Historical Perspectives of the Arab World: Factors in the Fall of the Ottoman Empire - Research Paper Example

Historical Perspectives of the Arab World: Factors in the Fall of the Ottoman Empire {name} {instructor} {date} Historical Perspectives of the Arab World: Factors in the Fall of the Ottoman Empire Introduction The Ottoman Empire was one of the world’s greatest powers, lasting from 1281-1922 under the hereditary rule of 39 sultans beginning with Osman I, who gave his legendary name to the entire empire. (Metz, 1996, Table 2) Just as the Romans and Byzantines before them, the Ottomans gradually declined and disappeared. There were many reasons for the eventual fall of the Ottoman Empire, and in this report three of these factors will be discussed: the interference from foreign powers, primarily the great European powers of Britain, Russia, and France; the inevitable internal unrest from the empire’s many ethnic and religious groups, which the European powers often used to their advantage; and the rise of Zionism, which directly affected the Ottoman province of Palestine and created turmoil in the empire’s fragile eastern provinces. The empire might have survived any one of these problems, but all of them together were too much for the empire to withstand. Interference from Foreign Powers It was natural for the Christian West to fear the power and influence of the Muslim Ottomans, especially after the Ottoman capture of Constantinople in 1453 put them on European shores. By 1683 they had extended their power to the very gates of Vienna; their attempt to capture the Austrian capital was defeated, but they remained powerful and a source of worry for the rest of the European governments. There was some justification for this concern, because while they were powerful the Ottomans were very adept at the sort of meddling that would eventually be their undoing. During the 16th and 17th centuries, Ottoman co-operation with the French, English, and Dutch was a means to support the enemies of their own two worst enemies, the Pope and the Austrian Hapsburgs (Karpat, 1974, 8), their chief rivals for control of the Ottomans’ European provinces. The control of the Balkans by the Ottomans gave the Christian governments an opportunity to portray the empire as the Muslim ‘bogeyman’ and paint the people of the Balkans as Christians oppressed under the Islamic Ottoman heel, particularly from the second half of the 18th century. (Emrence, 2008, 296) By the 19th century, foreign interference in Ottoman affairs was growing in intensity. Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 was aimed at the British, but necessarily involved the Ottomans. The Barbary War in 1803, the first overseas adventure of the young United States, was aimed at stopping the pirates along the North African coast, who were controlled by the Ottoman satraps and beys of Tunis, Algiers, and Tripoli. (Carrington, 2008, 5) Foreign involvement increased dramatically in the 1820’s and 1830’s for three reasons. The first of these, which set a dangerous precedent, was the Greek revolution that began in 1821 and ended in 1827. The British used the Greek revolt as a means to protect their position in the Mediterranean and maintain their balance of power against the Russians. Russia was a traditional enemy of the Ottomans, and so the British were able to convince Sultan Mahmut to accept a mediated end to the Greek war by raising the spectre of Russian interference in the matter. (Shaw & Shaw, 1977, 29-30) The second occasion for the meddling of foreign powers was the invasion in 1831 of Syria by the governor of Egypt, Muhammad Ali. Unlike the Greek rebellion, this was not a nationalist uprising by subject people, but a rebellious and practically independent Ottoman governor attempting to extend his influence, a much more internal affair of the empire than the Greek war had been. In 1833 the Ottomans and Russians signed a treaty at Unkiar Skelessi, which closed the Dardanelles to foreign warships. (Lapidus, 2002, 490) The implications of this were that Russia’s Black Sea territories would be protected and Russia would have access to the Mediterranean, and the Ottomans would not have to worry about a threat from Russia while they addressed their internal problem of Muhammad Ali. The British naturally were not pleased with this arrangement, and were concerned about the threat to their own power in the Mediterranean that Russian –Ottoman co-operation represented. They demanded that the integrity of the Ottoman Empire be respected, and that Ali be forced to withdraw back to Egypt. This was just a pretext, however, to forming an agreement with Austria and Russia in 1840 which did require Ali to give up Syria, but more importantly for the British, banned all warships from passing the Turkish straits in peacetime. In return for complying, Muhammad Ali was rewarded by the powers in 1841 with an agreement that he could establish a hereditary regime in Egypt. (Lapidus, 2002, 490) Altogether it was an extraordinary degree of foreign determination over internal Ottoman affairs. The third reason for foreign meddling in the affairs of the empire was the poor financial state the Ottomans had fallen into in the latter half of the 19th