Tanzimat Politics Revisited: New Sources and Novel Approaches

The Tanzimat era has long been a curiously neglected topic in the field of Ottoman history despite its key significance as a period of drastic political, social, economic, and intellectual transformation that linked the early modern empire with the tumultuous final decades. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries have seen a proliferation of exemplary scholarship with the thrust of new military history, while the Hamidian era and the final decades of the empire have never fallen out of fashion. However, Ottoman historians have paid relatively scant attention to the Tanzimat era which sustained some of the most archaic practices and institutions of the Ottoman ancien régime while at the same time bearing highly consequential political, economic, and social transformations. This lack of interest has served to perpetuate the outdated image of the Tanzimat as a naïve and largely failed reform process, an image which has emerged through successive historiographical interventions starting with the Second Constitutional Era and continued with the early Republic, as Doğan Gürpınar demonstrated: "As 19th-century optimism waned, the idea of the Tanzimat was also discredited… the Young Turks and subsequently the Kemalists demonized the Tanzimat to establish their legitimacy and demonstrate their vigilance by creating a diametrically opposite 'constitutive other'."¹ This teleological framework which took modernization as a linear process and assessed the Tanzimat with an eye to the eventual collapse of the empire has come to be increasingly criticized. Olivier Bouquet also criticized the reduction of modernization thrust to the "singular," "secular," and "enlightened" visions of a few "towering" bureaucrats like Mustafa Reşid Pasha who are frequently cited as having properly understood the European model.² In a similar vein, Adrian Brisku underlined the necessity of seeing political reform as a complex, contested, and contingent process, drawing a striking parallel with Russian history and calling for a focus on "the vocabulary of reform."³

Fortunately, the tide is shifting and we have seen three brilliant works come out in 2018 all of which contribute significantly to our understanding of the Ottoman nineteenth century. An excellent example of new diplomatic history, Aylin Koçunyan's book tackles a long neglected topic: the formation of the first Ottoman constitution in the nexus of Ottoman modernization and international diplomacy. Empirically rich and with a flowing narrative, Murat Şiviloğlu traces the formation of Ottoman public opinion focusing on the cultural and intellectual scene of the Tanzimat. Last but by no means the least, in an outstanding example of political sociology, Burak Onaran analyzes two conspiracies to dethrone Ottoman sultans (the Kuleli incident of 1859 and Meslek plot of 1867) contextualizing them in the intersection of Ottoman political tradition, domestic resistance to the Tanzimat, and global politics.⁴ All three works make use of a rich variety of sources, highlight a multiplicity of contexts avoiding teleology and reduction, and eventually propose nuanced accounts of Tanzimat politics that challenge long held assumptions and clichés. While each has individual limitations with regard to scope and sources, together these three books provide an excellent survey of the Tanzimat in the triangle of macro level conventional diplomacy, cultural transformation and micro level social history of contentious politics.

Negotiating the Constitution: A New Diplomatic History

True to its title, Koçunyan's work focuses on the diplomatic negotiations leading to the three "constitutional" documents of the Ottoman nineteenth century: Imperial Edict of Gülhane of 1839, Reform Edict of 1856, and the Constitution of 1876. Koçunyan aims to overcome the limited "internalist" and "externalist" accounts, which emphasize either the diplomatic pressure from Europe or Ottoman domestic agency in the...