Imperial Ottoman

History · In depth

The End of the Ottoman Empire: 1800 to 1922

The final century of the Ottoman Empire, from the Tanzimat reforms through the Young Turk Revolution, the First World War, and the abolition of the sultanate in 1922.

The final century of the Ottoman Empire, from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the abolition of the caliphate in 1924, was the most turbulent and most consequential period of the dynasty’s long history. It was the period in which the empire lost most of its territory, in which it attempted to remake itself along European lines, and in which it was finally extinguished. The broader history of the Ottoman Empire is set out in the main overview; the period before 1800 is treated in decline and reform.

The empire of the 1800s

The early nineteenth century opened with the empire in crisis. The Greek War of Independence (1821–1832) led to the establishment of an independent Greek kingdom. The Egyptian crisis of 1831 to 1840 saw the rebellious Muhammad Ali nearly conquer the empire. The first Russo-Turkish war of 1828 to 1829 ended with the Treaty of Adrianople, in which the Ottomans lost territory in the Caucasus and acknowledged Greek independence.

The most ambitious reform effort of the period was the Tanzimat, the series of reforms inaugurated by the Hatt-ı Şerif of Gülhane in 1839. The Tanzimat abolished tax farming, established a system of secular courts, codified commercial and criminal law, and declared the legal equality of Muslims and non-Muslims. The reform program was the work of a small westernizing elite, led by Mustafa Reşid Pasha, and it was supported, intermittently, by the sultans Abdülmecid I and Abdülaziz.

The Crimean War (1853–1856) brought the empire briefly back into the European state system. The war was followed by the Hatt-ı Hümayun of 1856, which extended the principles of the Tanzimat and which the European powers accepted as the basis for Ottoman membership in the Concert of Europe. The Public Debt Administration established in 1881, however, was a sign of the limits of Ottoman sovereignty. By the end of the century, more than a third of state revenue was committed to servicing the foreign debt.

The Tanzimat period also saw the emergence of new political ideas. The Young Ottomans, led by Namık Kemal, Ziya Paşa, and Ali Suavi, argued for a constitutional monarchy on the European model. The first Ottoman constitution was promulgated in 1876, and the first Ottoman parliament met briefly in 1877. The constitution was suspended by Sultan Abdulhamid II within a year, but the idea of constitutional rule would return to dominate Ottoman politics in the early twentieth century. The intellectual ferment of the Tanzimat period, including the introduction of European-style journalism and the first Ottoman novels, was one of the foundations on which the Young Turk Revolution would later build.

Abdulhamid II and the long reign

Abdulhamid II, who reigned from 1876 to 1909, was the longest-reigning Ottoman sultan and a deeply controversial figure. He came to the throne at a time of acute political crisis. The first Ottoman constitution had been promulgated in 1876, and the first Ottoman parliament had met briefly in 1877. Within a year, however, Abdulhamid had suspended the constitution, beginning a thirty-year period of personal rule.

Abdulhamid’s domestic program combined conservative Islam with modernizing reforms. He built the Hejaz Railway, expanded the telegraph and rail networks, and created a modern system of secondary education. He also used the prestige of the caliphate to organize Muslim opinion across the empire, in part to compensate for the loss of non-Muslim territories. The pan-Islamic policy, however, did not prevent the loss of Bosnia-Herzegovina to Habsburg administration in 1878, the formal Austrian annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908, or the Bulgarian declaration of independence in 1908.

The reign of Abdulhamid was also marked by the most violent incident of the late Ottoman period: the Hamidian massacres of 1894 to 1896, in which tens of thousands of Armenians were killed in eastern Anatolia. The massacres were triggered by Armenian demands for reform and by the failure of the international community to act on behalf of the Armenian population. They foreshadowed the Armenian Genocide of 1915 in both method and intent. The diplomatic context of the 1890s, including the question of Crete and the long struggle with Greece, was rooted in the territorial losses recorded in the Treaty of Karlowitz two centuries earlier, and the long-term weakening of Ottoman sovereignty that the treaty had inaugurated.

The Young Turk Revolution

The Young Turk Revolution of July 1908 was the result of years of opposition from army officers, students, and intellectuals to Abdulhamid’s autocracy. The revolution forced the sultan to restore the 1876 constitution. The first Ottoman parliament elected in 1908 sat briefly before being suspended. The counter-revolution of 31 March 1909 was suppressed, and Abdulhamid was deposed in favor of his brother Mehmed V.