century. Between the end of the Crimean War in 1854 and the accession of Abdulhamid II in 1876, the empire had borrowed heavily from foreign lenders to the extent that debt service accounted for about half of the empire’s yearly income. (Moore & Kaluzny, 2005, 253-254) The new Sultan already faced the problem of the threat of war with Russia. Internally, squabbling provincial officials had made the problem of foreign interference far worse by involving foreign diplomats in their local disputes – a legacy of the experience with Muhammad Ali – and now to make matters even worse, his empire was on the verge of bankruptcy. (Engen D. Akarli in Kushner (Ed.), 1986, 74) In 1876 Abdulhamid II was forced to declare bankruptcy and sign an agreement to resolve the outstanding debts that would give European creditors extraordinary control over Ottoman finances. (Moore & Kaluzny, 2005, 257) The war with Russia in 1877-78 was a disaster for the Ottomans diplomatically but perhaps even more so economically. The Congress of Berlin in 1878 that formally put an end to the war removed one-fifth of the empire’s population and two-fifths of its territory, severely straining its economic base. (Fieldhouse, 2006, 10) In 1881, a European-run Public Debt Commission was set up in Istanbul to oversee the repayment of the Ottoman foreign debt. It levied taxes on a variety of goods and such things as notarised documents, and collected the entire yearly tribute of Bulgaria, Greece, Cyprus, and Montenegro. (Fieldhouse, 2006, 8-9) Internal Unrest The Ottoman Empire at one time controlled large parts of three continents – Asia, Europe, and Africa – and had many different ethnic and religious groups within its population, many of whom had been made subjects of the Ottomans by force. While the empire was strong and efficiently-controlled, there was little they could do to gain their independence, and in many cases, the subject peoples were actually content with Ottoman rule. Despite being Islamic, or perhaps because of it, the Ottoman Empire was remarkably tolerant of different religions; non-Muslims did not have quite the same rights and privileges as Muslims, but they were free to practise their faiths, and were on the whole treated fairly under Ottoman law. (Carrington, 2008, 5, and Barnai, 1992, 11) Once the strength of the central authority began to wane, however, ethnic and regional differences became stronger, with more people willing to try to break free from the empire. From the middle of the 16th century the rulers of the outlying provinces became increasingly independent of Istanbul, and eventually the Sultans grew so frustrated with trying to maintain firm control that by the 17th century they permitted the provincial leaders to do as they saw fit, provided the taxes were collected and sent to Istanbul regularly. (Barnai, 1992, 14) The extreme examples of what the lack of central control could lead to were the Barbary pirates and the rebellious Muhammad Ali discussed in the previous section. Apart from these better-known situations, during the rule of Sultan Mahmut in the 1800’s, the Ottomans were repeatedly forced to address the problem of ‘notables’ in different parts of the empire; these were local ethnic authorities, sometimes Ottoman officials, who took advantage of the Sultan’s preoccupation with other troubles such as Greece or Syria to test their independence. In most every case the empire resorted to strong measures to end the revolts, with mixed results: in the Balkans in 1814-1820, which eventually led to Serbia becoming autonomous and practically independent; in Anatolia between 1812 and 1817, which led to the Kurdish chieftains gaining far more independence from Istanbul; and finally in Arabia in 1818, where the rebellious Arabs were kept in check only so long as the Ottoman army was there. (Shaw & Shaw, 1977, 14-15) From that time period through World War I, each of these areas would be used by foreign powers to meddle in Ottoman affairs, and each would play a part in the empire’s downfall. Beginning in about the 1840’s, the spread of internal turmoil put an end to the tolerant nature of the empire, and widespread massacres and other persecution of Christian subjects of the Ottomans began to take place. This was meant to be a way of controlling rebellious ethnic groups within the empire, who were increasingly becoming difficult for the central authority in Istanbul to manage. Perhaps the worst example of this started in 1893 with the systematic massacre and exile of the Armenians, much of it at the hands of the Hamidiye, an irregular force of pro-government Kurdish horsemen created by the Sultan Abdulhamid II. The Hamidiye were given assurances they would not be held accountable for actions committed against Christians, and local Kurdish chieftains were allowed to do whatever they pleased in their areas. (Carrington, 2008, 8, and Travis, 2006, 329-330) The Turks of Anatolia, meanwhile, seeing their Kurdish neighbours increasing in independence at the expense of the Armenians, began to form a strong nationalist movement of their own, which only worsened unrest in other parts of the empire, such as Arabia, which feared Turkish domination. (Fieldhouse, 2006, 18) World War I caused a dramatic