Abbas ruled only five years before he was murdered by two of his Albanian slaves. His uncle Said, who succeeded, was nine years younger than Abbas, corpulent, amiable and Francophile. His contrasting character did not, however, mean that he regarded himself as an Egyptian or cared for the interests of the Egyptians. His liberal attitude towards trade and enterprise resulted in the rapid growth in the size and importance of the foreign communities, and his friendship with the French engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps led to the building of the Suez Canal, which, under foreign ownership, was to be a prime cause and justification of Egypt’s subjection to European control.
In his classic work The Arab Awakening (first published in 1938) the Palestinian writer George Antonius describes the development of the concept of an Arab nation in modern times. His chapter on Muhammad Ali and Ibrahim is entitled ‘The False Start’. He quotes one of their contemporaries as observing that Muhammad Ali’s genius ‘was of a kind to create empires, while Ibrahim had the wisdom that retains them’. The suggestion is that, if Ibrahim had survived his father and the Western powers led by Britain had not combined against him, a revived Arab empire controlling the Nile Valley, the Red Sea and the Levant could have replaced the Ottomans as the world’s leading Islamic power.
Such a development is hard to conceive. Muhammad Ali had no vision of Arab national regeneration. When he considered claiming the caliphate from the sultan it was not to restore it to Arab hands. He remained an Albanian/Turk who never learned to speak Arabic. Ibrahim, it is true, chose to regard himself as an Egyptian – much to his father’s disgust. He spoke Arabic and could identify with his Arab soldiers. He dreamed of a revived Arab empire and sometimes rallied his troops with references to Arab historical glory. But none of this amounted to much. Centuries of Turkish political and military dominance in the Muslim world could not be erased. Neither Muhammad Ali nor Ibrahim had time to create new institutions which would last. Their dynasty survived, but their descendants were much lesser men.
4. The Struggle for Reform, 1840–1900
When 16-year-old Sultan Abdul Mejid I (1839–61) succeeded, his empire was in mortal danger. The reforms of his father, Mahmud II, had disrupted the old order while their benefits were still to be realized. The Janissaries, the core of the armed forces, had been repressed, but the training and weaponry provided by Moltke’s military mission had yet to prove effective, as the ignominious defeats by Ibrahim’s fellahin army had proved. The reforms in education – the new medical, engineering, naval and military schools staffed by foreign instructors; the student missions to European universities; and the creation of the first basis for compulsory primary education – were only beginning to produce a new generation of young Ottomans who could understand and cope with the great technical and scientific advances of the nineteenth century.
The young sultan lacked his father’s force of character, although for a time he was backed by his formidable mother, but he decided to continue and extend the reforms. Mustafa Reshid Pasha, the outstandingly able foreign minister who was on a mission to London when Mahmud II’s death was announced, was brought back to the capital to take charge of the reform programme and on 3 November 1839 the historic Noble Rescript of the Rose Chamber was promulgated – the first of a series of edicts which are known collectively as the Tanzimat or Reorganization. More than once, Mustafa Reshid fell from power, only to be restored again. Others carried on his work after his death in 1858. Conservative opposition was powerful, because the reforms were revolutionary in purpose and content. Although their achievements fell well short of their intentions, they initiated notable changes in the way the empire was governed and administered.
Two of the changes were truly revolutionary, in that they broke with the Islamic principles by which the empire had always been governed. The mere declaration of these changes, which were closely related, was shocking to traditional opinion. One was that all Ottoman citizens were to be perfectly equal before the law, regardless of race or creed. The other was the introduction of a new legal code which was distinct from that of the Islamic sharia administered by the qadis or Islamic judges.
Equality of all citizens before the law was a secular non-Islamic principle derived from the European Enlightenment and the nationalist ideals of the French Revolution. Islamic tradition and law prescribed tolerance and protection for non-Muslim subjects of the state, and it was according to these principles that non-Muslims were allowed a substantial degree of autonomy under the millet system. But this did not mean that the members of these minorities were equal to the Muslim majority.
The new concept of equality inevitably affected the supremacy of the Islamic sharia. Once again it was a principle which was at stake. Muslim rulers since the earliest days had in practice encouraged or allowed the creation of tribunals in which their own administrative decisions or customary law was applied. But these were on the fringes; the sharia courts were dominant, and nowhere more so than in the Ottoman Empire. Now the first steps were being taken towards the demotion of the sharia by creating a new body with powers of drafting legislation. The change was not immediate. The religious authorities fought against it and they were able for a time to prevent the introduction of a new commercial code outside the sharia. Nevertheless the process of secularization of the world’s leading Islamic power had begun.
Because the sultan and his reformist advisers always claimed that the changes were in accordance with Islam, the mass of the population was not aware of their importance. They were none the less revolutionary. Turks and Arabs of today, depending on their point of view, would regard them as either milestones on the road to catastrophe or as steps towards the modernization of the Islamic world which were essential if it were to resist the encroaching power of Christian Europe.
