Imperial Ottoman

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The Young Turk Revolution of 1908

The 1908 Young Turk Revolution that forced Sultan Abdulhamid II to restore the Ottoman constitution, opening the final phase of Ottoman history.

The Young Turk Revolution of July 1908 was the culmination of decades of opposition to the autocratic rule of Sultan Abdulhamid II. The revolution forced the sultan to restore the Ottoman constitution of 1876, opened a brief period of parliamentary politics, and set the stage for the final quarter-century of Ottoman history. The events of 1908 to 1909 are central to the end of the Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth century, and they are one of the most studied episodes in the history of the Ottoman Empire. Feroz Ahmad’s The Young Turks (1969) remains the indispensable narrative, although Şükrü Hanioğlu’s A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire (2008) has the better account of the ideology.

Key dates

  • 1889 — Founding of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) in Istanbul.
  • 1895 — Founding congress in Paris.
  • 24 July 1908 — Restoration of the 1876 constitution.
  • 13 April 1909 — The 31 March counter-revolution (Rumi calendar).
  • April 1909 — The Hareket Ordusu enters Istanbul.
  • 23 January 1913 — The Bab-ı Ali raid; CUP takes power.

The background

The opposition to Abdulhamid II had grown steadily through the late nineteenth century. The Young Ottomans, a group of intellectuals led by Namık Kemal and Ziya Paşa, had drafted the first Ottoman constitution in 1876, but the constitution had been suspended by the sultan within a year. The Young Turks, a more loosely organized group that took its name from the earlier movement, was formed in exile, especially in Paris, Geneva, and Cairo, in the 1890s.

The most important of the Young Turk organizations was the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), founded between 1889 and 1890 by students at the Mekteb-i Tıbbiye-i Şahane, the Imperial School of Medicine in Istanbul, and reconstituted at a founding congress held in Paris in 1895. The CUP was dominated by army officers and bureaucrats, and it was organized in clandestine cells across the empire, with a Salonica cell that became especially influential after 1906. Its leaders included Ahmed Rıza, a sociologist educated in Paris, and the later “Three Pashas”: Mehmed Talaat, Ismail Enver, and Ahmed Cemal. The two wings of the movement, Ahmed Rıza’s French-style positivist centralism and Prince Sabaheddin’s liberal personalism, never resolved their differences; Feroz Ahmad treats this as the central ideological fault-line of the CUP, and the same split shaped the way the post-revolutionary parliament behaved.

The revolution

The immediate cause of the revolution was the international crisis over Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Habsburg Empire, with Russian support, had occupied the Ottoman provinces in 1878 and had administered them ever since. In October 1908, the Austro-Hungarian government announced the formal annexation of the provinces, and a few weeks later, the Kingdom of Bulgaria declared its independence from the empire. The news reached Istanbul, and the CUP seized the moment.

The revolution began on 3 July 1908, when Major Ahmed Niyazi, a CUP sympathizer, led a small force of soldiers and irregulars into the mountains of Macedonia and demanded the restoration of the constitution. Within days, similar proclamations were issued across the empire. The CUP won the support of the army, the ulema, and the foreign embassies. On 24 July 1908, the sultan issued a rescript restoring the constitution. The Macedonian revolt, which had begun as a local protest against Austro-Hungarian intrigue, was the immediate trigger for one of the central events of the history of the Ottoman Empire.

The aftermath

The revolution opened a brief period of parliamentary politics. The first Ottoman parliament elected under the constitution met in December 1908. The parliament was a lively body, with a free press and vigorous debate. The CUP, however, was not a disciplined political party in the European sense, and it was divided between liberal, nationalist, and authoritarian tendencies, a split that surfaced in the rivalry between Ahmed Rıza’s positivist faction and Prince Sabaheddin’s liberal personalist wing.

The counter-revolution of 31 March 1909, known in the Rumi calendar as 13 April 1909, was an attempt by conservative forces, with ties to the Sheikh al-Islam and the ulema, to roll back the revolution. A mutiny of soldiers and students in Istanbul forced the parliament to depose Abdulhamid in favor of his brother Mehmed V. The CUP, with the help of the Hareket Ordusu (Action Army) under Mahmud Shevket Pasha that marched on the capital from Salonica, put down the counter-revolution and consolidated its control of the state.

The CUP and the road to the First World War

The CUP established effective control of the empire in January 1913 after a coup d’état, the so-called Bab-ı Ali raid, that brought the Three Pashas to power. The CUP pursued a policy of forced centralization, accelerated modernization, and demographic homogenization. The Armenian Genocide of 1915, in which an estimated 1.5 million Armenians were killed, was the most violent expression of the CUP’s policy. The revolution of 1908 had opened a brief window of constitutional rule, and the slide into authoritarian CUP rule and the eventual catastrophe of the war were the final phase of the long end of the Ottoman Empire.

The decision to enter the First World War on the side of the Central Powers was taken by the CUP in November 1914, against the better judgment of many of the surviving Ottoman statesmen. The war itself was a disaster. The empire was invaded from every direction, and by the armistice of 30 October 1918, the empire had lost four-fifths of its prewar territory and a large part of its population. Halide Edib Adıvar, who fought at the front in 1920 and addressed the Grand National Assembly that year, wrote later of the dilemma she and other Young Turk sympathizers faced:

“We had hoped to save the empire by giving it a constitution; we found, when it was too late, that the constitution was only a flag under which different factions fought for the body of the state.” — Halide Edib Adıvar, The Turkish Ordeal (1929)

Further reading

  • Şükrü Hanioğlu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).
  • Feroz Ahmad, The Young Turks: The Committee of Union and Progress in Turkish Politics 1908–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969).
  • Donald Quataert, The Ottoman Empire, 1700–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
  • Erik J. Zürcher, The Unionist Factor: The Role of the Committee of Union and Progress in the Turkish National Movement 1905–1926 (Leiden: Brill, 1984).
  • Caroline Finkel, Osman’s Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire 1300–1923 (London: John Murray, 2005).