The Reform Edict of 1856 and the Birth of “Ottomanism”
An Exploration of Ottoman Reforms in the Long Nineteenth Century- Part VI
Last week, I started venturing into the history of the Tanzimat (Reordering) Era, which spanned the years between 1839 and 1876. This period, I argued, was defined by two imperial edicts, the Gülhane Edict of 1839 and the Islahat (Reform) Edict of 1856.
The Gülhane Edict, as you may recall, brought about major social, political, and legal changes. Most importantly, it gestured towards guaranteeing the “equality of all Ottoman subjects before the law,” which was a profound shift in the relational status between Muslims and non-Muslims of the Empire. Meanwhile, it was also a triumph for the Ottoman civil bureaucracy, which took over the reins of power and ruled the Empire until Abdulhamid II restored the primacy of the sultanic authority once again during his reign.
In a sense, then, the Gülhane Edict of 1839 meant the beginning of a transformation for the members of the Ottoman political body, where they started transitioning from being the subjects of the Sultan to becoming the citizens of the Empire. Similarly, as Mustafa Resid Pasha read out the edict in the imperial rose garden, the Ottoman bureaucrats left behind their status as the sultan’s slaves and became the officials of the Ottoman state.
The Reform Edict of 1856, which I will talk about in this post, extended and solidified these transformations, especially when it came to the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims of the Empire. It also led to shifts in the political sphere, laying the groundwork for the birth of a new state ideology, “Ottomanism.”
The International Context of the Reform Edict
Similar to the Gülhane Edict, which was proclaimed at the height of Istanbul’s struggle with the Egyptian governor Mehmed Ali Pasha, the Reform Edict also came at another point of international urgency for the Ottomans: the Crimean War of 1854-1856, which the Ottoman Empire, forming an alliance with Britain and France, fought against Russia.
I won’t go into the details of the Crimean War here because it is too broad of a topic. Very briefly, it was one of the major episodes of the famous “Eastern Question,” which mainly hinged on the unity and integrity of the Ottoman Empire and pitted European powers such as Britain, France, and Russia against each other in the 19th century. Within this broader context, the Crimean War itself “occurred over the Holy Sites in Ottoman Palestine regarding the question of the protection of Orthodox Christians versus Catholics, by Russia and France respectively.”1 In the end, Britain and France sided with the Ottomans and jointly defeated Russia in 1856.
Once again, however, as it was the case with the Egyptian crisis, European support came at a cost. In return for allying against Russia, the European powers asked the Ottoman Empire to make more egalitarian changes concerning the Empire’s non-Muslim subjects, which resulted in the proclamation of the Reform Edict on 18 February 1856.
Admittedly, the Reform Edict bore traces of European influence much more than the Gülhane Edict of 1839. This still did not mean, however, that the Ottomans accepted the European demands wholesale. On the contrary, the Ottoman bureaucrats could successfully push back against France and Britain and formulated the document mostly to their own needs and concerns.
A more nuanced interpretation may be to see the imperial edict of 1856 as another step in the Ottoman officials’ commitments to reform the Empire in line with the “civilized” principles of the time, which, the bureaucrats hoped, would not only modernize and strengthen the Empire internally as a whole but also would lead to garnering the support of European powers.
As far as the latter aim was concerned, the Edict was successful. The Crimean War ended with the Treaty of Paris, which included the provisions of the Reform Edict that had been proclaimed just a month ago. Being a signatory, the Ottoman Empire was admitted to the “Concert of Europe” and became “the first non-Western state to conclude a treaty on a footing of formal equality with European powers,” attaining the “collective European security guarantee that Ottoman diplomats had advocated for nearly a century.”2 This guarantee would prove to be short-lived, but for the moment, the Ottomans got what they wanted.
What did the Reform Edict of 1856 bring?
Historian Ayşe Özil describes the Reform Edict of 1856 as “primarily a practical document with highly specific administrative regulations for non-Muslim communal and public life.”3 To be more specific, the Edict solidified the principle of equality between Muslims and non-Muslims and brought about a major transformation in the Ottoman state’s relationship with its non-Muslim subjects.
Although it was interpreted that way, both when it was first proclaimed and by later generations of scholars who studied it, a careful textual analysis of the Gülhane Edict shows that it did not contain anything definite with regard to the equality of Muslims and non-Muslims of the Empire. The Reform Edict, on the other hand, emphasized this point strongly while also stipulating measures that would make it a reality.
One such measure was related to the employment of non-Muslims in government institutions. Although there were exceptions, you had to be a Muslim to be able to serve in the Ottoman government apparatus before the Reform Edict was proclaimed. The Edict got rid of this principle and opened the gates of the Ottoman administration to all Ottoman subjects, regardless of their religion. This represented a major shift in the self-perception of the Empire.
This was not all. Non-Muslims also became eligible to serve in the military (although they could get an exemption by paying a certain fee, which, in a sense, replaced the poll tax issued to non-Muslims), while they could enter the new civil and military schools that had been established since the end of the 18th century. Finally, mixed courts were established where cases between members of different religions could be heard, although communal courts to litigate cases between coreligionists were kept in place.