The Committee of Union and Progress, the dominant faction in the new politics, established effective control of the empire in 1913 after a coup d’état. The CUP, as it was often called, was led by Talat Pasha, Enver Pasha, and Cemal Pasha, the so-called Three Pashas. The CUP pursued a policy of forced centralization, accelerated modernization, and demographic homogenization. The Armenian Genocide of 1915, in which an estimated one and a half million Armenians were killed, was the most violent expression of the CUP’s policy.

The loss of the remaining European territories in the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 was the final blow to the empire’s position in the Balkans. The wars were a disaster: the Ottomans lost nearly all of their European possessions west of the Çatalca lines, and hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees fled into Anatolia. The settlement imposed by the Treaty of London in 1913 created an independent Albania, recognized the loss of Macedonia, and confirmed the Bulgarian gains of the previous wars.

The First World War

The empire entered the First World War on the side of the Central Powers in November 1914, hoping to recover lost territory and to break the encirclement of European powers. The decision was taken by the CUP, against the better judgment of many of the surviving Ottoman statesmen. The war was a disaster on every front.

The Gallipoli campaign of 1915 was a successful defense, but the empire was invaded from every direction. The British captured Baghdad in 1917, Jerusalem in 1917, and Damascus in 1918. The Russian advance in the Caucasus, combined with the Armenian volunteer units, threatened to push into eastern Anatolia. By the armistice of 30 October 1918, the empire had lost four-fifths of its prewar territory and a large part of its population.

The First World War also produced a new kind of anti-Ottoman movement in the Arab provinces. The Husayn-McMahon correspondence of 1915 to 1916, in which the British high commissioner in Egypt promised Sharif Husayn of Mecca an independent Arab state in return for an Arab revolt against the Ottomans, set the stage for the Arab Revolt of 1916. The revolt, led by T. E. Lawrence and the Hashemite princes, tied down Ottoman forces and helped the British advance into the Levant. The post-war settlement, however, with the Sykes-Picot agreement and the Balfour Declaration, divided the Arab lands between British and French mandates and set the stage for the long conflict over Palestine.

The peace settlement and the national movement

The Treaty of Sèvres, signed in 1920, was the Allies’ first attempt to settle the post-Ottoman order. The treaty reduced the empire to a small state in Anatolia and gave international zones to the Armenians, the Kurds, and Italy. The treaty was rejected by the Turkish national movement under Mustafa Kemal, who had been the hero of Gallipoli.

The Grand National Assembly established in Ankara in 1920 led a successful war against the Greek invasion of western Anatolia, against the French occupation of Cilicia, and against the Armenian republic. The Treaty of Lausanne, signed in 1923, established the borders of the new Turkish state, provided for the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey, and abolished the capitulations.

The Turkish War of Independence, as it is known in Turkish, is one of the most consequential events of twentieth-century Middle Eastern history. It produced the modern Turkish state, the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey, and the abandonment of the Ottoman vision of a multinational empire. It also produced a new kind of national identity, defined in terms of Turkish language and Muslim culture, that had not been central to Ottoman self-understanding.

The end of the dynasty

On 1 November 1922, the Grand National Assembly abolished the sultanate. The last Ottoman sultan, Mehmed VI, left Istanbul on a British warship. Less than two years later, on 3 March 1924, the assembly abolished the caliphate itself, expelled the Ottoman dynastic family, and brought the six-century history of the dynasty to a close. The caliphate, which had been one of the most important titles of the Ottoman sultans since the conquest of the Mamluks in 1517, was abolished without ceremony, and the exiling of the Ottoman family in March 1924 brought to an end the longest-lived Islamic dynasty of the modern era.

The Republic of Turkey, declared on 29 October 1923, was a self-consciously modern state. It abolished the religious courts, replaced the Arabic script with a Latin alphabet, and proclaimed the principle of secularism. Yet the new republic inherited much of the Ottoman administrative practice, the civil code, and the self-understanding of a state that had once spanned three continents. The Ottoman centuries, ending in 1922, remain central to the identity of the modern Turkish state and of the many successor states in the Middle East and the Balkans.

The end of the empire, in other words, was not an event but a long process. Its roots lay in the decline and reform of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and even earlier, in the strains of the Ottoman golden age and the rise of the empire that preceded it. Understanding the twentieth-century dissolution requires an awareness of the long institutional and diplomatic history of the dynasty. The empire had been founded by Osman I, and the institutions that came under strain in the final century had been built up over the previous six. The 1453 fall of Constantinople had been the moment of greatest triumph, and the territorial losses of 1699, recorded in the Treaty of Karlowitz, had been the moment when the empire was first put on the defensive in Europe.