Davison - Essays in Ottoman and Turkish history, 1774-1923: the impact of the West

Modern Middle East Series, No. 16

Sponsored by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies

The University of Texas at Austin

Essays in Ottoman and Turkish History, 17741923

The Impact of the West

Roderic H. Davison

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS
AUSTIN

Copyright 1990 by the University of Texas Press
All rights reserved

First Edition, 1990

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, University of Texas Press, Box 7819, Austin, Texas 78713-7819.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Davison, Roderic H.
Essays in Ottoman and Turkish history, 17741923 : the impact of the West / Roderic H. Davison. 1st ed.
p. cm. (Modern Middle East series ; no. 16)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-292-72064-5
1. TurkeyHistoryAbdul Hamid I, 17741789. 2. TurkeyHistorySelim III, 17891808. 3. TurkeyHistory19th century. 4. TurkeyHistory20th century. 5. TurkeyCivilizationOccidental influences. I. Title. II. Series : Modern Middle East series (Austin, Tex.); no. 16.
DR555.D38 1990
956.1'015dc20

89-70774
CIP

ISBN 978-0-292-75893-3 (library e-book)
ISBN 978-0-292-75894-0 (individual e-book)

DOI: 10.7560/720640

To my students, who for the past fifty years have made the teaching ofhistorya stimulating adventure, andto the librarians, archivists, editors, designers, printers, andmembers of academic, scholarly, and eleemosynaryinstitutionscolleagueswhose help has made the search and the writing sopleasurable.

Acknowledgments

The staffs of a number of libraries have been helpful in many ways. These include the Library of Congress (especially its Near East, Law, and Stack and Reader divisions), the Harvard College Library, the Princeton University Library, the George Washington University Library, the New York Public Library, the University of Chicago Library (especially its Middle East Documentation Center), the Middle East Institute Library, the British Library (formerly British Museum) with its Colindale branch, the Bibliothque Nationale, and the Engineering Societies Library.

I am grateful also to the staffs of the Babakanlk Arivi (Prime Ministry Archive) and the D-Ileri Bakanli Hazine-i Evrak (Foreign Ministry Archive) in Istanbul, and to the Prime Ministers Office and the Foreign Ministry of Turkey, for permission to do research in those repositories. I have received many courtesies, further, from the Public Record Office (London), the Haus-Hof- und Staatsarchiv (Vienna), and the United States National Archives (Washington). Thanks are due also to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (now the United Church Board for World Ministries) for permission to use their archives, presently housed in the Houghton Library at Harvard, and formerly in the Divinity School library there.

For fellowships and research grants, I am indebted to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the American Research Institute in Turkey, the Middle East Center of Harvard University, and George Washington University. For support of publication, I am grateful to the Institute of Turkish Studies and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies of the University of Texas at Austin.

Thanks are due also to the copyright holders of the essays in this volume that have earlier been published elsewhere; the credit for each appears at the bottom of the first page of the essay.

Introduction

The Ottoman Empire at the start of the nineteenth century still covered a vast territory, including all of North Africa except Morocco, the whole Balkan peninsula, Anatolia, Syria, Iraq, and parts of the Arabian peninsula. Its hold on much of the area was, however, tenuous. Its peoples were many; Turks numbered somewhat fewer than half. In a world increasingly dominated by European power and increasingly agitated by nationalist sentiments this multiethnic Ottoman state struggled to survive. In its last century and a half it experienced both successes and failures in the quest for greater viability. After suffering defeat in the First World War, however, it finally disappeared. Among its successor states was the Turkish Republic, which established itself in the Anatolian core of the old empire.

All the essays in this volume excepting the first, a broad survey of Turkish history, examine events or developments in this period of Ottoman decline and reform, and of the birth of the republic. The modern history of Europe is often taken to begin with the French Revolution of 1789. The beginning of the modern history of the Ottoman Empire is sometimes linked to a dramatic event produced by that revolution, Napoleons invasion of Egypt in 1798. But the beginning can also conveniently be put at 1774, the year of the peace treaty sealing a major defeat of the Ottoman Empire by Russia, an event that pushed the Ottoman sultans toward more serious efforts at westernizing reforms. The essays begin with this treaty of Kk Kaynarca. They end essentially with the treaty of Lausanne of 1923, which launched the republic on its life as an independent sovereign state. Most of them focus on political and diplomatic developments, but they also concern religious, intellectual, social, and economic aspects of the Ottoman world. Eleven of these studies, written for varying purposes, appeared originally in widely scattered publications over a span of thirty-three years, beginning in 1948. They are here collected for the first time and again made available. One new study, on the advent of the electric telegraph in the Ottoman Empire, has been included. Because each essay is designed to stand alone, there is occasional overlapping when one complements another.

Although independent, the essays are linked by a common theme. The linkage, which was not intentional when they were written, flows logically from the course that Ottoman history took in these years. Every essay deals with change, and in every case with change that came about because of the impact of the West. The essay Foreign and Environmental Contributions to the Political Modernization of Turkey focuses most specifically on that impact, but all reflect change that occurred directly or indirectly because of contact with the West.

For the Ottomans, the West in the modern period was essentially Europe. America was distant and uninvolved; individual Americans had some impact on Ottoman society, but it was modest. Europe meant, in general, a somewhat French-flavored western civilization shared by peoples in a number of large and small states, in many of which technology and industry were advancing rapidly. More specifically, Europe meant the great powers, the governments who dominated international affairs and referred to themselves as the Concert of Europe. From the eighteenth century until 1861 they were the Pentarchy of EuropeBritain, France, Austria, Prussia, and Russia. Then Italy was added as a sixth power when it became a unified kingdom, and in 1871 the unified imperial Germany replaced Prussia. Russia was a member of this western group, a full participant in European great power politics and also since the time of Peter the Great a country consciously westernizing first the military and then some other aspects of Russian life. Only after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 was Russia split from her great power fellows to become East. In the essay Turkish Diplomacy from Mudros to Lausanne there appear Easterners among the Turks, those who in the postwar nationalist struggle looked to Russia for cooperation and aid, as opposed to the Westerners, who preferred ties to the western European powers.