During the two decades after 1856 the western powers were occupied with the wars connected with the creation of Italy and Germany, and Russia was recovering from the Crimean conflict and attempting far-reaching internal reforms. The Ottoman Empire was given another chance to change. It entered upon a crucial phase of its attempts at reorganisation and westernization, a period known as the Tanzimat (the Reform Era (1856-76)). Reforms were undertaken to preserve and revitalise the empire. In order to keep up with the challenge of Europe not only military advancement was necessary but also improvements in education, in the judicial system, and in the organisation and efficiency of public administration. The Ottoman statesmen addressed themselves to the task of rooting out administrative abuses, but also to the adoption of some western ideas and institutions. They tried to create a concept of common citizenship without distinction according to religion. Equality before the law among all Ottoman subjects and general guarantees of equal protection were thought to be helpful for strengthening the independence and integrity of the empire, increasing the loyalty of all peoples in the state and thus diminishing separatist tendencies.
The undertaken reforms met with obstacles. The statesmen apparently did not realise that the growing nationalism among the various Balkan Christian peoples had crucial implications. The Muslim population, in its turn, took the principle of equality to be contravening Ottoman tradition. The areas of social life that needed reform were so numerous and so closely interwoven with each other that there was almost no aspect of Ottoman life that did not need change.
Economic progress was most needed. Adopting the trite medical metaphor of his time, Barkley expresses his opinion on the question thus:
Feeling himself [the sick man on the Bosphorus] to be in a bad way, he at last took the advice of his European doctors and consented to pay for a dose of medicine named "Progress". (Barkey, p. 1.)
The handling of finance, in the capitalist context of the nineteenth century, was to prove beyond the wits of any Ottoman government. One after the other, from 1858 onwards, they came to depend on foreign loans, a dependence which was to lead them to an ultimate financial collapse. In the Empire it was neither the Moslem Turks who profited from banking and industrial investment, nor any longer primarily the non-Moslem minorities -- the native Greeks, Armenians and Jews. Now it was the capitalist enterprises of Europe itself which came to dominate the Turkish economy (Kinross, 480.).
Barkley, Henry C. Bulgaria before the War during Seven Years' Experience of European Turkey and Its Inhabitants. London: Murray, 1877.
Kinross, Lord John. The Ottoman Centuries. The Rise and Fall of the Turkish Empire . London: Jonathan Cape, 1977.
Last modified 2001