The other reforms of the Tanzimat were aimed at this central purpose of regenerating the empire’s strength. Sultan Mahmud’s policy of opening new military schools with foreign instructors was greatly extended. Of greater importance was the new recruiting law, reducing military service from its hitherto indefinite period to a fixed term of five years followed by seven in the reserves. A body of civil police, or gendarmerie, was also instituted.
Modernizing the armed forces, although requiring time and energy, was simple compared with the task of raising educational standards. Mustafa Reshid understood that this was a prerequisite for the success of all the other reforms. The only existing educational institutions were the Koranic schools maintained by the ulama with private donations. A vast programme was launched for the creation of a state university and a centralized network of primary and secondary schools. A Ministry of Education was established. Although religion was proclaimed as having primacy in the new curriculum, in effect a system of secular education was being created. Many fewer schools were founded than had been hoped, but it was the principle that mattered.
Because these reforms were expensive, they were related to the single greatest weakness of the empire and the primary reason for its failure to match the power of Europe – finance. In the first great Ottoman centuries, the empire’s vast resources had fed its conquering armies, although even then successive sultans had found that shortage of funds placed limits on their ambitions. By the mid nineteenth century the balance of economic strength had shifted wholly in favour of western Europe – and especially Britain and France, as they passed into the second stage of the industrial revolution which Turkey had barely begun. The European powers were able to use their political and economic power to force the empire to allow its economy to be incorporated into the nineteenth-century liberal capitalist system. British, French and Austrian textiles and other manufactures began to pour into the Middle East from the early years of the century. Facing the onslaught of Muhammad Ali’s armies, the sultan was in no position to resist Europe’s demands. As we have seen, the Anglo-Turkish treaty of 1838 removed all restrictions on European imports.
Free trade was by no means entirely harmful to the empire. As European manufactures flooded i
n, the traditional handicrafts and textile industries suffered, but there was a huge growth in demand for raw materials such as Syrian silk, Egyptian cotton and Anatolian wool. Production of cereals and fruit also expanded to meet the needs of the growing cities. The merchant class prospered and with it the capitalist institutions of banks, insurance and limited commercial companies began to develop for the first time in the empire. However, there were two drawbacks for the rulers of the empire. One was that so much of the newly created wealth accrued to foreigners, who benefited from the Capitulations, rather than to Ottoman subjects. The other was that the ending of the traditional system of government monopolies eliminated the principal source of state revenues.
Mustafa Reshid and his colleagues were aware of the dangers of the traditional policy of debasing the currency to meet the empire’s chronic deficits. They took steps to avoid this by withdrawing the old coinage and issuing a new currency on European lines, consisting of a gold pound divided into 100 piastres. This ensured monetary stability for a period. However, at the same time they took the unavoidable but potentially disastrous course of issuing treasury bonds as a means of raising revenue. Before long these bonds were circulating as a form of currency, causing alarming inflationary pressure. The temptation to resort to Europe for state loans in order to withdraw the treasury bonds became overwhelming. The banking institutions now existed through which the savings of the willing European middle classes could be channelled into foreign investment. In 1851 Mustafa Reshid signed an agreement with a British and a French bank for a state loan of 55 million francs. This was the first step on the road which led to the bankruptcy of the empire two decades later.
Because the Ottoman armaments factories were inefficient and outmoded, new equipment had to be imported from Europe. Even in time of peace the effort to restore the military balance with the West placed a heavy strain on the empire’s finances. At this point it became involved in war with its traditional European enemy – Russia. The Crimean War was not of its own choosing; it was more the consequence of rivalry between the powers of Europe.
Russia was mildly concerned at the prospect of a reformed and revived Turkey; however, the autocratic and ambitious Tsar Nicholas I believed that the collapse of the empire was a more likely outcome of the reform programme. In 1844 he proposed to the British government a plan for the empire’s partition: Britain would have Crete and Egypt, Istanbul would be a ‘free city’, and the Balkan states would be autonomous under Russian protection. The tsar denied that he entertained Catherine the Great’s dreams of restoring the Byzantine Empire – he said that Russia was in the fortunate position of requiring no more territory – nevertheless, Britain remained extremely suspicious of his intentions. It was still the policy of Britain – as well as of France and Austria – to keep the Sick Man of Europe alive as long as possible, to prevent any of his vital organs from falling into Russian hands. The British response to the tsar was guarded.
The empire might have been left in peace had it not been for a dispute between France and Russia over the control of the holy places in Palestine. In 1740 Sultan Mahmud I, through the Capitulations agreement signed with France, had granted privileges to the Roman Catholic monks in the holy places and had placed the French pilgrims as well as those of other Latin Catholic nations under the protection of the French flag. However, under the secular influence of the French Revolution, French interest in the holy places declined, and Russia took the opportunity to enlarge the privileges of the Orthodox Church in the Holy Land at Latin Roman Catholic expense. In 1850 Louis Napoleon, needing the support of the French Catholic Church in his struggle for power, decided to reassert Catholic rights in Palestine and made a formal demand in this respect to the sultan. When the tsar refused to relinquish any of the rights that Russia had acquired, the Ottoman government proposed a compromise through which both sides would retain their privileges but the sultan would undertake the protection of the holy places and the Christian pilgrims. Both France and Russia rejected this.
