosul – for an end to the political decentralisation of the preceding two centuries and a reassertion of sultanic authority. Sultans Selim III (1789–1807) and Mahmud II (1808–39) responded with reform programmes that opened the Ottoman reform era (1789–1922).

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Çakır, Serpil, Osmanlı kadın hareketi (Istanbul: Metis, 1994)Google Scholar
Davison, Roderic, Reform in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963)Google Scholar
Findley, Carter V., Bureaucratic Reform in the Ottoman Empire: The Sublime Porte, 1789–1922 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980)Google Scholar
Findley, Carter, Ottoman Officialdom: A Social History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Georgeon, François, Abdülhamid II: le sultan calife (1876–1909) (Paris: Fayard, 2003)Google Scholar
İnalcık, Hahl and Quataert, Donald (eds.), An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)Google Scholar
Karpat, Kemal H., Ottoman population, 1830–1914: Demographic and social characteristics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985)Google Scholar
Kili, Suan and Gözübüyük, Şeref, Türk anayasası metinleri (Ankara: Türkiye İş Bankası Yayınları, 1985)Google Scholar
Mardin, Şerif, The Genesis of the Young Ottoman Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962)Google Scholar
McCarthy, Justin, Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims (Princeton: Darwin Press, 1995)Google Scholar
Ortaylı, İlber, İmparatorluğun en uzun yüzyılı (Istanbul: Hil Yayınları, 1987)Google Scholar
Pamuk, Şevket, A Monetary History of the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)Google Scholar
Quataert, Donald, Ottoman Manufacturing in the Age of Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)Google Scholar
Rogan, Eugene L., Frontiers of the State in the Late Ottoman Empire: Transjordan, 1851–1921 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)Google Scholar
Shaw, Stanford J. and Shaw, Ezel Kural, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Somel, Selçuk Akşin, The Modernization of Public Education in the Ottoman Empire, 1839–1908: Islamization, Autocracy and Discipline (Leiden: Brill, 2001)Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • The Tanzimat II
  • Edited by Reşat Kasaba, University of Washington
  • Book: The Cambridge History of Turkey
  • Online publication: 28 November 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521620963.003
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • The Tanzimat II
  • Edited by Reşat Kasaba, University of Washington
  • Book: The Cambridge History of Turkey
  • Online publication: 28 November 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521620963.003
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • The Tanzimat II
  • Edited by Reşat Kasaba, University of Washington
  • Book: The Cambridge History of Turkey
  • Online publication: 28 November 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521620963.003
Available formats
×