The Tanzimat Reforms — Imperial Ottoman

The Tanzimat — literally “reorganizations” — is the conventional name for the centralizing, Europeanizing reforms of the Ottoman Empire that began with the Gülhane Decree of 3 November 1839 and ended with the promulgation of the first Ottoman constitution on 23 December 1876. The Tanzimat era transformed the institutional framework of the Ottoman government, the relationship between the state and its non-Muslim communities (the millet system), the legal system, the educational system, the fiscal system, and the provincial administration. The reforms were inspired by European models and supported, with varying degrees of consistency, by Britain, France, and (later) the German Empire; they were opposed, with varying degrees of success, by conservative elements within the Ottoman ruling class.

Key dates

1839 — Gülhane Decree, 3 November; the abolition of tax farming is announced.
1840 — Penal Code, modelled on the French Code of 1808.
1850 — Commercial Code (the first Ottoman code to admit non-Muslims on equal footing in commercial matters).
1856 — Islahat Edict, 18 February; the cizye is abolished.
1858 — Land Code (Arazi Kanunnamesi), drafted by Ahmed Cevdet Pasha.
1864 — Vilayet Law; 1871 a supplementary law.
1868–1876 — the Mecelle, the codified civil code, is promulgated in sixteen books.
1876 — first Ottoman constitution (Kanun-ı Esasi), 23 December.

The Gülhane Decree, 3 November 1839

The Tanzimat was inaugurated by the Gülhane Decree (Hatt-ı Şerif of Gülhane), read aloud in the rose garden of the Topkapı Palace on 3 November 1839, in the presence of Sultan Abdulmecid I, the members of the Divan-ı Hümayun (the imperial council described in the article on the Grand Vizier and the Divan), the senior officials of the empire, and a delegation of foreign ambassadors. The decree, drafted principally by Mustafa Reşid Pasha and his associates, promised security of life, honour, and property for all Ottoman subjects, regardless of religion; a regular and transparent system of taxation; a fair and public system of justice; the abolition of tax farming (iltizam); and the equal applicability of the new laws to all subjects. The decree was followed by a series of codes — the 1840 Penal Code, the 1850 Commercial Code, the 1858 Land Code, the 1864 Vilayet Law, and the 1870 General Schools Regulation — that together constituted the Tanzimat legal framework.

“From this day forward, the cause of every accused person shall be publicly heard, in conformity with our divine law, after inquiry and examination; and as long as it is not possible for a public hearing to be had without publicity, publicity shall be allowed.” — Gülhane Decree, 3 November 1839

The Islahat Edict, 18 February 1856

The Islahat Edict (Hatt-ı Hümayun of 1856) was issued on 18 February 1856, in the midst of the Crimean War, under the pressure of the British and French allies of the Ottoman state. The edict extended the guarantees of the Gülhane Decree to the non-Muslim communities in explicit terms: equality of all subjects before the law, eligibility of non-Muslims for military service, eligibility of non-Muslims for state office, abolition of the cizye, abolition of the discriminatory provisions of the kanun, and reorganization of the non-Muslim millets. The edict was the first of a series of measures that the European powers used to intervene in Ottoman affairs on behalf of the empire’s Christian subjects. The 1863 Armenian National Constitution, the 1862 Rum Millet Regulation (modified in 1872), and the 1865 Jewish Millet Regulation all attempted to implement its provisions. The two edicts are formally distinct: the 1839 Gülhane decree is a Hatt-ı Şerif (“Noble Script,” issued in the sultan’s personal name), while the 1856 Islahat Fermanı is a Hatt-ı Hümayun (“Imperial Script,” issued in the formal chancery style); the legal distinction mattered to European jurists and to Ottoman jurists, and the use of one form or the other was itself a political signal.