Britain was naturally concerned. Unlike Russia and France it was not spoiling for war but, disliking Russian ambitions towards the Ottoman Empire more than those of France, it was inclined to side with France and Turkey. The British government endeavoured to keep the peace, but it became clear that Russia was aiming to secure a protectorate over not only the Orthodox monks but also the twelve million Orthodox Christian subjects of the empire. This was something the sultan was bound to refuse. When the Russians occupied the Danubian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, Turkey declared war. Ottoman troops crossed the Danube and secured four initial victories. Although vast, the Russian armed forces were as much in need of modernization as the Turkish, and it seemed at first as if the Ottoman reforms were achieving results. The British and French fleets entered the Dardanelles strait. Britain hoped that this would be enough to cause the Russians to withdraw, but Tsar Nicholas was not deterred. The Russian fleet bombarded the Black Sea ports and destroyed a Turkish squadron. On 27 March 1854 Britain and France declared war on Russia, with strong support from public opinion at home.
The war lasted less than two years and ended when Austria threatened to intervene against Russia. If the hostilities revealed serious defects in both the British and the French armies – in some respects they were still fighting the Napoleonic wars – the Russians were in even worse condition. Although the war was fought over the internal affairs of the Ottoman Empire, Turkish troops played an insignificant role. After their initial successes on the Danube, only one Turkish division was involved.
The terms for the ending of the war were negotiated in the Treaty of Paris of March 1856. Russia abandoned its claims to the protection of the Ottoman Christians, and the exclusive Russian protectorate over the Danubian principalities was replaced by a joint protectorate of the powers of Europe. Free navigation on the River Danube was entrusted to the supervision of an international commission and the Black Sea was neutralized.
Under the treaty, the Christian powers undertook to respect the independence and territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire and to maintain it, if necessary, by armed intervention. This could be regarded as the admission of Turkey into the so-called Concert of Europe, but the manner in which it was done was highly patronizing. In effect the Christian powers were claiming the right to interfere in the internal affairs of the empire if they felt that their interests were threatened by one of their rivals. At the same time, the powers were expressing their approval of Turkey’s essentially westernizing reforms. A new charter or Imperial Rescript was announced as a prelude to the Treaty of Paris, reaffirming the Tanzimat and carrying the reforms a stage further. This had been drafted in collaboration with the representatives of the powers, notably the energetic British ambassador Stratford Canning. On the insistence of the powers, the terms of the charter were incorporated into the Treaty of Paris.
The Imperial Rescript reiterated in stronger and more specific terms than ever before the full equality of all Ottoman subjects ‘without prejudice of class or creed’ in all matters relating to taxation, ownership of property, education and justice. If applied in full, this concept would have amounted to the dismantling of the Islamic order which was the basis of the empire. This was only very partially achieved, but the charter did have some important consequences: new commercial, maritime and penal codes, which were largely based on French law, were introduced, and the holy sharia ceased to be dominant in many areas of life.
However, the measure which had the most immediate and far-reaching effect on Ottoman society was the new land law, based on Western practices which it was hoped would enable the empire to catch up with Christian Europe. The traditional system, in which the land was the property of the state but the cultivators had a variety of established rights in return for the payment of a regular tax (the miri), was replaced by one which was based on individual freehold landownership with full rights of disposal and succession.
Such a revolutionary reform could not be full
y applied. It was often circumvented, and many traditional practices survived. The results were highly discouraging. The old system was harsh and inequitable in many respects – the practice of tax-farming had been monstrously abused, and it was a long-standing aim of the Ottoman reformers to abolish it – but the practical result of the new land code was to turn many of the more influential tax-farmers into freeholders and the bulk of the cultivators into sharecroppers or hired labourers. A powerful new landlord class was thus created. Very few of the new class of large landowners were enlightened or progressive farmers. A prosperous peasantry on the Western model – investing in and developing its own property – was not created. Well-intentioned efforts by the reformers to increase agricultural output by the distribution of free seed and to create a network of rural co-operative banks to provide the farmers with cheap and easy credit were failures – the necessary administrative system and technical expertise were lacking. The only minor success was in the settlement of some hundreds of thousands of refugees from Russia on hitherto uncultivated lands in Anatolia.
Similar problems beset all the efforts of the Ottoman reformers to increase the productive capacity of the empire’s economy as an essential means of raising revenues, as Western ambassadors in Istanbul were urging. In fact it was the liberal free-trade principles that had been imposed by Europe which prevented the reformers from providing the Ottoman infant industries with the protection they needed in order to survive.
The truth was that there was no prospect of a ‘great leap forward’ in the Ottoman economy which would have enabled it to compete with those of the industrialized powers of western Europe. The main features of advanced nineteenth-century capitalism and the expertise to manage them were lacking, and it would take much more than a generation to develop them. Moreover, the system of Capitulations meant that much of the more progressively managed parts of the economy were in foreign hands and therefore outside Ottoman control. In 1867 an amendment to the land code for the first time allowed foreigners to own land in the empire.
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