increase in the ethnic and religious tensions throughout the empire, which were exploited to maximum effect by both the European powers and the Ottomans themselves. In Arabia, Britain provided overt support to the rebellion of Saudi Prince Faisal in the person of T. E. Lawrence – “Lawrence of Arabia” – and other British officers, finally launching their own direct military actions against Mesopotamia, Palestine, and Syria in 1916 and 1917. (Carrington, 2008, 9) In November 1914, the Sultan Mehmet – still the titular ruler of the empire although controlled by the junta led by Enver Pasha – issued a jihad against “the enemies of Islam”. (Travis, 2006, 331) There seemed to be two objectives to this. First, it was an appeal to the common faith of the majority of the empire, which would hopefully calm some of the rebelliousness. Second, it was an appeal to the Turkish-speaking Muslim subjects of Russia in the Caucasus region, where the Ottoman army had just launched a major offensive, which would hopefully provoke an uprising against the Tsar. The violence against non-Muslims predictably backfired against the empire, with sectarian unrest only increasing as a result. In Mesopotamia, for example, the patriarch of the Assyrian (Nestorian) Church even went so far as to proclaim his people’s independence and declare war on the empire. (Travis, 2006, 333) In the Caucasus, the Ottoman army was met with a Russian counteroffensive and suffered tremendous losses, and routed all the way back to Lake Van deep inside Turkey itself; not only had the Turkish peoples not responded to the call for jihad, a great many Armenians, refugees from the 1893 pogrom, both served with the Russian army and harassed the Ottomans as guerrillas. As a result, a second great massacre of Armenians in the war zone took place, atrocities that came to the attention of the Allies and resulted in harsh conditions against the Ottomans in the post-war settlement. (Steven A. Glazer in Metz (Ed.), 1996) The Rise of Zionism The break-up of the Ottoman Empire was guaranteed by the outcome of World War I, and because of the actions of the victorious allies in determining how to redraw the map of what had once been one of the world’s great powers, the modern world is still troubled by their consequences. Traditional ethnic areas, boundaries, and the wishes of local people were pointedly ignored by the European powers led by the British and the French, who did what they pleased without regard to the long-term effects. A very good example of this is Iraq, which was formed by the British by combining the old Ottoman provinces of Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul – provinces with different religious and ethnic backgrounds whose people did not particularly get along with each other, which is why the Ottomans kept them separate. (Khalidi, 1998, note 45, 219) But the worst example was in Palestine, where the Zionist movement found a home with the approval of the British, and in spite of all dissent not only from the people who lived there, but also those in other countries, such as America, who felt it was wrong to allow foreigners to overrun an otherwise peaceful, long-established community. Zionism, the claimed right of the Jewish people to a homeland in Palestine, had existed in some form for centuries, and the tolerance of the Ottomans to non-Muslims ironically allowed the movement to prosper. From the 1730’s there was a steady stream of Jewish immigrants and pilgrims to Palestine, most carefully organised by the so-called ‘Istanbul Officials’: wealthy, influential Jews with good relations with the Ottoman government, and who were in a sense the first Zionists. (Barnai, 1992, 29) Under Ottoman law, the Jews were allowed to live peacefully almost anywhere in the empire, Palestine included, and for a long time Palestine was one of the more stable parts of the empire. But with the rise of radical Zionists such as Chaim Weiszman and Theodor Herzl in the pre- and early-World War I period, Palestine began to grow rebellious as the number of Jewish immigrants – ones that had no intention of living peacefully with their Palestinian neighbours – increased. The Palestinians were angered not by Ottoman control, but rather the ineptitude and greed of Ottoman officials who seemed unwilling or unable to manage the flood of hostile aliens. (Khalidi, 1998, 131-132) Then in 1916 the British government issued the Balfour Declaration, which stated that they “viewed with favour” the plan of Zionist Jews to establish a homeland in Palestine. (Carrington, 2008, 10) Some influential Zionist supporters in the United States pressed for a moderate plan, envisioning not a Palestine under Jewish rule but a democratic state incorporating both Jewish immigrants and the native Palestinian Arab population. (Carrington, 2008, 12, 14) But the Weiszman-Herzl concept had the support of the British, who held the mandate over Palestine, and furthermore the US had failed to ratify the League of Nations charter, which limited American influence in the post-war era. As the historian Arnold J. Toynbee observed (in Karpat, 1974, 17): “The most unfortunate of all the ex-Osmanli peoples have been the Palestinian Arabs. In the First World War, Palestine was