Şerif Mardin, in The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought (1962), reads the Islahat Edict as the moment at which the Tanzimat reformers recognized the depth of conservative opposition they faced; the edict, Mardin argues, is best understood as a defensive concession to European pressure rather than as a free-standing program of reform. The reading is contested — Roderic Davison, in Reform in the Ottoman Empire, 1856–1876 (1963), treats the edict as part of a coherent program — but the disagreement turns on a question of emphasis rather than on a question of evidence.

The 1858 Land Code

The 1858 Land Code, drafted principally by Ahmed Cevdet Pasha, was the most ambitious single legal reform of the Tanzimat era. The code replaced the classical kanun on land tenure with a new framework that recognized several categories of land (mülk, miri, vakıf, metruk, mevat) and regulated the rights of ownership, transfer, and inheritance. The code aimed to encourage agricultural productivity, to clarify the legal status of land, and to provide a basis for the orderly assessment and collection of the land tax. The code had an unintended consequence: by clarifying the legal status of land and establishing procedures for registration, it opened the door to large-scale alienation of land to non-Muslim merchants, European speculators, and (later) commercial agriculture. Donald Quataert, in The Ottoman Empire, 1700–1922 (2000), treats this as the decisive opening for the foreign penetration of the Ottoman economy.

The 1864 Vilayet Law

The 1864 Vilayet Law reorganized the provincial administration on a uniform pattern modelled on the French departments. The empire was divided into vilayets (provinces), each governed by a vali (governor) appointed by the Ministry of the Interior. Each vilayet was divided into sanjaks, each sanjak into kazas, and each kaza into nahiyes. The vali was assisted by an Idare Meclisi (Administrative Council) and a judiciary drawn from the reformed secular courts. The 1871 General Administration of the Provinces Law supplemented the 1864 law, and the two together constituted the basic framework of Ottoman provincial administration until the abolition of the empire — and, indeed, the basis of the provincial system of the Turkish Republic until the early twenty-first century.

The 1876 Constitution

The 1876 constitution, the Kanun-ı Esasi (Fundamental Law), was promulgated on 23 December 1876 by Sultan Abdulhamid II. The constitution was drafted by a commission of senior officials led by Midhat Pasha, under the pressure of the European powers and the threat of European intervention. It established a bicameral parliament — a senate (Meclis-i Ayan) appointed by the sultan and an elected chamber of deputies (Meclis-i Mebusan) — and a system of ministerial responsibility, building on the model of the Grand Vizier and the Divan inherited from the classical period. The first Ottoman parliament met on 19 March 1877. It lasted only two years: in February 1878, using the pretext of the Russian advance on Istanbul in the war of 1877–1878, Abdulhamid II prorogued the parliament and ruled as an autocrat for the next thirty years. The constitutional experiment, however, established the principle of constitutional government in Ottoman practice and was the model on which the Young Turk constitution of 1908 was based.

The Mecelle: The Tanzimat Civil Code

The single most important product of the Tanzimat era was the Mecelle (Mecelle-i Ahkâm-ı Adliye, “The Book of Just Decisions”), the codified civil and commercial law promulgated in sixteen books between 1868 and 1876. The Mecelle was the work principally of Ahmed Cevdet Pasha (Grand Vizier 1873, 1875–76, 1878) and a commission of senior ulema of the Hanafi school, and it was drafted with explicit reference to the French Civil Code (Code Napoléon) and the Majalla of the Hanafi jurists. The first book (Kitâb-ı İbtidâi) defined the legal concepts; the subsequent books covered sales (bey), hire (icâr), guarantee (kefâlet), transfer of debt (havâle), partnership (şirket), gift (hibe), agency (vekâlet), bailment (emân), and the general rules of obligation. The Mecelle applied to the civil and commercial transactions of all Ottoman subjects — Muslim, Christian, and Jewish — and it gradually replaced the şer’î courts’ traditional discretion with a fixed code of rules. It remained the law of the civil and commercial transactions of the successor states — including the Turkish Republic, which adopted it as a whole in 1926 — until the Swiss Civil Code replaced it in 1926. Ahmed Cevdet Pasha also wrote a famous Tezkire (chronicle) and a Tarih (history), and Ahmed Vefik Pasha, a second reformer of the same generation, translated the comedies of Molière and managed the first Ottoman parliamentary sessions as speaker of the Meclis-i Mebusan.

