Abstract
This paper tries to put the end of the Ottoman Empire into a larger perspective of imperial history. Empires are understood here as two types of political order where a centre controls a periphery of significant size. Either (type one) they co-opt local elites into the imperial elite as was the case in the Austrian Empire or (type two) control beyond the local level rests with people from the centre as in the case of the British and other European colonial empires. The classical Ottoman Empire was an Empire of the second type controlled more or less exclusively by people from the centre (e.g. the Balkan Peninsula). During the last decades of its existence, it turned into a polity of the more open “Austrian” variant. Unfortunately, this change occurred at a time when Empires of the “Austrian” kind where (a bit bizarrely) seen as instruments of oppression and therefore did not help the Empire to survive the onslaught of nationalisms. By consequence, it was in the name of nationalism that the successor states of the Empire (and the Republic of Turkey most prominently) then turned against the efforts of imperialists of the “British” kind that in a second wave of anti-imperialism after World War one were increasingly seen as obsolete.
This short paper does not aim at providing the reader with a general picture of late Ottoman history. Short overviews that also contain all the factual information used for the present paper can be found e.g. in Quataert (2000), Hanioğlu (2017), or Howard (2017).
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Notes
- 1.
A typical example of this milieu and its ideas is analysed by Fleischer (1986).
- 2.
On him Thomas (1972).
- 3.
Speaking about nationhood in late antiquity is problematic. What is implied here by “nation state” is that the political borders coincide with the region where a certain people lives and not e.g. with the territory ruled by a certain ruler or other forms of definition of a political entity. Nation state in this sense does not imply that the whole population is identified with the “nation” or should have political rights and obligations. This does not even hold true for e.g. the US before the Civil War (in the south until the 1960s).
- 4.
This process of integration of peripheral elites was already under way since at least the Social War in the first century BC or even earlier. But until the end of the first century this integration did not go without resistance of established members of the aristocracy, as when Claudius tried to introduce aristocrats from Gaul into the Senate. This resistance may be seen as a typical case of defense of the privileges of the established against outsiders as analyzed by Elias and Scotson (1965). The European colonial empires of the 19th and 20th centuries started in their turn to admit some of the colonized to their centers of power, both in the British and even more in the French case (cabinet members and high administrators like Blaise Diange, Félix Eboué and later Leopold Senghor being only three very well-known examples). But this process of integration of peripheral elites had not really come under way when the colonial empires dissolved.
- 5.
This is a central thesis of Berger (2016).
- 6.
There has been some debate on the role of Islam and jihad in the early Ottoman state. A balanced overview is to be found in Kafadar (1995).
- 7.
In other Muslim empires, the administration normally was not in the hand of slaves. The important role held by Christians (who could not aspire to wield political power of their own in the Mamluk state) was in a way functionally similar to slave recruitment of bureaucrats in the Ottoman Empire. On older polities see Berger (2020).
- 8.
Their fiefs by contrast were not hereditary.
- 9.
When they did so as in the seventeenth-century Kadizadeli movement, they were in opposition to the entrenched positions of the traditional families of religious dignitaries.
- 10.
That he had a very peculiar understanding of what that meant in the Turkish case is another matter.
- 11.
Some people would say that the EU was rather a German informal empire of course, and this impression on the part of many outside Germany is an important element of the present crisis of the institution.
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Berger, L. (2022). The Long Lasting End of the Ottoman Empire. In: Gehler, M., Rollinger, R., Strobl, P. (eds) The End of Empires. Universal- und kulturhistorische Studien. Studies in Universal and Cultural History. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-36876-0_28
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