The Edict also stipulated for non-Muslim communities to form a council or assembly to organize their internal affairs. This council was to include laymen as well as ecclesiastics. As Ozil points out, this desire to reform the non-Muslim communities could be seen as a part of the Ottoman state’s wider effort to centrally reorganize the administrative structure of the Empire while also deepening the state’s reach into different parts of the Ottoman society.4
What did the Edict mean in practice?
One of the main goals of the proclamation of the Reform Edict was to foster a new sense of belonging among the non-Muslim subjects of the Empire, who constituted around 40% of the population at the time.5
From the beginning of the 19th century onwards, the Ottoman Empire witnessed the emergence of nationalist movements, especially among the non-Muslim populations of the Empire. This centrifugal trend was particularly strong in the Balkans, with the Greek Revolution of 1821–1829 and the Serbian uprising between 1804 and 1835 being the most obvious examples. Moreover, as the Crimean War demonstrated clearly, European powers could claim to be protectors of different non-Muslim groups within the Ottoman lands, making the Empire vulnerable to outside intervention.
The Reform Edict and its efforts to ensure equality between Muslims and non-Muslims of the Empire should be seen within this context. Özil puts it succinctly when she argues that with the Reform Edict of 1856, “the Ottoman state attempted to more closely tie the non-Muslim communities to itself within a newly shaped organizational framework.”6 As a result, the Empire started moving beyond “the hierarchical order of society of which the Muslim/non-Muslim divide was a significant part in the medieval and post-medieval periods,” while “non-Muslim rights as a whole were for the first time written down in a very specific manner and addressed the empire as a whole.”7
In that sense, the Reform Edict accelerated the emergence of a new ideology in the Ottoman political scene: the idea of “Ottomanism.” Ottomanism was mostly a state project, originating within the Ottoman bureaucracy of the time. Its main goal was to create an “Ottoman nation,” based on a common Ottoman identity. It may be argued that this process started with the Gülhane Edict of 1839, although an “Ottomanist” framework became much more explicit with the Reform Edict of 1856. The latter text, for instance, included a provision to bolster the “heartfelt bonds of patriotism”8 among the Ottoman subjects, which could be read as an early expression of the ideal of “Ottomanism.”
From the perspective of the Ottoman state, the main purpose of the Ottomanism ideology was to provide a coherent and viable alternative to the “nationalisms” that were starting to take root in the Empire’s peripheries. What it aimed at was to create internal cohesion in the Empire under the umbrella term of being a member of the Ottoman body politic.9 In other words, it was an effort to transform “hitherto Muslim, Christian, and Jewish subjects into Ottomans”.”10
To this end, the old legal distinctions of Muslims, and non-Muslims (dhimmis), for instance, were replaced by the umbrella term “Ottoman” in the Ottoman Law of Nationality of 1869, where a separate category of “foreigner” was also codified. The emergence of this new concept (foreigner) was important because it signified the drawing of the limits of who belonged to the Ottoman nation, representing a major step in the construction of a distinct “Ottoman identity” that was theoretically blind to the Muslim/non-Muslim divide.11
Overall, then, the Reform Edict of 1856 was another major episode in the history of the Ottoman reform era. It led to a drastic shift in the relationship that the non-Muslim subjects of the Empire had with the Ottoman state while also leading to the birth of the Ottomanism ideology that aimed at creating a common Ottoman identity to counter the nationalist currents that threatened the integrity of the Empire in the 19th century. The effects of these political, social, and legal transformations, on the other hand, were felt differently among different ethnic and religious groups in different parts of the Empire, which I hope to talk about in the upcoming weeks.
Meanwhile, if you have any questions or comments, please let me know.
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Ayşe Özil, “Ottoman Reform, Non-Muslim Subjects, and Constitutive Legislation: The Reform Edict of 1856 and the Greek Central Regulations of 1862” in Narrated Empires: Perceptions of Late Habsburg and Ottoman Multinationalism, eds. Johanna Chovanec and Olof Heilo, (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), p.181.
Carter Findley, Turkey, Islam, Nationalism, and Modernity: A History, 1789-2007, Yale University Press, 2010, p.83.
Özil, “Ottoman Reform,” p.187.
Ibid., p.173.
Ibid., p.171.
Ibid., p.187.
Ibid., p.188.
Findley, Turkey, Islam, Nationalism, and Modernity, p.100.
Salim Çevik, “Ottomanism and Varities of Official Nationalism” in Narrated Empires: Perceptions of Late Habsburg and Ottoman Multinationalism, eds. Johanna Chovanec and Olof Heilo, (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), p.63.
Şükrü Hanioğlu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), p.74.
Ibid., p.74.
I see that this series kinda stopped at Part VI, I just want you to know it is a vert interesting series and I appreciate all of the Ottoman adjacent content you publish.