“The first principle of the Mecelle is the principle of legal certainty: every right has a definite form, and the forms are not to be departed from.” — Ahmed Cevdet Pasha, Heyet-i İlmiye (the drafting commission), 1868

The Young Ottomans and the Critique of the Tanzimat

The Tanzimat reforms provoked, from the 1860s, a powerful intellectual reaction. The Yeni Osmanlılar (Young Ottomans) — Namık Kemal (1840–1888), Ziya Pasha (1825–1880), İbrahim Şinasi (1826–1871), and Ali Suavi (1838–1878) — argued that the reforms had been imposed from above by a bureaucratic elite and that they had failed to win the loyalty of the Muslim population. They advocated a constitutional monarchy grounded in the principle of hürriyet (liberty) and a politics rooted in a reconstructed Islamic-Turkish tradition. Namık Kemal’s play Vatan yahut Silistre (Fatherland, or Silistria, 1873), his newspaper İbret (Lesson), and his treatises on public law (Hürriyet, 1868) shaped the political vocabulary of the late Ottoman opposition; the Young Ottomans were exiled and imprisoned, but their constitutionalism informed the 1876 Kanun-ı Esasi and the Young Turk movement of 1908. Şerif Mardin’s The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought (1962) is the standard treatment; it has the additional virtue of placing the movement in the broader context of nineteenth-century Islamic political thought.

The Limits of the Reforms

The Tanzimat reforms were not, in the event, able to preserve the empire. The reforms failed for several reasons: the resistance of conservative elements within the ruling class, the limited administrative capacity of the state, the opposition of the European powers, the rise of nationalism, and the long-term economic decline of the empire. Despite these limitations, the Tanzimat reforms were one of the most ambitious programs of state-directed modernization in the nineteenth-century world, and the constitutional monarchy, the secular school system, the reformed civil service, and the codified laws of the Tanzimat were the foundation on which the modern Turkish Republic was built in 1923.

Frequently asked questions

When did the Tanzimat begin and end?

The conventional dates are 3 November 1839, when the Gülhane Decree was read in the rose garden of Topkapı, and 23 December 1876, when the Kanun-ı Esasi was promulgated. The first date inaugurates the era of reform proper; the second date marks the moment at which the reform program is overtaken by constitutional government. The 1878 prorogation of parliament by Abdulhamid II effectively ended the Tanzimat as a political project, even though the Mecelle and the provincial codes continued to be applied for decades afterward.

Why did the Tanzimat fail?

A question on which the historiography remains split. Bernard Lewis, in The Emergence of Modern Turkey (1961), emphasizes the long-term cultural resistance of the Muslim population to the Europeanizing program. Şerif Mardin emphasizes the bureaucratic character of the reform and the failure to mobilize popular support. Carter Findley, in Bureaucratic Reform in the Ottoman Empire (1980), emphasizes the structural constraints — the limited administrative capacity, the shortage of trained personnel, the chronic fiscal weakness. The most defensible answer is that all three factors were at work, and that the relative weight of each shifted over the course of the period.

What was the most lasting product of the Tanzimat?

The Mecelle is the strongest candidate. Codified between 1868 and 1876 under the direction of Ahmed Cevdet Pasha, the Mecelle governed civil and commercial transactions across the empire and was adopted, in its entirety, by the early Turkish Republic. The Turkish Republic replaced it with the Swiss Civil Code in 1926, but the Mecelle’s categories still shape Turkish private law in marginal but identifiable ways, and the Mecelle’s Hanafi-jurisprudence approach — codified rules of obligation rather than discretionary judicial reasoning — has had an afterlife in the legal systems of the modern Arab world.