conquered from the Ottoman Empire by Britain, and, without the inhabitants of the country being consulted, Palestine was placed under a British mandate, the terms of which incorporated the ‘Balfour Declaration’ of 1917.... Under Ottoman rule, the Palestinians had not been in danger of being swamped by foreign settlers in their own homeland.” Conclusion In a way, Zionism was the final tragedy of the Ottoman Empire: one of the best and most enlightened things about Ottoman society had been its tolerance for differences among its people in the interest of keeping the peace, and in the end it was used for the selfish ends of a small minority to create turmoil. It was not what brought down the empire, but rather an expression of those things that did – foreign rivalry and interference, the erosion of strong central control, and too many divergent interests among the different people in the empire. What is perhaps most sad about it all is that the world is left with so little of what was good about the Ottoman Empire, and so many problems – Palestine, Iraq, the Balkans, the Caucasus – that resulted from its passing. References Barnai, J. (1992). The Jews in Palestine in the Eighteenth Century. Tuscaloosa, Alabama: University of Alabama Press. – Good source with many factual details; critical of Zionism, but treats all the subject matter objectively. Carrington, P. D. (2008). Could and Should America Have Made an Ottoman Republic in 1919? Duke Law School Research Papers Series No. 187, February 2008, and William & Mary Law Review, 2008. (SSRN: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Papers.cfm?abstract_id=1092588). – Very good paper that gives details about behind-the-scenes foreign meddling in the Mideast. More critical of the U.S. than anything, the article is also sympathetic to the Arabs and Palestinians. Emrence, C. (2008). Imperial paths, big comparisons: the late Ottoman Empire. Journal of Global History, 2008 (3): 289-311. (Cambridge University Press: doi:10.1017/S1740022808002738 http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=2572348). – Mostly a review of other works and research methods, and not an abundant source of new information about the Ottomans. Fieldhouse, D. K. (2006). Western Imperialism in the Middle East 1914-1958. Oxford: Oxford University Press. – Very good source, explains the break-up of the Ottoman Empire as a basis for the later chaotic state of the Mideast. Karpat, K. H. (Ed.). (1974) The Ottoman State and its Place in World History. Boston: Brill. – Excellent source with a mixture of different points of view, which makes it very objective overall. Khalidi, R. (1998). Palestinian Identity. New York: Columbia University Press. – Fair source, in that most of the book deals with the post-Ottoman era, but makes a few good points relevant to this study. As might be expected, is extremely anti-Zionist, but seems even more critical of the Western powers for letting it happen than the Zionists themselves. Kushner, David. (Ed.). (1986) Palestine in the Late Ottoman Period: Political Social and Economic Transformation. Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi. – Not a very helpful source for this study, but has a little useful information. More concerned with genealogies and social organisation among the inhabitants of Palestine, and seems to be strongly pro-Zionist. Lapidus, I. M. (2002) A History of Islamic Societies, 2nd Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. – Excellent, detailed, objective survey of the whole of Ottoman history as well as other parts of the Islamic world. Very good explanation of foreign interference in Ottoman affairs. Metz, H. C. (Ed.). (1996). Turkey, a country study. 5th Edition. Washington, D.C.: Federal Research Division, Library of Congress. (Library of Congress: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/trtoc.html) – Excellent objective source covering the whole history of the nation of Turkey. Moore, L., & Kaluzny, J. (2005) Regime change and debt default: the case of Russia, Austro-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire following World War One. Explorations in Economic History, 42(2), 237-258. (Elsevier/ScienceDirect: doi:10.1016/j.eeh.2004.06.003 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6WFJ-4D7K19S-1&_user=10&_coverDate=04%2F30%2F2005&_rdoc=1&_fmt=full&_orig=na&_cdi=6796&_docanchor=&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=3a4b8e8125ca4714ead098ebb53d30e0). – A fair source, very technical in economics, but gives insight into the economic aspects of the Ottoman decline. Shaw, S. J., & Shaw, E. K. (1977). History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, Vol. II: Reform, Revolution, and Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. – Ezel Kural Shaw is a native of Istanbul, and has provided an excellent source by using many old Ottoman records to which she had access. Travis, H. (2008). ‘‘Native Christians Massacred’’: The Ottoman Genocide of the Assyrians during World War I. Genocide Studies and Prevention, 1(3): 327-371. (SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=950428). – A fair source which does contain many useful factual details, but does a poor job of hiding its anti-Islamic bias. Read More